"Robin McKinley - The Door in the Hedge" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKinley Robin)

sweet-smelling meadow and spinning helplessly in your tracks seeking for the shadow that is always
behind you. For much of that watchfulness is friendly: if you lie down by the side of a brook and fall
asleep, the murmuring water sends pleasant dreams of love and courage; and if a child loses its way in a
forest, it finds its way out again before it is anything more than tired and scratched and cross and hungry.
And there are years when no babies at all are stolen from their cradles, and new mothers laugh, and
grandparents gloat, and new fathers spin fabulous dreams of future greatness and trip over their own feet.
But there are also years when expectant mothers go about with white faces and dread the arrival of what
they most want, and the fathers listen anxiously for a childтАЩs first cry, but are not soothed when finally
they hear it. And the fatherтАЩs first question, as is the way of fathers everywhere, is тАЬA boy or a girl?тАЭ But
his reasons, in this last country, are a little different. The faeries always choose boy babies.
The story is still told that once, perhaps a century ago, or perhaps two, a five-weeks girl was
snatched away through a window her parents knew only too well that they had bolted carefully from the
inside. But after two daysтАФor rather, nights, for all immortal thievery occurs in the dark hoursтАФthe baby
was returned.
There was never any question of a changeling. The whole silly idea of changelings was invented by
lazy parents too far inland for any faintest whiff of faerie shores to have reached them; parents who
cannot think of any other reason why their youngest, or middle, or eldest, or next-to-somethingest child
should be so regrettable; they know they arenтАЩt to blame.
So there was no shadow in these parentsтАЩ overjoyed minds. But they were good people, and
thoughtful, and after telling everyone they knew just once about the miraculous return, they never
mentioned it again. Except once to the girl herself when she was almost grown; and she nodded, and
looked thoughtful, but said nothing; and the uneasy dreams she had had for as long as she could
remember, about impossible things that insisted that they were to be believed, stopped abruptly. She
never mentioned the dreams to anyone either. Loose talk about faeries, dreams, and impossible things
was not encouraged. It might be dangerous.
Six weeks after the little girlтАЩs marvelous adventure a family that lived only two streets over from her
family lost its babyтАФa boy. He was the third child: he had two older sisters. He was not returned;
nothing was ever heard of him again.
That was always the way of it. Nothing was ever again heard of the lost children; that was what, in
the end, made it so terrible. The little girl who was returned seemed none the worse for wear; but then
she had only been gone two days, and since she had been brought back she must have been a mistake.
There was some thought, rarely mentioned aloud, that the fact that the faeries treated their mistakes
kindly, or at least had been generous enough to bring this particular one back, was a good omen for the
treatment of those they kept. It was this idea, persisting in the backs of peopleтАЩs minds, that made the
retelling of the story of the baby that was returned so common. It was all the comfort they had. What
happened to all the other ones, the ones that disappeared forever?
But the parents of girls are not to be envied either. A boy, if he survives his first year, is safe. It is the
girls who at last have the harder time of it, because it is when they reach their early blush of womanly
beauty, between the ages, say, of sixteen and nineteenтАФit is then that they are in danger. And as it is the
strong, handsome, happy boys that are taken, so it is the wisest and most beautiful girlsтАФthe girls who
come home early from the parties they most enjoy, and leave their friends desolate behind them, because
they know their parents are worrying at their being out so late; the same girls who never themselves think
about being stolen because they have far too much else to do with their time and talents.
If a girl reaches twenty, she may breathe easier and think about marrying. But she has arrived safely
at the cost of the cheerful carelessness of her youth; and it is too late for her to regain it now.
But the land was a good land, and its true people could not desert it, for they loved it; and it seemed
that the land loved them in return; even if there were those who found the landтАЩs curious awareness of the
people who stood or walked upon it disquieting. And sometimes even those who had been born and
raised there left to find some country that would not keep them awake at night with its silence. Perhaps,
bordering Faerieland, as it did, the touch of immortality made this land richer, more beautiful even than it