Spindle's End

by Robin McKinley

  Narl stared at her. She could see by the tension in him that he was feeling the same strains she was; but she was not as strong as he, and while he clasped his hands together till his arms strained at his sleeves, her right arm was being dragged upward into the vacant air while her left hand was trying to crawl up her spine. “Back in the Hall,” she said, “you said about seers . . .”

  Understanding leaped into Narl’s eyes, and he glanced toward the approaching things, and at Flinx, still yelling and streaking back and forth under the bits of them that seemed to touch the ground, which should have been feet but weren’t—the bits above what should have been feet extended a great way up and sideways—and Rosie, following his look, had a brief, wild impression that they were tripping over him, or maybe that they were turning to give chase, as if in the place they came from they were a sort of dog, and recognised, even in this place, which must have seemed very queer to them, a thing like a cat, meant to be chased. But there was only one of him, and no sane cat would attack a pack of dogs; these things were closing round him. . . .

  And then there were a dozen Flinxes, twenty, twice twenty, all of them spitting and squalling, all of them with their hair standing on end, all of them shooting back and forth among the dizzying things, and the things were now making noises of their own, rather like wind keening under eaves, and the fact that the things now seemed to have a great many more sticking-down bits, as if they’d grown a great many more legs, gave an impression rather like a dog’s hackles rising in reverse. The by-now-several-times-twenty Flinxes stopped hurtling back and forth through the crowd of the things (Rosie wondered how all the false Flinxes managed not to run into each other, and thought perhaps they simply ran through one another), and took off in several-times-twenty directions, and the things all scattered and went after them.

  The landscape was empty again, and the little company all stood up straight and sighed, and relaxed. The strange grap plings that had seized them were gone. And here was Flinx, looking pleased with himself, having returned from nowhere anyone saw him returning from, giving a last lick to a nicely smoothed-down tail.

  They had come a little farther from the castle during the confrontation with the unbalancing things, and now they looked round to reorient themselves. The castle had, somehow, got behind them. As Rosie turned to find it again, she heard Sunflower whine: not a miserable whine this time, but a small intrigued considering whine.

  These things looked rather more human: upright, swinging what might be arms, walking with two legs; although what they walked on and from where was a little obscure, since they seemed to be walking out through the doorless wall of the castle, and across the moat on a level with the ground, although there was nothing there for them to walk on. They stalked across the invisible bridge, and as they came to the rough tussocky ground beyond it they spread out, so that the rank of them coming toward Rosie and her friends was twenty or thirty bodies wide. Faceless bodies; they had head shapes at the top of their body shapes, but there was no glint of eyes, no irregular shadows from the hollows and protrusions of other features.

  Sunflower began to bark and leap, rushing back and forth in front of her companions, wagging her tail feverishly, sometimes curling herself up into a circle and spinning round and round in place, uttering little cries, half whimper, half yelp, which was all what she did any time there were visitors at Woodwold and she was neither out hunting (when she was the model of a sober, dedicated retrieving dog, and never made a gesture or a sound without direction from her huntsman) nor locked up somewhere. She obeyed about half the Prendergasts; if any visitor were so unlucky as to meet her with only one of the other Prendergasts in attendance, they were on their own to face the barrage.

  These are mine, she said to Rosie. Tell the fairy. And she galloped off toward them.

  Rosie didn’t have to tell Narl; there were a hundred Sunflowers before she’d gone more than a few bounds; two hundred before she arrived at the marching first row of things. The Sunflowers leaped on the things, striking them in what might have been their groins and their stomachs. The ones she knocked down immediately she began to lick furiously, especially around the face regions; and convincing-looking arms rose up to try to fend her off. But she was an old hand at this game, and she knew how not to be fended. Those things that had not immediately been knocked down, she circled round behind and flung herself at backs of knees, smalls of backs; more of them fell down, and she began to lick them, too. They didn’t like being licked; they thrashed and wriggled, and made snatches at the Sunflowers which were never where they had been when the snatches began; and tripped up those few of their fellows that some Sunflower or other hadn’t already managed to hurl down.

