Spindle's End (3 page)

It will not do, said the councillors and courtiers. (The magicians were still nursing their snit about not having been told of the queen’s pregnancy, and refused to attend the discussions about the name-day. What they were really outraged about, of course, was that a mere fairy had successfully thrown fairy dust in all their eyes.) You must, said the councillors, have the sort of name-day that other countries will send emissaries to—we will need their good wishes, their favourable memories, in nineteen or twenty years’ time. And you cannot make the sort of fuss that an emissary is going to remember pleasantly if a hundred thousand or so of your people are milling around the city walls, trampling the fields into mud, and demanding to be fed and housed.

This made the king and queen thoughtful, for the king remembered the long difficult search for his wife, and the queen remembered what a shock it had been when the envoy had presented himself at her father’s rather small and shabby castle, and she had had to be rushed out of the kitchens where she was boiling sweetmeats and up the back stairs to wash her face and comb her hair and put on her best dress to meet him. (He had been eating her sweetmeats with a look of great concentration and contentment, when she had made a stately entrance into the front room, slightly out of breath from having hopped down the corridor on one foot and then the other, pulling on her shoes. She hadn’t realised that her sweetmeats, excellent though she knew them to be, would render even a king’s envoy happy to wait.)

A compromise was reached. It was the sort of compromise that made the councillors gnash their teeth, but it was the best they had been able to wrest from their suddenly obstinate rulers, who would keep insisting that their daughter belonged to her people. Heralds would be sent out to every village—each and every village—to proclaim at the town centre, which might be anything from the steps of the mayor’s house in the larger to the town well or watering-trough in the smaller, that one person, to be chosen by lot (if the magicians had recovered from their snit, they would provide cheat-proof lots; otherwise Sigil would find fairies to do it), was invited to the princess’ name-day. And that one person, whoever he or she was, need only present the lot, as good earnest of the invitation, to be allowed entry into the royal grounds on the name-day.

The councillors and courtiers could only see the fabulous amount of organisational work, and, magicians or no magicians, the infinite amount of cheating that would go on—or at least would try to go on—as a result of this plan. And while the court folk were applying court mores to many ordinary people who wouldn’t know a political intrigue if it grew butterfly wings and bit them, it was true that the heralds, who were themselves ordinary people under their livery, tended to let it be known, especially at the smaller villages, at the local pub after the official announcement was made, that the king and queen had wanted to invite everyone, really everyone. And that if the person with the royal lot showed up with a friend or two, chances were they’d all get in.

That took care of the common citizens, and, barring the number and manner of them, that was the easy part. Much harder were the high tables: who would sit near the king or the queen, who would have to make do at a slightly less high table headed by a mere prince or duke or baron, which countries were to be invited to send emissaries, and whether the fuss made over the emissaries should have more to do with the size and status of the country, or the number of unmarried sons in the royal family.

But hardest of all was what to do about the fairies.

Court magicians were members of the court, and there would be special high tables just for them, where they could compare notes on astrological marvels, cast aspersions on the work of other magicians not present to defend themselves, and be slightly world-weary about the necessity of coming to so superstitious and ridiculous an event as a royal name-day.

But fairies were a different kettle of imaginary watery beings. Some fairies were nearly as powerful as the magicians, and what they thought and did was much more varied and unpredictable. Magicians had to attend the Academy for a number of years, and anyone calling himself a magician—since it was usually a he—had a degree in hippogriff leather to show for it, although no one but another magician would be able to read the invisible writing on it. Magicians could make earthquakes happen if they wanted to, or a castle go up (or down) in a night, and a properly drawn-up magician’s spell could last a lifetime. Mostly they were hired by powerful people to spy on their powerful neighbours, and to demonstrate their existence, so that the powerful neighbours didn’t try anything with their own magicians. (Fetes where the magicians of rival families would be present were always well attended, because the spectacles were sure to be exceptionally fine.) Magicians without a taste for this sort of flash stayed at the Academy, or at other academies, pursuing the ultimate secrets of the universe (and philosophies concerning the balance of magic), which were, presumably, dangerous, which was why Academicians tended to have long sombre faces, and to move as if they were waiting for something to leap out at them. But the point was that magicians had rules. Fairies were the wild cards in a country where the magic itself was wild.

