Spindle's End (32 page)

Rosie,
muttered the rafters.
Rosie,
whispered the roof tiles.

The stories about Woodwold, which for many generations had interested no one but scholars and the citizens of the Gig, had been brought out of the backs of people’s minds; except that there were so many gaps there was very little story after all (discounting, in the cause of temperate truth, the more elaborate flights of the Gig’s bards), except that it was an odd old house, one of the largest and oldest and perhaps the oddest in the entire country, and it lay very near the edge of nowhere, on the bank of the River Moan. Some tales could be told of the Prendergasts: that they were even older than their house, that their forefathers and foremothers, fore-aunts and fore-uncles, had come to their ruler’s call whenever their ruler had had need of them; they had stood by the queen when she foiled Pernicia the first time; they had fought at the side of the king when he drove the fire-wyrms out of the Gig. It was half remembered, half believed that it was at that time that the Prendergasts had fallen in love with the Gig and had decided to stay there, and that it was in thanks for their valour against the fire-wyrms that the king had deeded it to them.

There was a crumb of a story about why Woodwold had been founded where it had; something to do with a seer’s vision. Forecasters’ visions were the least reliable of the practical magics, and the longer-term a forecast the less reliable; few people would choose to build a house from something a seer had said. But the crumb of story insisted that the seer had been a member of the Prendergasts himself, which was curious, since seeing, however useless, required very strong magic, and the Prendergasts were not a magical family. Perhaps they had been, and it had left them over the generations.

There were no recent stories of the Prendergasts, unless you were horse-mad. The odd, damp little bit of country under their stewardship did, it was true, prosper, but fine hides and wool and weaving and ironmongery and carved spindle ends—and horses—did not make interesting stories.

People said, I wonder what the princes will make of their elder sister?

Everyone said, What shall we make of our future queen?

Ikor had removed to Woodwold with the princess; as a stranger to the Gig and a member of the royal court (and, perhaps, as a negligent wearer of naked sabres) he had an authority that the humans of Woodwold were glad to rely on (the animals were less impressed, and, Rosie feared, the house failed to notice at all). Aunt and Katriona remained—except for too-infrequent visits—in Foggy Bottom, and tried to seem no more and no differently distressed than Peony’s aunt and uncle.

Peony’s aunt and uncle were in considerable confusion of mind, waking, as they now believed themselves to be, from a long dream, in which Peony had been their niece. Their only sorrow now was that they could not quite remember how it had come about that they had been so astonishingly chosen to raise the secret princess. They felt they had the vaguest wisp of memory of someone, a fairy or a magician (“magician,
I
think,” said Hroslinga. “Wasn’t he tall, solemn, and dressed all in black?”), giving them a child to be raised as their niece: (“I remember him telling us he had to make us forget his visit,” said Hroslinga. “I remember his hand coming toward my forehead to rub out the memory. I
do.
”) “We always knew we were ordinary,” said Crantab, “but we didn’t know we were
perfectly
ordinary!” He loved his joke so much he had to tell it several times a day, but people were inclined to be indulgent to the man who had raised the princess, and went on laughing at it to please him. Crantab and Hroslinga were happy not to be called up to Woodwold; they were happy to leave all that to Katriona and Aunt, and to the mesmerising and rather scary Ikor.

But Hroslinga, one day, having told the story of the black-robed magician all over again for the dozenth time to Katriona (the story, with a little help, was becoming ever more interestingly detailed—“Although, by the fates, she doesn’t need much help,” Katriona said to Aunt), said something else. They had been folding sheets together, and remembering that this had been one of the jobs Rosie and Peony had done. A silence had fallen as Katriona tucked little sprigs of lavender between the folds, and gathered up Hroslinga’s sheets to hand to her, and Hroslinga, musingly, as she accepted the bundle, said, “It is a great relief to me now, to know that she isn’t my own kin. I was never as fond of her as I knew I should be; and this has troubled me all her life.”