  There were, by now, more Sunflowers than there were things, and the Sunflowers not occupied in licking amused themselves instead by running across the supine (or occasionally prone, in which case the attending Sunflowers rootled relentlessly about the head to get at where the face should be) bodies of the things, landing heavily and taking off again with a great deal of thwacking and scrabbling.

  The things seemed to be growing thinner, as if the false Sunflowers were licking the magic away, and that magic was all there was of them.

  Quite suddenly the Sunflowers standing on the bodies of their victims started thumping abruptly to the ground as the things disappeared. The false Sunflowers began to disappear, too. There were six left when the last thing flicked out of existence; and then there was only one Sunflower. She looked round to check that her duty was done (for a moment Rosie could see the faithful, thorough hunting dog in her expression), and she came trotting back toward Rosie, grinning hugely, with her tongue lolling out of her mouth.

  She permitted herself to be patted and praised, leaning against Rosie’s and then Narl’s knees. The big hounds all looked deeply embarrassed; they had spent their lives looking the other way from Sunflower’s excesses, unable to understand how she could be the same dog they knew out in the field, attending to business. She looked round at them with a glint in her eye, knowing full well what they were thinking. Then she sighed, stood up, and shook herself: and looked over at Flinx, who was looking at her.

  Flinx stood up and wandered, as if carelessly, and thinking of something else, in the general direction of Sunflower, who stood still, watching, her tail a little raised. He paused and looked round, as if suddenly aware that he was, by some strange chance, very near to Sunflower; and then he walked the last few steps toward her and raised his face. She lowered hers, and they touched noses. Not bad, said Flinx. Not bad at all. Sunflower’s tail gave a slow, majestic wag.

  “Well,” said Rosie, and patted Narl’s shoulder as she had just been patting Sunflower’s. “Are you all right? Er—thank you.”

  Narl shook his head, and his other hand reached for Rosie’s patting hand, and held it. “Rosie—” he began, and stopped. “Rosie, whatever happens—” and stopped again. He smiled at her, a funny, half-sad smile (Ironface! Smiling! Rosie heard the animals murmuring round her; the Block, cracking, from Flinx), and said, “I’m too tired and stupid to put it into words, and if I weren’t so tired and stupid I wouldn’t be trying. Don’t thank me. It’s—it’s an honour to serve you, Princess.”

  “Don’t call me Princess!” shouted Rosie, snatching her hand away, feeling as if he’d struck her across the face.

  “I’m sorry,” he said wearily, “but we’d better get used to it, hadn’t we?” He turned away, and began to walk slowly back toward the castle.

  After a moment she followed him, and the animals closed up round them, and soon they were walking side by side, but neither of them spoke.

  When they arrived at the edge of the moat again, they found their own footprints in a patch of rough sand, setting out in the other direction; they had come all the way round, and, except for the not-door and not-bridge that Sunflower’s things had used, they had seen nothing resembling a way in.

  Somewhere, Rosie thought, Pernicia is waiting. Is she watchi
ng us? Has she known of us since the moment Eskwa opened the rose hedge?

  Is she scornful? Is she—worried? Are we not what she expected?

  Is Peony still alive?

  Rosie’s mind bucked away from that last thought, and instead she said to herself crossly, But Pernicia should want to see us. And Rosie wrapped that thought round with an irrational irritation similar to what she would have felt if she had turned up at someone’s farm to look at a horse and found no horse and no one home. She should want to see us.

  She should want to finish what she started.

  Rosie’s irritation drained away, and she was standing in the middle of nowhere with a few friends round her, and the little wind that blew past her smelled of dust and emptiness.

  How do you build a bridge out of nothing and unlock a door you can’t find?

  All that was around them was dirt and sand and stones. And the things at the bottom of the moat that weren’t stones. She took the gargoyle spindle end out of her pocket and looked at it. She was thinking about the twentieth fairy gift at her name-day, the one just before Pernicia had come, the one that had given Pernicia the shape of her curse. Katriona had told her about that, too, the last day in Foggy Bottom.

