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

surface, and a pair of green eyes, more sea-green than leaf-green. Ravn
called them "mermaid's eyes" and laughingly insisted on checking her feet
each morning for signs of her secret nightly excursions: for fronds of
seaweed, he said; for seahorses, flippers, or scales! She had no idea what
he meant by this, and had solemnly told him so, which surprised him
much, for surely everyone knew the tales of the selkies of the Northern
Isles, who borrowed human form to seduce unwary sailors and fishermen,
and then slipped into their fishy skins at night and returned to their ocean
homeland, leaving their lovers mazed and heartbroken. She smiled again
into the mirror and watched her lips curve up into a pale pink bow, saw
how her cheeks rounded and the skin around her eyes creased. She relaxed
the expression and stared mercilessly at her changed image in the
reflective surface. In this strong morning light she was able to spy out the
vaguest of lines running from the sides of her nose to the corners of her
mouth, fanning outward from her eyes. She had not thought she knew how
to smile, or make any other such expression; but these faint marks told
another story.
The Master had always treated her as a thing rather than any sort of
person, a solace and pastime for his pleasure alone in the chilly, empty
world of Sanctuary. Until this time she had never questioned her place in
that world, but now a new thought came to her.
In some lost past, she must have smiled and frowned and pursed her
lips enough times to have etched these small lines into her skin.
In some lost past, therefore, she must have had another life.
 Feelings that she could put no name to welled up in her. She dropped
the mirror to her lap, barely registering its cold touch on her naked skin.
Beside her, her husband stirred briefly, eyelids flickering, then he stilled
and slipped back into deep sleep. She reached and brushed a frond of his
black hair away from his brow, and felt herself calmed by the sheer
simplicity of the act, Such a man of many parts, she thought, taking in
the conjunction of the weather-beaten skin of his face and neck with the
vulnerable whiteness of his chest and belly; at the dark hands and
forearms flung wide upon the linen sheet which contrasted with legs so
pale they were like limbs belonging to another man. Only the curling black
hair that grew everywhere upon him knit the whole together, blurred the
seams, confused the edges.
Leaning toward him, she laid the mirror now on its side before his
sleeping face and watched as his breath bloomed on the cold metal. The
bloom faded and died, then was restored with each new passage of warm
air. Then she wiped the mirror on the sheet and breathed on it herself.
Nothing.
The metal remained pristine, unblemished.
"For all your reputation, there is no heat in you," she remembered the
Master saying to her. Then, under the binding of his magic, it had been as
much as she could do to concentrate on the sound his words made; it was
only now, away from his influence, that she began to see what he might
have meant by this, yet no matter how many times she tried the test, the
result was still the same and she still had no better understanding of who
she was or where she had come from. It was a mystery that was coming to
obsess her, to drive her mind ceaselessly through every hour of the day and