She was too deep in her own thoughts to see how Katriona’s hands shook as Hroslinga accepted the weight of the sheets; and she had no way of knowing that Katriona shut herself up as soon as she left, so she could burst into tears without anyone knowing. When she came out again a few minutes later, wiping her eyes, she went out into the yard, where her three children were playing under Barder’s preoccupied but probably watchful enough eye, and hugged them all fiercely in turn (“Oh,
mum
,” said Jem disgustedly). She never told anyone what Hroslinga had said, not even Aunt or Barder, and, contrary to all her usual scruples, laid a mild enchantment on Hroslinga, that she might never say it again.

The other Gig fairies were pressed into service to the princess, too, but theirs was a different sort of service; they were to keep the bounds beaten, the bounds of the Gig, against . . . whatever might seek entry that was not welcome. Such was the disturbance round the revealing of the princess that there was a terrific amount of magical activity all over the Gig, and bounds-beating under these conditions was more than plenty to prevent any fairy having time or energy to be inquisitive about what another was up to, or to wonder if the two best fairies in the Gig didn’t seem a little too weary and anxious and preoccupied when all they should be doing that was any different from what any of the rest of the Gig fairies were doing was missing their cousin-niece who was being well taken care of by that very odd but unmistakably magisterial Ikor, up at Woodwold with the princess.

It wasn’t as though the bounds had to be held against anything—or anyone—in particular; it was just a general policing activity, although very trying. The entire Gig was drawing the sort of mostly minor but vexing magical disruptions that fairy houses did, but expanded for its greater dimensions: dja vines, instead of growing the length of an arm, grew the height of a tall man overnight; there were clouds of butterflies, wearing little frilly dresses made of primroses and hats of lily-of-the-valley (which was disconcerting in midwinter); door latches became oracular, so you could not go in and out of your own front door without being told (in sepulchral tones) what your next sennight was going to be like (fortunately the predictions were usually wrong); and three stremcopuses had been seen. Stremcopuses rarely came so far north, and never at this time of year; the winter winds made their twiggy arms die back at the tips.

 

Rowland had been the princess’ first visitor, the very afternoon of the princess’ arrival at Woodwold. He had appeared dressed like a blacksmith—if an unusually clean blacksmith—but he was unintimidated by the Great Hall as no blacksmith should be, and he carried himself not at all like a blacksmith. He also obviously assumed that he would see the princess. These things gave him away at once. The news of what, precisely, they gave him away as, tarried only a little behind the central tidings of the revelation of the princess herself. The story was, of course, exceedingly popular with everyone who heard it: the heir of Erlion who had vowed to marry the princess, and who, disguised as a blacksmith’s apprentice, fell in love with the princess disguised as the niece of a wainwright. . . .

Poor Peony had had only one caveat about her impersonation: “You cannot tell Rowland that I am the princess, that it is happily ever after for us,” she had said, savagely: Peony who was never savage about anything. “For I am still the niece of a village wainwright, and he is the Heir-Prince of Erlion.” Rowland, loyal subject of the king as well as Erlion’s prince, kept whatever Ikor told him to himself; and perhaps only those who knew him well-Rosie among them-could read in his carefully composed face that happily ever after was not guaranteed.

Ikor, as tired and drawn as Aunt and Katriona and much more dour, once said to Rosie, “If he had met you anywhere but a smith’s yard . . .”

He said it because his exhaustion was bearing him down till he hardly thought to remain standing beneath its weight till the princess’ birthday; and the vow of the ten-year-old prince might have been another post to thrust under the sagging roof-tree of their artifice. But Rosie had her own fears and sorrows, and she could not stop herself from biting back at him: “Then he would have fallen in love with me? But he would not, you know. He might have found himself bound to me, yoked to me, like oxen in harness, but it would not have been love. Let them have what they have, because at least it is real, in all this . . . all this . . .”

Ikor fell on his knees beside her, which he never did now, not now that they were at Woodwold and Peony was the princess. “Forgive me,” he said. “Forgive me.”

