Spindle's End (16 page)

“I’m not just a little fond of her,” said Barder in a voice that was very nearly normal. “Do you know—what happened just now, or don’t you want me to ask?”

Aunt and Katriona exchanged a look. Aunt said, “No, I don’t know. But I won’t uncork bdeth juice in this cottage again.”

“Bdeth juice?” said Katriona slowly. “But bdeth grows quite near here—where the Gig runs into the wasteland where no one lives.”

“Yes,” said Aunt.

There was another little silence.

“Something was watching us from the wood,” said Katriona.

“I don’t think they saw us,” said Aunt. “I think—I hope—they will not have seen
us.
I think I did that much. But that was all I could do. And they would have figured us out soon enough if you hadn’t brought us away so quickly.

“Barder—you must have some protection, before you leave us tonight. I’m not sure . . . I could simply make you forget, I think. That’s perhaps safest, and you’ll sleep better.”

“I—I’d rather not forget,” said Barder. “If you don’t mind. And—Rosie matters to me, too. What—whoever she is.”

Katriona said suddenly: “Touch your gargoyle’s nose. The one you made for a spindle’s end.”

Barder had his back to the spinning wheel. He looked at Katriona in surprise, but he turned slowly round and saw the shining gargoyle and its necklace, which looked like woven fog strung with will-o’-the-wisp. “The fates of my ancestors,” he said in wonder, but he stood up and moved toward it, holding out his hand. He hesitated just before his fingers touched the gargoyle’s nose, but he leaned forward—for a moment his entire body lit up with the soft eerie light of the amulet; and Katriona caught her breath, thinking that she’d never realised how beautiful he was.

And then the light went out, and the gargoyle was just a spindle’s end, with a nose shiny from rubbing, and the amulet was just an odd piece of jewelry; and the outside door banged open, and Rosie said plaintively, “Are you
through
talking yet? I’ve been as long as I can, and I’m hungry.”

 

Five weeks after that the king’s fortress of Flury was broken into, and the regiment which guarded it was found asleep at their posts, fallen any way across their spears and their swords; and their horses were asleep, and the horse flies on the horses were asleep, and, deeper inside, the magicians were asleep, and the fairies were asleep, and everyone else, from the courtiers to the kitchen maids, were asleep, too.

The carters who were bringing their weekly waggon loads of fresh food ran away in terror, and Shon had spoken to one of those carters, because Flury was not so very far from Turanga. “He says the same thing happened at Fordingbridge—everyone was found asleep—only it was a relieving regiment as found ’em, and that’s why the story didn’t come out, as it has this time. He says the sleep’s a bad one, and everyone wakes up from nightmares, and some of ’em were sick, and some of ’em are still sick—especially the magicians.”

“What about the princess?” said Cairngorm.

“The princess had been taken away a fortnight earlier, while the king was there to go with her, which must be nicer for her—she must hardly ever see her mum any more, the queen mostly stays in the royal city with the little boys,” said Shon. “I’ve heard a rumour they smuggle her back to the city sometimes. . . .”

“I hope so,” said Cairngorm.

“Yuh,” said Shon, childless himself and not very interested. “There’s different stories about why the princess got shifted early this time. Some say the royal magicians set up a—a random pattern spell about when to move her, and some say some fairy seer got her knickers in a twist and insisted she be moved early. It don’t matter which—just that she wasn’t there.”

“They’ll beat Pernicia yet,” said Dessy, Flora’s younger sister.

“Love, we hope so,” said Cairngorm. “But we won’t know till the day after the princess’ one-and-twentieth birthday, and that’s some years off yet.”

The single sentence every one of the princess’ people remembered best about the curse Pernicia had laid upon her was
My disposition of her future may happen at any time.

Meanwhile Rosie went on talking to animals. Since most of the people who had much to do with her liked her, and because Narl seemed to take her seriously, and because she was Aunt’s niece and Katriona’s cousin, the jokes made of it were rarely unkind. But because she would tell people about it, certainly if they asked, and sometimes if they didn’t (“Dessy, it’s no use flirting with that young thatcher from Waybreak, he won’t have anything to do with you because he’s afraid of your mother; his pony says so”), people heard a fair amount about it.

