Spindle's End

by Robin McKinley

  It was Barder’s half day today, and he usually came out to the cottage for the evening, and she was almost too tired to enjoy his company. A cup of tea will help, she thought. It might have been any voice she heard, or perhaps it was a voice that had made itself out of the air of Foggy Bottom and what some people said out of her hearing. As they passed the pub, Katriona waving briefly without looking up, the voice was saying, “. . . should have married her eleven years ago, or no reason to marry her at all.”

  In the first shock she thought she might have imagined it, but she hadn’t imagined it, because there was Barder suddenly beside her, and she could see in his face that he had heard the voice, too. She saw that he was angry, and for all that she had known and loved him for most of her life, she did not dare ask why. The three of them walked to the cottage together, Rosie chattering about birds and horses and earthworms, and the other two silent, although Barder usually talked easily to Rosie, and as if nothing she said surprised him (like that earthworms have no eyes but see the earth they creep through in beautiful visions, like the sort of visions people hope to have from eating fish). Aunt met them at the garden gate, looked into their faces, and told Rosie to go feed the cows and chickens. Rosie usually did this anyway, but she paused a moment, looking at the other three, knowing that she was about to miss something she would be interested in, and knowing also that it wouldn’t happen if she hung around. She went off at a dragging, un-Rosie-like pace, her shoulders hunched and her head down.

  “I don’t understand,” said Barder, as soon as the cottage door closed behind them. “It seems to me just meanness, and Foggy Bottom isn’t usually mean without cause. I would have knocked that useless blockhead down”—by which Katriona guessed he had recognised the voice or the speaker—“but I thought you would not like it. Dear heart, I know you are not Rosie’s mother. I remember the skinny little stick you were when you left for the princess’ name-day, and you were the same skinny little stick when you came back with that enormous bundle of half-grown baby.” He did not at first notice how still Aunt and Katriona became at his words. “I can’t say I wouldn’t have cared if you’d had a baby who—who wasn’t mine; I would have cared a great deal. But—I would have asked—if I hadn’t known she couldn’t be.”

  “Aunt went to fetch her after I came back,” Katriona said faintly.

  Barder stared. “But—no she didn’t—I saw you. You looked like you’d been dragged backwards through every hedge and spinney between here and the royal city. I heard you sneeze. I was coming back from Treelight, the short way, across Lord Pren’s fields. It’s not exactly the short way. I—I’m afraid I had a habit of finding an excuse to walk past your cottage while you were away, just to look, even though I knew I’d hear as soon as you got back. I saw the light when Aunt opened the door.”

  Aunt said sharply, “Did you tell anyone what you’d seen?”

  Barder shook his head, slowly, bewilderedly. “No. My aunt—my mother’s sister—was ill; that’s why I’d been in Treelight. It was my half day. They only wanted to hear about her, at home, and by the next day I thought, what is there to tell? Kat’s had a rough journey; let her recover in peace. We’ll all hear about it soon enough. I waited till I’d seen Kat in town again, and then I came to see you, and there was Rosie. And then there was this story about how Aunt had gone to fetch her. I just thought people were remembering wrong—we were all mostly thinking about the princess then, and about Pernicia—it wasn’t worth arguing about. Perhaps it was fairy business; you don’t argue about fairy business. But you would remember. . . .” He looked at the two of them, and his gaze settled on Aunt, and Katriona could see him working it out. Stop! she wanted to shout. Don’t think about it!

  “You laid it on us,” he said to Aunt. “But why?” He smiled. “Anyone would think you’d stolen the princess.”

  The gargoyle spindle end blazed with sudden light, and three of Aunt’s little bottles fell over—ping, ping—and the third one dropped off its shelf and shattered on the hearth. A sharp green smell invaded the room, and then all three of them were in a wild landscape, surrounded by irregular ranks of tall, wry, standing stones, bent and distorted in strange postures. Among the stones was a low, scrubby, creeping growth whose tiny pointed leaves gave off the harsh smell of Aunt’s little bottle.

