"Jude Fisher - Fool's Gold 02 - Wild Magic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fisher Jude)

the women of Eyra and, enviously, by the men, as "The Stallion of the
North"? stirred briefly as those silky fibers brushed him, his eyelashes
fluttering like the lift of a crow's wings.
The Rosa Eldi smiled. It was an expression she had been practicing
each day in the privacy of these chambers, with the aid of one of her
husband's many gifts to her? a mirror of polished silver, glass, and
mercury, bought from traders from the Galian Isles: a miraculous thing in
itself; but all the more so to the Rose of the World, who had never seen her
own face, except as a reflection in the eyes of enraptured men.
They told her she was beautiful and rare, the most perfect of women:
but she had no means to judge if they meant what they said. She had
spent all of the life that she could recall cloistered away in Sanctuary, that
remote icy stronghold, whose only inhabitants had been a black cat? Bëte
? the mage, Rahe, and Virelai, the Master's apprentice. Rahe had told her
she was beautiful over and again, but since he had also given her to believe
that he had created her in an image most pleasing to his own eyes, it
seemed a subjective judgment.
Then, when Virelai had stolen her away and they had traveled out into
the world, she had had the opportunity to assess for herself the concepts of
beauty and perfection; but in the beginning the assault on her starved
senses had been so overwhelming that she had found everything? from
the commonest dungfly to the mightiest tree? beautiful and perfect in
and of itself. And yet, at the same time, everything she saw had seemed
oddly familiar to her, as if the images that had populated her dreams had
suddenly slipped from her head to swarm around her in all their myriad
forms and colors.
But people were the most disconcerting. She had no idea of how to react
to them, and so usually she said nothing and just drank in their images to
recall later in the darkness of the wagon in which she, the cat, and the
apprentice had lived while they traveled; but what struck her repeatedly
was how women recoiled from her, smiling with their mouths, but rarely
with their eyes, as if they mistook her silent gaze for insolence, or a threat.
Men, on the other hand, appeared to fall in love with her in an instant and
become so helplessly enraptured that they wanted to have congress with
her there and then, no matter how inappropriate the time, place, or
circumstances. The women did not like that, either. It seemed that in the
making of her, the Master had invested her with sufficient magic to
seduce every man on Elda (though that had clearly not been his intention,
which was surely to keep her to himself alone) and from what she now
understood about such matters, it seemed that Virelai had understood her
power early in their journey and had made himself a considerable sum of
money from these men and their use of her as they traveled across the
world.
She felt her smile fade at these memories: felt it by the release of the
muscles in her face. Turning, she reached over and retrieved the mirror
from its place on the tapestried settle beside the bed, and tilted the pretty
artifact until the first rays of the dawn's light were caught between its
sheeny plate and her pale, pale skin. The silver gave back to her an oval
face as white as milk, except where her husband's beard had during the
night rasped her chin and cheek and brought a faint pink flush to the