"Nancy Kress - Arms and the Woman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

Arms and the Woman
Nancy Kress
The hour after the third-year class in Advanced History of Armor Styles was
supposed to be my research time, but a tyro knight had asked to see me, and of course
tyros are so sacred that we mere loremasters must drop everything and counsel them,
no matter what valuable papers might miss the Loremaster Quarterly deadline. To
make it worse, the apprentice turned out to be Tyro Marigold. I have little patience
with stupid people; it is my only fault. Marigold is the stupidest apprentice that Castle
Olansa has ever had. By far.
“Loremaster Gwillam, I’m being haunted,” she said, sitting on the edge of the wooden
bench in my study, her blue eyes perfectly round. The emblem on her breastplate was
upside down. I reached over and twisted it to its locked and upright position.
“If you’re being haunted, then go get a spell from Father Martin.”
“I can’t, because—”
“Don’t tell me you `can’t.‘ You know tyros are exempt from hauntings during all of
training except vigil week.” Although probably she didn’t know. Certainly I hadn’t
been able to teach her much about chivalric lore. Why should Father Martin have
been any more successful teaching her about death duty?
“I can’t see Father Martin about this because—”
“Don’t tell me `can’t,‘ girl! Just do it!”
“—the ghost is my aunt, First Dame Cecilie of Castle Thlevin!”
That, of course, put a different cast on the situation. I leaned forward and scrutinized
Marigold carefully. No, she wasn’t lying. Her pop-eyed blue gaze looked genuinely
baffled, and genuinely frightened. Besides, she was too stupid to lie.
Which was what made the situation interesting. Ghosts almost never choose relatives
to haunt for their tuitions. Obviously an unstilled ghost has to haunt someone to learn
whatever lessons it failed to learn in life, but usually relatives are part of the reason
they didn’t learn the lesson in the first place. Wisdom deficits tend to run in families.
Most ghosts need to go outside the family to discover the principles they didn’t see
illustrated in life. So why was a First Dame haunting her own niece?
And why Marigold? What could a tyro this stupid—she was dead last in the lists for
jousting, hunting, arcana, military strategy, fencing, astrology, and
heraldry—possibly teach anybody? The only award Marigold had ever won, in three
years at Castle Olansa, was Miss Congeniality, and I suspect that was a pity vote by
the other tyros. The tyromistress is constantly trying to eradicate their
sentimentality, but with thirty-three teenage girls in the tyro class alone, it’s difficult.
 Marigold squirmed under my close inspection, looked away, looked back, nervously
fiddled with her armor emblem, which again ended up upside-down. No, she wasn’t
lying.
“Tyro, when did you last see the ghost of First Dame Cecilie?”
“Last night! At midnight, Loremaster. Oh, she was so awful! She wore full
armor—breastplate, tace, tasset, pauldron, all of it—and was smeared with blood! And
she had no… no right arm!” The young voice was filled with horror. The right arm, the
sword arm.
“All right,” I said. “You may go.”
“G-go? But… but what should I do?”
“Nothing, until I send for you again. That will be this evening. I need to think.”
At the mention of thinking, Marigold nodded reverently, in homage to a foreign
activity. She tiptoed out, so as not to disturb my thinking, her armor clanking on the
stone threshold. When she’d clanked out of sight, I closed the door to my study and