"Michelle West - Winter Death" - читать интересную книгу автора (West Michelle)

Winter Death
by Michelle West

Kayla was born in the harsh winter of life in the mining town of Riverend. Her
father had been born there, and her mother had come from the flats of Valdemar's
most fertile lands. An outsider, she had learned to face the winter with the same
respect, and the same dread, that the rest of the villagers showed. She had come to
be accepted by the villagers in the same way, slowly and grudgingly at first, but
with a healthy respect that in the end outlasted all of their earlier superstitious fear
of the different.
Margaret Merton, called Magda for reasons that Kayla never quite understood,
was different. She could walk into a room and it would grow warmer; she could
smile, and her smile would spread like fire; her joy could dim the sharpest and
bitterest of winter joy could dim the sharpest and bitterest of tempers, when cabin
fever ran high. How could they not learn to love her?
Even in her absence, that memory remained, and when her daughter showed
some of the same strange life, she was loved for it. More, for the fact that she was
born to the village.

The Heralds came through the village of Riverend in the spring, when the snows
had receded and the passes, in the steep roads and treacherous flats of the
mountains, were opened. Heralds seldom stopped in the village, although they rode
through it from time to time.
When they did, Kayla took the little ones from the hold and made her way down
to the village center to watch them ride through. She would bundle them one at a
time in the sweaters and shawls that kept the bite of spring air at bay, and gently
remind them of foreign thingsтАФmanners, behavior, the language children should
use in the presence of their elders.
She would remind them of the purpose of Heralds, and promise them a story or
two if they behaved themselves, and then she would pick up the children whose
toddling led them to cracks in the dirt, sprigs of new green, sodden puddlesтАФin
fact, anything that caught their eye from the moment the hold's great doors were
openedтАФand hurry them along; in that way, she managed to keep them from
missing the Heralds altogether.
This spring was the same, but it was also different; every gesture was muted, and
if she smiled at all, it was so slight an expression that the children could be
forgiven for missing it. It had been a harsh winter.
A terrible winter.
 And the winter had taken the joy out of Kayla so completely the villagers
mourned its passing and wondered if it was buried with those who had passed
away in the cold.
On this spring day, the Heralds stopped as the children gathered in as orderly a
group as children could who had been cooped up all winter.
There were two, a man and the woman who rode astride the Companions that set
them apart from any other riders in the kingdom of Valdemar.
"Well met," the woman said, nudging her Companion forward at a slow walk.
Kayla heard the whisper that started at one end of the small group and traveled to
the other. She almost smiled.
Almost.
Mitchell and Evan began to shove each other out of the way in an attempt to be at