“Don’t be stupid,” said Rosie; “if you don’t get up at once I shall pull your ears. Hard. That’s better. Look, doesn’t it make—what you’re doing—easier that Rowland is—is tied to Peony, not to me?”

Ikor rubbed his sleek and hairless head, as if checking that his ears remained unpulled. “Perhaps it does. Perhaps it does. It’s just that all of this . . . all of this is wrong.”

Rosie smiled a little. “I’m glad you think so, too,” she said, daring him to protest that the wrongness that troubled him was not the same as that which troubled her. But he knew Rosie a little by now, and did not rise to the bait. “Yes,” she went on, “like nobbling a horse, so he will lose a race he should have won; or possibly to put the buyer off, because you’ve decided you want to keep him.”

Ikor gave her what Rosie called his not-the-princess look. “We want very much to—er—put this buyer off.”

“We shall,” said Rosie, trying to be encouraging. “We shall because we must. And I’m very stubborn, you know.” But the not-the-princess look metamorphosed into another look, one that she liked much less, and might have called the yes-the-princess look, except that she didn’t want to call it anything. She looked thoughtfully at Ikor’s ears.

Rosie had been sitting in the window embrasure in their bedroom during that conversation with Ikor, while Rowland was visiting his supposed betrothed in the tower parlour. The duty or the honour of chaperonage was left to Lady Prendergast. Mostly Rosie was alone during Rowland’s visits, listening to the murmur of voices through the wall. And what she mostly did was think of Narl. She had never told Peony her feelings about Narl, even before Ikor had come; it was the first secret she had ever had from her. She did not weep—she had not wept since Ikor’s first evening at Foggy Bottom—but when she remembered Narl her dry eyes burned, and her eyelids seemed to blink open and closed in hinged sections, like shutters. Narl had not come to Woodwold once in all the time the princess had been there; any smith’s business had to be taken to him at the Foggy Bottom forge. Even Lord Pren’s own personal request could not bring him. People shook their heads, but those who knew him were not surprised; Narl would hate the commotion that hung round everything to do with the princess, and the commotion began at Woodwold’s gates.

Rosie had not seen him since the day of the storm. Her last words to him had been “Oh, bother, it’s
sheeting
,” as she prepared to run across the square to home and supper; she had not even said good-bye. And the last day and a half at what she still thought of as her home had been busy, horribly, chaotically busy. But he had not tried to see her either. Or Peony.

Rosie felt sometimes that her entire experience of Woodwold was contained in her favourite window-seat, with the friendly spider in the corner. She sat there so often: when Rowland and Peony were together, in the middle of the night when the dreams were particularly bad and Rosie feared to wake Peony with her thrashings and mumblings, when the two of them were allowed an interval of quiet before the next meeting with the most recently arrived courtiers (the trickle rising to a deluge as the princess’ birthday approached, till even Woodwold grew nearly full), the next dinner party, the next fitting of the princess’ ball gown. It was, perhaps, the only place in Woodwold where she could draw herself together and remember herself, think of herself, as Rosie; it was therefore the only time she felt quite real.

The people round the princess and her lady cossetted them as best they could; they were often sent back up to their tower for a rest (one of the Prendergast daughters, who tended to forget to be daunted by royalty, said that if they didn’t spend half their lives climbing all those stairs they probably wouldn’t be so tired in the first place), but neither of them had any gift for ladylike resting. Peony sewed, asking for anything that needed hemming or mending to be sent up to her; there was outrage at this request at first, but, as Peony explained, she had been a country girl all her life, and she had learnt to like having something to do with her hands; and (untruthfully) that she did not care for the fussy work of embroidery. And so it was arranged, with Lady Pren, in distress, patting her collarbones with rapid little blows like a bird’s wings fanning, and, when this was not enough to relieve her feelings, twisting her necklaces till Peony gently took her hands in her own, and said, “Dear Lady Pren” (no one, to Rosie’s knowledge, had ever called either the lord or the lady “Pren” to their faces, although everyone in the Gig used the nickname out of their hearing), “you will do this to please me, will you not?” And Lady Pren would.