Spindle's End (46 page)

It was a long walk, and an eerie one, for the tall curtain of rose stems still hung on either side of the drive, as if they were walking down a roofless tunnel; nor was there any sound but what they made themselves. Rosie tormented herself by pretending she could see through the woven roses enough to discern a tree or two that stood just by the drive, or one of the pavilions erected for the ball; but she did not really believe she saw anything but more rose stems.

By the time they could see the courtyard opening out at the end of the way (much to Rosie’s relief), while Fast was still taking small clumsy steps, he no longer stumbled, his nose had come a few inches up off the ground, and his breathing was no more than hoarse. When they came within sight of the stables, Rosie ran forward as quickly as she could, which wasn’t very, looking despairingly at the liveried groom who still lay sprawled in sleep in the corridor just outside Fast’s door, and pulled down the beautifully folded horse blanket that hung on it. Fast was nearly at the door when she met him with her armful.
No,
she said.
You have to keep moving.
Where was Spear? She discovered she could take on yet one more worry: Had something happened to Spear? She threw the blanket over Fast and buckled it. The dogs all collapsed again.
Spear?

And there he was, trotting stiffly toward her.
Spear—can you keep Fast moving? I’m sorry. He
must
walk—so must the others,
she added, looking round at heaps of panting dogs.
But Fast specially. Tepid water, little and often—but he must-n’t stop moving—
she was chivvying him down the aisle and into the courtyard as she spoke
—Spear, can you do it?

The four-legged scourge of obstreperous human drunks gave the seventeen-hand horse and the way-worn fleethounds a measuring glance and answered mildly,
Of course I can do it.

Rosie started off hurrying and then thought, Back soon? From what? What do I have to hurry toward?

She stopped on the far side of the courtyard, a few steps before she had to. Because while the drive was open, Woodwold was still swaddled in rose stems, just as she had left it. She looked up at the sky again, but drizzly Gig grey no longer comforted her. She listened to the silence, knowing what it meant; knowing what she would find when she went back into the Great Hall. I should be hurrying, she thought, for the danger is no less than it was; I have merely eluded it again, for the moment. But I do not know my course. I haven’t even rescued Peony—I don’t know where she is, nor Narl and the others. It’s all very well, what Hroc said
—no one was after us—
but I’m now inside the briar hedge again, and they’re still out there, with Pernicia’s army, who will be a lot quicker to grab the next lot because the first ones got away.

What have I done, after all? she thought. What have I done? I suppose Pernicia will just come for me again; and I may have killed Fast. Maybe Narl can get Peony right away . . . maybe if they go far enough, Peony will wake up . . . then, at least, out of all of us, Narl and Peony . . .

She sat slowly down at the edge of the courtyard, and wrapped her arms round her pulled-up knees, and rocked back and forth, her mind empty. She hardly noticed when two hounds came up to her and pressed themselves round her, rather as they had done at the princess’ ball, as if they were holding her together, as if they were aware that she needed holding together. Vaguely she felt Hroc licking one ear, and someone else—Froo, she thought—licking the other.

She was half asleep when the words—if, after all, they were words—entered her understanding. She could not say she heard them, for the taking in of meaning was as much deeper in and other-than-human than animal speech as animal speech was deeper in and other-than than human. It was as though meaning grew somewhere in the centre of her body, as if the marrow of her bones were talking to her.

She felt in her body that Pernicia’s castle was gone. She felt that there had been a hard place that hurt her—she could almost feel where it had been, low under her left ribs—that had disintegrated, fallen back to the earth it was made from; that the sun and the rain upon it would make good earth of it in time to come, not merely the crumbled remains of the castle as it was now, lying like a shattered vase upon a floor, still glinting with the paint the maker of it had laid upon it, a tint of dark magic. For now the important thing was that it was no longer a castle, could no longer be a castle; its maker would not put it together again. And Rosie had done this, Narl had done this, Flinx and Sunflower and Zel and Hroc and Throstle and all of them had done this. Weaker, Rosie thought, very dimly, for it was difficult, in this deep-in place, to put anything in human words. We have weakened her.