Even the queen was a little hesitant about issuing a blanket invitation to fairies. Several hundred fairies together—let alone several thousand—in one place were certain to kick up a tremendous dust of magic, and fate only knew what might be the outcome.

“But most fairies live in towns and villages, do they not?” said the queen. “So they are, in a way, included in the invitation our heralds are carrying.” The fact was that no one really knew how many fairies—even how many practising fairies—there were in the country; the ones people knew about were the ones who lived in the towns and villages with other people and visibly did magic. There were known to be fairies who lived in the woods and the desert places (and possibly even in the waters), but they were rarely seen, and it was only assumed that they were fewer than the known ones.

There were also, of course, wicked fairies, but there weren’t many of them, and they tended to keep a low profile, because they knew they were outnumbered—unless someone angered them, and people tried very, very hard not to anger them. It was the malice of the wicked fairies that gave the good ones a lot of their most remunerative work putting things back to rights, but generally speaking, things could be put back to rights. People were diligently cautious about bad fairies, but they didn’t worry about them too much; less than they worried about the weather, for example, a drought that would make crops fail, or a hard winter that would bring wolves into the towns. (It was actually easier if droughts or hard winters were caused by a bad fairy, because then what you did was very straightforward: you hired a good fairy to fix it. The capriciousness of real weather was beyond everybody, even the united efforts of the Academy, who periodically tried.)

“I think,” said the king slowly, “I think that’s not quite enough.”

The queen sighed. “I was afraid you’d say that.” There had been relatively little magic in her father’s country and she had never quite adjusted to the omnipresence of magic, and of magical practitioners. Magic had its uses, but it made her nervous. Sigil she loved dearly, and she was at least half-friends with several of the other fairies strategically employed in the royal household; the magicians she mostly found tiresome, and was rather relieved than otherwise that none of them were at present speaking to her because they blamed her for the secrecy of her pregnancy.

There was a pause. “What if,” said the queen at last, “what if we invited a few fairies to be godmothers to our daughter? We could ask twenty-one of them—one each for her twenty-one names, and one each for the twenty-one years of her minority. Twenty-one isn’t very many. There will be eighty-two magicians. And it will make the fairies seem, you know, wanted and welcome. We can ask Sigil whom to invite.”

“Fairy godmothers?” said the king dubiously. “We’ll have a time getting that past the court council—and the bishop.”

Sigil had been worrying about the fairies, too, and thought that inviting one-and-twenty fairies to be godmothers would be an excellent idea, if they could hedge it round first with enough precautions.

“No gifts,” said the king. “Too controversial.”

“Oh, godmothers must give gifts!” said the queen. “It would be terribly rude to tell them they mustn’t give their godchild anything!”

“The queen’s right,” said Sigil, “but we can tell them they must be token gifts only, little things to amuse a baby or flatter a baby’s parents, nothing—nothing—difficult.” What she meant, the king and queen both knew, was nothing that would make the princess unduly visible on the ethereal planes. That sort of thing was the province of heroes, who were old enough to choose it and strong—or stupid—enough to bear it. “And I think we should invite at least one man. Male fairies are underappreciated, because almost no one remembers they exist.”

“You must be the first of the godmothers, dear,” said the queen, but Sigil shook her head.

“No . . . no,” she said, although the regret was clear in her voice. “I thank you most sincerely. But . . . I’m already too bound up in the fortunes of this family to be the best godmother for the new little one. Give her one-and-twenty fresh fairies, who will love the tie to the royal family. And it can be quite a useful thing to have a few fairies on your side.” The king remembered a time when he was still the prince, when one of the assistant chefs in the royal kitchens, who was also a fairy, was addressed by a mushroom, fried in butter and on its way to being part of a solitary late supper for the king, saying, “Don’t let the king eat me or I’ll poison him.” There was always a fairy or two in the royal kitchens (the rulers of this country did not use tasters) and while it took the magicians to find out who was responsible for the presence of the mushroom, it was the fairy who saved the king’s life.

