"Tamora Pierce - Circle Opens 4 - Shatterglass" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pierce Tamora)

her hair cut off at one length at ear level, and the knee-length tunic worn by Tharian men. She was also
extremely dirty.

“Excuse me,” Tris called to her. “Do you know the way to Achaya Square?”

The girl picked up the second barrel in a row of them and dumped its contents into her cart.

Tris cleared her throat and raised her voice. “I said, can you tell me the way to Achaya Square?”

The girl nicked her eyes toward Tris, then away. She dumped her empty barrel next to the others, and
picked up a full one.

Well, thought Tris. She can hear me; she’s just being rude. She stalked over to the cart. “Don’t you people
believe in courtesy to visitors?” she demanded crossly. “Or are all you Tharians so convinced that the
world began here that you can’t be bothered to be polite?”

Though the barrel she had taken to the cart was still half full, the girl set it down and fixed her gaze on
Tris’s toes. “You shenosi,” she said quietly, using the Tharian word for foreigners. “Don’t they have
guidebooks where you come from?”

Tris’s scowl deepened. She was not particularly a patient girl. “I asked a simple question. And you can
look at me if you’re going to be snippy.”

“Oh, it’s a simple enough question,” replied the girl, still soft-voiced, her eyes still fixed on Tris’s no-
nonsense shoes. “As simple as the way is if you just follow that long beak of yours. And I’ll give you
some information for nothing, since you’re obviously too ignorant to live. You don’t talk to prathmun,
and prathmun don’t talk to you. Prathmun don’t exist.”

“What are prathmun?” demanded Tris. She chose not to take offence at the remark about her nose. It
was not her best feature and never had been.

“I am a prathmun” retorted the girl. “My mother, my sisters and my brothers are prathmun. We’re
untouchable, degraded, invisible. Am I getting through that thick northern skull yet?”

“Why?” asked Tris, curious now. This was far more interesting than a simple answer to her question.
“Why should prathmun be those things?”



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The girl sighed, and rubbed her face with her hands, smearing more dirt into it. “We handle the bodies of
the dead,” she told Tris wearily. “We skin and tan animal hides. We make shoes. We take out the night
soil. But mostly, we handle the dead, which means we defile whatever we touch. If you don’t move along
and a giladha—”

“What?” asked Tris.

“One of the visible people,” replied the girl. “If they see you talking to me, they’ll demand you get