"Patricia A. McKillip - The Changeling Sea" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKillip Patricia A)

Tide. PZ7.M478678Ch 1988 [Fie]—del9 88-3435 CIP AC


FOR
JEAN KARL



ONE

NO ONE REALLY KNEW where Peri lived the year after the sea
took her father and cast his boat, shrouded in a tangle of fishing
net, like an empty shell back onto the beach. She came home when
she chose to, sat at her mother’s hearth without talking, brooding
sullenly at the small, quiet house with the glass floats her father
had found, colored bubbles of light, still lying on the dusty
windowsill, and the same crazy quilt he had slept under still on the
bed, and the door open on quiet evenings to the same view of the
village and the harbor with the fishing boats homing in on the
incoming tide. Sometimes her mother would rouse herself and cook;
sometimes Peri would eat, sometimes she wouldn’t. She hated the
vague, lost expression on her mother’s face, her weary movements.
Her hair had begun to gray; she never smiled, she never sang. The
sea, it seemed to Peri, had taken her mother as well as her father,
and left some stranger wandering despairingly among her cooking
pots.
Peri was fifteen that year. She worked at the inn beside the
harbor, tending fires, scrubbing floors, cleaning rooms, and running
up and down the kitchen stairs with meals for the guests. The
village was small, poor, one of the many fishing villages tucked into
the rocky folds of the island. The island itself was the largest of
seven scattered across the blustery northern sea, ruled for four
hundred years by the same family.
The king’s rich, airy summer house stood on a high crest of land
overlooking the village harbor. During the months when he was in
residence, the wealthy people of the island came to stay at the inn,
to conduct their business at the king’s summer court, or sometimes
just to catch a glimpse of him riding with his dark-haired son down
the long, glistening beaches. In winter, the inn grew quiet; fishers
came in the evening to tell fish stories over their beers before they
went home to bed. But even then, the innkeeper, a burly,
good-natured man, grew testy if he spotted a cobweb in a high
corner or a sandy footprint on his flagstones. He kept his inn
scoured and full of good smells.
He kept a weather eye on Peri, too, for she had a neglected look
about her. She had grown tall without realizing it; her clothes were
too loose in some places, too tight in others. Her hair, an awkward
color somewhere between pale sand and silt, looked on most days,
he thought, as if she had stood on her head and used it for a mop.
He gave her things from the kitchen, sometimes, at the end of the