"Jo Walton - Relentlessly Mundane" - читать интересную книгу автора (Walton Jo)

loom with half a handwoven cloth in the corner. Tharsia's weaving was
improving, but still terrible. The colours on this one were so ugly that it took Jane
a moment to notice the man standing next to it.


"Mark!" she said, and felt her heart beat suddenly faster. She was so shocked
she allowed her real joy in seeing him into her voice. "I thought you were in
Florence?"


"I was; I just got back," he said. "Hi, Jane." The casual tone he used was more
painful than anything since -- since she had seen him the last time.


"Hi," Jane said, trying not to blush. She had been fifteen when they'd told her in
the High Temple in Porphylia that she would always love Mark as much as she
did then. She hadn't thought to ask if he'd always love her. If she had, she'd
have stayed, like Kay, stayed where she was wanted and useful and where
everything was noble and beautiful.


... Not everything, she reminded herself for the millionth time. She wasn't
Tharsia, to forget how scared they had been, to forget the very real danger, the
evil and hideous things they had faced. Faced, and fought, and defeated. In
Porphylia things were all very obviously what they were.


"Terry told me you were coming over," Mark said, sitting down on one of
Tharsia's squashy chairs and disarranging the lacy drape.


"Yeah," said Jane, feeling tongue-tied and idiotic.


"Tharsia," Tharsia corrected, automatically. She liked it now, though when she'd
been twelve and in Porphylia she'd been only too pleased to have them call her
Terry or Teresa and treat her as normal.


"OK, sis, Tharsia it is," said Mark, obligingly, as he had so many times before.


"So, what were you doing in Florence?" Jane asked him.


"Giving a talk, looking at some old stuff, that sort of thing," he said.


"Did you find anything?" Tharsia asked.