"Diana Wynne Jones - Howl's Moving Castle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jones Diana Wynne)

kitchen, or workshop, was beautifully cozy and very peaceful. Sophie went properly to sleep and
snored. She did not wake up when there came a flash and a muted bang form the workbench, followed
by a hurriedly bitten-off swear word from Michael. She did not wake when Michael, sucking his burned
fingers, put the spell aside for the night and fetched bread and cheese out of the closet. She did not stir
when Michael knocked her stick down with a clatter, reaching over her for a log to put on the fire, or
when Michael, looking down into Sophie's open mouth, remarked to the fireplace, "She's got all her
teeth. She's not the Witch of the Waste, is she?"
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Jones, Diana Wynne - Howl's Moving Castle.txt
"I wouldn't have let her come in if she was," the fireplace retorted.
Michael shrugged and picked Sophie's stick politely up again.
Then he put a log on the fire with equal politeness and went away to bed somewhere
overhead.
In the middle of the night Sophie was woken by someone snoring. She jumped upright,
rather irritated to discover that she was the one who had been snoring. It seemed to her that she had
only dropped off for a second or so, but Michael seemed to have vanished in those seconds, taking the
light with him. No doubt a wizard's apprentice learned to do that kind of thing in his first week. And he
had left the fire very low. It was giving out irritating hissings and poppings. A cold draft blew on
Sophie's back. Sophie recalled that she was in a wizard's castle, and also, with unpleasant distinctness,
that there was a human skull on a workbench somewhere behind her.
She shivered and cranked her stiff old neck around, but there was only darkness behind her.
"Let's have a bit more light, shall we?" she said. Her cracked voice seemed to make no more noise than
the crackling of the fire. Sophie was surprised. She had expected it to echo through the vaults of the
castle. Still, there was a basket of logs beside her. She stretched out a creaking arm and heaved a log on
the fire, which sent a spray of green and blue sparks flying through the chimney. She heaved on a
second log and sat back, not without a nervous look or so behind her, where the blue-purple light form
the fire was dancing over the polished brown bone of the skull. The room was quite small. There was
no one in it but Sophie and the skull.
"He's got both feet in the grave and I've only got one," she consoled herself. She turned back
to the fire, which was now flaring up into blue and green flames. "Must be salt in that wood," Sophie
murmured. She settled herself more comfortably, putting her knobby feet on the fender and her head
into a corner of the chair, where she could stare into the colored flames, and began dreamily
considering what she ought to do in the morning. But she was sidetracked a little by imagining a face in
the flames. "It would be a thin blue face," she murmured, "very long and thin, with a thin blue nose. But
those curly green flames on top are most definitely your hair. Suppose I didn't go until Howl gets back?
Wizards can lift spells, I suppose. And those purple flames near the bottom make the mouth- you have
savage teeth, my friend. You have two green tufts of flame for eyebrows..." Curiously enough, the only
orange flames in the fire were under the green eyebrow flames, just like eyes, and they each had a little
purple glint in the middle that Sophie could almost imagine was looking at her, like the pupil of an eye.
"On the other hand," Sophie continued, looking into the orange flames, "if the spell was off, I'd have
my heart eaten before I could turn around."
"Don't you want your heart eaten?" asked the fire.
It was definitely the fire that spoke. Sophie saw its purple mouth move as the words came.
Its voice was nearly as cracked as her own, full of the spitting and whining of burning wood. "Naturally
I don't," Sophie answered. "What are you?"
"A fire demon," answered the purple mouth. There was more whine than spit to its voice as
it said, "I'm bound to this hearth by contract. I can't move from this spot." Then its voice became brisk
and crackling. "And what are you?" it asked. "I can see you're under a spell."
This roused Sophie from her dreamlike state. "You see!" she exclaimed. "Can you take the
spell off?"