"Robin McKinley - Spindle's End" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKinley Robin)

between earth and air and water; which is to say that things with legs
or wings were out of balance with their earth element by walking
around on feet or, worse, flying above the earth in the thin substance
of air, obviously entirely unsuitable for the support of solid flesh. The
momentum all this inappropriate motion set up in their liquid element
unbalanced them further. Spirit, in this system, was equated
with the fourth element, fire. All this was generally felt to be a load
of rubbish among the people who had to work in the ordinary world
for a living, unlike philosophers living in academies. But it was true
that a favourite magical trick at fetes was for theatrically-minded
fairies to throw bits of chaff or seed-pods or conkers in the air and
turn them into things before they struck the ground, and that the
trick worked better if the bits of chaff or seed-pods or conkers were
wet.)
Slower creatures were less susceptible to the whims of wild
magic than faster creatures, and creatures that flew were the most
susceptible of all. Every sparrow had a delicious memory of having
once been a hawk, and while magic didn't take much interest in caterpillars,
butterflies spent so much time being magicked that it was a
rare event to see ordinary butterflies without at least an extra set of
wings or a few extra frills and iridescences, or bodies like tiny human
beings dressed in flower petals. (Fish, which flew through that most
dangerous element, water, were believed not to exist. Fishy-looking
beings in pools and streams were either hallucinations or other things
under some kind of spell, and interfering with, catching, or-most
especially-eating fish was strictly forbidden. All swimming was considered
magical. Animals seen doing it were assumed to be favourites
of a local water-sprite or dangerously insane; humans never tried.)
There did seem to be one positive effect to living involuntarily
steeped in magic; everyone lived longer. More humans made their
century than didn't; birds and animals often lived to thirty, and fifty
was not unheard of. The breeders of domestic animals in that
country were unusually sober and responsible individuals, since any
mistakes they made might be around to haunt them for a long time.
Although magic was ubiquitous and magic-workers crucially
necessary, the attitude of the ordinary people toward magic and its
manipulators was that it and they were more than a bit chancy and
not to be relied on, however fond you were of your aunt or your
next-door neighbour. No one had ever seen a fairy turn into an eagle
and fly up above the trees, but there were nursery tales about that,
too, and it was difficult not to believe that it or something even more
unnerving was somehow likely. Didn't farmers grow more stolid and
earthy over a lifetime of farming? Wasn't it likely that a lifetime of
handling magic made you wilder and more capricious?
It was a fact much noticed but rarely discussed (and never in any
fairy's hearing) that while fairies rarely married or (married or not)
had children, there never seemed to be any fewer fairies around, generation
after generation. So presumably magic ran in the blood of the
people the way it ran in all other watery liquids, and sometimes there
was enough of it to make someone a fairy, and sometimes there was