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

magic; everyone lived longer. More humans made their century than didnТt; birds
and animals often lived to thirty, and fifty was not unheard of. The breeders of
domestic animals in that country were unusually sober and responsible
individuals, since any mistakes they made might be around to haunt them for a
long time.
Although magic was ubiquitous and magic-workers crucially necessary, the
attitude of the ordinary people toward magic and its manipulators was that it
and they were more than a bit chancy and not to be relied on, however fond you
were of your aunt or your next-door neighbour. No one had ever seen a fairy turn
into an eagle and fly up above the trees, but there were nursery tales about
that, too, and it was difficult not to believe that it or something even more
unnerving was somehow likely. DidnТt farmers grow more stolid and earthy over a
lifetime of farming? WasnТt it likely that a lifetime of handling magic made you
wilder and more capricious?
It was a fact much noticed but rarely discussed (and never in any fairyТs
hearing) that while fairies rarely married or (married or not) had children,
there never seemed to be any fewer fairies around, generation after generation.
So presumably magic ran in the blood of the people the way it ran in all other
watery liquids, and sometimes there was enough of it to make someone a fairy,
and sometimes there was 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 countryТs
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 councillorsТ list.) So farЧso far as the countryТs histories
extended, which was a little over a thousand years at the time of this storyЧthe
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, didnТt it, and that was all that
mattered.
The present king was not only an only child, but had had a very difficult time
indeedЧor his councillors hadЧfinding 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 kingТs cousins began to
hang around court more than they used toЧhis generation was particularly rich in