It was not everything, but it was something. They had, all of them together, done something.

She felt the effort round her, under her and over her, the effort to speak so that she could hear, and know that she was not alone with five hounds and a horse, willing and loyal though they were, little, flimsy, squashy creatures, almost as fragile and insubstantial as she was herself.

Woodwold. Woodwold was talking to her.
Rosie. Princess. I am here, too.
Woodwold was awake.

Slowly she uncurled herself, finding it strange that she could do so, that she appeared to be this light, airy, bendable creature; she weighed so little it seemed to her surprising that she did not float away like a leaf. How precarious, to stand on feet, to carry what substance one had in this scanty and attenuated manner. . . .

She shook herself and took a deep breath. Hroc and Froo came to their feet and looked at her expectantly. She turned to look toward where the Great Hall lay behind its embrace of rose stems, and then found her own feet and ordered them to take her there. She went unerringly to a certain snarly mess of rose stems, visibly no different from any other along the great hummocky hills of rose stems beneath which lay Woodwold, and prised them apart with her hands; and they permitted themselves to be prised.

She ducked, and stepped underneath, and began, carefully, to part those that now wound across her way; and they, too, permitted themselves to be moved aside. She caught herself on a thorn, once, and a drop of blood fell from the tip of her forefinger; and she held her breath, and thought of Peony, and then she put her hands out again to pull at the next layer of rose stems, and saw another drop of blood fall twinklingly from her finger and onto a hunched brown elbow of stem; and then she was through the next low, twisted arch, and reaching for the next beyond it.

She came after some little time to the old doors of the Great Hall, and here she stood on tiptoes and brushed at the stems that hung round it as if they were no more than cobwebs; and they broke and fell aside at her touch as if they were cobwebs indeed. The sunlight seemed to fall on her more strongly than it had before, and she turned round and saw behind her two hounds, and a great tall arch stretching through the rose hedge; and yet, as she had made her way through it, the partings she had made had only been enough to let her through if she crouched and held her arms close to her sides; and once Froo had yelped as, following her, he misjudged. She took a deep breath, and turned back to the doors, and flung them open—the old doors that had been opened for the first time in over a century for the princess’ one-and-twentieth birthday, and which had required four men on each to persuade them—and the light rushed in to brighten as much of the floor as it could reach.

But most of the Great Hall was still dark from the gnarled rose stems over its windows. That’s the first thing, she thought. She went to the tall window nearest her, scrambled up to stand on its sill, fumbled with the latch, and put her hands through against the rose stems, pushing at them as if they were no more than an odd sort of curtain, but pushing gingerly, on account of the thorns; her finger still throbbed where she had caught it before. The thick branches creaked, and gave, and she pushed a little more vigorously, and they rustled as they parted, and the sunlight came in, and she noticed that it looked like sunlight, that it was no longer grey and gloomy, and when she peered up, the sky was blue, and the shreds of cloud that drifted across it were white. And when she looked again at the rose stems, she noticed that they were now covered with leaves, which was why they had rustled; but they had been bare and brown but minutes before.

She clambered down from the windowsill and went on to the next, and pushed back the suddenly green rose stems from that window, and then the next, and the next; and when she came to the last, she saw flower buds among the leaves, although the princess’ birthday was in early spring.

Only when there were no more windows to free from their blindfolds did she turn to look into the Hall.

It was almost worse, being able to see, because it emphasised how wrong what she saw was. She found Katriona at once, and knelt beside her again, stroked her hair. She was still breathing. She was still asleep.

The deep, bone-marrow knowledge stirred in her, and she knew that from this sleep, magical and malicious as it was, the sleepers would take no harm, unlike the sleepers found in the broken fastnesses, years ago, where the princess might have been. Woodwold could do this much for the little creatures that walked under its roofs; it had watched over other little creatures for hundreds of years, and it understood hurt and harm and the will to do evil. But it did not comprehend sleeping and waking any more than it comprehended walking and breathing; this was why (Rosie thought) Pernicia’s sleep had first confused it, but had failed to hold it.