  You could spin thread till you had enough to make rope; you could make a bridge out of rope. “If I only had something to spin with,” she said, and ran her other hand through her hair in her characteristic gesture of discontent or dismay.

  “Much too short,” said Narl. “Try mine.” He plucked a hair from his head and held it out to her.

  Rosie hesitated. She remembered what had happened with Peony’s bit of cloth and embroidery silk. But to spin something they might all walk on, even from a fairy gift . . . especially since she didn’t know how to spin; she only knew what it looked like, from watching Kat and Aunt. She held the spindle in one hand, as if telling herself, or Narl’s single black hair, or the magic-sticky air, what she wanted, and then she gave the hair a twist, as if it were fluff from a sheep she wished to mould into thread; and she closed her eyes.

  Immediately she felt something—something—coiling and looping and winding through her fingers, and she felt the spindle end spinning and spinning and spinning till her fingers were hot with friction, and heavy curls of something were falling down her arm, and piling up at her feet, and at last she felt the spindle being snatched out of her hand, and Narl’s voice, almost laughing, in her ear: “Enough! Enough! Imagine if I’d given you two hairs!”

  Cautiously she opened her eyes. Around them in great silky waves lay . . . the something. Black it was, as black and glossy as Narl’s hair, and it shimmered in the sullen light as if it were breathing. She picked up the end of it that still lay at her feet, and discovered a kind of supple rope, as big around as her two hands could grasp, but as light and flexible as Narl’s single hair had been. “Can we make this into a—a bridge?” she said.

  “I have a better idea,” said Narl. “I don’t see a door, do you? And I bet the roof’s no better. Let’s squeeze her out. She’ll know where the doors are in her own house.” He handed her the emptied spindle end, and she automatically gave its nose a rub before she put it back in her pocket.

  “Squeeze . . . ?” said Rosie.

  But Narl was already paying out arm’s lengths of the black rope, letting it coil up at his feet, then kneeling, and measuring it a second time, squinting up at the castle as he did so, muttering under his breath, “Not as if the best eye in the world is going to give us much help here.”

  She felt tired—no, she felt exhausted—and dull, and could not imagine what he had in mind; and then he stood up, holding the rope in both hands, with the lengths he had measured between, and flung it—

  It seemed to blow up and away from them, like a single hair on a current of air so gentle you cannot feel it against your face. It spiralled for a while, and then it floated, and drifted—and then it seemed to stop, seesawing, like a hair in a weakening draught; and Narl put his hands round his mouth and blew.

  The high centre of it shot up, as if awakened from sleep, dragging its languorous loops behind it, and at the peak of the castle it drooped a little, hung, and then fell, over the roof of the castle, one end caught by the crenellations, the other sagging toward the moat—

  But Narl was already running round the edge of the moat, shaking out the black rope behind him, and just before he disappeared round the far side of the castle, he took another handful of rope and gave it a yank and a flick, and Rosie saw the caught bit fly up in the air again, and then come softly down on the far side of the castle.

  Narl hastily tied the loose end round his waist, and was pulling the other in as quickly as he could, backing toward Rosie as he did so. “I don’t think we want this to touch the bottom of the moat,” he said, and handed her the long end, while he untied the other. “Pull,” he said. Rosie, bemused, pulled. What could a rope made of nothing and one human hair do against the walls of a castle?

  She pulled. The rope seemed to clasp at her hands, as if it were a sentient member of the party, consciously trying to apply its own strength; she almost heard it trying to speak to her. If a house can speak, she thought wildly, why not a rope made of nothing? She took a better grip, scraped her boots in the ground a little, dug her heels in, and pulled.

