Patricia Briggs - The Price

VIP免费
2024-11-24 0 0 29.06KB 12 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
The Price
Patricia Briggs
Year: 2000
Molly couldn't recall just when the first time she'd seen him had been. Never before this summer
certainly.
She did know that it wasn't until the fourth market of the season that she'd begun to watch for him. It was
then the market steadied to a trickling flow of people rather than the flood that came initially. Sitting at her
booth, she had time to observe things that on busier days escaped her notice.
He would wait until she was occupied with a customer before coming to her small booth and touching the
weaving on the tables. If she stopped to talk to him, he turned away and melted into the crowd as if he
were uninterested.
Her first thought was that he was a thief, but nothing was ever missing. The next explanation that
occurred to her was that he was too abashed by her looks to approach. She knew that many men, even
ones she'd known in childhood, were intimidated by her looks.
Being beautiful was better than being ugly, she supposed, but it caused quite as many problems as it
solved. For instance, it cost her several weeks before the idea that he might be worried that she would
find him frightening crossed her mind.
It wasn't that he was ugly, but he didn't look like anyone she'd ever seen either. Small and slight — he
moved oddly, as if his joints didn't work quite the way hers did. He reminded her of the stories about the
fauns with human torsos on goat's feet that ran through the hills. She'd even stolen a quick glance at his
feet once, when he thought she was haggling with a customer — but his soft leather boots flexed just as
hers did.
If she'd been certain that he was frightened of her, she would have let him choose his own time to
approach her. But she had watched him closely last market day, and he didn't seem the sort to be easily
intimidated. So she brought her small loom with her, the one she used for linen napkins, though usually
she preferred to work with wool since wool caught her dyes better. The loom made her appear to be
busy when there were no customers about — and so she hoped to lure him to the booth.
He wandered over casually, and she pretended not to notice him. She waited to speak until he became
engrossed in a particularly bright orange-patterned blanket before she spoke.
"It's my own dye," she said without looking up. "There's a plant in the swamp that a marsher collects for
me each spring. I've never seen a color that can match it — rumpelstiltskin, they call it."
He laughed, before he caught himself; it sounded rusty and surprised, as if he didn't do it often. She
wasn't certain what the joke was, but she liked the sound of his laughter, so she smiled into her weaving.
"I know it," he said finally, when she thought that he'd decided to leave. "A wretched-looking plant to be
responsible for such beauty."
She looked at him then, seeing his face clearly for the first time. His features were normal enough, though
his nose was a bit long for the almost delicate mouth and eyes. His skin was mottled and roughened, as
though someone had carved him from old oak and forgotten to sand the wood smooth. The effect was
odd and unsettling.
He stood still under her regard, waiting for her judgment. She smiled, turning her attention back to her
weaving. "Beauty is as beauty does, sir. A blanket will keep you warm whether it is orange or
dust-colored."
"But you made it beautiful."
She nodded. "That I did, for I must sell it, and most people look for pretty things. My face calls more
people to my booth than might otherwise come here, and I am glad of it. But the blanket I sleep with is
plain brown, because I find that it suits me so. Your face, sir, would not cause me to cross the street to
look at you, but the way you touch my weavings led me to tease you into this conversation."
He laughed again. "Plain-spoken miss, eh?"
She nodded, then inquired mildly, "You are a weaver as well, sir?"
"And you are a witch?" His voice imitated hers.
It was her turn to laugh as she showed him the calluses on her fingers. "Your hands have the same marks
as mine."
He looked at her hands, then at his own. "Yes," he said. "I am a weaver."
They talked for some time, until he relaxed with her. He knew far more than she about weaving in
general, but he knew hardly anything about dyeing. When she asked him about it, he shrugged and said
that his teacher hadn't used many colors. Then he made some excuse and left.
She wondered what it was that had bothered him so as she packed the merchandise that hadn't sold in
the back of the pony cart with the tables she used to display her goods.
"Patches," she said to the patient little pony as he started back to the mill, "he never even told me his
name."
.
On the next market day, a week later, she brought some of her dyes with her in a basket, making certain
that she included some of the orange he had admired so much. She left it out in the open, and it wasn't
long before he approached.
She kept her gaze turned to the loom on her lap as she spoke. "I brought some dyes for you to try. If you
like any of them, I'll tell you how to make them."
"A gift?" he said. He knelt in front of the little basket and touched a covered pot gently. "Thank you."
There was something in his voice that caused her to look at his face. When she saw his expression, she
turned her attention back to her weaving so that he would not know she had been watching him: there
were some things not meant for public viewing. When she looked up again, he was gone.
She didn't see him at all the next time she set up her booth, but when she started to place her weavings in
the back of the cart, there was already something in it. She pushed her things aside and unfolded the
piece he'd left for her.
Her fingers told her it was wool, but her eyes would have called it linen, for the yarn was so finely spun.
The pattern was done in natural colors of wool, ivory, white, and rich brown. It was obviously meant for
a tablecloth, but it was finer than any she'd ever seen. Her breath caught in her chest at the skill necessary
to weave such a cloth.
Slowly she refolded it and nestled it among her own things. Stepping to the seat, she sent Patches toward
home; her fingers could still feel the wool.
The cloth was worth a small fortune, more than her weavings would bring her in a year — obviously a
courting gift. To accept such a thing from a stranger was unthinkable . . . but he didn't seem like a
stranger.
Patricia Briggs - The Price.pdf

共12页,预览2页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：12 页 大小：29.06KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-11-24

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

高考理综 人际关系 配电装置 动力学连接体 力的合成 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 12
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注