"Yolen-TheLadysGarden" - читать интересную книгу автора (Yolen Jane)

The Lady made a face at the breeze. She hated making any kind of mistake. But
then she smiled at the breeze because it had, after all, merely been reporting,
not making judgments. And then the Lady instructed slightly larger breezes to
waft their gauzy shifts together and make a rope to hook through the handles of
the basket. In this way the child was raised up and over the wall and into the
garden proper.

And that, you see, was the Beginning of the End.

THE CHILD was a boy. That was evident at once. And he was hungry. That, too, was
evident. But whose child he was or why he was there at all, those questions
could not be answered, not even by the Lady. Indeed those questions were never
to be answered, but by tea time the next day it didn't matter because by then
they were all thoroughly besotted with him.

Infanta was the first to fall under his spell, when he raised his little hand up
to her mane and tangled his chubby fingers in it.

The next to fall was Tartary. "He has," she cooed to the Lady, "your voice." By
which she meant she was listening to him, though not really hearing him, for
certainly the baby did not have the Lady's voice at all, hers being low and
rounded and full, and his just being full.

Wishart actually held out the longest, until the breezes lifted the child onto
his back. The baby crowed his delight, and if you could at that moment have seen
the look in Wishart's old pearly eyes, you would have been sure they had turned
to oceans themselves. He trotted around the inner path, past the herb gardens,
stepping over rockery plants with a lightness he hadn't shown in years.

The Lady changed the baby's clothes and fed him pap she mixed herself, and wiped
both his face and his bottom as if that were something she had always wanted to
do. And she sang to him as she cleaned, songs like "Dance to Thy Daddy, My
Little Laddie," and "Trot, Trot to Boston," which hadn't even been invented yet.
And "Western Wind," which had.

Eventually, after months of squabbling, they settled on Waverly as his name.

"Because the waves brought him," the Infanta said, looking down fondly into his
crib.

As long as Waverly was a baby and then a child, there was no trouble in the
Lady's garden. After all, except for uprooting some of the slighter plants -- to
see what held them to the ground -- Waverly was a good boy, if overly curious.
Of course curiosity was not something either the Lady or the unicorns really
understood. But they realized, if somewhat begrudgingly, that curiosity would
serve young Waverly in his education, and so they did not stifle it.

By the time he was ten and had gone through "What's that?" and "Why's that?" and
on to "Why not?" however, they had all begun to lose patience with him. With
their sense of time, it seemed that only yesterday they had drawn baby Waverly