  There was now an odd sort of smoke, or fog, rising off the castle, or dripping down its sides, and a strange vertiginous gleam where the rope touched its walls, a quaking, precarious gleam that made no sense if you looked at it, made no sense in the same way the castle hanging in the sky over the briar hedge round Woodwold had made no sense, made no sense and made your head spin and your balance waver the way the upside-down things that had chased the Flinxes made no sense. The way the things in the bottom of the moat . . . Don’t look in the bottom of the moat, Rosie told herself. Don’t look at the contact point between a rope that doesn’t exist and a castle with no doors. Just pull. Pull.

  She glanced over at Narl; his face was drawn into deep lines with the intensity of what he was doing, and she felt a tiny foolish stirring in her breast, a stirring of hope. If he thinks . . .

  She realised she was nearly tipping over backward; the rope was lengthening—or the castle wall was yielding to pressure. Sure it was: easy as squeezing whey from a stone, like the brave tailor in the story. In the story it was cheese, and he only said it was a stone. Don’t look. Don’t think. Just pull. She resolutely looked away from the castle and the moat, backed up a step, two steps, to keep the rope taut. The smoke, or whatever it was, was growing thicker; and it was enough like ordinary smoke that it made her eyes water, it caught in her throat and made her cough. Pull. She looked to her left: she could still see Narl through the increasing murk, but the animals, beyond him, were little more than huddled shapes.

  You loathsome child, spat into her mind; she flinched, and might have slackened the rope, but the rope itself reached out and wrapped itself round her hands. She stood, wondering if she were trapped, seeing out of the corner of her eye Narl taking another step backward as he kept the tension on his end of the rope, feeling the pull on her own wrists, staring at her helpless hands, feeling the weight of the spindle end hanging in its pocket, tapping against her thigh. Rope? she said tentatively. The rope did not reply; but she no longer felt trapped, but embraced.

  Look at me.

  Rosie jerked, startled, grasping at the rope with her fingertips, looked up. Pernicia stood there, carrying something in her arms. Someone. Peony.

  You cannot have her, Rosie said without thinking, without thinking to whom or how she was speaking. You cannot have her.

  Peony lay lightly in Pernicia’s arms, as if she weighed no more than a hollow doll. Perhaps Pernicia was very strong; perhaps the uncanny air of this place bore Peony up; perhaps the magic of the poisoned sleep also robbed her flesh of its living weight. That it was Peony herself and no false semblance Rosie was sure; she did not believe that even Pernicia could make so fine a replica of her friend that R
osie would not see through it at once. There was the faintest of frowns on Peony’s face, as if she knew, somewhere in the back of her sleeping mind, that something was not quite right.

  You cannot have her. It’s me you want.

  I want neither of you. But I will have both.

  No. Not Peony. It is not her fault.

  Her fault? Her fault? It is not her fault that she agreed to this shoddy despicable charade? It is not her fault that she seized my spindle’s end? But I do not care whether it is her fault or not, any more than I care that a stupid hulking girl was first-born to the king and queen twenty-one years ago rather than two hundred and one. I have been waiting my time, and it has come.

  Her words rang or bellowed or crackled or reverberated strangely in Rosie’s head, or her ears. Rosie had never been quite sure how she spoke to animals, nor how they spoke to her, other than that something happened besides the ordinary sounds and gestures most people heard and saw animals make. And each animal had an idiom, a vernacular, a little different from every other animal; for some animals, like dogs, elaborate their speech with sneezes and barks and growls and tail waggings and ear flattenings and yawnings and pawings and bowings and many other sounds and gestures, while some animals, like most insects, had speech that was little more than a series of clicks and ticks in a kind of code Rosie happened to have the key to (mostly).

  Pernicia’s speech seemed to be all of this, as if dogs and cats and cows and horses and hawks and beetles were all speaking the same things simultaneously—except that they would not use the same signals, the same expressions—and although Pernicia stood silent and motionless with Peony in her arms. With the rough discordance that should not have been comprehensible but was, there was something else, and the something else was in the grey and purple fog that slid and swirled round the castle. Rosie swayed a little, and the rope, drawn close round her wrists and forearms, held her up.