Spindle's End (33 page)

Peony was good at moments like that. Under Peony’s gentle despotism, the Prendergasts’ housekeeper forebore to cast herself as the victim in a melodrama over the fact that it was impossible to keep the princess’ rooms dust-free (and, even more important, did not take it out on her housemaids). The horribly snooty majordomo smiled when he saw her, and, after the first sennight, did so even before Peony smiled at him. The nasty old earl from Scarent, who had obviously come early for the princess’ birthday so that he could work up a really thorough dislike of her first, had been won round in a few days. And the Prendergasts’ first grandson, who was three years old and a monster, could be wheedled into good humour with the same tricks Peony had used on Katriona’s children and all her little baby-magic boarders.

So Peony sewed, when they were in their bedroom alone together and it was not time to sleep (or to pretend to). At first Rosie sat with her hands pressed between her knees as if they might do something awful if she released them, even in the absence of embroidery silk. But one day when she was feeling as if she might burst from her own idleness, Barder arrived with a large lumpy parcel, which upon opening was half a dozen knobs of good cured wood, perfectly suited to the whittling of spindle ends.

“It wasn’t me,” he said. “I’ve been thinking you have enough on your plate. Narl sent them. He said you’d be getting bored.” Barder accompanied Katriona to Woodwold when he could, “to see how you’re getting on. We don’t grow accustomed to your being gone from us, love, and nor do the littles, and specially not your creatures.”

Rosie sighed. There were many worsts about life at Woodwold; one of them was that it was, somehow, harder to talk to animals from the princess’ tower than it had ever been from the wheelwright’s yard or the smith’s forge. Almost everyone in the animal world that Rosie knew was now strangely inarticulate, and creatures she had not met before were even worse. She also had the uncanny sense that everyone was deeply preoccupied with something else, so preoccupied that this was at least part explanation for why she found it difficult to have a conversation with them. It was the sort of preoccupation she was accustomed to when there were new babies at home; but she had always before known when it was that, and besides, for most everybody, it was the wrong time of year. But no one would tell her what it was about, and grew even more inarticulate if she inquired.

There was the additional fact that the housekeeper had hysterics any time she found dog hair on the cushions or cat hair on the coverlet or the odd pinfeather on the carpet in their bedroom or parlour. Years ago Katriona had invented a charm that made animal hair leap off fabric as if stung and stick to the charm-bearer’s brush, but Rosie couldn’t ask her to make one now.

“I can tell Fwab from any other chaffinch, however far away he sits, for the drooping of him; and Flinx is hardly half the cat he was,” Barder continued.

“Flinx?”
said Rosie, astonished. “I’d’ve thought he’d be glad to be shut of me.”

“You know cats better than that,” said Katriona.

“Well . . . ,” said Rosie. “Flinx was so, you know, consistent.”

“Consistency is the first thing you should be suspicious of in a cat,” said Katriona, and was rewarded with one of Rosie’s now-rare smiles, and felt her own face creak with weariness and worry as she smiled in response.

Fwab had tried to fly up to their tower window, and had succeeded, once or twice, but had had to admit that the protective spells were like a very bad headwind, and after the first week he did not try again. Rosie missed Fwab and Zogdob and Spear—and Flinx—nearly as much as she missed Narl; and perhaps Peony guessed this, for it was Peony, in the first days of their imprisonment, who had insisted on a tour through the stables every morning after breakfast. The Master of the Horse, although far more hesitantly and deferentially than before, still occasionally asked Rosie questions about this or that horse’s mood or health, and she would have welcomed more such questions, but he did not seem to believe her when she told him this. But she did stop to rest her head against the head or shoulder of Gorse and of Fast every day. Gorse did not speak to her again as he had spoken the night that Ikor had come, but she felt a great warm solid understanding strength radiating from him, and she found herself relying on that minute every day when she stood next to him and felt it.

Fast showed her horse-pictures of vicious-faced women with teeth like wolves and claws like taralians falling under the trampling hoofs of valiant steeds who looked a lot like Fast, and whuffled the drooly remains of his breakfast down her lady-in-waiting frocks.