  It was twilight, almost dark. To one side of them at a little distance trees began to mingle with the standing stones till—in the dimness they could not be sure—it seemed that the boles moved together into the darkness of a forest. There was a horrible feeling of unfriendly eyes watching. Opposite this wood, if it was a wood, on their other side, the standing stones and the low creeper grew sparser till the rough land was bare; but far away there was a tall bulk on the horizon, tall but narrow for its height—some immense standing stone? Or some bleak fortress built by human hands?

  The sun had gone behind it, whatever it was, and the sky was still purple in the memory of the sunset, the sky and the castle. It was a castle. The castle, indeed, as Katriona stared at it, seemed to send up streaks of purple from its base, as she had once seen a cloak do. . . .

  “No,” she said, and, somehow, she did not know how, flung herself and her two companions back into the cottage, where the fire still burnt on the hearth, and the gargoyle still gleamed honey-golden, as if it were a faceted gemstone instead of wood, and a light shone through it, and a dark sticky puddle, purple in the firelight, lay on the floor, glittering with shards of broken glass. Aunt was already picking up the ash bucket and throwing spadefuls on the puddle; by the time Katriona remembered to breathe, the green smell was almost gone, smothered in a fug of cold ash. Katriona coughed.

  “P—” began Katriona.

  “Don’t say her name,” said Aunt, and Katriona saw that Aunt’s hands were shaking. Aunt turned her head as if looking for something and unable to remember where it was; she laid down the bucket and shovel and put her hands to her forehead as if her head ached. Katriona heard Barder sit heavily down; his chair legs bucked briefly against the floor. But she was already pulling the stool near the chimney and groping for the little iron cauldron that sat in a niche high up on its face. She felt its presence before her fingers found it, turning the cauldron on its side so it spilled into her hand. She climbed down, holding it still wrapped in its cloth, and then unrolled it and flung it quickly round the gargoyle’s thick little neck, above the loop on the spinning wheel the spindle went through.

  The translucent beads of the sabre-bearer’s amulet gleamed like the gargoyle’s face, only a creamy, swirly white, like fresh milk with the cream still on it, instead of the yellowy-coppery glow of wood; they swung gently against the frame of the spinning wheel. The cottage and the three people in it jolted back into normality, like the end of an earthquake, or the sudden departure of fever.

  Aunt dropped her hands and Barder sat up. Katriona went behind Barder’s chair and bent over him, wrapping her arms round his chest and putting her cheek to his; he crossed his own arms the better to seize hers, and pressed her to him. After a moment she kissed his cheek, and he released her; and then the three of them sat down near enough to each other that they could hold one another’s hands.

  “Thank the fates Rosie was outdoors,” said Aunt.

  “Then it’s—true,” said Barder.

  “I’m afraid so,” said Katriona. “But I didn’t steal her; she was—er—given to me.”

  Barder nodded as if this were a perfectly reasonable explanation.

  There was a little silence, and then Katriona said, “Is it because Barder saw me that the glamour didn’t work, Aunt? Do we have to worry about anyone else who might have seen me? I had thought no one had seen me—but I was so tired by then—”

  “Don’t blame yourself,” said Aunt. “You did extraordinarily well. And I don’t think that’s why it didn’t work. I’m afraid glamours work best where there are fewest connections—and Barder cared far too much. I imagine Flora might have a little difficulty deciding whe
n Rosie arrived, too, if she had any reason to think about it, but she doesn’t. Barder, I’m sorry. This really isn’t the sort of thing that happens just because you’re—er—a little fond of someone who’s a fairy.”

  “I’m not just a little fond of her,” said Barder in a voice that was very nearly normal. “Do you know—what happened just now, or don’t you want me to ask?”

  Aunt and Katriona exchanged a look. Aunt said, “No, I don’t know. But I won’t uncork bdeth juice in this cottage again.”

  “Bdeth juice?” said Katriona slowly. “But bdeth grows quite near here—where the Gig runs into the wasteland where no one lives.”

  “Yes,” said Aunt.

  There was another little silence.

  “Something was watching us from the wood,” said Katriona.

  “I don’t think they saw us,” said Aunt. “I think—I hope—they will not have seen us. I think I did that much. But that was all I could do. And they would have figured us out soon enough if you hadn’t brought us away so quickly.

