Spindle's End

by Robin McKinley

  “I am thinking I will ask my aunt and uncle if I can go to Smoke River for a season. Perhaps I can learn a spinning charm.” Peony gave Rosie a thin, watery smile, like sun trying to break through rain clouds. “You know it is a great frustration to me that I spin poorly.”

  Rosie did know. Peony was slow and clumsy about this as she was slow and clumsy about almost nothing else. It was a long-standing joke between them that Peony had been able to spin perfectly well until Rosie moved next door. Rosie had once offered to loan the gargoyle spindle end to Peony, explaining about the nose rubbing, but Peony declined, saying seriously that if it were a charm, it belonged to their family, and it would have its feelings hurt, or might go wrong, if loaned outside.

  “I’ll ask Barder to make you a spindle end as a coming-home present,” said Rosie, stifling the urge to beg Peony not to go away and leave her alone, alone with Narl at the forge every day.

  The sun broke through a little more credibly in Peony’s smile this time. “I’d rather you made me one yourself,” she said.

  CHAPTER 15

  Autumn was a season of storms, when the winds shouted bestiaries and the genealogies of kings and queens under doorsills and down chimneys, and chimney pots, after such storms, were found to have taken up residence on other roofs of their own choosing, and sometimes in trees, and several times at the bottom of the town well, which they did not want to leave, saying it was peaceful down there, the presiding element disinclined to air-frenzies like wind, and that fish were pleasanter companions than humans. There were too many storms, and people grew weary of them, and the dull fevers of the spring and summer became sticky, hacking coughs.

  It had been raining off and on, cold, obdurate, needle-tipped rain, with often a hard frost overnight, weeks of this, till the ice got into the ground and discouraged the winter crops from growing, and the tracks were sloppy and rutted and treacherous, and the sky low and dark and menacing. Foggy Bottom was less foggy than usual, for the nervy winds that had blown all year were still blowing, in haphazard gusts from all the points of the compass; the strange fevers that troubled the Gig backed and blew and came and went like the disagreeable winds; the fog-sprites huddled under people’s eaves and shrieked like banshees, especially in the middle of the night; and none of the fairies’ weather-guessers worked.

  And then the storm descended in a lash of sleet and hail. Rosie was soaked to the skin running across the square from the smith’s and home to supper. There were only four of them that evening; Joeb was taking his day off at Grey’s farm where he was courting the dairymaid in any and all weathers, and Peony was with her aunt and uncle. Jem, Gilly, and Gable were all asleep upstairs; Katriona’s last baby-magic boarder had gone home three days ago. “We won’t hear if anyone howls, in this wind,” said Katriona.

  “Jem will come and tell us if anyone does,” replied Aunt.

  They all listened, but for nothing they knew to expect, and started in their chairs when an especially savage wind-fist drove at the shutters. Rosie thought of Narl sitting over a small solitary fire, and wondered if he ever wished for company. Katriona had occasionally inveigled him across the square to supper; she said they owed the master of Rosie’s livelihood something, and he had refused any other payment. “She’s done me a favour,” was his only explanation. He talked little more at the supper table than he did during the day at the forge, but he wasn’t a difficult companion; and he and Barder were old friends. Barder could translate Narl’s grunts better than anyone else in the village, save Rosie. But Narl had not come to supper in the last six months.

  There was a bang on the kitchen door, the door to the yard. It was so substantial and purposeful a bang that while everyone wanted to assume it was only, once again, the wind, they all knew it was not. They stopped listening for nothing and instead wished for this something to go away. There was another bang.

  Barder sighed, because he had barely sat down to supper.

  “Is it a bad break?” he asked resignedly—because it always was, at suppertime, and it would be, in this weather, or whoever it was would have waited till morning. It might be so bad a break there were horses to cut free; in which case Rosie would have to come with him. . . . He spoke before he had the door properly open. But the tone of his voice changed the question on the last word, as he opened the door fully.