“How is Narl?” Rosie said, looking down, fondling a burl.

Barder gave a short laugh. “Who knows? He’s still smithing. I hadn’t realised that he’d got chatty with you around, Rosie, till you’re no longer around and he’s stopped. I don’t think he says a word from one end of a sennight to the other; there’s a joke that he won’t take a stranger’s horse because he’d have to tell ’em what the fee is.” He paused. “Last time I spoke to him—I mean last time he spoke to me—was to ask if I had any burls to spare, that I should bring you a few to keep your hands busy.”

 

The weeks crawled by. Astonishing numbers of sheets had been hemmed, or taken ends-to-middles and resewn; table linens had never been in such order since the Prendergasts had first swept the reeds off the floors and bought plates instead of trenchers and began using table linen. And a great many tiny rents and puckers and misdone previous patches in all the Prendergast daughters’ wardrobes had been mended, because Peony had become friends with Callin, the Prendergast daughter who had made the remark about the number of stairs to the tower.

“You would think that the princess would have more to do than anyone; and yet all it is is waiting and
waiting
,” said Rosie. She was down to her last spindle end. This one was her favourite. She had recognised it at once, as she rubbed her fingers over each of them in turn, deciding which one to do first; and so she had saved it till last.

But the spindle end, her best spindle end, was not going well. It was not that Rosie’s knife slipped, nor that she could not see what her line was; but that the line, once seen, was not what it should be; and she kept turning the wood over in her hands, looking for the real way in to the spindle end she was sure she saw there. To give herself more time to think she had already finished the spindle itself; in her frustration she had cut it almost too thin—almost thinner than the finger of a three-month-old baby. Delicately she touched the tip of it with her forefinger. Nothing happened.

Rosie held the half-shaped wood in her hands for a moment and then looked up, across to Peony still bent over her needle, and let her eyes drift out of focus, trying to see the real princess. She hung between them murkily, not there but not quite not-there; and then Rosie picked up her knife again and began to chip at a fresh surface. This would be the princess’ own spindle end. It would be an oval human face with a wide forehead and a round chin, like both Rosie’s and Peony’s, and curling hair, longer than Rosie’s but shorter than Peony’s, and a faintly smiling mouth wider than Peony’s but narrower than Rosie’s, a nose less delicate than Peony’s but less blocky than Rosie’s.

The princess’ face had seemed to leap out of the wood at her, once she had seen her, and she had found it difficult to tear herself away from it, as if making it was important, and not merely a way of getting through some empty hours.

She turned away from the window now, and the comfortless, catless view, and picked up that last spindle end. It was too dark to see it, and Rosie did not wish to light a lamp; there would be lit lamps enough tomorrow night, during the ball, and she wanted to remember the darkness. She wanted to remember herself standing in quiet darkness, alone, with nothing but her thoughts for company, and the soft sound of Peony’s sleeping breath.

The spindle end felt heavy, cupped in her hands; her thumbs found the wide-open, long-lashed eyes, the gentle rise of the nose, the smiling mouth, the tiny ridged roughness of the coiling hair. She had only just finished it that afternoon; every time she had looked at it, there had been one more detail to put right, and one more and one more. It had drawn her on till she had done all she knew or could guess to do; and she thought, This is the spindle end I would have given Peony when she came back from her season in Smoke River. I wonder what I would have told her it was?

Whatever happened, tomorrow night, her world would be changed utterly and forever. During these last three months . . . at any moment, she almost felt, she might still have thrown off the frocks she had now to wear as the princess’ lady-in-waiting, and run back to Foggy Bottom, and begged Narl to take her back. That she knew this was an illusion didn’t make it any less alluring, because at some level it was still a tiny bit true—and her bound and caged will yearned at the crack between those bars that would not let it free. These three months were merely preparation, however tense and troubling; tomorrow was the day when the irrevocable change came. Tomorrow. The princess’ birthday. Her birthday.