Sigil took the queen’s hands in her own. “Let me look after the catering. What do you think the cradle should be hung with? Silk? And what colours? Pink? Blue? Lavender? Gold?”

“Gold, I think,” the queen said, glad to have the question of the fairy godmothers agreed upon, but disappointed and a little hurt that Sigil refused to be one of them. “Gold and white. Maybe a little lavender. And the ribbons should have pink and white rosettes.”

CHAPTER 2

The shape of the country was rectangular, but there was a long wiggling finger of land that struck down southeast and a sort of tapering lump that struck up northwest. The southeast bit was called the Finger; the northwest lump was called the Gig, because it might be guessed to have some resemblance to the shape of a two-wheeled vehicle with its shafts tipped forward to touch the ground. The royal city lay a little north of the Finger, in the southeast corner, nearly a month’s journey, even with frequent changes of horses and a good sprinkling of fairy dust for speed, to the base of the Gig.

The highways that bound most of the rest of the country together gave out at the beginning of the Gig. The local peer, Lord Prendergast, said, reasonably, that he (or his forebears) would have built a highway if there had ever been any need, but there never had been. Nothing exciting ever happened in the Gig, or at least hadn’t since the invasion of the fire-wyrms about eleven hundred years ago, before the days of highway-building. So if you wanted to go there you went on cart tracks. (The lord’s own travelling carriages were very well sprung, and he would upon occasion send them to fetch his less well equipped, or more easily bruised, friends and associates outside the Gig.)

And what you needed, muttered the royal herald, bearer of a little pouch of cheat-proof lots (almost empty now) and important tidings about the princess’ name-day, was not swift horses but six-legged flat-footed ponies that could see in thick mist and the green darkness of trees. He had given up riding, after his fancy thoroughbred had put its foot in a gap of root and stumbled, for the umpty-millionth time, and he was now leading it, half an eye anxiously upon it, for he thought it was going a bit lame. He sneezed. Also needed were human beings impervious to cold and damp. The Gig was a damp sort of place, and most of its village names reflected this: Foggy Bottom, Smoke River, Dewglass, Rain-hill, Mistweir. Moonshadow didn’t sound very promising either, although at least it didn’t utterly guarantee wet; and the last village of the Gig, right out next to the wild lands where no one went, was called Treelight. He had thought this was a very funny name when he was setting out from the royal city. It was less funny now, with the leaves overhead dripping down his neck, and he not yet arrived at the first village of this soggy province. He sneezed again.

To think that Lord Prendergast preferred to live out here and leave his seat at court empty from year’s end to year’s end! There must be some truth in the stories about that family, and the house they lived in, Woodwold, a vast mysterious place, a thousand years old or more, full of tales and echoes of tales, and with some uncanny connection with the people that lived in it. But it was still a grand and beautiful house—grand enough for a highway to have been built to get to it. Except it hadn’t been.

The herald blinked, distracted. The sun had suddenly cut through the leaf cover and a gold-green shaft of light fell across his path. He looked at the sunbeam, scowling; there was no reason, this far off the highway and with soggy leaf-mould the chief road surface, for there to be so much dust to dance in a sunbeam. The thick dust and moist air would conspire to leave ineradicable chalky smudges on his livery. He sighed again. Maybe Foggy Bottom—which should be the first village he came to—would have a blacksmith who could look at his horse’s foot.

Foggy Bottom had heard of the princess’ birth as quickly as the rest of the country; one of the village fairies had a particular friend who was a robin whose wife’s cousin’s sister-in-law was closely related to a family of robins that lived in a bush below the queen’s bedroom window, and had heard the princess’ first startled cry. Foggy Bottom was expecting something like the herald (and was accustomed to travellers who had never been to the Gig before, by the time they reached Foggy Bottom, looking cross and rather the worse for wear), but were not at all expecting his announcement.