Spindle's End

by Robin McKinley

  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 reli
eve 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.

  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 qui
et 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.