She knew what was supposed to happen. There would be—despite all the protective spells to the contrary—a spinning wheel and a sharp spindle end that the princess would be impelled to touch; but it would be Peony, as the princess, folded in spells and counterspells, who would touch it, either because the curse was tricked into recognizing her as the princess, or because Sigil and Ikor and Aunt and Katriona’s conscious interference, buttressed and bolstered by the belief of everyone around them, would make it so.

But she would not die, because she was not the princess, and the curse, at the moment of consummation, would reject her, as the wrong end of a magnet tosses away iron filings. But the magic would by then have gone too far to turn back, like a bottle falling off the edge of a mantelpiece; and Peony would fall into an enchanted sleep, and every guardian enchantment of every fairy and every magician present—and there would be many present—would be wrapped round her at once, to hold her safe.

Magic gone wrong produces a perilous uproar, a perilous and unpredictable uproar, the greater for the greater magic. The only thing they could well guess about this uproar was that it would be powerful, as Pernicia’s spell was powerful; powerful and wicked and still deadly dangerous, not least because all the fairies and magicians who would be there for the party could not be told what they were really doing. They would believe it was the princess whose enchanted sleep they were watching over. It would be up to Aunt and Ikor, and Sigil . . . because Rosie would be flung, in the recoil of magic gone wrong—somewhere; and Katriona was to go with her.

There would be much magic to counteract, to defy or deflect, and Rosie would not be able to do it. Katriona’s part was to see that Rosie arrived at the final confrontation—whatever it was. But it was all horribly, incomprehensibly dangerous. Aunt and Ikor might have managed to lie to her about just how much they could not do and could not control; but one look at Katriona’s face told Rosie the truth.

Rosie recalled some of the tales and ballads Barder had taught her: the hopeless causes, the outnumbered gallantry, the one-faint-chance against despair. She thought of her favourite stories: the magician Merlin, sired by a dragon, creating a great circle of standing stones to hold the light of midsummer to protect the ordinary people he loved against the wild magic of the strong young land they lived in; the harpist who loved his singing wife so much that he followed her to the land of the dead where between them they persuaded the god of that place to give her back, and when they died together, many years later, they were a legend more for their continued devotion to each other than the adventure of their youth; many of the tales of Damar against the North, especially of Harimad-sol at the Madamer Gate, and the holding of the way at Ullen. And she remembered King Harald of this, her own country, against the fire-wyrms—and her own progenitrix against Pernicia, although no one knew much about that tale. This was another of those occasions, and she hoped that someone would be telling this story, too, some day, as the one faint chance that succeeded.

It was the best they could do. It was the only chance they had.

At dinner in the Great Hall, where all dinners had been held since the arrival of the princess, Rosie’s consciousness flew up into the rafters to talk to the merrel. At first they could not make each other out through the great noise of many people eating and drinking and talking together, and through the many penetrating and single-minded thoughts of dogs and mice intent on anything that fell under the tables and off platters, and of cats trying to decide between nice fresh mice and unpredictable but always interesting human leavings. (The dogs kept Woodwold free of rats and—usually—squirrels and the occasional venturesome weasel, but mice were below their notice.) But Rosie and the merrel had persisted, or Rosie had, feeling almost as if the merrel were lifting her up, as if she did not merely sit but flew over the heads of the people—above the roof of the Great Hall, above the thick fogs of Gig winter and damp clouds of magic dust, to where the sun shone. . . . However it was, they learnt to talk to each other, and Rosie mostly chose the merrel’s company, except when someone, disturbed or intrigued by the intense, inturned look on Rosie’s face, shook her shoulder or her elbow until she returned to her place at the table and answered whatever question had been put to her in a human voice. “I was just thinking,” was all she usually said, and a small admiring rumor began to circulate about the princess’ lady-in-waiting, that the girl who had once been a horse-leech had become a philosopher. The merrel, who after so many years of living above the Great Hall with nothing to do but think and listen, assisted in recent years by conversations with Rosie, had learnt human language almost as well as another human. It was the merrel who told her about the rumour. Under other circumstances Rosie would have found this funny.