"Michelle West - Winter Death" - читать интересную книгу автора (West Michelle)

Is there a difference between watering a plant and drowning it? Here, in
Riverend, there are few. The ore the mines produce is needed by the King. I have
chosen to help these people, as I can, because I have grown to love them.
She had been silent, then.
Promise me, Kayla.
I promise, Mother.

In the end, she slept.
And the great beast was waiting for her, eyes red with fire, wings a maelstrom of
emotion. He was despair, anger, loathing, but worse: He made mockery of the
transience of the things Kayla valued: Love. Loyalty. Hope.
And who better to know of transience than she? She had buried a husband, a
mother, a father. But worse, so much worse.
The dreams had always been her terror and her salvation.
When she lost her oldest child, Darius, unnamed and unnameable, had come to
her in the untouched winter of a Riverend that was barren of life, and she clung to
his back and wept, and wept, and wept.
Her youngest was old enough to walk, not old enough to speak, and he was also
feverish, and she prayed to every god that might have conceivably lived, and in the
end, weak and almost weightless, her second child's fever had broken.
But he never recovered, and although he seemed to take delight in the coming of
spring, in the warmth and color of summer, the weight he had lost did not return.
And she had wept then, at the start of winter, because she knew what it would
mean. But at least, with her second, she had time. She told him stories. She sang
him songs. She held him in the cradle of aching arms, and she comforted him, and
herself, until she was at last alone.
But she was considered young enough in the village, if her heart was scarred; she
was twenty-two. Her oldest son had survived six years, which was better than
many, and the oldwives gathered to discuss her fate, and to ask her to marry again.
She had almost forgotten her mother's words, that day, and the promise she had
made to her mother—for her mother was dead, and that death was so less painful
than this terrible intrusion of the living.
 She had had nothing, nothing at all. She had carried the blackness and the
emptiness within her until it had almost hollowed her out completely. She felt it
now; it was a visceral, terrible longing.
A desire for an end. An ending.
And she knew it for her own.
The dragon nodded, wordless; swept back huge wings, opened its terrible jaws.
They were kin, she thought. He offered nothing but truth.
Two things saved her.
The first was the flash of white in the darkness: Darius, the Companion of winter
in Riverend. And the second, more real, more painful, the small fingers that
bruised her arms, the whimpering that reached her ears, that pierced the fabric of a
dream she could not escape, tearing a hole in the wall between sleep and the
waking world.
The child was weeping. She held him, and the ache in her arms subsided. This
was what she was. This was what her mother had taught her to be: comfort. Hope.
But when he called for his mother in the darkened room, she answered; she could
not deprive herself of that one lie.