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

"Twelve."
The frown deepened. "Twelve. And you've never apprenticed to anyone?"
She shook her head.
"Well. I'm not sure that I can offer you such a positionтАФI've heard that your par
won't hear of you traveling, and this
town is not my home. But Gerrald has offered me much money to teach you for the sum
and I admit that the offer itself is unusual enough to have piqued my curiosity. If you
willing, I would teach you some small amount of my craft."
He brought with him gold and silver, sparkling gems and glossy pearls, opals and ebon
small dragon's hoard.
But he brought something better, something infinitely more alluring: fire. Fire, in the h
of the rooms her father had built.
She had waited for her father's permission, and her father had granted it.

The man in robes came again, three times, the water jug heavy in his hands. She wat
his shadow against the cobbled stones, and her hands ached. Her grandmother's hands ache
wellтАФ but she blamed that ache on the ocean Cessaly could taste when her tongue touched
lips.
Cessaly had not yet seen the ocean; she had seen buildings, horses, and streets that wen
for as far as the eye could see. There were white birds in the air above, birds with an
raucous cries; there were insects beneath her feet among mice and rats; there were cats s
and slender, and dogs of all shapes, all sizes.
There was no workshop; she had been forbidden all of her tools. When traveling along
road, she had been permitted to idly carve the pieces of wood she had taken from the farm;
were gone now.
She wanted them.
There was no dirt beneath her feet; there were stones, smooth and flat, longer than she
and at least three times as wide. There were fences, too, things of black iron or bro
Nothing that she could work with.
She plaited her hair instead, until her mother caught her at it, and grabbed both her ha
stilling them.
"Not here," she had said severely. "Not here."
Her hands began to ache; her eyes began to burn. She could not wait forever.
The jeweler stayed in Durant for four years. He bought a house for himself, very nea
common; he built his workshop, sent for his apprentices, and brought his business to the to
He also made a room for Cessaly, and her mother brought her to it, and took her from it, e
day except for the Mother's day.
Cessaly worked with gold, with silver, with platinum. She handled his diamonds,
emeralds, his rubies, the blinking eyes of curved sapphires, the crisp edges of amethyst
firestone. He had begun by telling her what he wished her to achieve, and had ended, quic
by simply giving her material to work with.
He often watched as she worked; often worked by her side, making the settings upon w
he might place the results of her labor. He was not a man who was given to praise, and ind
he offered little of itтАФbut his silence was like a song, and his expression in the frame of
silence, a gift. Cessaly liked him.
And because of that, she decided that she would make something for him. Not for
merchant to whom all of her work eventually went, but for Master Sivold himself.
Because she wished the gift to be entirely hers, she chose wood to work with; wood
something that she could easily afford on her own. The merchants came in the spring, and w
they did, she asked if they might bring her something suitable. But she did not ask for