Spindle's End (25 page)

Eight months.

“In love with
Rowland
?” said Rosie with a little of her usual force. “No. He’s nice enough, but he’s . . . he’s . . . oh, he’s
boring.
” Her voice was plainly telling the truth, but her thoughts were on something else, and she turned her lips in and bit down on them, as if preventing herself from saying anything further.

Barder came in just before the silence among the three women became sticky, threw himself into a chair, and sighed. “Joeb will be along as soon as he’s washed,” he said. “I’m sorry we’re late again. Every wheeled vehicle in the Gig seems to be having the most extraordinary bad luck. Spokes break, rims pop, axles crack—I don’t understand it. Crantab says the same. He has a waggon in for repair now that looks like it simply made up its mind to burst. We could both take on new apprentices now—there’s plenty of work for them—but this isn’t the way it should be, and it’s not the sort of work you feel really happy doing. . . .”

His voice tailed away because the suspicion had to arise that the unusual level of breakages was due to some kind of magic, and cleaning up magical messes was not considered wholesome or honest labour. “The only thing no one has brought me for mending is a spindle’s end,” he said, trying to make a joke of it. He looked at the two fairies. “Usually you tell me when it’s something that concerns me or my work,” he said.

Joeb entered at that moment, looked round, took the plate Aunt offered him, but instead of sitting down as he usually did, said hastily that there was something he wanted another look at tonight, and went back outdoors. In the silence of the kitchen they heard his footsteps retreating on the hard-packed earth of the yard.

“Kat,” said Barder.

“We don’t know,” she said, but as if the words were wrung out of her. “It feels like a searching spell. Something that knows it has been searching for the wrong thing for a long time.” Too long a time, she thought. Searching spells don’t last twenty years, but this one had. It was a gallimaufry, a patchwork, a bristling, ragged confusion of the shreds of many days, days stretching into years, worked and reworked and turned back on themselves, the frayed ends teased out and bound together again, every failure stitched into the body of the thing, so that it would not be repeated, till at last it would find what it wanted because there would be nowhere else left to look. And it was almost undetectable; it was the shaggy greyish fringe at the edge of your vision when you had gone too long without sleep. It was—probably—a senseless series of fevers and breakages. Katriona couldn’t have made such a spell. She didn’t know any fairy who could have. It was so outlandish neither Katriona nor Aunt could fully believe it existed; and they were the only two of the Gig fairies who could so much as guess at it.

She is as safe as ordinariness can make her.
Ordinariness and beast-speech, that rare fairy talent.

Aunt said: “Your waggon probably did burst.”

Barder picked up the bread knife and examined it as if deciding what it was for. “Do you know what it wants?” he said.

“No,” said Katriona. “Yes,” said Aunt. “Sort of,” said Katriona, speaking so nearly simultaneously that the four words came out as a kind of burst: “Noyessortof.”

There was another pause, and Barder said slowly, “I see,” and then the three of them exchanged a look so fraught with unsaid understanding—a look that appeared to bind them not merely all together but also to prevent their looking at something else—that Rosie began to pay attention.

She was aware that all had not been well in the Gig this year. She knew about the fevers and the breakages, and the steady high run on minor squaring charms, which kept ordinary things what they were. It was only yesterday that Dessy, having had the third mug in a row turn into a frog when she tried to put beer in it, and despite her having murmured “mug, stay mug” over each as she took it down from the shelf, burst into tears and swore she was going to run away to Turanga and find a job in anything that wasn’t a pub. Rosie had happened to enter the pub while Dessy was still weeping and threatening to leave, and had got down on her hands and knees to talk the beer-mug frogs out from under the bar, where they were huddling, confused and frightened, and longing for something, so far as Rosie could make out, that seemed to be a sort of swamp made of beer and sausages.

