Spindle's End

by Robin McKinley

  While she was watching, Rowland came up to her and spoke her name. She had to prevent herself from starting away from him, and she knew, when she met his eyes, that she hadn’t quite succeeded. She smiled at him, a little tentatively; her mouth didn’t want to turn upward. She knew he was both aware of and hurt by her avoidance of him—she had said barely three words together to him in the last three months—but then he didn’t know the truth of their situation.

  “Rosie,” he said, and then, in a rush, as if he had meant to say something else entirely, “can we not be friends? I must value a—a relationship between us, because you are Peo—the princess’ friend; but beyond that I—I like you. Once I—I thought you liked me. I have not forgotten that it was you who taught me the names of the Foggy Bottom dogs, especially the medium-sized brown ones that all look alike, and to recognise birds from the songs they sing. I miss our days together at the smith’s.”

  Rosie’s eyes filled with tears before she could stop them. “Oh!” said Rowland, horrified, groping for his handkerchief, “I beg your pardon!” Rosie remembered just in time not to blot her eyes on her sleeve, and fumbled for her own handkerchief, rolling the little gargoyle in her pocket as she did so. She blew her nose on her own but accepted and used Rowland’s to mop her face, as a kind of answer to his question, because she couldn’t think what to say to him. Presumably he would know soon enough, and then perhaps he would understand why she had avoided him.

  But she had not answered his question, and he hesitated to put it again. He took his slightly damp handkerchief back, and folded it slowly, as if each corner squaring with the other corners was crucially important, while he tried to think of something else to say to her. “Narl sends his best wishes,” he offered at last.

  Rosie grunted, a Narl-like grunt. She could think of few things less likely than Narl sending anyone his best wishes; and as far as she knew, Rowland was now spending most of his time at Woodwold. He had asked and been granted a place in the rota of the princess’ guard. But his remark did confirm her guess that Narl would not come to the ball. She had known he wouldn’t, but her heart nonetheless sank further.

  Rowland still showed no sign of leaving her, and the crush of people was willing to let them alone for a little while; it seemed fitting that the man the princess loved and the woman who was the princess’ best friend should have a word or two to say quietly to each other. Rosie hugged to her the thought of the princess’ first royal command. With a dowry such as the princess might bestow on her best friend, would the prince of Erlion allow his heir to marry a wainwright’s niece? But even if she had known the answer was yes, this could not comfort her much. Ikor was quite capable of lying about the dissolution of the bond made by the Erlion heir’s vow—or at least of refusing to do it, even if it were possible, if his magic or his understanding of his sovereign’s subjects told him that it would be better for the country, and the country’s head of state, if it remained intact. “What will you do,” she said at last, “if you cannot marry Peony?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, the words spaced out one from another. “I know I must think of this. The people—the princess’ people—look at us and smile and want it to be a happy ending. The story is a very satisfactory one, is it not? My childhood vow, and then falling in love with a girl I meet at a country smith’s, when I, too, am in disguise, and she turns out to be the princess.

  “But it is not a story, with the happy ending already written and waiting for us to turn the pages. The people I know—it seems to me they believe that the refusal to announce our betrothal is some kind of whim, to make the suspense more exciting. I know it is not. Ikor—Ikor told me very little, only that there is no betrothal, and—he could not hide from me that there is something else to tell; and I look in Peony’s face, and I know there is something she is not telling me—something that hurts her—something that hurts us. I know there is something she is not telling me as clearly as I know she loves me. I—I spend my duty hours wondering what it is, while I walk up and down, or check that the emeralds or the rubies or the amethysts are still hanging where they were a quarter hour ago. What I find myself wondering about most often is the curse—the curse that we are supposed to believe has failed. I would like to believe that it has failed, quietly, with no sign of her who cast it, despite the fact that the entire country has lived under the shadow of that curse for twenty years.

