"Charles de Lint - The Riddle of the Wren" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Lint Charles)

dragged me off back home."
Janey regarded her friend, hands on her hips, uncertain of what to do.
"Let me come home with you, then," she said. "I can help you with your
chores and maybe your dad'll give you the rest of the afternoon off."
"I don't think you should," Minda said. "He's been in a foul mood all day
long and I don't want him yelling at you."
"He doesn't scare me."
Minda looked steadily at her until she shrugged.
"Well, not a whole lot," Janey said. "Besides, if he ever tried to lay a
hand on me, my dad'd whack him for a loop!"
Minda smiled. "Thanks for listening, Janey. Are you working
tomorrow?"
"Only in the morning."
"I'll try to get away after the noon meal."
"Where shall we meet?"
"At Biddy's corner," Minda decided.
Janey lifted her eyebrows. "Are you going to have your fortune read?"
Minda shook her head. "We could go visit Rabbert."
"Or Wooly Lengershin. He's promised to teach me how to juggle."
"Does he want his payment in kisses or sweets?"
"Both!" Janey said with a laugh.
 Minda picked up her basket. "I have to go."
"All right. Try not to dream, Minda. And if you do—try to remember
that a dream's all it is. Don't be a Silly Sealy."
"Janey Jump-up!"
"Minda Miggins loves Tom Higgins!"
Giggling like the schoolgirls they'd been only a few years before, they
went their separate ways.


Minda was still smiling when she returned to the courtyard of her
father's inn. It was a two-story timber frame building with a stone
foundation that stood at the corner of Cob's Turn and the King's Walk,
which was the name the King's Road bore as it wound through
Fernwillow. Hadon Sealy, recently widowed and with his two-year-old
daughter in tow, had bought it fifteen years ago when the previous owner
retired. It was called The Wandering Piper—a name Hadon kept both
because of the goodwill that was already associated with it and the fact
that he didn't have enough imagination to give it a better. There'd been no
great increase in trade since the change in ownership, but there'd been no
noticeable drop in business either, a fact that had kept the local gossips'
tongues wagging all through the first winter, considering what a dour face
Hadon turned to the world in general, and to his young daughter and help
in particular.
Minda winked at Pin the stableboy as she hurried through the yard to
the kitchen. Slipping through the door, she prayed her absence had gone
unnoticed, but no sooner had she set her basket on the long counter that
ran the full length of the kitchen's west wall than her father entered from
the common room, his bulk filling doorway. Hadon was black-haired
where she was brown, heavy-set where she was slim. His eyes were a pale