Occasionally the information was useful: she told Aunt that the reason why Jad, the baker’s dog, was getting so thin was because the baker’s hob didn’t much like milk, but did like the table scraps that went into Jad’s bowl. The hob was getting fat, because Jad was a big dog, and Jad was getting thin, because the hob’s bowl of milk was small. “I’ll see to that hob,” said Aunt. “Poor Jad.”

But it was evident that Rosie’s range of acquaintance among the animal kingdom was not merely broad but voluble. People listened, and some smiled, and some asked questions—and the answers to some of those questions brought more fleeces to the cottage, and other trade goods, much to Rosie’s astonishment and Katriona’s bemused and secret delight. And some shook their heads. Especially fairies. This wasn’t how talking to animals went. Except that it did, with Rosie. Katriona thought again of all the milk Rosie had drunk on her way between her old life and her new one, and wondered how Rosie might have grown up if she had drunk only magician-inspected, fairy-purified, royal domestic animal milk, once she had been weaned from her mother’s breast. Perhaps the royal family’s amenableness was more an inherited willingness to adapt to circumstance—and Rosie’s circumstances were unusual. Katriona’s own beast-speech had never been as fluent and comprehensive as Rosie’s; Katriona might have given her something on her name-day, but it hadn’t been a transfer of her own beast-speech, like a parcel changing hands.

There was an unusual silence (even allowing for Rosie’s absence; she had special dispensation to stay late at the smith’s that afternoon, and chat up some of Lord Pren’s young stock) by Aunt’s fireside after the news about Flury.

“I wish the queen’s fairy—Sigil—would send us some word,” said Katriona.

Aunt laid the charm she was mending in her lap. “She would if she could.”

“I know,” said Katriona. “That’s what I mean.”

They looked at each other, and each saw reflected in the other’s eyes a tall castle standing alone in a barren landscape, with a smoky purple sky behind it.

CHAPTER 10

As the years passed and, it seemed, the king’s folk must have searched every handsbreadth of the king’s land, and the royal magicians had searched every thought’s-breadth of every dimension over and under the king’s lands (by the time Rosie was thirteen, divisions of the royal cavalry accompanying royal magicians had swept through the Gig four times; but if they found anything mysterious at the edge of the wild lands where the bdeth grew, they gave no sign), and the royal fairies had touched or tasted or listened to every wisp of wild magic that sprang from the king’s lands, and there was still no news of Pernicia—no sign, no trace, no trail, no clue—another sort of story began to be told. No one could say where the first of these stories had come from, but that its purpose was to rally morale was perfectly clear.

The reports all agreed that the princes were growing up into fine boys, but they had an elder sister who was supposed to be queen, and no one was going to forget this: not their parents, not their country, nor even themselves, who had, it seemed, never met her: the magicians had declared that it would be too dangerous. When the Princes Colin and Terberus made their first little public speeches on their eighth birthday, both of them mentioned her, and their hope that they would meet her soon. Everyone found this very moving, especially when Terberus had added suddenly, in his own voice, to what had obviously been a prepared speech, “I would
like
a sister.” His people wanted his sister, too, and watching the little princes grow up and become young men who could give speeches only made that longing more acute.

And, if there is a powerful and wicked fairy somewhere around, you want to know where she is so you can stay out of her way. The possibility that she might jump out at you from any shadow is very unsettling.

So it was said that the princess had been turned into a lark or a peacock (or, blasphemously, a fish), so that she would have no finger to prick; that it had not been the real princess at the name-day, but only a magical doll, so the curse had not in fact been laid on the princess at all, and while the king and queen were keeping her tucked away somewhere while Pernicia was still at large, there wasn’t really that much Pernicia could do to her but what she could do to anyone . . . which was likely to be nasty enough, and the king was very sensibly determined to drive her out of hiding and out of his country. There was even a story that Pernicia had been captured, but that this news was not allowed out because the king would not be satisfied till every one of her spies and helpers had been found and identified. Few people found this story very comforting: the idea of Pernicia no longer at liberty was outweighed by the idea that one’s own friends and neighbours might be infiltrated by her confederates.

