"Tad Williams - The War of the Flowers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Tad)

though she were a corpse being readied for burial. Day after day, at least when the weather was fair, they
set her in a sedan chair тАФ not an easy task, even for some of the larger, stronger creatures on the staff,
for although the patient was slender, she was tall and long of limb, and always as limp as a sack тАФ and
rolled her out to the manor's garden.
There she would remain, eyes staring straight out at nothing, the hands her attendants had folded still
lying neatly in her lap, her handsome, fine-boned face as hollowly purposeless as a bell with no clapper,
until someone came and took her away again.
Once, during one of the power outages, which were occurring in the city and its outskirts with worrying
frequency these days, a muddled staff had neglected to bring her in. The night nurse, seeing her empty
bed, had gone looking for her and found her still sitting in her chair in the garden, staring at nothing, her
dress soaked with dew and her milk-white skin goose-pimpled with cold.
Mr. Lungwort had been very upset about that, not so much out of pity тАФ it was hard for anyone with the
administrator's somewhat narrow personality to pity something that showed no more liveliness than a
lump of wax тАФ but out of fear that her wealthy family might discover the mistake and remove her from
Zinnia Manor, along with her sizable endowment. Two nurses were sacked and a night orderly was
severely reprimanded, but the patient herself gave no sign that her night outdoors had made any
difference.
Lungwort's records showed that her name was Erephine, but he did not encourage conversational
familiarity between his staff and their charges тАФ the "guests," as Lungwort called them тАФ and
especially not toward members of the highest Houses, however intimate the staff's interactions with
them might be, however unprepossessing the patient. To her blank face, a face that animation might
have made beautiful, they addressed her only as "Lady Primrose," or simply, "my lady." The sound of
their voices and the touch of their careful hands seemed to mean no more to her than had the night dew.
If she had been a mortal woman, and her caretakers mortal too, the word "soulless" might have been
whispered, but fairies do not pretend to have souls, and if they do have such things, they are not aware of
them.


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To the nurses and orderlies of Zinnia Manor, many of them unabashed wearers of wings and unrepentant
believers in the old tales and ways, it was clear that their unmoving, unspeaking charge, so pretty, so
utterly lifeless, must have a story, something darkly romantic and grandly tragic, but if the administrator
or anyone else knew it, the secret remained closely held. When the staff drank betony tea together and
gossiped about Mr. Lungwort's padded suits and the disgusting proclivities of the Feverfew twins, they
called her the Silent Primrose Maiden and tried to imagine what had happened to bring her to this
terrible condition. Not even the most extravagant guesses came anywhere near the truth.
After all, it was possible to imagine that lives might once have been lost and reputations sacrificed for
the light in her eyes, those eyes that were now so terribly, terribly empty, but none of the gossiping staff
of Zinnia Manor could have guessed that soon an entire world might pass into eternal shadow for the
sake of that same, dead stare.

DESCENT
It was a good day, one of very few in the two months since Cat's miscarriage тАФ since the night his old
life ended, as he sometimes thought of it, never considering how he might be tempting fate. A decent
night's sleep and for once no bad dreams gave him a looseness in his heart and his step he hadn't felt for
a while. (He had been having the same nightmare a lot lately, eerie and claustrophobic, where he was
trapped in something like a room full of mist or smoke, staring out at the unreachable world through a
thick window.) But today bad dreams seemed to have evaporated in the sunshine. Walking through a