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

would never meet their king), in times of great importance she reverted
to her upbringing. The king was lucky enough to love his wife,
and had been rather struck by her tales of a king and queen who had
open court days, when anyone who wished to speak to them could
turn up and do so. He thought an open name-day a splendid notion.
It will not do, said the councillors and courtiers. (The magicians
were still nursing their snit about not having been told of the queen's
pregnancy, and refused to attend the discussions about the name-day.
What they were really outraged about, of course, was that a
mere fairy had successfully thrown fairy dust in all their eyes.) You
must, said the councillors, have the sort of name-day that other countries
will send emissaries to-we will need their good wishes, their
favourable memories, in nineteen or twenty years' time. And you
cannot make the sort of fuss that an emissary is going to remember
pleasantly if a hundred thousand or so of your people are milling
around the city walls, trampling the fields into mud, and demanding
to be fed and housed.
This made the king and queen thoughtful, for the king remembered
the long difficult search for his wife, and the queen remembered
what a shock it had been when the envoy had presented himself at
her father's rather small and shabby castle, and she had had to be
rushed out of the kitchens where she was boiling sweetmeats and up
the back stairs to wash her face and comb her hair and put on her best
dress to meet him. (He had been eating her sweetmeats with a look
of great concentration and contentment, when she had made a
stately entrance into the front room, slightly out of breath from having
hopped down the corridor on one foot and then the other, pulling
on her shoes. She hadn't realised that her sweetmeats, excellent
though she knew them to be, would render even a king's envoy happy
to wait.)
A compromise was reached. It was the sort of compromise that
made the councillors gnash their teeth, but it was the best they had
been able to wrest from their suddenly obstinate rulers, who would
keep insisting that their daughter belonged to her people. Heralds
would be sent out to every village-each and every village-to proclaim
at the town centre, which might be anything from the steps of
the mayor's house in the larger to the town well or watering-trough
in the smaller, that one person, to be chosen by lot (if the magicians
had recovered from their snit, they would provide cheat-proof lots;
otherwise Sigil would find fairies to do it), was invited to the princess'
name-day. And that one person, whoever he or she was, need only
present the lot, as good earnest of the invitation, to be allowed entry
into the royal grounds on the name-day.
The councillors and courtiers could only see the fabulous amount
of organisational work, and, magicians or no magicians, the infinite
amount of cheating that would go on-or at least would try to go
on-as a result of this plan. And while the court folk were applying
court mores to many ordinary people who wouldn't know a political
intrigue if it grew butterfly wings and bit them, it was true that the
heralds, who were themselves ordinary people under their livery,