  A tall dripping figure stepped inside, invisible within a silvery cloak that glistened in many colours: This was finer cloth than even Smoke River could make. Invisible, that is, except for the bare feet. Rosie noticed the feet first—clean and smooth, despite the weather and the roads—and the way they seemed to feel the floor as a hand might feel a tool unfamiliar to it.

  “Forgive me,” said Barder, embarrassed and stiff with it. “Good evening to you. I am the wheelwright, as well as—well, I fix most things made with wood. The wainwright shares this yard with me, but the nearest carpenter is at Waybreak. When there is a knock on the door at this time of day in bad weather, it is usually because there is something to be mended.”

  The head, hidden inside the deep hood, nodded. But as it flung its sodden cloak back from its face, Katriona leaped to her feet with a little, terrible cry. “It is too late!” she said. “You cannot have her!” She moved sideways to stand behind Rosie’s chair, and put her hands on Rosie’s shoulders, and Rosie, bewildered, and frightened by the tone of Katriona’s voice, could feel her hands trembling. There was a muscular ripple across the feet, like a hand testing the heft of sword or axe; Rosie found it difficult to raise her eyes to the face.

  The wet figure shook its head, and raindrops flew; there was a puddle forming on the floor. “You cannot deny what she is, any more than I can deny that the last one-and-twenty years have also made her yours.”

  He turned to look at Barder, who had closed the door against the storm but stood staring, with his hand on the latch, at their unusual visitor. Under his cloak he wore clothing that seemed to be made entirely of long ribbons of fabric cunningly wrapped and tucked; and his hairless skin was the colour of deep water in shade, a kind of dark silky iridescence not unlike that of his cloak. His bald head gleamed like a jewel. Strangest of all, by his side hung a long curved blade like nothing the Gig had ever contained, fine metalwork curling over the hilt and lettering in a strange language written on the blade, for it wore no scabbard, picking up the light as the man moved so that it seemed as if it moved of itself, as if it shrugged its own skin free of the wet caress of the cloak. No one ever wore anything so obviously a weapon in the Gig; even when the king’s cavalry rode through their sabres were sheathed and hung like long thin luggage from their saddles.

  The stranger looked at Barder first, and when he was done looking at Barder, he looked slowly round the rest of the room as if he had every right to be there and to inspect it so closely. If Rosie had not been frightened by his assurance—and by the casualness with which he carried his long blade—she would have been angry at his presumption. When his eyes fell on her she was enough recovered from the shock of his appearance—and Katriona’s reaction—to stare straight back at him, but the protest she would have liked to utter remained stuck in her throat.

  He turned at last to Katriona, and Rosie, seated while the two of them stood, could not decide if he raised his chin to condescend to her or to recognise her as an equal. “Listen,” he said to Katriona, and as he stretched out his hand toward her a spider dropped down from nowhere, from some fold of his glittering, ribbony sleeve. “These are the words you have waited long to hear: ‘Small spider weave on a silver sleeve, Oh weave your grey web nearer. From a golden crown let your silk hang down, For lost, lost, lost is the wearer.’”

  The spider fell about halfway to the floor from the man’s outstretched arm; hesitated, and ran back up its silk, disappearing briefly there in the silvery folds, and then let itself briskly down again. Now it had two streamers to work from; busily it began to swing itself back and forth, spinning a web, in the wheelwright’s kitchen in Foggy Bottom
, hanging from a stranger’s sleeve. But just as the web began to take shape—it was a crazy-quilt web, each loop at variance with its neighbours—the spider paused, as if dissatisfied, and ran round its gossamer network, tweaking corners as if, from the spider’s perspective, they would not lie straight, like a person making a bed.

  “I know who you are,” said Katriona, and the anger in her voice was startling. “I know who you are. Is this—festival trick—of yours intended to amaze the country folk? I think we deserve better than your contempt.”

  The man said gently, “I did not know I carried a passenger till just now, when I held out my arm.”

  The spider rushed down to the bottom of its uncompleted web, and appeared to hurl itself off the edge, like a child taking a running leap into a swimming hole. It touched the floor, snapped itself free of its silken ladder as if impatiently, and set off across the floor. Toward Rosie.

