"Kim Wilkins - The Autumn Castle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilkins Kim)

above the stones, then stopped with a lurch. Hunched over inside it, dressed in smeared rags of an
indeterminate color, was a white-haired hag with a wispy beard.

The queen seized Christine and forced her forward.

"Hey," Christine cried in protest. Four other pairs of hands were on her, and she was forced to her knees
in front of the well, her head held down on the cold stone.

The queen directed more commands at the witch and, without warning, the hag's bony gray hands shot
out and clapped Christine deafeningly around the ears.

"Ouch!" Christine cried, then heard somebody say, "Don't complain, we do you a favor." Only, she didn't
really hear it. She heard something completely differentтАФa sentence in that garbled half-German they all
spokeтАФand yet when it entered her ears and slid into her mind, it turned into words she understood
completely. She raised her head, gasping.

"Give Hexebart your tongue," the queen said.

Christine flinched away, tried to get to her feet, but more hands forced her down.

"Your tongue, foolish girl," one of the queen's assembly said. "You must speak as well as hear."

The thought of the hag touching her tongue repulsed her, but she was afraid these dream-characters were
about to get violent, so she gingerly poked out her tongue. Once more Hexebart's fingers stole out from
behind the bars of her cage. The witch grabbed her tongue, yanked it, and then released it.

"Jesus! That really hurt." But even though these were the words she said, they came out sounding
completely different to the collected assembly. Hexebart cackled at Christine's bewildered expression.
The queen pressed a dainty hand to her mouth to hide her smile, then collected her queenly demeanor.

"Hexebart," she said, turning to the hag. "Begone!"

"Gladly, you preening pig, you buttered turd, you sugared sow." Hexebart released the rope and slid
back down the well.

The queen turned her attention to Christine and tried a smile. "I shall receive you in the south turret in
twenty minutes."

"Okay. Fine." The odd echo of her words in a foreign tongue shivered in her ears.

"Hilda, take her and feed her. She's far too thin."

"Yes, your Majesty," a portly woman said, stepping forward to seize Christine's arm. "Come, girl."

Christine was led back into the dim castle, hoping that she would stay in the dream for the next twenty
minutes so she could hear what this dream-queen was going to say. Perhaps she knew all the secrets of
the universe: the truth about God, the reason evil exists, life after deathтАж

Christine's skin froze. Perhaps this wasn't a dream at all; perhaps it was a near-death experience. What if
she had been hurt so seriously in her fall in Jude's apartment that she was even now lying on a hospital