  “Barder—you must have some protection, before you leave us tonight. I’m not sure . . . I could simply make you forget, I think. That’s perhaps safest, and you’ll sleep better.”

  “I—I’d rather not forget,” said Barder. “If you don’t mind. And—Rosie matters to me, too. What—whoever she is.”

  Katriona said suddenly: “Touch your gargoyle’s nose. The one you made for a spindle’s end.”

  Barder had his back to the spinning wheel. He looked at Katriona in surprise, but he turned slowly round and saw the shining gargoyle and its necklace, which looked like woven fog strung with will-o’-the-wisp. “The fates of my ancestors,” he said in wonder, but he stood up and moved toward it, holding out his hand. He hesitated just before his fingers touched the gargoyle’s nose, but he leaned forward—for a moment his entire body lit up with the soft eerie light of the amulet; and Katriona caught her breath, thinking that she’d never realised how beautiful he was.

  And then the light went out, and the gargoyle was just a spindle’s end, with a nose shiny from rubbing, and the amulet was just an odd piece of jewelry; and the outside door banged open, and Rosie said plaintively, “Are you through talking yet? I’ve been as long as I can, and I’m hungry.”

  Five weeks after that the king’s fortress of Flury was broken into, and the regiment which guarded it was found asleep at their posts, fallen any way across their spears and their swords; and their horses were asleep, and the horse flies on the horses were asleep, and, deeper inside, the magicians were asleep, and the fairies were asleep, and everyone else, from the courtiers to the kitchen maids, were asleep, too.

  The carters who were bringing their weekly waggon loads of fresh food ran away in terror, and Shon had spoken to one of those carters, because Flury was not so very far from Turanga. “He says the same thing happened at Fordingbridge—everyone was found asleep—only it was a relieving regiment as found ’em, and that’s why the story didn’t come out, as it has this time. He says the sleep’s a bad one, and everyone wakes up from nightmares, and some of ’em were sick, and some of ’em are still sick—especially the magicians.”

  “What about the princess?” said Cairngorm.

  “The princess had been taken away a fortnight earlier, while the king was there to go with her, which must be nicer for her—she must hardly ever see her mum any more, the queen mostly stays in the royal city with the little boys,” said Shon. “I’ve heard a rumour they smuggle her back to the city sometimes. . . .”

  “I hope so,” said Cairngorm.

  “Yuh,” said Shon, childless himself and not very interested. “There’s different stories about why the princess got shifted early this time. Some say the royal magicians set up a—a random pattern spell about when to move her, and some say some fairy seer got her knickers in a twist and insisted she be moved early. It don’t matter which—just that she wasn’t there.”

  “They’ll beat Pernicia yet,” said Dessy, Flora’s younger sister.

  “Love, we hope so,” said Cairngorm. “But we won’t know till the day after the princess’ one-and-twentieth birthday, and that’s some years off yet.”

  The single sentence every one of the princess’ people remembered best about the curse Pernicia had laid upon her was My disposition of her future may happen at any time.

  Meanwhile Rosie went on talking to animals. Since most of the people who had much to do with her liked her, and because Narl seemed to take her seriously, and because she was Aunt’s niece and Katriona’s cousin, the jokes made of it were rarely unkind. But because she would tell people about it, certainly if they asked, and sometimes if they didn’t (“Dessy, it’s no use flirting with that young thatcher from Waybreak, he won’t have anything to do with you because he’s afraid of your mother; his pony says so”), people heard a fair amount about it.

  Occasionally the information was useful: she told Aunt that the reason why Jad, the baker’s dog, was getting so thin was because the baker’s hob didn’t much like milk, but did like the table scraps that went into Jad’s bowl. The hob was getting fat, because Jad was a big dog, and Jad was getting thin, because the hob’s bowl of milk was small. “I’ll see to that hob,” said Aunt. “Poor Jad.”

