Spindle's End (20 page)

There was a silence, but Aunt was frowning.

Joeb said hesitantly, “Er—there’s a tale—a fairy tale—” And sneezed, harder this time.

“Ward and keep you,” said Katriona quickly. You could lose all kinds of important bits if you sneezed too hard and one shot out, and there was something waiting to steal it. Not that she or Aunt couldn’t get it back, but it was better not to lose it in the first place. “Yes?” she said. “You mean that might apply here?”

“Well, it might,” said Joeb cautiously; he was still a little in awe of his master’s new family. “It’s just that sometimes when a fairy marries, there’s more magic around for a little while after.”

Aunt said, “Yes, I know that one. It’s supposed to be one of the reasons fairies marry less often than the rest of you. I think the tale came after the fact, but never mind.”

“It’s true then?” said Katriona.

“Perhaps,” Aunt said neutrally. “Church ceremonies trouble the connection between the magical and the ordinary. A fairy in the middle of an important one could draw a kind of magical attention to it that pulls the balance out for a little while.”

“Draw . . . attention?” said Katriona; and Rosie looked up from her plate, wondering why Katriona’s voice had gone so odd.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” said Aunt, still neutral. “It’s only a little extra baby-magic—seven of them together are very likely to have had some cumulative potency as well—and Shon may have waited longer than usual.” But Aunt’s and Katriona’s eyes turned to Rosie, and then, after a moment, Barder looked at her, too, thoughtfully.

“Don’t look at me!” said Rosie. “It’s nothing to do with me! All I did was stand around wearing that silly crown of flowers and being taller than everyone except Barder! I only talk to animals! I’m
not
a fairy!”

 

Three days after that conversation Rosie woke up in the middle of the night to a
crash
that shook the house. She lay for a moment trying to catch her breath, because she felt as if she personally had been thrown to the ground and the breath knocked out of her, though she was still in her bed. Her head swam. But as soon as she could she levered herself out of bed to look for the others. She still did not know the house well enough to walk through it confidently in the dark, and she felt her way down the stairs, toward the wavering light she could now see round the frame of the not-quite-closed kitchen door.

She pushed the door open with an effort and found Aunt bent over the fire, which should have been banked and dark at this time of night, rapidly throwing some reeking herb onto the flames, while Katriona knelt by the hearth muttering rhythmically, in what Rosie recognised as a spell-chant; but she had never heard her speak so quickly and desperately before. There were little flickering shadows on the walls, like robins’ shadows, although Rosie could not see the robins themselves.

“Kat—” she said; but her voice was a croak; the pressure on her chest she had felt upstairs had returned. She thought she heard Katriona falter at the sound of her voice; but by then Rosie was sinking to her knees, her vision slowly clouding over: I’m fainting, she thought; I’ve never fainted before; how very odd this feels; I feel as if I am no longer quite
here
. There were strong streaks of colour across her vision—purpley grey, like a malevolent fog. And then she felt something round her neck, and it burned, it was burning her, no, it was burning the queer oily cloud she seemed to be suspended in, and then she felt a hand grasping her upper arm so hard it hurt, and she was back in the kitchen again—of course she had never left it—only she was lying on the floor, and it was Katriona’s hand on her arm, and Katriona was kneeling beside her.

“Rosie?” said Katriona.

Rosie sat up cautiously. She could breathe again, but there was still a hot, almost-burning sensation round her neck and across her upper chest, as if she were wearing a fiery necklace; she put her hand up to it and found a little bit of charred string, which came apart in her hand. She looked at it, completely bewildered; the fragments smudged across her fingers and fell to her lap. “Oh, Kat,” she said, “I’m sorry; I’ve ruined your magic for you, haven’t I? I didn’t know you ever did—did things—in the middle of the night like this. I woke up—there was this awful crash—and I couldn’t breathe for a moment.”

“It’s not your fault,” said Katriona; there was a lit candle at her elbow, and the hollows of her eyes looked huge. “If—if it was disturbing you, you were right to come and tell us. It’s a very good thing you came down. Rosie, if anything like that ever happens again, come and tell us
at once
. Do you hear me? Promise. Promise that you’ll find Aunt or me
immediately
.”

“Yes—yes, I promise,” said Rosie, looking at her wonderingly. “Was—was it just me? Not Barder or Joeb or the littles?”

