"Melanie Rawn - Salve Regina" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rawn Melanie)

SALVE,
REGINA
MELANIE RAWN



~oOo~




Known for the Dragon Prince and Dragon Star trilogies, MELANIE
RAWN has earned a reputation for far-ranging fantasy novels which
reinvent the tropes of the genre with new life and ambition. She was a
teacher and editor before turning to fiction writing full-time. Her most
recent novel is the second in the Exiles trilogy, The Mage-born Traitor.
The clash of religion and mythology has widespread effects in the cultures
where it has happened. "Salve, Regina" takes a close look at what happens
when one person is at the center of that conflict.




~oOo~



Her bones were numb with kneeling on cold stone. On the cobbled floor
beside the beds of her fevered children; on the broken pebbles beside the
graves of her parents and her sister and her sister's sons and her friends
and her own dear husband; on the rough flags of the Church, before the
altar and the candlesтАФshe knelt and tended and wept and prayed all this
long winter until her bones were numb.

The priest stood upright beside the deathbeds, beside the graves, before
the altar, intoning the sacred incomprehensible words of the Faith. He
called to Christ for surcease of famine and disease, for deliverance from
poisoned water and dying cattle and withered soil. He stood upright amid
the Holy Relics and the Holy Water, the candles, and the chalice her own
dear husband had fashioned with worshiping hands and Monseigneur le
Baron's gift of silver.

Excepting the priest's, all heads in the village bowed heavy with
repentance for sins committed and sins imagined and sins unknown. The
miller's wife flogged herself bloody; she died four days later, so it was
obvious she had not repented enough. The baker's weakling newborn
daughter did not cry out when Holy Water drenched her brow; she died
the next morning, so it was obvious that her silence meant the Devil had
not flown out of her at Baptism. All that winter there were ashes and
offerings, vows and Masses. The dying confessed, were shriven, tasted