"Michelle West - The Memory of Stone" - читать интересную книгу автора (West Michelle)

She didn't. She said nothing.
After a moment, he lifted the lid from the box, and then his eyes grew wide, and wider
his lashes seemed fixed to his brows.
"Master Sivold?"
He continued to stare.
"Master Sivold?"
And when he finally blinked, his eyes teared almost instantly. He closed the lid of the
with great care, and set it down on the workbench. "When did you make this, Cessaly?"
"Yesterday."
"Yesterday?"
"Yesterday. And a little bit of the night."
He raised his hands to his face. "I knew we were doing you a disservice, child," he
when he at last chose to lower them. "But I thought that your parents would be happi
youтАФif you worked in the Free Towns." He shook his head. "You must send for your par
child. Tell them I need to speak with them. Tell them it is urgent."

And so she had.
They had come to speak with Master Sivold, and the closed door came between her
understanding and their adult wordsтАФbut she had waited just beyond the reach of the door'
swing, and when it opened, it opened upon her pale face, her wide eyes.
Master Sivold was angry. Her father was angry. Her mother, grim and silent, s
between them, hands curved in fists, knuckles white as the bone beneath stretched skin.
She knew better than to ask what had been said. It was obvious that their anger had ha
good place to go, and she wasn't about to provide one.
But Master Sivold's anger was pointed, directed; when he turned toward her, it smoo
itself away from the lines of his face. She almost wished it hadn't; he looked old as it left h
"Cessaly, I want to ask you a question."
She gazed sideways at her father; his glance spared her nothing, but his nod
permission.
"How did you make the box?"
"How?"
He nodded. Gentle, that nod, as if she were a babe. She didn't like it. "Same as I m
anything else."
"Tell me," he said again. "Take as long as you like."
"I chose that piece of wood," she said, "because it was the right wood. It took a
while."
"How did you know what to carve?"
"Wood knows," she said quietly. She never talked about her work, and it made her ner
to speak now. She wasn't sure why. "I wanted to make it for you," she added. "And I started
minute I got the wood home, but it told me to wait. It told me to wait for the longest day."
"And how did you know what day that was?"
"I didn't," she said again. "The wood knew."
Master Sivold turned to look at her father. Her father, whose shoulders seemed sm
somehow.
"And the sun knew," she continued, thinking about it, feeling the wood in her hand
warmth of that sun on the back of her neck, her head, its light on the dark streaks of grain.
"Tell us what the sun said," Master Sivold told her.
She looked at his face for a moment, seeing in the lines around
his eyes and lips the movement of wood grain. She reached out, unthinking, to touch him
feel the surface of that skin, that grain.