  But it was evident that Rosie’s range of acquaintance among the animal kingdom was not merely broad but voluble. People listened, and some smiled, and some asked questions—and the answers to some of those questions brought more fleeces to the cottage, and other trade goods, much to Rosie’s astonishment and Katriona’s bemused and secret delight. And some shook their heads. Especially fairies. This wasn’t how talking to animals went. Except that it did, with Rosie. Katriona thought again of all the milk Rosie had drunk on her way between her old life and her new one, and wondered how Rosie might have grown up if she had drunk only magician-inspected, fairy-purified, royal domestic animal milk, once she had been weaned from her mother’s breast. Perhaps the royal family’s amenableness was more an inherited willingness to adapt to circumstance—and Rosie’s circumstances were unusual. Katriona’s own beast-speech had never been as fluent and comprehensive as Rosie’s; Katriona might have given her something on her name-day, but it hadn’t been a transfer of her own beast-speech, like a parcel changing hands.

  There was an unusual silence (even allowing for Rosie’s absence; she had special dispensation to stay late at the smith’s that afternoon, and chat up some of Lord Pren’s young stock) by Aunt’s fireside after the news about Flury.

  “I wish the queen’s fairy—Sigil—would send us some word,” said Katriona.

  Aunt laid the charm she was mending in her lap. “She would if she could.”

  “I know,” said Katriona. “That’s what I mean.”

  They looked at each other, and each saw reflected in the other’s eyes a tall castle standing alone in a barren landscape, with a smoky purple sky behind it.

  CHAPTER 10

  As the years passed and, it seemed, the king’s folk must have searched every handsbreadth of the king’s land, and the royal magicians had searched every thought’s-breadth of every dimension over and under the king’s lands (by the time Rosie was thirteen, divisions of the royal cavalry accompanying royal magicians had swept through the Gig four times; but if they found anything mysterious at the edge of the wild lands where the bdeth grew, they gave no sign), and the royal fairies had touched or tasted or listened to every wisp of wild magic that sprang from the king’s lands, and there was still no news of Pernicia—no sign, no trace, no trail, no clue—another sort of story began to be told. No one could say where the first of these stories had come from, but that its purpose was to rally morale was perfectly clear.

  The reports all agreed that the princes were growing up into fine boys, but they had an elder sister who was supposed to be queen, and no one was going to forget this: not their parents, not their country, nor even themselves, who had, it seemed, never met her: the magicians had declared that it would be too dange
rous. When the Princes Colin and Terberus made their first little public speeches on their eighth birthday, both of them mentioned her, and their hope that they would meet her soon. Everyone found this very moving, especially when Terberus had added suddenly, in his own voice, to what had obviously been a prepared speech, “I would like a sister.” His people wanted his sister, too, and watching the little princes grow up and become young men who could give speeches only made that longing more acute.

  And, if there is a powerful and wicked fairy somewhere around, you want to know where she is so you can stay out of her way. The possibility that she might jump out at you from any shadow is very unsettling.

  So it was said that the princess had been turned into a lark or a peacock (or, blasphemously, a fish), so that she would have no finger to prick; that it had not been the real princess at the name-day, but only a magical doll, so the curse had not in fact been laid on the princess at all, and while the king and queen were keeping her tucked away somewhere while Pernicia was still at large, there wasn’t really that much Pernicia could do to her but what she could do to anyone . . . which was likely to be nasty enough, and the king was very sensibly determined to drive her out of hiding and out of his country. There was even a story that Pernicia had been captured, but that this news was not allowed out because the king would not be satisfied till every one of her spies and helpers had been found and identified. Few people found this story very comforting: the idea of Pernicia no longer at liberty was outweighed by the idea that one’s own friends and neighbours might be infiltrated by her confederates.

  Almost everyone’s favourite story was of the party planned for the princess’ twenty-first birthday, which would beggar the descriptive abilities of all the bards in the country. The stories of the party grew more fantastic with every telling, and, of course, they all had blissfully happy endings.

  These stories of the princess’ prospective one-and-twentieth birthday party made Aunt snappish. “They’re worse than castles in the air,” she said to Katriona one afternoon after Gismo, one of Shon’s alternate drivers, had been giving fantasy free rein at the pub about the latest schemes for wonders. “Or rather, they are castles in the air, and made out of big heavy stones that are going to fall on all our heads and squash us flat.” Katriona let the confused provenance of this metaphor pass in silence.