  “It is not only Peony’s face that tells me there is something I do not know. It is Ikor’s face, Ikor who came here first and arranged us all into this new order, this new story. Do you know that Ikor would not meet my eyes when he told me there was no betrothal? Ikor is not a man who does not meet the eyes of those he speaks to. And there is something in your Aunt’s face, and your cousin Katriona’s, and in yours, too, Rosie. There is a great and terrible weight upon all of you. This is what I fear—this is what I think: that the curse has not failed. Perhaps that is what the ball is for: to make most of the people believe, so that . . . so that what?”

  He paused. They were both looking at Peony, who was now talking to Terberus. They were both fair and graceful, with quick, attractive smiles, and Terberus was only middling tall. They could be brother and sister, thought Rosie. She remembered something else that Katriona had told her on the last day in Foggy Bottom: how a glamour worked least well over the people who had the most connections with the truth. Love was a very strong connection.

  “Rosie,” said Rowland. “I’m not asking you to tell me what it is, because Peony would have told me if it would not do some harm for me to hear it. But—do you know what I do not know?”

  Rosie looked at him. “Yes,” she said. “I do know. And so I know why she cannot tell you.”

  She saw that, however much he thought he had accepted the existence of that hidden thing, the confirmation of it was a blow to him; and she was sorry for this, sorry for having dealt him such a blow on top of the last three months of denying their friendship. The few of them who knew—even if Rowland didn’t quite know what he knew—should be able to stick together.

  Perhaps it was the strain of knowing that whatever would happen would happen tonight, perhaps it was the magic-fog muddling her thinking, perhaps it was the hopelessness of her own love making her foolish, but she added impetuously: “But I think I can tell you that it means—it means Peony will not die tonight, whatever P-Pernicia does.” As she realised what she had said, she saw a little flicker of understanding run across Rowland’s face—an understanding too near the truth. He had no guess that Peony was not the princess, but he glimpsed a reason why two young women, one of them dreadfully cursed, might be bound so closely together as to confuse the curse into choosing the wrong one. . . .

  Rosie admired him for his immediate look of horror and dismay at the same time she was appalled at the slip she had made. “No, no,” she said hastily. “It’s not what you—” But at that moment Lady Pren decided that the two of them had talked only to each other long enough, and, important guests that they were, they had to spread themselves more liberally among the others.

  Rosie found the young lord Lady Pren bestowed her upon rather hard going (as doubtless he found her). Perhaps as a result of her conversation with Rowland, she felt the fog pressing round her again, and the passage of time began to confuse and disorient her, as if she were standing precariously on the limb of a tree and time was the wind now lashing its branches. She came to herself standing alone—she didn’t remember the young lord leaving—but there was a fleethound head suddenly under her hand, and so she stroked it, while it—Hroc—looked up at her and sent loving thoughts.

  She looked down and saw that there was quite a little party of hounds following her—and getting under people’s feet. Lord Pren allowed his favourite dogs indoors (as well as the ladies’ lapdogs, which rarely, Throstle excepted, went outside), but under most conditions they stayed out of the humans’ way for fear of being banished to the kennels after all.

  If you want to hang around so
meone, you should go hang around Peony. She’s the princess here.

  No, said Hroc. She isn’t.

  Rosie sighed—and caught a quick look from Peony, as ever not far away, feeling the sigh, and wondering if there were anything wrong she should pay attention to. Rosie shook her head, and returned her attention to Hroc.

  Animals knew what they had to know about magic, that it was liable to turn them into brambles or thunderclouds at any moment and, if they were lucky, back again; but it was always there, like thickets and weather, and, like thickets and weather, to be borne as stoically as possible. Domestic animals (and the brighter or more inquisitive wild ones) knew that humans meddled in it, but then houses and barns and preserved foods over the winter were another sort of meddling, and on the whole domestic animals (and a few wild ones) approved of houses and barns and preserved foods. Coming up with ideas like houses and barns and preserved foods and then building or storing them (and, unlike squirrels, finding them again) was the sort of thing humans did, but there were limits. A fire in the fireplace was lovely, but it didn’t change the fact that there was a snowstorm outside. The idea of what Rosie and the other conspirators were doing was, in animal terms, like trying to convince a snowstorm to fall on one house instead of the one next door.

