Spindle's End (28 page)

She was glad she was sitting down, for she could feel tremendous forces shifting inside her, aligning this new, appalling knowledge with everything she knew about herself, and everything she didn’t know: with her memories of cutting her hair when she was four, of falling into a bog when she was ten, of looking into the darkness of the cottage loft when she was fifteen, of finding out that she was in love with Narl when she was twenty; of growing up talking to animals as she talked to people, and not understanding for a surprisingly long time that not everyone did this. She felt as if when she stood up again this immense change would have expressed itself physically somehow; she would be taller or shorter or have six fingers on each hand—as people with fairy blood occasionally did—but no, she was the princess, and her family, her real family, had no magic in it.

And then her eyes filled with tears, and she threw herself forward into Katriona’s arms (Ralf squeaked, but held his place), Katriona, dearest cousin, sister, mother—and none of these, for Rosie was a princess, the daughter of the king and queen, and no blood at all to Katriona, to Aunt, to Jem and Gilly and Gable, and the loss was suddenly more than she could bear.

“Oh my dear, my dear,” she heard Katriona saying, “you are still our own Rosie; never doubt it.”

She cried for what felt like a long time, till her eyes were sandy and her mouth dry, and then she stopped. She wiped her eyes (and Ralf’s back) with a towel that Aunt offered her, and Spear and Hroc licked the bits she missed. When she raised her face from the towel the first thing her eyes fell upon was the little grinning gargoyle that Barder had carved. She remembered the story of the blunted spindles, how the lost princess had been cursed to prick her finger on a spindle—an iron spindle, such as Rosie had never seen—on her birthday, and die of it; and she remembered Katriona’s habit of rubbing her finger down the gargoyle’s nose, for luck or reassurance, and how she, Rosie, had picked the habit up from her.

The room was very full of animals now: sheep and lambs; a fawn, its mum with her head through the door; several more cats—mostly on the table; rabbits and hares; a grizzled old badger and a smallish young pig; a shiny black cock sitting on the back of Barder’s empty chair, pretending to ignore the glossy cock pheasant, whose tail was longer than his if not so iridescent, on the back of Katriona’s. Birds perched almost everywhere that would hold two clutching bird feet, including the backs of the sheep. There were a few moles pretending to be small humped velvety shadows, and a stoat, looking stubborn, as if his friends and family had tried to talk him out of coming and he had come anyway. Lord Pren’s stallion, Gorse, thrust his head through the window Fwab had opened, and Rosie heard Fast whinnying behind him; and she could hear the teem and seethe of the courtyard, as more beasts came, and more and more and more.

Water still dripped off the trees and trickled down the roof, but the only other noise was what the animals made. Rosie could hear the giggle of otters, and she heard the pattering thoughts of goats and the more laborious ones of cows, and not far away in the forest there was at least one bear. She looked up as another shadow fell across the doorway, and there was Peony, an expression of astonishment on her face, and a half-grown fox cub in her arms.

Rosie stood up again, tucking Ralf under one arm; there was now a sparrow sitting on one shoulder, and a grouse on the other; one of the sparrow’s wings clapped against her ear as it kept its balance; Ralf was under that arm. But it was only the tiny prickle of Fwab’s claws against her scalp that was making her eyes water. Two of the mice she had shaken out of her trouser leg had scampered up the outside, and dove into a pocket just before her standing would have shaken them loose a second time. Rosie ran her free hand through her short hair in her old familiar gesture—Fwab, very used to it, hopping in the air just long enough for it to sweep under him—but this time, to those looking on, the resulting fuzzy nimbus looked less like a sunflower and more like a soldier having just removed a battle helmet. Her voice was perfectly steady:

“We haven’t much time to decide what we will say, for Lord Prendergast’s people will be close behind Gorse and Fast, and the village will be close behind them, as soon as they look out their doors for a breath of air before bed this evening and see the menagerie at the wrights’. My one-and-twentieth birthday is upon us—that is what you are here to say, is it not, Ikor?—and my final doom comes with it, for good or ill. What is it that we must do?”

Part Four

CHAPTER 16

Again Rosie found herself standing at the strange window of a strange new bedroom, staring out into darkness and a series of roofs, and wondering what was to become of her. But this bedroom was still strange to her after three months, whereas the wheelwright’s house had been home in three weeks.

The window she stood at now was high up, much higher than any village house, higher indeed than any tree Rosie had ever climbed. Nor were the roofs she looked out on the friendly, ordinary muddle of sheds and outbuildings suitable to a house that had belonged to several generations of village craftspeople, and some rather untidy common land beyond, but a long rolling sea of wings and stableblocks and armories and chapels and bakehouses and dairies and servants’ quarters, and still more walls and roofs that she had no names for, surrounded by beautifully kept parkland and pasture and gardens and poultry runs.

She was at Woodwold.

She wished for a cat to be lying nearby, flicking its tail in the starlight and muttering indecipherably. But the tower room—chosen by Lord Prendergast and approved by Ikor—was very high indeed, and the confusion of roofs alarming, even for a cat that liked climbing. It was always quiet up here, but tonight not only did no owls hoot, no horses whinny from the stables, no dogs bark in the grounds: the mice behind the wainscoting and the pigeons under the elegant lacery of the overhanging roof were silent.

Waiting.

Tomorrow was the princess’ twenty-first birthday. There was to be a grand ball, the grandest ball anyone had ever seen or heard of, and Rosie, as if from exile or through a wasting illness, remembered the old stories of what the princess’ twenty-first birthday ball would be.