“Yes, it was just you,” whispered Katriona, and she let go of Rosie’s arm and sat down with a bump. “Different people—react differently. Like Joeb and dust. It’s not your fault.”

Rosie looked across the kitchen to where Aunt was still standing by the fire; but the herbs she threw in now she threw in pinches, not handfuls, and the tension had gone out of her. She looked at Rosie and smiled. “Go back to bed, dear heart. It’s over now. Kat, you go to bed too. I can finish here. It’s over.”

 

The baby-magic wore off at last, and Katriona’s seven little monsters were sent home, Tibby and Dackwith and Mona looking rather dazed, as if they couldn’t quite remember what had been happening for the last four months. The weather was peculiar for the rest of that year (much to the farmers’ dismay), with hailstorms in summer and warm heavy rain after the winter solstice when there should have been hard frosts and fairy rimes which might tell fairy seers something about the year to come. Katriona and Aunt were kept busier than usual disentangling sprite and spirit mischief, and even the good-natured domestic hobs and brownies showed a tendency to curdle milk and sour beer and throw shoes left out to be cleaned in the dung heap. But the year turned, and became another year, and things settled down to their usual level of business.

Katriona and Barder’s first baby was born eighteen months after the wedding, shortly after Rosie turned sixteen. Rosie was steeling herself to feel superfluous and misplaced (she had spoken to Peony about this, but no one else), and the afternoon Katriona’s pains started and the midwife was put on alert, there being nothing at the forge that couldn’t wait, Rosie went out for a long walk in the forest. She gave herself a very earnest talking-to, only half listening to all the birds and beasts giving her kindly messages for the mother-to-be—or at least only half listening till Fwab turned up. Fwab was a chaffinch who felt that his second-most-important role in life (the first being to raise as many little chaffinches as possible) was to educate the strange human who talked to animals.

He flew down and landed on Rosie’s head, and gave her scalp several sharp pecks. “Ow!” said Rosie crossly, and brushed him away. He fluttered just out of reach and sat down on her head once again.
Pay attention!
he said, peck.
Babies are important!
Peck.
Babies are the most important!
Peck.

All right
, said Rosie.
I hear you. Go away.

You humans live too long; that’s your problem,
said Fwab, but he spread his wings and flew off.

It had already been arranged that Rosie should sleep with Peony if Katriona was still having her baby overnight; but that night Rosie couldn’t sleep. The houses were close enough together that she could hear the bustle from the other side of the courtyard, and see the glow of the light cast from the upstairs window. Besides, she could hear the mice chatting away about it. Mice are terribly chatty. They will chat about anything, and if there is nothing to chat about, they will chat about having nothing to chat about. Compared with mice, robins are reserved. Rosie felt that if mice did less chatting they would be supper for cats and owls less often, but this was not her concern. The most important rule of the beast world was: You do not interfere.

So she lay next to Peony the night Katriona’s first baby was born and listened to the mice, and so of course she knew when the baby’s head was seen, and when the rest of him followed, and she wondered if Katriona had thought about the mice, and if she hadn’t sent Rosie any farther away because it was all right with her that Rosie should know from them what was going on, or that there was nowhere else to send her . . . or that Katriona had forgotten about Rosie in the excitement of the baby. She remembered the dark wakeful nights in the cottage loft before the wedding, when she had listened to the echoes telling her she was not who she believed she was. She wished she had the gargoyle spindle end with her, tucked under her pillow; she had thought of asking if she could take it with her, but it seemed too childish, and she was too old to be childish. She had given up being childish during those last weeks at the cottage.

She was already tiptoeing round Peony’s room and picking up her clothes when she heard the first faint cry. She dressed slowly and carefully in the gentle darkness, as if she were preparing to meet a stranger she needed to make a good impression on. She stepped into the hallway, but then halfway down the stairs she stopped, and wasn’t sure if she could go any farther. She put her hand against the wall, and finally went on, but as if this were an unknown staircase, and there might be ogres at the bottom.

