"Jane Yolen - Briar Rose" - читать интересную книгу автора (Yolen Jane)

Briar Rose

17

"Shut up!" Shana and Sylvia said in unison.
Gemma took the spoon and cup away and gave Rebecca a slice of apple
instead. "Now one day, flnally and at last and about time, the queen went
to bed and gave birth to a baby girl with a crown of red hair. " Gemma
touched her own hair in which strands of white curled around the red like
barbed wire. "The child's face was as beautiful as a wildflower and so the
king named her . . . "
"Briar Rose, " Sylvia and Shana breathed.
"Briar Rose, " repeated Rebecca, only not nearly so clearly, her mouth
being quite full of apple.
CHAPTER

It was spring, or at least so the calendar said, but a soft snow hz
been falling all night, coating the Holyoke streets. The Lynx labon
up the slippery hill, chugging instead of purring like the Merced
they'd had to leave behind in the shop.
"I told Mother that Mercedes was a lemon, but she on
laughed," Sylvia said, playing once again with her gold-shrin
earring. She'd already worried the right one off and was at work
the left.
"And I told her Father would have done a damned sight bett
taking a mistress instead of a Mercedes for his midlife crisis. For o:
thing, they're cheaper!" Shana always had to get off the better lin(
The two of them smiled at each other, their quick tongues, da
hair, wide-set eyes, and high cheekbones marking them as twii
though actually they were eighteen months apart.
Becca, the youngest, smiled at them both, but she was not p,
of their magic circle and never had been. Guiding the sputtering lit
beige car up the last hill, she forced it through an attempted spin-C
with a sure hand.
"Come on, Rocinante," she murmured. The car had already bE
very secondhand when she bought it and Rocinante was the oi
name that presented itself at the time. She never felt right ab(
Briar Rose

19

owning something that performed for her without giving it a name.
"Come on, baby, up and over."
The Lynx managed to crest the hill and Becca turned it expertly
to the right on Cabot Street, coasting to a stop in front of the
three-story brick nursing home.
"Here we are," she said, as much to the car as to her sisters.
Sylvia and Shana got out quickly, volleying curses at the snow,
and walked in briskly. They didn't even stop to stomp off the wet,
clinging snow from their Ferragamo boots.