The courtiers, including (so far) forty-four magicians and twenty-six fairies, had been arriving for the last two months. Ikor, the queen’s fairy’s special emissary, greeted them, and told them what they needed to know; and if any of them doubted him (as the magicians surely did, on principle), none of them challenged him. For the story—the story that was given out by Ikor—was that it had been the queen’s fairy, Sigil, who had saved the princess on her name-day, and who had repulsed Pernicia and devised the princess’ sanctuary. (As a result, fairies all over the country were being treated with a reverence they were quite unaccustomed to, and which the more practical among them found rather a nuisance.)

Sigil herself had not only refused to come forward and be made a proper fuss over; she faded to a vague colourless presence at the queen’s elbow no one was absolutely sure, a moment later, that they had seen at all. But the other courtiers, grand and strange, poured into the Gig, complaining about the roads, speaking with the accent of the royal city; and with them they brought exquisite gifts, for the Prendergasts, and for the princess.

The king and queen and their three sons had set out for the Gig as soon as possible after the announcement of the princess’ whereabouts was made—an announcement that had flown on spell-wings from the Gig to the royal city—but they were taking a long passage through their country, meeting their people, letting them see from the joy in their faces that the news was true, and assuring them that they would take an even longer passage back to the royal city, and introduce everyone who wanted to meet her to the princess, who would be imprisoned no more.

There was no mention of the fact that Sigil had told the king and queen that they must not arrive at Woodwold before the very day of the ball.

There were people all over the country saying, Woodwold! How very extraordinary! We never thought of Woodwold! And others who said, Lord Prendergast is a deep one, keeping to himself as he does; and yet the Prendergasts have always been like that, staying away from court to bury themselves in their own lands, notoriously loyal when they might have been kings and queens themselves, almost as if fate were laying something up for the future.

The entire country felt as if it were on holiday, as if all the feast days of the year—of the last one-and-twenty years—were being rolled together to make one immense, joyous, irresistible celebration. Because the princess’ ball was Pernicia’s final rout—this too was explicit in the story Ikor was telling. Pernicia had failed. She had had her twenty-one years, and she had failed. They had kept their princess safe. On her twenty-first birthday they would not be looking anxiously over their shoulders for black and purple shadows where no honest shadows could lie; they would be celebrating the end of darkness.

For this was a part of the great magic Sigil and Ikor and Aunt and Katriona had created. This was a part of their last, desperate throw against the fate that had caged the princess on her name-day: that the people should believe that Pernicia had already lost, and that the princess’ birthday was a time of rejoicing; that they might freely love their restored princess so much that the love itself was protection and defence—and that behind that defence other, secret defences could be devised.

People forgot; it was in the nature of people to forget, to blur boundaries, to retell stories to come out the way they wanted them to come out, to remember things as how they ought to be instead of how they were. And Aunt and Katriona and Ikor and Sigil had arranged to help the people forget, to remember just a little—just a crucially little—awry.

Pernicia could not be defeated by any of the usual means of straightforward feats of magic and of arms. And so they had had to come up with an alternative.

It was a deceiving magic so vast that the four fairies walked half in the spell-world all their waking hours, and their dreams were troubled by it even when they slept, which was little enough, and restlessly. Katriona felt as if she and Aunt and Ikor and Sigil had unravelled themselves from their human shapes and reknitted the thread into a world-shape: the shape of a world where Pernicia had lost, and the one-and-twentieth birthday of the once-cursed princess was a joyful and carefree occasion, where the only concern would be that you didn’t miss anything particularly good to eat, and that you shouted loudly enough when the princess’ health was drunk. She knew Aunt and Ikor felt the same by the expressions on their faces: the faces of people whose bodies could barely hold their clothes out in the right dimensions of height, width and depth, because there was so little of them left, beyond the magic they maintained and endured.

She wondered, now that she felt a tattered, shambling thing herself, if the tattered, shambling, persistent searching spell had once been a human being. She and Aunt had not seen it again since Ikor had arrived in Foggy Bottom. She did not know if it had disintegrated, or gone home, or . . .

The conspirators all wondered why Pernicia remained silent. Ikor had won their second-to-last throw—he had found the princess before she did; but the news of the princess’ discovery was not only no secret; it had caused a tremendous thunderclap in all the ethereal layers, from the darkest underground chambers of the gnomes and earth-sprites and rock-witches to the high cold realms of the cloudswallowers and the star-dancers. Pernicia knew. Pernicia also must know that some enchantment was making the people of the country she planned to destroy believe that her design had already foundered. But she was biding her time, as the last days ran out before the princess’ one-and-twentieth birthday—when Pernicia would be at her strongest. The birthday, and their final contest. And Katriona found herself grotesquely grateful for her enemy’s silence, for she did not think the conspirators’ precarious delusion could have held against even so much as one gust of Pernicia’s laughter, the demon laughter that had pulled the banners down on the princess’ name-day.

Katriona often thought she could not have done it at all without Sigil. It was not just a matter of four of them instead of three; it was the clear patient lines of the magic Sigil worked, which never sagged nor snarled and were never overwhelmed or confused. She never saw Sigil’s face, although when she heard her voice, she sounded as nearby as if she stood next to her, with her arm round her waist again, and Katriona holding a baby princess. None of the three of them in Foggy Bottom knew where Sigil was, not even Ikor; she had not remained in the royal city, nor had she gone on the royal progress with the king and the queen and the princes. But the three other fairy conspirators often heard her voice, and constantly felt her presence, and her strength, and her love for the princess she had not seen in more than twenty years.