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

plaster-dust. (Housecleaners in that country earned unusually good wages.) If
you lived in that country, you had to de-scale your kettle of its encrustation
of magic at least once a week, because if you didnТt, you might find yourself
pouring hissing snakes or pond slime into your teapot instead of water. (It
didnТt have to be anything scary or unpleasant, like snakes or slime, especially
in a cheerful householdЧmagic tended to reflect the atmosphere of the place in
which it found itselfЧbut if you want a cup of tea, a cup of lavender and-gold
pansies or ivory thimbles is unsatisfactory. And while the pansiesЧput dry in a
vaseЧwould probably last a day, looking like ordinary pansies, before they went
greyish-dun and collapsed into magic dust, something like an ivory thimble would
begin to smudge and crumble as soon as you picked it up.)
The best way to do it was to have a fairy as a member of your household, because
she (it was usually a she) could lay a finger on the kettle just as it came to a
boil (absentminded fairies could often be recognised by a pad of scar-tissue on
the finger they favoured for kettle-cleaning) and murmur a few counter-magical
words. There would be a tiny inaudible thock, like a seed-pod bursting, and the
water would stay water for another week or (maybe) ten days.
De-magicking a kettle was much too little and fussy and frequent a job for any
professional fairy to be willing to be hired to do it, so if you werenТt related
to one you had to dig up a root of the dja vine, and dry it, and grate it,
producing a white powder rather like plaster dust or magic, and add a pinch of
that to your kettle once a week.
More often than that would give everyone in the household cramp.
You could tell the households that didnТt have a fairy by the dja vines growing
over them. Possibly because they were always having their roots disturbed, djas
developed a reputation for being tricky to grow, and prone to sudden collapse;
fortunately they rerooted easily from cuttings. УSheТd give me her last dja
rootФ was a common saying about a good friend.
People either loved that country and couldnТt imagine living anywhere else, or
hated it, left it as soon as they could, and never came back. If you loved it,
you loved coming over the last hill before your village one day in early autumn
and hearing the corn-field singing madrigals, and that day became a story you
told your grandchildren, the way in other countries other grandparents told the
story of the day they won the betting pool at the pub, or their applecake won
first place at the local fete. If you lived there, you learned what you had to
do, like putting a pinch of dried dja vine in your kettle once a week, like
asking your loaf of bread to remain a loaf of bread before you struck it with a
knife. (The people of this country had developed a reputation among outsiders
for being unusually pious, because of the number of things they appeared to
mutter a blessing over before they did them; but in most cases this was merely
the asking of things it was safer to ask to remain nonmagical first, while work
or play or food preparation or whatever was being got on with. Nobody had ever
heard of a loaf of bread turning into a flock of starlings for anyone they knew,
but the nursery tale was well known, and in that country it didnТt pay to take
chances. The muttered words were usually only some phrase such as УBread, stay
breadФ or, in upperclass households, УBread, please oblige me,Ф which was a less
wise form, since an especially impish gust of magic could choose to translate
УobligeФ just as it chose.)
Births were very closely attended, because the request that things stay what
they were had to be got in quickly, birth being a very great magic, and, in that