  Oh dear, thought Rosie. Spiders like all insects were very hard to talk to—with a slight exception for butterflies, who were all crazy in an almost human way, especially the ones who had spent most of their short lives enchanted. Talking to them was like trying to walk on your hands, or say all your words backwards, or kiss your elbow. In some cases it was just about possible (Rosie could have something pretty nearly resembling a conversation with a butterfly, if both she and the butterfly were trying) but sometimes it wasn’t. Rosie had never picked up much but an irregular clicking that she guessed might be some sort of code, supposing she could figure it out, from any spider.

  This one was clicking furiously as it came toward her across the floor—a tiny smith’s hammer tapping away at an even tinier bit of iron. Tickettytickettyticketty. She didn’t want to bend over with Katriona’s hands still heavy on her shoulders, so she sat quietly as the spider came up to her, made its way over boot to trouser leg and up to lap, and crept to the back of her hand. It was so light she could only feel it on her by looking at it; then she could just sense the bend of a hair as it trod upon her skin.

  The clicking stopped abruptly. I’m sorry, she said to it. I don’t understand. I can’t . . . er . . . hear you.

  There was a pause. Then a click, a pause, another click, another pause, a click, pause, click. Then a longer pause, and repeated. Rosie realised on the third repeat that she could hear differences in each of the four clicks; and so she strained to listen. All . . . will . . . be . . . well, said the spider, and stroked the back of her hand with several feet; they felt like eyelashes. There was something familiar about its voice—except spiders don’t have voices—something familiar about its words, no, its inflection, no, something that reminded her of something from a very long time ago, from those ancient days before she lived with Aunt and Katriona. Something about her parents? She had never wanted to know about her parents, as if knowing, somehow, would make her belong less to the family she loved.

  But the people round her were talking. Katriona’s voice no longer sounded angry, only tired and disheartened. “I have nothing to return to you, for it burnt to black ash, and then crumbled to dust so fine I could not hold it, although I tried,” she said.

  “Did it?” said their visitor, and they all saw that he was shaken. “Did it? I had not realised she was so strong. When, can you tell me when it happened?”

  “Yes,” said Katriona. “Six years ago, in late summer, about three and a half months after Barder and I were married.”

  “Six years ago,” said the man, as if thinking aloud. “Yes, I remember, it was a season of storms at Caerleon. We feared then that she had drawn a true line on what she sought, for we knew we had yielded more than we could afford. But when nothing happened—when nothing seemed to happen—we thought we had held after all. Well! Old Nagilbran would be pleased to know what good use his amulet was put to; he was inclined to think me frivolous.” And the man smiled a grim smile that was not frivolous at all.

  Why didn’t Katriona say, “What are you talking about? What has another battle at another royal stronghold have to do with us?” But she didn’t. She said, “I think it did more than the work of that one night. Since then there have been no more . . . except . . . I wish I had it now. You said you would take it from me when I had no further use for it, but I have use for it now, by reason of your coming”; and she caught her breath on a sob, and her fingers dug painfully into Rosie’s shoulders.

  That the stranger was a fairy was as obvious as his bare feet. Rosie had never met a magician—seeing an occasional one riding with a company of king’s cavalry didn’t count as meeting—but the wildness that hung round this man told her he had never gone to the Academy, never spent long hours indoors memorising the pronouncements of his forebears, never earnestly debated the existence of fish. The room was thick with the possibilities of his power. It fanned her face like the heat of the fire; Rosie half believed she could reach out and pluck a miracle from the air, and it would take definition and solidity from the mere shape of her hand reaching for it. And yet she could read from the way he held himself, as if she might read a horse or a hawk, that this man would placate Katriona if he could; that for all he wore a sword and stared round the room like a wealthy buyer at a fair, he came as a friend—even as a supplicant.

  What could anyone in the Gig—except possibly Lord Prendergast—have to do with a man like this man? Rosie glanced down at the back of her hand; the spider had disappeared.

  He stood as if waiting or thinking; at last he said gently, “You knew this day would come; I cannot help it, any more than you, any more than she herself can.”