  Hroc had been there that first evening in Foggy Bottom, when Ikor had told them what they were going to do, when the necessity of some scheme against Pernicia was as plain to Hroc and the others as a flung rock in the ribs—even if the manner of it seemed like one of those strange human designs that get you ultimately into more trouble than they get you out of. But Hroc had shrugged a dog-shrug, as most of the other animals had shrugged their kinds of shrugs. Human business was human business, with which they would not interfere; and there were other matters to attend to. Rosie was still wondering about those other matters, about whether the sense of preoccupation she felt in her animal friends was something more ominous than that they had little to say to a woman who was spending all her time indoors, playing at being a lady-in-waiting, and doing no useful work. The thought that it was only this, that they had nothing to say to her any more, was so bitter that it was hard for her not to want the preoccupation to go ahead and be something ominous.

  But the last thing the conspirators needed right now was Rosie’s friends making it obvious that Rosie seemed ill and distracted on the princess’ birthday.

  Well, so pretend she is the princess, said Rosie, and Hroc gave her a weary look. Pretend was one of those human words. The only equivalents, and they were not helpful ones, were the deception of the hiding predator, and the playing-to-learn-skills that all animal children did to a greater or lesser extent. Hroc knew perfectly well what “pretend” meant when Rosie said it to him; he just believed it to be piffle, as if she had told him grass was pink and water was not for drinking.

  She looked into his patient, intelligent eyes and thought, with a sudden bubble of panic: This isn’t just a loophole, a gap for a nimble enemy archer to shoot through; this is an entire wall that isn’t there: that the animals know. That they’re waiting for something to happen—something besides the euphoric celebration of the princess’ one-and-twentieth birthday. And that the something would happen to Rosie.

  Why hadn’t Aunt and Katriona seen? Never mind Ikor, who had a tendency to see only what he was looking for. And she felt the deep subterranean grumble of Woodwold agreeing with her, and knew, then, that some of why Woodwold had lain so wakeful these last three months was because of the perilously incompatible difference in the stories it heard through the footfalls of those who went loose upon the earth.

  However deadly a mistake they had made, it was too late to change it now.

  Hroc, sensing her distress, dug his nose into her leg a little harder. At least tell the others to go away, she said. I do not want attention called to me this way.

  The other dogs stretched or shook themselves and began to wander away as if they had never been clustered round Rosie in the first place. And you say you do not believe in pretend, said Rosie, and Hroc smiled a dog-smile, with his eyes and ears.

  The fog was returning in earnest. Rosie saw the king place the crown of inheritance on Peony’s head, and the king’s bishop bless her; heard the first official cheers led by her brothers; and she saw that the queen kept her eyes too carefully on Peony, and did not once look at Rosie, though she was always near at hand, and whom everyone else, in the knowledge that she was the princess’ best friend, made a point of smiling at and speaking a word to. It was noted that the princess’ best friend was pale and preoccupied (and that one of Lord Pren’s fleethounds was shadowing her as if waiting to be a sort of self-motile sofa, should she need to sit down suddenly: the courtiers by now all knew about her talking to animals), but then who could blame her? My lord Rowland was almost as distracted, but he had his noble upbringing to fall back on, and he could (as the saying went) make conversation with an enchanted chamber pot. My lady Rosie was only a village girl after all. How lucky they were that the princess, although she, too, had been raised as a village girl, was so poised and gay on this splendid and historic occasion, and effortlessly seemed to take up her proper position.

