(eng) Pamela Dean - Secret Country 01 by The Secret Country

Author:The Secret Country [Country, The Secret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

THEY had little time to think, and none to resolve anything so complicated. Preparations for the Banquet of Midsummer Eve began days before the event, and no one was exempt from work. No matter where Laura went, to the rose garden, to the moat, to the clove-scented fastness of the West Tower, some harried grown-up would hail her with glad cries and send her on some incomprehensible errand. Burrowing in the cellar among piles of sheepskins, she wondered why any banquet should need thirteen black ones; picking all the white roses in the garden, and sucking her pricked fingers, she racked her memory for what was wrong with the red and yellow.

She met Ellen carrying an armful of indignant kittens. She found Ruth scattering sand in the halls. She watched Ted grimly sort through colored ribbons; she giggled to see Patrick make ferns and wildflowers into garlands, scowling as fiercely as if he were reading poetry.

This flurry was not without its benefits. Ted and Patrick had no more fencing lessons. Randolph told them to practice and left them alone. Laura learned her way around the innermost part of High Castle; Ellen was spared the ordeal of geography lessons. Ruth, rummaging in the library for a recipe which one of the undercooks had disgraced himself by forgetting, discovered a collection of damp and unpleasantly stained volumes about the sorcery of the Green Caves. She sat up late reading them every night and was grumpy every day from then on.

They had little time to argue and barely time to eat. “If it’s this bad before this banquet,” said Patrick, one evening when they sat in the dining hall painfully picking the seeds out of millions of raisins, “what will it be like before the Unicorn Hunt?”

“That’s outside,” said Ellen, crunching an unseeded raisin.

“So what?” said Patrick. “We’ll probably have to weed the whole forest.” He flung a handful of seeded raisins into a wooden bowl and looked balefully at Ted. “Quit using your right hand,” he said.

“You’ll make him stutter,” said Ruth.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.