Читать книгу The Bone Doll’s Twin - Lynn Flewelling - Страница 14

From the private journal of Queen Tamír II, recently discovered in the Palace Archives (Archivist’s note: passage undated)

My father moved us to that lonely keep in the mountains not long after my birth. He put it about that my mother’s health required it, but I’m sure by then all Ero knew she’d gone mad, just as her mother had. When I think of her at all now, I remember a pale wraith of a woman with nervous hands and a stranger’s eyes the same colour as my own.

My father’s ancestors built the keep in the days when hill folk still came through the passes to raid the lowlands. It had thick stone walls and narrow windows covered by splintery red and white painted shutters – I remember amusing myself by picking off the scaling flakes outside my bedchamber window as I stood there, watching for my father’s return.

A tall, square watchtower jutted from the back of the keep, next to the river. I used to believe the demon lurked there, and watched me from its windows whenever Nari or the men took me outside to play in the courtyards or the meadow below the barracks house. I was kept inside most of the time, though. I knew every dusty, shadowed room of the lower floors by the time I could walk. That crumbling old pile was all the world I knew, my first seven years – my nurse and a handful of servants my only companions when Father and his men were gone, which was all too often.

And the demon, of course. Only years later did I have any inkling that all households were not like my own – that it was unusual for invisible hands to pinch and push, or for furniture to move about the room by itself. One of my earliest memories is of sitting on Nari’s lap as she taught me to bend my little fingers into a warding sign …