Spindle's End (14 page)

 

The usual thing with fairies was that when they first began speaking in whole sentences that followed one from another in a way that grown-ups could sometimes understand, they spent a few months doing baby-magic, and if a nonmagical family were so unfortunate as to find their little one turning the cooking pots into elephants and making the time in that house never bedtime, they had to find a fairy to take it till the worst was over. (One of the many curiosities about this situation was that while grown-up practising fairies were almost all women, baby-magic was about equally distributed between little boys and little girls. Magicians, who themselves almost never suffered baby-magic although magicianry ran in families just as fairyhood did, had done complicated studies of this phenomenon but had reached no useful conclusions.) Sometimes a general sort of containment charm would do, but most often a three- or four-year-old fairy needed a grown-up fairy to prevent it from doing itself (or the unmagical members of its family) any actual harm. Aunt and Katriona were the fairies of choice for this task all over the Gig (somewhat to their dismay; a lot of other things don’t get done when one is minding small children).

But Aunt had never lost her ascendency over even the severest attack of baby-magic, which had sometimes happened elsewhere. The pub gossips still told the story of Haveral, who hadn’t practised in thirty years by the time Rosie was born, who lost control over a young fairy named Gobar. Gobar had turned herself into a giant stremcopus, which is a sort of tree-shaped creature that eats people, and Haveral into a small spotted terrier with only one ear. The first anyone knew about this was the stremcopus (which, fortunately, showed no sign of eating anyone) marching through Smoke River on its long rooty feet, roaring in a highly unstremcopus-like way, and waving its long branchy arms (most stremcopuses have at least six). Panting behind it came a small spotted terrier with only one ear, far too out of breath from trying to keep a pace more suited to eight-foot legs than eight-inch ones, to speak any counter-charms. As the ill-assorted pair disappeared down the road toward Foggy Bottom and Woodwold, another fairy blinked a few times and said wonderingly, “That was Haveral.” “The stremcopus?” “No, of course not—the terrier.” Versions differed, but it took Haveral several days, or possibly a week, to turn Gobar back into a small girl again, by which time they had passed through all the Gig’s towns several times.

When Rosie had begun speaking in paragraphs everyone but Aunt and Katriona waited for some spectacular outbreak of baby-magic. None occurred. The villagers teased Katriona and her aunt about it, but teased them rather crossly, because they felt cheated of some good and deserved entertainment. Even with two experienced fairies watching her like hawks, Rosie, knowing Rosie, should have been able to get off at least one marvel before they bagged her. There were bets on it, and the odds were on Rosie. The two fairies smiled at anyone who brought the subject of Rosie’s likely fairyhood up, Aunt placidly, Katriona nervously, because Katriona suspected Rosie was up to almost anything, even magic, even though she didn’t have any.

Aunt was never forthcoming about her family but she let it be understood that the sister who was Rosie’s mother had had no magic herself, and had married a man from an entirely magicless family, and that everyone’s interest was misplaced. (Aunt wasn’t from the Gig. The story was that there had been a terrible row with her parents when the young Sophronia had decided to apprentice herself to a professional fairy; she had been expected to satisfy herself with descaling kettles, and to get on with ordinary life. No one knew if the story was true, although Katriona knew that the reason she herself had come to Aunt was that she had been thrown into so severe an irruption of baby-magic as a result of the shock of her parents’ death that all the local fairies working together had been unable to cope with her, and had informed the reluctant family that someone of her own blood had the best chance of doing so.)

Many of the village households contained a minor, non-professional fairy who could tend the family water vessels and mild outbreaks of baby-magic in little fairies no more powerful than they were themselves; but it seemed to Foggy Bottom a bit rich that a family which had produced Aunt and Katriona could also have produced a little thug like Rosie if she wasn’t a fairy, too. But Rosie did no baby-magic.

The nearest she came to it was befriending Narl, the village smith. Narl was odd even as smiths went, and most smiths were odd.

