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

It was a girl, and the names chosen to be given her on her name-day
were: Casta Albinia Allegra Dove Minerva Fidelia Aletta Blythe
Domina Delicia Aurelia Grace Isabel Griselda Gwyneth Pearl Ruby
Coral Lily Iris Briar-Rose. She was healthy-just as Sigil had said she
would be-and she was born without any more trouble than the
birth of babies does cause, which is to say the queen was aching and
exhausted, but not too exhausted to weep for joy when the baby was
laid in her arms.
The eldest child of the reigning monarch was always next in line
for the throne, be it boy or girl; but it was usually a boy. There was a
deeply entrenched folk myth that a queen held this country together
better than a king because there is a clear-eyed pragmatic common
sense about an unmagical woman that even the most powerful or
rather, especially the most powerful-magic found difficult to
disturb; it was thought that a man was more easily dazzled by
pyrotechnics. Whether this was true or not, everyone believed it,
including the bad fairies, who therefore spent a lot of their time
making up charms to ensure the birth of male first children to the
royal family. The royal magicians dismantled these charms as quickly
as they could, but never quite as quickly as the bad fairies made
them up. (As it was difficult to get any kind of charm through the
heavy guard laid round the royal family, these charms had to be
highly specific, with the knock-on effect that third children to a reigning
monarch were almost always girls.) But the folk myth (plus the
tangential effect that first-born princesses were rare enough to be interesting
for no reason other than their rarity) guaranteed that the
birth of a future queen was greeted with even greater enthusiasm than
the birth of a mere future king; and so it was in this case. No one
seemed to remember, perhaps because their last queen had been nearly
four hundred years ago, that that queen had left some unfinished business
with a wicked fairy named Pernicia, who had sworn revenge.
The princess' name-day was going to be the grandest occasion
that the country had ever seen, or at least that the oldest citizen could
remember-grander than the king and queen's wedding sixteen years
ago-grander than the king's parents' wedding, almost fifty years
ago, and certainly grander than the king's own name-day because
he'd been born eighteen months after his parents' wedding and no
one had realised he was going to be the only one.
The king and queen wanted to invite everyone to the name-day.
Every one of their people, they felt, should have the opportunity to
join them on their day of joy and celebration. They were talked out
of this ridiculous idea by their councillors-uncharacteristically in
agreement on this particular topic-with some difficulty.
It had been the queen's idea to begin with. Her native country
was just about small enough that everyone could be invited to a
major royal occasion (although the royal list-makers and caterers
and spare-chair-providers would hope that not everyone came), and
the king and queen recognised by sight a substantial minority of their
subjects. While she found her husband's country rather intimidatingly
larger (and it seemed all wrong to her that many of his subjects