But her real attention was elsewhere. She’d never before had a problem she could neither forget nor do something about. She wanted never to have seen that look on Narl’s face; she wanted never to have found out what that look meant to her. She wanted not to watch Peony moving through elation and misery a dozen times a minute. She had wanted to blame Rowland for everything, but found she couldn’t, because he was a friend. He was patient and thoughtful and funny (in a way that as she’d gotten to know him better reminded her of Peony. It didn’t surprise her that they’d fallen in love, but she wondered how they’d managed to do it in an instant). He was interested in animals, not only the horses and oxen a blacksmith shoes. He learnt the names of all the village dogs, even the medium-sized hairy brownish ones that all looked alike to most people, and he stopped to listen to birdsong. And the cats liked him. They called him Sweet-breath and Aroouua, which was a cat word indicating that you had supple joints. They rarely said aroouua of human beings. They called Narl Stone-Eye and Block.

He wasn’t really boring. She just wasn’t in love with him.

She’d been listening idly to the conversation, wrestling unwillingly with her own thoughts, and she looked up just in time to intercept the charged glance among the other three. If I’d held a stick between them at that moment, she thought, it would have sizzled.

Rosie said to Flinx, lying near the cradle so he could play a kind of dicing with death between his tail and the cradle rockers,
You could tell us something, couldn’t you? You cats know something’s up; even the priest’s cats are worried.
She couldn’t be sure, then, if he let his tail be pinched deliberately, or whether, stiffening all over in outrage at Rosie’s question—a cat does not submit to interrogation—he merely forgot, and left it in a dangerous location; but pinched it was, and he bounded to his feet with a shriek and darted out of the room. “Oh, Flinx,” sighed Katriona. “You could lie somewhere else.”

“That cat doesn’t come indoors to lie near the fire because he’s getting old,” said Aunt. “He does it to prove that he should never come indoors at all.” The conversation was turned; but supper was a haunted meal that evening.

 

Like most lunches were at the forge now, Rosie thought the next day: haunted. Rowland and Peony seemed hardly to talk to each other, and when they did speak it was like Aunt and Katriona and Barder last night; as if what they were really saying was happening somewhere behind their words. Rosie had begun to imagine—she hoped she was imagining—that whatever irresistible force was drawing Rowland and Peony together, there seemed to be another, nearly as powerful, that was dragging them apart. Rosie half wanted to watch them, and half wanted never to look at them at all. She developed Narl’s habit of wandering round the forge staring at things, although she was careful not to choose the same things to stare at that Narl himself did.

She wondered why the air between Rowland and Peony seemed to twinkle sometimes, and that when they were together they seemed more troubled by magic-midges than people who weren’t fairies, sitting in a forge, ought to be; and she pretended that her own skin didn’t seem to tingle and buzz if she sat long near them. She had never paid much attention to people in love before—except Katriona and Barder, but they’d been in love since before she was born, and presumably all the itchy unsettledness of it had worn out by the time Aunt had fetched her home to live with her and Kat. Maybe this is just what love—that first burst of mutual love—was like. Magic did tend to be drawn to excitements and upheavals. She thought of asking Aunt, but she didn’t have the heart for it.

Of course the village found out about Rowland and Peony. Peony’s beauty and sweetness had made her prospective marriage the liveliest odds at the pub since Rosie’s disappointing show of baby-magic, and far more heatedly contested, since at least half the men (young and old, married and unmarried) laying their wagers were in love with her themselves.

“So, Narl, are you ready to take on another man permanently?” said Grey one day. Narl only grunted, but Grey would have been astonished if he had answered so frivolous a question. But Brinet, from whom Rowland rented a room and in whose kitchen he had his breakfast, asked Rosie one day if Peony’s aunt had started measuring the family wedding dress against her niece’s figure; and Rosie, expressionless, grunted, and walked away.

“Grunted at me just like Narl! Not a word! Not a nod or a smile!” said Brinet, much offended, to Cairngorm, later that day. “I don’t think working with a man like Narl is good for a young woman, however clever she is with beasts!”

But Rosie felt herself to be at full stretch and had no slack for dealing with busybodies. A few days after she had declined to answer Brinet, she found Peony weeping into a pan of potatoes she was peeling, and sat down and put an arm round her. “I—I’m sorry,” said Peony. “It’s just—suddenly too much.”

“Can’t you marry him then?” said Rosie, remembering what Narl had said, and guessing what was suddenly too much.

“No,” said Peony, and when the single syllable made her tears stop Rosie knew how hopeless it was—knew, perhaps, because of all the tears she herself had not shed into her own pillow recently. “No. He’s pledged to—to someone else. Someone he’s never met. She—she has a curse on her, and it makes her very lonely and sad.”

