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

not. (One of the things ordinary people did not like to contemplate
was how many people there might be who were, or could have been,
fairies, and were masquerading as ordinary people by the simple
process of never doing any magic when anyone was around to notice.)
But there was a very strong tradition that the rulers of this
country must be utterly without magic, for rulers must be reliable,
they must be the earth and the rock underfoot for their people. And
if any children of that country's rulers had ever been born fairies,
there was not only no official history of it; there were not even any
stories about it.
This did mean that when the eldest child of each generation of
the ruling family came to the age to be married (and, just to be safe,
his or her next-younger and perhaps next-younger-after-that siblings)
there was a great search and examination of possible candidates in
terms of their magiclessness first, and their honesty, integrity, intelligence,
and so on, second. (The likelihood of their getting along
comfortably with their potential future spouses barely rated a mention
on the councillors' list.) So far-so far as the country's histories
extended, which was a little over a thousand years at the time of this
story-the system had worked; and while there were stories of the
thick net of anti-magic that the court magicians set up for even the
cleanest, most magic-antipathetic betrothed to go through, well, it
worked, didn't it, and that was all that mattered.
The present king was not only an only child, but had had a very
difficult time indeed-or his councillors had-finding a suitable wife.
She was not even a princess, finally, but a mere countess, of some
obscure little backwater country which, so far as it was known for
anything, was known for the fleethounds its king and queen bred, but
she was quiet, dutiful, and, so far as any of the cleverest magicians
in the land could tell, entirely without magic Everyone breathed a
deep sigh of relief when the wedding was over, it had been a wait of
nearly a decade since the king came of marriageable age
But the years passed and she bore no children
Certain of the king's cousins began to hang around court more
than they used to-his generation was particularly rich in cousins and
one or two of these quietly divorced spouses who were
insufficiently nonmagical There had not been a break in the line
from parent to child in the ruling of this country for over five hundred
years, and the rules about how the crown was passed sideways
or diagonally were not clear Neither the king nor the queen noticed
any of this, for they so badly wanted a child, they could not bear to
think about the results if they did not, but the councillors noticed,
and the king's cousins who divorced their spouses did themselves no
good thereby
Nearly fifteen years after the king's marriage the queen was seen
to become suddenly rather pale and sickly Her husband's people,
who had become very fond of her, because she was always willing to
appear at fairs and festivals and smile during boring speeches and to
kiss the babies, even grubby and unattractive ones, which were thrust
at her, were torn between hoping that whatever she had would kill