In a country as magic-ridden as that one, you had to be a particular kind of very tough egg to choose to go into smithery. Fairies could and did, of course, live with and handle cold iron every day, but no fairy would choose to be a smith. (It was suggested that the reason so many fairies burnt themselves on kettles they were clearing was because those kettles were so often made of iron, and contact with iron made fairies absentminded.) It was not only that even a drop of fairy blood in a smith could cripple him with rheumatism while he was still young; magic hated cold iron, and tended to hang around smithies for a chance to make trouble, which, though only rarely successful, made the atmosphere round a forge rather thick. Fairies who visited forges almost always found themselves flapping their hands sharply in front of their faces as if troubled by midges, and even ordinary people sometimes batted away invisible specks that weren’t there. (Since Rosie’s conversation was vigorously illustrated with hand gestures, in and out of the smith’s yard, it was impossible to say if she was waving at invisible specks or not.)

There was another more intriguing bit of folklore that said that truth was truth in a smith’s yard, but this had not been very rigorously tested, at least not for many years. There was an ancient story of the king, sixteen or eighteen generations ago, dragging his rival to a smith’s yard to demonstrate that he was the true heir and the other an impostor, but the story didn’t say what the demonstration had consisted of. And there was a tradition of moving deadlocked legal struggles to a smith’s yard for the truth to be discovered that way; but this was not at all popular with the smith whose yard it was, since legal truths have a way of emerging with excrutiating slowness.

There was a more dubious bit of folklore concerning fairy smiths, but this was so manifestly nonsense that even children soon grew out of asking for tales of them, although the tales were good exciting ones full of adventures.

Smiths were also the only men who were not expected to keep themselves clean shaven. This wasn’t precisely a law, as no contact with fish was a law, but it was rather more than a fashion, as it was rather more than a fashion to shave outdoors on the street (this was less strictly observed during hard winters), where anyone watching (although no one did, because it was something that happened every day) could see that proper sharpened steel was being used. If a man habitually shaved indoors and in private, there might be a story that went round that he was a fairy, and using copper, in case of accidents; and there was just that unease about strange or un-admitted fairy powers that this would not be well thought of. Fairies were fine, more or less, and you wouldn’t get through life in this country without their help; but you wanted to know when one was around. Wild magic and a bad heart, after all, had produced Pernicia.

A boy’s first shave was an important rite of adulthood because it said that he put his baby-magic, if any, behind him permanently; and a man with a beard was as good as saying he was a fairy. Men with beards could expect to be asked for fairy aid, and to rouse anger if it were withheld, as if the man had lied or cheated. If you had a beard, you were a fairy—or a smith. And if you were a smith you wore an iron chain round your neck any time you were away from your own village, so that people recognised you.

But Narl was clean shaven. His nickname—never repeated in his hearing—was Ironface, because his expression rarely varied, and he never spoke more than he had to.

He was also notoriously resistant to children. This was hard luck on the young of Foggy Bottom, who would have hung round the forge to talk to the horses, if they could have. Rosie’s befriending him was more like real magic than baby-magic, and the more inexplicable for that. Especially since Rosie was generally talking nineteen to the dozen when Aunt or Katriona, having mislaid her, knew to try the forge first, and came to rescue her—or rather, him. Katriona, red faced, tried to apologise, the first time.

“Don’t,” he said. “She’s welcome here.” There was a pause. Katriona could think of no suitable reply to this wholly uncharacteristic remark, and then Narl added, “I like her talk.”

Katriona closed her hanging jaw with a snap, swallowed hard, said, “Oh—well—thank you,” and took Rosie (still talking) away with her. “He didn’t at all
look
like he was enjoying her company,” she said to Aunt later. “Of course he never does look like he’s enjoying anything. Or not enjoying anything, for that matter. But when he turns to you, with that great black apron and all that black hair, for a moment it’s a shock, as if he’s a bit of his own work come to life. You would think a small child would be afraid of him.”

“Not Rosie,” said Aunt.