  Rosie heard the long speech the king’s bishop made, and could hear by the way his voice soared and fell, and hastened forward and drew back to mark each word, that it was a speech full of erudition and noble sentiments, but she understood nothing of it. She made herself watch, and so noticed the Gig’s Chief Priest looking both sulky and gratified as a member of the king’s bishop’s train, and the Foggy Bottom priestling looking thrilled and daunted (and almost unrecognisable in a shiny new hood) several tiers back in the same train. When, after the bishop, Lord Prendergast stood up and gave a much shorter speech, she only saw that he was smiling as he spoke. She must have lost a few moments, because a plate loaded with food was suddenly lying before her, and she discovered that she was sitting at a grand table with Katriona on one side and Barder beyond her, and Callin on Rosie’s other side, and the princess’ other ladies beyond. There was a reaccumulating drift of hounds and a spaniel or two over her feet and under and behind her chair, and Throstle, who had made a study of this kind of behaviour so he could perform it so charmingly that even people who didn’t like dogs failed to protest, trotted along the table among the goblets and platters and epergnes, and jumped into Rosie’s lap. Throstle adored Rosie, who had rescued him in the last three months from a life of uninterrupted lapdoggery by bringing him on her stable rounds every morning, telling Lady Pren it was therapeutic, which was true enough. (The new system had almost broken down after Throstle tackled a rat bigger than he was; he had it by the neck in the prescribed terrier manner, but it was going to beat him to death before it died. Fortunately Milo, Hroc’s brother and best friend, had been there to finish it off.)

  Peony sat between the king and the queen, with the princes on either side of them; and the youngest prince, who was the farthest away from her, on his elder brother’s right hand, kept slipping out of his chair to stand by hers, holding on to the back of it and half climbing it, as boys, even princes, will do, as he spoke to her.

  Rosie put her hand in her pocket, and touched the round butt of the spindle end, seeking the face of the little gargoyle, her finger finding its nose by the silkiness of the tiny well-polished slope; and the fog, while no lighter, for a time seemed a little easier to bear, although she had no appetite for supper. She looked round the table for other familiar faces, and caught Rowland watching her worriedly, and she did not have the strength to smile at him. She looked—not at, but round the queen, hoping for some glimpse of Sigil, who must, surely, have arrived in or with or somehow simultaneous to the royal train, even if she did not wish to attend the ball, and once or twice she thought she saw a small drab person bending near the queen as no servant but only a beloved friend could do; but Rosie could never see her clearly.

  After dinner the dancing began, but Rosie did not dance. She would not have dared, because dancin
g was one of the name-day fairy gifts; but she had been able to say, truthfully, and with most of the Gig as witnesses, that she had never danced. Ikor claimed to have tried to teach her, and that even magic was in this case unavailing. (If there had been any jokes about clodhoppers behind her back, Rosie had never heard them. She was, although she was unaware of it, an imposing figure, not only on account of her height and the princess’ fondness for her.) Fortunately Peony danced as well as if she were enchanted, and Rosie guessed which fairy had been the giver of that particular bounty by a look of such maudlin fatuity on her face that it caught even Rosie’s cloudy eye. All the godmothers were, of course, present; and if one or two of them had some impression that their gifts had not gone quite as they had expected, they were too public-spirited to mope.

  Katriona sat with her on a padded bench against the wall, and Rosie sent most of the dogs away again when they tried to follow her. Katriona held her hand as if feeling her pulse for fever, which perhaps she was; and Rosie leaned back against Woodwold’s wall and half thought she felt it twitch. Through the fog she thought, I am still waiting to go home. I am not waiting for my birthday to be over so I can go—so that I can go to the royal city and become a princess, and—and let Peony be herself again; I am waiting for a few months of sham to be over so I can go home, and live in the wheelwright’s house, and work as a horse-leech. She made an effort to keep her head up, not only so that she might be seen as sitting with dignity, instead of lolling feebly, but because looking down at her own fine skirts made her dizzy, as if the twinkly grey were a series of whirlpools any one of which she might fall into and drown.