Almost everyone’s favourite story was of the party planned for the princess’ twenty-first birthday, which would beggar the descriptive abilities of all the bards in the country. The stories of the party grew more fantastic with every telling, and, of course, they all had blissfully happy endings.

These stories of the princess’ prospective one-and-twentieth birthday party made Aunt snappish. “They’re worse than castles in the air,” she said to Katriona one afternoon after Gismo, one of Shon’s alternate drivers, had been giving fantasy free rein at the pub about the latest schemes for wonders. “Or rather, they
are
castles in the air, and made out of big heavy stones that are going to fall on all our heads and squash us flat.” Katriona let the confused provenance of this metaphor pass in silence.

The door crashed open, and a little gust of rain and Rosie walked in. Rosie was humming. Since her hums were all more or less tuneless, you never knew which song she had in mind if she didn’t say any of the words. She looked at Aunt’s and Katriona’s faces and said, “What’s wrong?” Katriona smiled at her, feeling at once better and worse for the sight of her, thinking, not for the first time, of what the king and queen had lost—not just their daughter, but Rosie.

“We were talking about the princess,” said Aunt.

“Oh,” said Rosie. She had some fellow feeling for the princess, since they were the same age, and she had grown up with the mystery of what had become of her, and of the grown-ups’ interest in any tale purporting to have news of her.

Rosie had a notion that the only way grown-ups knew to protect you was to lock you up somehow—even protective spells usually had a locking-up quality about them, like the anti-drowning-in-a-bog one Aunt had laid on Rosie about eight months ago, after what Rosie still insisted indignantly was nothing
like
a near miss, and which simply prevented Rosie from walking in certain directions in certain places, although there were quite a few certain places round the damp and fenny Foggy Bottom. (There were serious disadvantages to being a fairy’s niece. The bog spell took more upkeep than ordinary families could afford. Aunt had at least let the utterly humiliating spell that prevented her from being sat on by large animals lapse a couple of years ago; of course within a day or two a horse she was holding for Narl had stood on her foot, but he was the sort of horse who if he hadn’t been able to stand on your foot would have bitten you instead, so she supposed it didn’t count. Besides, it had happened at the forge, where even Aunt’s charms became wandery and confused. She hadn’t mentioned the episode at home.)

Suggestions about the princess’ whereabouts nearly always included some reference to a fortress or stronghold, so Rosie always imagined the princess surrounded by a lot of stonework. At first she had seen her in a tiny tower room, but then she thought no, she’s a princess, she can have a large room—and lots and lots of grim-visaged guards armed to the teeth with an assortment of deadly and terrifying weapons Rosie had never seen and could only pretend to imagine. It sounded like a pretty miserable life and Rosie felt sorry for her.

“Why don’t we look for her?” said Rosie. “She could live with us. Aunt, you’re the cleverest fairy in the Gig. Even Narl says so, and he’s not trying to get a spell for free. If you found her, no one would know where she’d gone, and so she’d be safe. She could have some fun here. I could show her where all the
bogs
are.” Rosie had not come indoors in the best of tempers, as she had forgotten which way she had been headed till she found herself reheaded home, briskly carried by insurrectionist feet. The ballad she’d been humming as she came through the door—another one Barder had taught her—had a pleasingly bloodthirsty chorus which suited her mood: “ ‘I lighted down my sword to draw, and hacked him into pieces sma’, and hacked him into pieces sma’ . . . ’ ” Maybe she could be the princess’ guard.

There was a little silence. “That’s an interesting thought, dear,” said Aunt, “but I’m afraid you have a rather inflated idea of my skills.”

Katriona, fascinated, said, “What would we tell everyone about where she came from?”

Rosie shrugged. She had lived as long as she could remember with Aunt and Katriona; they seemed a fine sort of family to her. The only question she had yet been moved to ask about her parents was how tall they had been, as it was plain she was going to be taller than either Aunt or Katriona. (Her outlandish colouring, in mostly dark- or mouse-coloured Foggy Bottom, had been explained by a tow-headed father from the south.) “That Aunt has another niece, and us another cousin, of course.”