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

was a threat. "Very well. I will return with your answer." He walked away then, and only w
he reached the doors did he turn and proffer the most perfunctory of bows.
Gilafas waited until he left, and then he made his way to the grand desk that served as
great room's foundation. There he paused, running his hands over the surface of a very sim
box. It was a deep, deep red, and the carvings across its face were not up to the standard
the least of the guild's makers.
But he had been told what lay within.

Cessaly stood between the twin pillars of her mother and her grandmother, her knuckles
white as the alabaster statues in the distance.
Distance was a tricky thing to measure. There were men who could do it; they could
you things by the length of cast shadows, the rise of buildings beneath the fall of sunlight s
arcane measure of the shape of the land. Or so her father had once said. He had stayed in
Free Town of Durant. Said his good-byes at the edge of the fields that had yet to be tilled
planted, his face dark, his eyes squinting against the light. Except that the sun had been a
back of his head, a shining glint over the brim of his weathered hat.
Her brothers, Bryan and Dell, had hugged her tight, lifting her in the twirl and spin of m
younger years. They hadn't said good-bye. Instead, they had offered her the blessin
Kalliaris, asking for the Lady's smile, and not her terrible frown.
She had offered them gifts. Wood carvings, things made from the blunt edge of chisel
knife. To remember me by, she'd said. In case I don't come back.
A bird. A butterfly. Nothing useful.
But in those two things, some quickness of captured motion: tail feathers spread for fl
beak open in silent song; wings, thin and fine, veined and open, devoid only of the color
might have lent them the appearance of life.
Dell had handled the butterfly as carefully as he might had it been alive; his clumsy, h
hands, callused by the tools of their father's trade, hovering like wings above wings, memb
of wings, afraid that his grip might damage the insect's flight.
 Her father had taught them that, each in their turn, and butterflies sometimes sat on the p
of their steady fingers, wings closed to edge, feelers testing wind. Birds had been less trus
of course, and they were predators in their fashion, beaks snapping the skein of butterfly w
in a darting hunt for sustenance.
Cessaly loved them, hunter and hunted, because they were small and delicate whe
flight. She had never been large.
Her brothers took after their father; they were broad of shoulder,
silent, slow to move. But they put their backs into the labor that had been chosen for t
taking comfort in the Mother's season.
Cessaly had tried to do the same, she a farmer's daughter. But the hoes and the spades
standing blades of the scythes, often spoke to her in ways that had nothing to do with
Mother. She might be found carving mounds of dirt, or fallen stalks of wheat, into shapes: g
fortresses, sprawling manors, even small castlesтАФ although the poverty of her splendor
become apparent only when she had reached the outskirts of Averalaan.
They thought her clever then.
Her father would often cry out her mother's name, and the deep baritone of his vo
cracked by the dry air of the flat plains, returned to her. Cecilia, come see what your daug
has made!
Even her mother's habitually dour expression would ease into something akin to a s
when she came at her husband's call, and they would stand, like a family of leisure,
moments at a time, oohing and aahing.
She had loved those moments.