"Gregort Maguire - Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maguire Gregory)

looks alone. A changeling is said to be

deficient of something essential, either memory, or sense, or mercy. Iris wants to ask the Master about
the nature of changelings, and how to identify one, but he interrupts her thoughts, mumbling on.
"And even though I testify about the terrible human state, and its rescue by the sanctity of Jesus, what,
what, what in this annus dominus are we brought to, we the laborers, the artisans, the cooks of linseed
stew?" The Master throws his brush across the room. "They want /lowers, flowers for commerce, beauty
to sell as if it had its own sake! Why don't the dreamless Calvinists just go off to Constantinople? Why
don't they join the pagan Mohammedans who rebuke the notion of portraying divinity in anything but
Euclidean tiles of blue and gold? Or why don't I just take myself to the Spanish Netherlands and set
myself up there? Where I can paint what I want, and keep food on the table as well?"

"Why don't you?" asks Iris, goaded from her shyness by

his ranting.

"I love my home, and this is my home," he yells. "Don't

you understand that?"

Iris doesn't answer. Home is hard to recollect already, usurped by that nightmare of torches, accusations,
an escape in a flatboat over fields flooded with sea water, as the full moon blazed upon them like the eye
of a vengeful judge. Her family had left home so quickly—who really knew if Jack Fisher was even given
a Christian burial, or was he still drifting in the suck of the receding tides, a bloated corpse leaching his
blood into the ruined crops?

THE OBSCURE CHILD

"What, what is it?" says the Master, coming toward Iris, but she starts, and jumps away.

—a minor demon, sniffing the midnight air, on the hunt, chasing after them—

"No," she says, keeping it all unremembered, "no, no." "Then if you won't say, out, out in the air, enough
of my prattle; what do you care for the madness of an obsessed man? Go for flowers. Go with your
enormous sister for flowers. Trot off and drag an armload of pretty weeds for me, so I can waste my
time and feed myself."

He looks at Iris, then peers down into his brushes, splaying the bristles of one with his clean left thumb.
"Bring me flowers, child," he says, more softly. "Out into the air with you. You look like a crone before
your time."

THE OBSCURE CHILD

Mead

eaaow

Schoonmaker—the Master—gives Iris a short knife. He tells her how to find the meadow. Iris helps
Ruth put her wooden shoes back on, and she fits on her own pair. Then the girls clasp their hands and
run.