Rosie’s heart sank. “It’s a family thing then?” What is a blacksmith doing with the kind of family that pledges its sons to other people’s daughters sight unseen? Especially daughters with curses on them? That explains his manners, of course, if he comes from that kind of family, but then what is he doing as a blacksmith? Because he is a blacksmith. Even I can see he knows what he’s doing, and Narl would never have taken him if he didn’t. Couldn’t he chuck it all over and
be
a blacksmith?

Magic, thought Rosie, and frowned. Was this part of what Aunt and Katriona were talking about the other night, when Barder was trying to squeeze some answers out of them? But if the searching spell wanted Rowland, wasn’t he right there? Maybe not, surrounded by cold iron.

“Oh, Rosie,” said Peony, picking up a potato. “I hope you never fall in love with the wrong man—the wrong man that you know is the right man.

“It isn’t for much longer,” she added, after a pause. “He must go home soon and—l-live up to his oath. They are to be married shortly after her—her birthday, which is in spring, when the crocuses come out. Like the princess, and you, Rosie.”

Rosie grunted a Narl grunt. She was back that day from Woodwold. Lord Prendergast’s hounds had broken away from the huntsman, which had never happened before in anyone’s memory, and Lord Pren had had to forbid the man to quit his post, and set a spy on him that he couldn’t creep off and disappear, so devastated was he. Rosie was called out to talk to the dogs, who were all deeply ashamed by their ignoble behaviour, and grovelled abjectly to the huntsman, whom they loved, at every opportunity.

I don’t know,
said Huwreer, one of the oldest and wisest hounds.
I’ve never felt anything like it. It was like being six months old again, but crazy. I’ve known crazy dogs. They can’t learn and they don’t care they can’t learn, and that’s worse, and if your huntsman doesn’t know his job, one crazy dog can ruin the pack, because when we’re running
—Huwreer paused. Rosie knew what she meant. When a dog’s brain is full of prey-smell there isn’t a lot of room for independent thinking.

Storm coming,
the merrel had said, sitting in the darkness in the roof of Lord Prendergast’s Hall.
Storm coming.
The weather, advancing toward autumn, was as restless and volatile as Lord Pren’s youngest son’s horses; but bad weather had never sent the dogs mad before.

Rosie felt she was surrounded by bad weather—her own and everyone else’s. Rain and wind hardly came into it. Rowland couldn’t really have anything to do with the princess, but it still seemed so very
odd
that her own private world should be trying its best to crack up during this last, tense, distracted year before the princess’ one-and-twentieth birthday. If this is what it felt like in the Gig, it must be really dreadful where she was.

“I am thinking I will ask my aunt and uncle if I can go to Smoke River for a season. Perhaps I can learn a spinning charm.” Peony gave Rosie a thin, watery smile, like sun trying to break through rain clouds. “You know it is a great frustration to me that I spin poorly.”

Rosie did know. Peony was slow and clumsy about this as she was slow and clumsy about almost nothing else. It was a long-standing joke between them that Peony had been able to spin perfectly well until Rosie moved next door. Rosie had once offered to loan the gargoyle spindle end to Peony, explaining about the nose rubbing, but Peony declined, saying seriously that if it were a charm, it belonged to their family, and it would have its feelings hurt, or might go wrong, if loaned outside.

“I’ll ask Barder to make you a spindle end as a coming-home present,” said Rosie, stifling the urge to beg Peony not to go away and leave her alone, alone with Narl at the forge every day.

The sun broke through a little more credibly in Peony’s smile this time. “I’d rather you made me one yourself,” she said.

CHAPTER 15

Autumn was a season of storms, when the winds shouted bestiaries and the genealogies of kings and queens under doorsills and down chimneys, and chimney pots, after such storms, were found to have taken up residence on other roofs of their own choosing, and sometimes in trees, and several times at the bottom of the town well, which they did not want to leave, saying it was peaceful down there, the presiding element disinclined to air-frenzies like wind, and that fish were pleasanter companions than humans. There were too many storms, and people grew weary of them, and the dull fevers of the spring and summer became sticky, hacking coughs.