"Michael Swanwick - Cold Iron" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swanwick Michael)

and sorry to have lost it. Rooster's eyes were two cold gleams of moonlight afloat in the night. He knelt
on her bed, bony knees pressing against her. His breath smelled of elm bark and leaf mold intermingled.
"Would you mind moving? You're poking into my ribs."

Rooster grinned and pinched her arm.

She shoved him away. Still, she was glad to see him. They'd established a prickly sort of friendship, and
Jane had come to understand that beneath the swagger and thoughtlessness, Rooster was actually quite
nice. "What do we have to decide about Stilt?"

"That's what we're going to talk about, stupid!"

"I'm tired," Jane grumbled. "I put in a long day, and I'm in no mood for your hijinks. If you won't tell me,
I'm going back to sleep."

His face whitened and he balled his fist. "What is this—mutiny? I'm the leader here. You'll do what I say,
when I say, because I say it. Got that?"

Jane and Rooster matched stares for an instant. He was a mongrel fey, the sort of creature who a century
ago would have lived wild in the woods, emerging occasionally to tip over a milkmaid's stool or loosen
the stitching on bags of milled flour so they'd burst when flung over a shoulder. His kind were shallow,
perhaps, but quick to malice and tough as rats. He worked as a scrap iron boy, and nobody doubted he
would survive his indenture.

At last Jane ducked her head. It wasn't worth it to defy him.

When she looked up, he was gone to rouse the others. Clutching the blanket about her like a cloak, Jane
followed. There was a quiet scuffling of feet and paws, and quick exhalations of breath as the children
gathered in the center of the room.

Dimity produced a stolen candle stub and wedged it in the widest part of a crack between two warped
floorboards. They all knelt about it in a circle. Rooster muttered a word beneath his breath and a spark
leaped from his fingertip to the wick.

A flame danced atop the candle. It drew all eyes inward and cast leaping phantasms on the walls, like
some two-dimensional Walpurgisnacht. Twenty-three lesser flames danced in their irises. That was all
dozen of them, assuming that the shadow-boy lurked somewhere nearby, sliding away from most of the
light and absorbing the rest so thoroughly that not a single photon escaped to betray his location.

In a solemn, self-important voice, Rooster said: "Blugg must die." He drew a gooly-doll from his jerkin. It
was a misshapen little thing, clumsily sewn, with two large buttons for eyes and a straight gash of charcoal
for a mouth. But there was the stench of power to it, and at its sight several of the younger children
closed their eyes in sympathetic hatred. "Skizzlecraw has the crone's-blood. She made this." Beside him,
Skizzlecraw nodded unhappily. The gooly-doll had been her closely guarded treasure, and the Lady only
knew how Rooster had talked her out of it. He brandished it over the candle. "We've said the prayers
and spilt the blood. All we need do now is sew some touch of Blugg inside the stomach and throw it onto
a furnace."

"That's murder!" Jane said, shocked.