“No,” agreed Katriona, half proud and half perplexed. “Not Rosie.” The soft thump of Aunt’s treadle continued undisturbed for several minutes and then Katriona said, “You know—about truth in a smith’s yard. You don’t think—”

“No,” said Aunt. “I think she is probably safer with Narl than anywhere else. If it had occurred to me that such a friendship were possible, I would probably have tried to help it happen—which almost certainly would have been a mistake.”

Katriona gave a muffled laugh; it was hard to imagine anyone influencing Narl to do anything, even Aunt. And Rosie herself was about as influenceable as the waxing and waning of the moon.

After that first time, while Rosie was not exactly encouraged to run off and pester the smith, Katriona didn’t immediately go after her when she headed purposefully in that direction. But, after a good deal of wrestling with her conscience, she went to their priestling, the one who had written Rosie onto the Foggy Bottom register, and paid him to pray for her safety while in the smith’s yard: that she would not cut or bruise herself on cold iron, nor burn herself on hot, nor stand in just the wrong place when the fire, unbearably goaded by mischief-seeking magic, suddenly flared; nor any of the other things that can happen to a child in the way of grown-ups’ work. Katriona would have preferred a nice straightforward charm, but nice straightforward charms rarely worked in a smith’s yard. Any fairy who discovered how to build a charm that would reliably pump a smith’s bellows, for example, would be set up for life; every smith in the country would want one. No one had. A priest’s prayers were better than nothing, and infinitely preferable to trying to dissuade Rosie from doing something she wanted to do. Prohibition was always a last resort in dealing with Rosie. Furthermore, Katriona had come to like the Foggy Bottom priest, because he was so obviously fond of Rosie; and the fact that she liked him, too, sweetened Katriona’s attitude still more, although the truth was that Rosie liked almost everybody.

 

The betting on Rosie’s baby-magic was eventually wound up, to the great grief and frustration of everyone involved, and villagers found other things to gossip about. But what few people realised for some time was that Rosie really was talking to animals. And that they were really talking back.

She had begun chattering to them as soon as she began talking, but she was a friendly little thing, and there were more animals than people round Aunt’s cottage, with the forest on one side and some of Lord Prendergast’s fields on the other. Although she spoke to animals no differently than she spoke to people, this was the sort of thing many children did, and if it was more marked in Rosie than in most children, there were many things about Rosie that were more marked than in most children.

Rosie, as she grew older, more and more evidently waited for the animals she addressed to answer her—her face, with its transparent complexion, told any watcher that she believed they did answer her. The oddest thing, however, to the villagers’ minds, was that she slowly stopped speaking human language to animals. She would be found sitting or standing near Corso or Spear (the pub’s tall majestic wolfhound and best peacekeeper) or any of her other many animal friends, often both silent and not doing anything. Everyone knew Rosie never spent any time silent and not doing anything.

Katriona came to fetch Rosie away from Narl’s one afternoon and discovered her looking into the eyes of a sweating, shivering colt, whose nose rested in her cupped hands. Katriona could see her fingers gently stroking the little knob under its chin. Narl squatted beside her, his empty hands dangling between his knees, his head level with hers, looking into the colt’s face as intently as she was.

Rosie let out her breath in a long sigh, sounding very much like a horse herself, with a
whuffle
on the end of it; and as she moved, she moved as a horse moves, and bowed her head as a horse bows its head, for all that she had only two legs and a short human neck. The colt turned its head, and tentatively reached its nose toward Narl, who turned his own face to lay his cheek against its cheek. “I’ve told him you’re nice,” said Rosie. “It’s because you’re clean shaven, you see. He’s not going to stand around on three legs and let a clean shaven man do weird human things to his feet. Clean shaven men yell at you and yank your girth up too tight and flop onto your back as if they think they don’t weigh anything, and jab you in the belly with their feet.”

“He’s not getting that handling from Pren’s folk,” murmured Narl, while the colt investigated his face with its lips. Its ears were easing, and beginning to prick forward.

“No, but he did at his first place,” said Rosie, “and their blacksmith had a beard. Oh, hello, Kat. You’ll be all right now,” she said, as if to both Narl and the colt, and turned to Katriona. “I hope it’s teatime,” she said. “I’m hungry.”