Woodwold had done what it could. Now she must lead the way.

Rosie stood up, looking round her wildly. She was taking deep, involuntary breaths, and at first she thought she had made more of an effort climbing window frames than she had realised, and then she thought she must be fighting off some lingering odour of the sleep-spell, and then she thought she was probably frightened; but as she sucked in the air and expelled it violently she knew that none of these things were the real reason she stood and panted: what she was was
angry
.

She couldn’t ever remember being so angry—not even when she had knocked down the man who had been beating his horse instead of trying to free the trapped wheel of the cart—not even when she had found the whip scars, invisible under the sleek hair unless you were looking, on the colt who had been afraid of Narl because he had no beard—not even when she had first begun to realise what Ikor’s message meant to her, to Katriona and Aunt and Barder—and Peony and Rowland and Narl—and Jem and Gilly and Gable, and Crantab and Hroslinga—and all of the Gig—the whole country—not even then. She was bursting with anger; her skull throbbed with it; her hands, hanging at her sides, felt hot and swollen with it.

Pernicia,
she shouted.
We have business, you and I.

There was a low laugh, and Rosie spun round, and saw Pernicia walking in through the open door of the Hall. “How very sweet of you to be angry with me,” she said. “Such an invitation, anger. I might have been delayed a little longer, else.” She was carrying a cane in her left hand, which Rosie had not seen before, and there were several red marks on her cheek, and she had her right hand tucked into her long dark-streaked robe with the thorn tears in it; and Rosie’s deep knowledge reminded her of the ruined castle, of what the destruction of that castle meant.
We have weakened her.

“I could almost—er—adopt you for that; the last one-and-twenty years have been difficult for me too, and I could use a good lieutenant. I have never had a good one.”

Rosie made a spitting, inarticulate noise.

“But it has gone too far for that now, has it not? That is almost a pity. One of us must die, you know; the magic will pull your whole dreary Gig apart else; I couldn’t stop that now even if I wished to. Although I don’t wish to, you know; I want it—and the country—nice and whole. To do as I like with.

“But I hadn’t expected there to be two of you; my mistake. I almost wonder if it might be worth saving one of you—do I mean saving? Perhaps not quite as you would mean it. But—no. I’m sure it has gone too far for that. . . .” She raised the cane, waving it gently in the air like a fan, and then paused, and dropped its tip a handsbreadth or so—

Fairies didn’t carry wands. Except in direst need.

—as if to aim it like a weapon.

Magic can’t do everything.
Rosie hurled herself upon her, seizing her throat between her hands.

CHAPTER 22

As the two of them struck the floor, Pernicia underneath, Woodwold cried out, a shriek of wood and iron and stone, a convulsion like an earthquake; and sleeping bodies slid across the heaving floor, rebounding off each other and off pieces of equally unsettled furniture, and there were muffled, confused cries, as of sleepers caught in a nightmare.

Rosie was dimly aware that something was going on round the two of them, but she had no consciousness to spare for thinking about it; her entire focus was in keeping her hands round Pernicia’s throat. She knew she had succeeded so far only because Pernicia had not imagined anyone attacking her directly, and had had no immediate ward against it; but Rosie could feel hundreds of tiny threads of magic, tickly and horrid like centipede legs, pulling at her fingers; and the cane, the wand, whatever it was, was beating at her back, and every time it hit her there was a nasty, miserable sensation like hitting your elbow on a door, and every time it was raised it left behind it a feeling like burning. She tried to hold in her mind that image of the castle she and Narl and the animals had pulled down; she tried to remember that they had weakened her; she told herself Pernicia hadn’t turned her into a paving stone or an octopus yet; and as long as she had her hands locked where they were, she wasn’t going to be able to prick her finger on a spindle. . . .