She met the midwife, wrapping her cloak round her for her homeward journey, crossing the forecourt; Arnisa smiled at her, and patted her arm. “A fine big boy,” she said. Rosie went in the kitchen door and exchanged a long look with Flinx, who was guarding the door from the kitchen to the rest of the house and, for once, failing to present himself as utterly indifferent to circumstances. She went slowly upstairs to Barder and Katriona’s bedroom, making a wide circle round a bundle of stained bedding and soiled straw standing by the door.

“Come in,” said Aunt’s voice. “I thought you wouldn’t be asleep.”

“I knew the mice would tell you,” said Katriona faintly, as Rosie timidly pushed the door open. “Come see.” Katriona looked exhausted, but her face had been washed and her hair combed. The bedclothes still smelled of the herbs in the linen cupboard, but there was another, stronger smell in the room. Barder stood up from Katriona’s side and came toward Rosie, offering her the little bundle he carried. It took her a moment to realise that he was expecting her to take it in her arms, and not just peer at the little red squinched-up face at one end of it. “This is Jem,” said Barder. “He’s your—I’m not sure what the name of it is, but he’s your family.”

CHAPTER 12

Rosie wasn’t so sure about babies, whatever Fwab said, but she didn’t feel superfluous and displaced so much as suddenly one of the grown-ups who were all in this mess together. The empty, lost feeling that had troubled her before Katriona’s wedding had been mostly filled up or pushed aside by her new life and new responsibilities—but Jem squashed the remains of it flat. Jem took up as much time as there
was
time. “Is it because he’s a fairy?” said Rosie, baffled, to Aunt.

“No, dear, it’s just because he’s a baby,” said Aunt, refraining, with heroic self-control, from remarking that Rosie had been a baby just like him (if not more so) not so very long ago. When Rosie was eighteen and Jem was two, and walking, and beginning to talk, and while he was a total little pest (thought Rosie) he was also almost recognisable as a future human being, Katriona had Gilly, and it started all over again.

One evening when Rosie was walking Gilly, who was going through an unfortunate phase when she would only consent to sleep if she was in some grown-up’s arms and that grown-up was walking the floor with her, Rosie thought: We haven’t heard any rumours about Pernicia in . . . in . . . since the wedding. Shon doesn’t tell us stories about the king’s magicians any more—and we haven’t seen some poor cavalry lieutenant through here on a wild-goose chase in a long time. Rosie looked into Gilly’s little sleeping face—she had gone all limp and squashy, like bread dough that has absorbed too much water—and tried to be pleased. But Rosie at eighteen was too old to believe that something out of sight was something safe; and from nowhere a cold tendril of fear touched her.

“Thank you, love,” said Katriona, coming through the door yawning from her nap; “I’ll take her now.”

“Kat—” said Rosie, handing the baby over delicately, but not so delicately that she didn’t grizzle and threaten to wake up and cry properly, “Kat, we haven’t heard about Pernicia in years. Even Gismo doesn’t have any stories about anybody but the three princes any more.”

“No,” said Katriona, beginning to walk round the kitchen as Rosie had walked. The kitchen was their biggest room, and well laid out for walking, with the long table down its centre and the spinning wheel in the corner by the door. “No, we haven’t.” Her eyes went to a little three-legged iron pot that now held a roll of charm string. Rosie had never found out what had happened to Katriona’s necklace; only that its loss had distressed her greatly.

“But what about the poor princess?” said Rosie.

“I don’t know,” said Katriona, looking back at Rosie, and Rosie saw that she was sad and frightened and worried, and Rosie thought, how like Kat, to love someone she’s never met because she has a curse hanging over her and it must be really awful for her. Poor princess. I wish I could tell her she has someone like Kat on her side. I hope the royal fairies are nice to her, but they can’t be half as nice as Kat. “Maybe Pernicia’s given up,” she suggested, “and the princess will go home tomorrow.”

Katriona tried to smile. “I wish.” She went on, quietly, not to disturb the baby, but as if she had thought about it a long time: “Curses tend to wear out, of course; but she’d know that. She’d have set up something to bind over the passage of time before she came to the name-day. Sometimes crossing the threshold from child to adult may break even a powerful curse, as it did for Lord Curran many years ago”—Rosie nodded; Barder had taught her the ballad about it—“we hoped . . . but she must have found a way round that too. Aunt has always said it’s been the twenty-first birthday from the beginning; the rest is just cruelty, as if the curse weren’t cruel enough. . . .”