"Waters, Elisabeth - The Lesser Twin" - читать интересную книгу автора (Waters Elisabeth)

Something snapped in Kiara; she thought it must be her temper. While she had been a salamander nothing had touched her nearly enough to get her angry, but this was her sister, her other self, reduced to a servant for Tamor and his incompetent new mistress. She transformed to human form, retaining enough fire about her to substitute for the clothes that had burned away that day in the kitchen fire. The stone floor was very cold under her feet. "You opened the circle, fool-and left it open! Doesn't Tarnor train his 'priestesses' at all?"

"Of course he does!" the blonde replied indignantly. "He's a great wizard!"

"Not as great a wizard as you are a fool-both of you!" She slapped the girl's hand away from Karina's mouth. "Being good in bed is not the major qualification for a priestess." Her old clothes chest still sat in the corner, and she grabbed the first dress to hand, doused the rest of her fire, and hastily dressed, hoping not to freeze to death in the process. "And I suppose being a good housekeeper is?" Karina, apparently unable to cope with questions like "why were you a salamander?" was falling back on their old sibling rivalry. "You're always right, always perfect-but you can't even get a man!"

"Why would I want to? You've always had plenty for both of us!" Kiara snapped back, and looked at her sister critically. "But you won't be able to much longer if you hang around here being a drudge-already your hands are rough, and your hair looks dreadful, when did you last brush it?" Karina burst into tears, the blonde stared from one to the other in total incomprehension, and Tarnor limped heavily into the room. "What's this noise? I told both of you that I expect my priestesses to get along with one another-how am I supposed to do Great Magick with the pair of you acting like common scolds? Magick requires sacrifice, concentration, and discipline."

"None of which you possess," Kiara said coldly, drawing herself to her full height and slowly advancing on him. "You're not fit to scrub a hearth-witch's cauldron."

"I don't know who you are, girl, or what you're doing in my Tower, but obviously you know nothing of Magick." Tarnor's voice was low and sonorous, but to Kiara he was so obviously bluffing that she couldn't understand why the other girls couldn't hear it. She didn't bother to answer in words; she simply stretched both arms out at shoulder height, pointing toward him. She noticed that they were pale and smooth (being a salamander seemed to have done wonders for her complexion), before she started the flames running down them and shooting out from her fingertips. It was a ridiculously simple trick, using virtually no energy, and not dangerous to anyone in the room; but it had most satisfying results. Tarnor fled screaming, the blonde sank to her knees in a small cowering heap, and Karina fainted.

Kiara lowered her arms, stopping the flames, stepped over her sister's body, and began to pack her clothes. After a moment Karina moaned softly, and the blonde, with a fearful glance at Kiara, fled the room. Kiara finished packing her things, then turned to her sister.

"I'm leaving this place, Karina. If you care to accompany me, pack your things."

"But Tarnor-"

"He's not going to stop us," Kiara pointed out.

"But I can't abandon him! He needs me to save him."

"Save him from what?" Kiara inquired. "That blonde girl-or his own incompetence?"

"You don't understand," Karina said. "He's really a good person underneath, but he needs my love to manifest it."

"Oh, I think I understand," Kiara said slowly. "You think that if you love him enough and stick with him, you can change him into what you think he should be. Just as I always thought that if I stuck with you long enough, you'd turn out like me."

"But I am like you, aren't I? We're twins."

"Yes, but I don't know that we're any more alike in essence than we are in looks." Kiara shrugged. "In any case, I'm going. If you want to come with me, come. If you want to stay here, stay."

"I can't leave him," Karina repeated.

"Then stay with him." Kiara sighed and picked up her pack. "Be happy, Karina." She hugged her sister, then turned and walked out the door, no longer half a pair of twins, but an individual in her own right.



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About Elisabeth Waters and "The Lesser Twin"

Elisabeth Waters is my cousin and has been my live-in secretary/office manager/computer programmer/etc, for sixteen years now. Her "job description" here defies analysis, but seems to boil down to making order out of the chaos of my life, which can be very chaotic indeed. She is a superb short-story writer (this story took second place in the Cauldron vote out of the thirty-nine stories in issue 9). Although she is prone from time to time to throw herself down in a tantrum, declaring that she doesn't want to be a writer at all, she is one of the better writers of short stories I know. Her first novel, Changing Fate, will be published by DAW Books in April 1994, which means it should be available when this anthology is published. When you read it, tell me if I'm not right in saying she's a superb writer. Although she declared from the beginning that she wanted nothing to do with the magazine, my relative inability to cope with prosaic matters has forced her to have a great deal to do with it-which she does as superbly as she does everything else. Our first issue featured one of her better short stories-the illustration for which, as ill luck would have it, happened to be the only time I ever encountered an art plagiarist in the fifty years of my career. Fortunately her other contributions to us have had better luck. She is currently applying to law school at the University of California; but she's done so well handling my complicated legal affairs without a law degree that I hope her legal career turns out to be purely recreational.