"Patricia A. McKillip - Winter Rose" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKillip Patricia A)

One

They said later that he rode into the village on a horse the color of buttermilk, but I saw him walk out of
the wood.

I was kneeling at the well; I had just lifted water to my lips. The well was one of the wood's secrets: a
deep spring as clear as light, hidden under an overhang of dark stones down which the brier roses fall,
white as snow, red as blood, all summer long. The vines hide the water unless you know to look. I found
it one hot afternoon when I stopped to smell the roses. Beneath their sweet scent lay something shadowy,
mysterious: the smell of earth, water, wet stone. I moved the cascading briers and looked down at my
own reflection.

Corbet, he called himself to the villagers. But I saw him before he had any name at all.

My name is Rois, and I look nothing like a rose. The water told me that. Water never lies. I look more
like a blackbird, with my flighty black hair and eyes more am-ber than the blackbird's sunny yellow. My
skin is not fit for fairy tales, since I liked to stand in light, with my eyes closed, my face turned upward
toward the sun. That's how I saw him at first: as a fall of light, and then something shaping out of the light.
So it seemed. I did not move; I let the water stream silently down my wrist. There was a blur of gold: his
hair. And then I blinked, and saw his face more clearly.

I must have made some noise then. Perhaps I shifted among the wild fern. Perhaps I sighed. He looked
toward me, but there was too much light; I must have been a blur of shadow in his eyes.

Then he walked out of the light.

Of course I thought about him, at first the way you think about weather or time, something always at the
edge of your mind. He didn't seem real to me, just something I dreamed on a hot summer day, as I
swal-lowed water scented with roses and stone. I remembered his eyes, odd, heavy-lidded, the color, I
thought then, of his hair. When I saw them a day or two later, I was surprised.

I gathered wild lilies and honeysuckle and bleeding heart, which my sister, Laurel, loved. I stayed in the
wood for a long time, watching, but he had gone. The sky turned the color of a mourning dove's breast
before I walked out of the trees. I remembered time, then. I was tired and ravenous, and I wished I had
ridden to the wood. I wished I had worn shoes. But I had learned where to find wild ginger, and what
tree bled a crust of honey out of a split in the wood, and where the 1 berries would ripen. My father
despaired of me; my wondered at me. But my despair was greater if I my wonder, like a wild bird. Some
days I let it fly and followed it. On those days I found the honey the secret well, and the mandrake root.

My sister, Laurel, is quite beautiful. She has chesnut hair, and skin like ripened peaches, and great grey
eyes that seem to see things that are not quite discernible others. She doesn't really see that well; her
world is pie and fully human. Her brows lift and pucker worriedly when she encounters ambiguities, or
sometimes on Everyone in the village loves her; she is gentle and : spoken. She was to marry the next
spring.

That twilight, when I came home barefoot, my skirt, full of flowers, her lover, Perrin, was there. Perrin
looked at me askance, as always, and shook his head.

"Barefoot. And with rose petals in your hair. You look like something conceived under a mushroom."
I stuck a stem of honeysuckle in his hair, and bleeding heart into my father's. It slid forward to in front of