  “I had no choice!” cried Katriona.

  “You could have let her die,” said the man. “She would have died by now, else. Several times over. Or worse than died. Do you need me to tell you so?”

  But Katriona had sunk down by Rosie’s chair, her hands running down Rosie’s arm, and then she laid her head against her hand resting on Rosie’s knee, and cried like a baby. Rosie, not until that moment realising she could, leaned over and picked up her cousin, her foster-sister, the only mother she could remember, and pulled her into her lap, as if Katriona were the child and Rosie the guardian, the protector, the champion. Rosie put her arms round her, and swept the damp hair off her forehead, and kissed her, and Katriona clung round her neck and wept.

  “Fox,” murmured the man. “Fox—badger—bear—otter. Doe and cow, mare and goat, bitch and wolf and . . . You had a journey, did you not, with the little one? Rosie, is that what you call her? Rosie?”

  Rosie surged to her feet, Katriona still in her arms, fury giving her the necessary strength. “Stop it,” she said to the strange man who had hurt Katriona and ruined their peace. “I do not know what you are saying to Katriona, but I do not like it. I like it even less that you should talk about me as if I am not here. Rosie is my name. And you have not yet told us yours.”

  Katriona made a tiny sound of embarrassment or thanks, and Rosie bent and let her gently down, keeping her own gaze fastened on the dark man. The rain had stopped, and the wind. In the sudden silence, if the humans in the room had not been so intent on each other, they might have noticed that Flinx had crept into the kitchen, and the house mice had crept in round him, as if they knew that for this evening of amazements they were safe from him. One of the kitchen shutters—the one that never fit properly, and leaked when the wind was from the west—rattled briefly and swung open, and Fwab hopped in, followed by several robins and an owl. The door to the courtyard opened silently, for Spear was clever with latches, and he was followed by Zogdob and Ralf, the baker’s half-grown puppy. Through the open door anyone who looked might have seen several deer walking quickly into the wrights’ yard, ears wide and alert; and a hump on a pile of timber might have been discerned as a badger. Still slightly too far away for human ears was the sound of galloping hoofs; just audible, but not absolutely identifiable as anything other than the wind, was the long ecstatic bay of a hunting hound declaring that he had found his scent and was following it.

  Th
e stranger murmured, “But they have never told her; Sigil, they have never told her,” and many expressions ran over his face like small sharp gusts of wind riffling the surface of a pool: astonishment, dismay, disbelief, disapproval darkening to condemnation; and the man stepped toward Rosie and, to her utter horror, dropped on his knees in front of her. From that position he gently drew up his beautiful and dangerous blade and laid it across his hands, holding it up toward her as if it were a gift. Rosie involuntarily put her hands behind her back.

  “It is your name, yes,” he said, looking up at her, the sheen of his skin opalescent in the soft lamplight, the blade in his hands bright as the moon. “But you, dear one, dearest one, you are our princess, the princess we have striven so anxiously to defend, Casta Albinia Allegra Dove Minerva Fidelia Aletta Blythe Domnia Delicia Aurelia Grace Isabel Griselda Gwyneth Pearl Ruby Coral Lily Iris Briar-Rose. And I am your servant Ikor, among the least of your servants, but I was to be your one-and-twentieth godparent, and so I was sent by the queen’s fairy, Sigil, to find you, and to tell you that your long concealment is at an end at last, and we must quickly plan what to do; for she who cursed you seeks you even as I have done—and she will—as I have done—find you, for we can no longer stop her. We have tried, these twenty years, but we have finally failed, and we know it. No fairy—no magician—should have been able to make a searching spell that endured twenty years, but Pernicia did it. It is a great shaggy thing by now, spiny as a holly tree with the errors of twenty years’ looking; and we have teased and pestered and vexed it as we could—the guarded fortresses were not our only means of confusion—but it has gone on looking. When we found that the spell had settled here, in the Gig—we knew what this meant. And so the best we could do at the bitter end is hope to find you first—only a minute first, an hour, a day—or three months. I gladly offer my life to you, but that is not enough.”