Spindle's End

by Robin McKinley

  And then something hurtled past them, growling, and jumped at the faces of those standing in front of Woodwold’s gates. Hroc. And behind him Milo and Tash and Froo, all of them red-eyed and streaked with foam from the speed and distance they had run, following Fast. Pernicia’s creatures gave way, a little, in surprise, and their stolid, irresistible, waiting strength was against them because the hounds were quick and agile; gaps appeared in the enemy line in front of the briar hedge. And Fast, who had come to a halt when the hounds shot by, leaped forward again, and Rosie found herself shouting at the top of her lungs, shouting, too, with her inner voice, half aware of the armoured creatures blocking the road to Foggy Bottom rolling forward to close in behind her, “Woodwold!” Woodwold! Let us in! And, as a token, she pulled the gargoyle spindle end from her waistcoat, and threw it into the heart of the hedge.

  And the hedge pulled itself back, like two ladies drawing back their skirts, the stems wrinkling themselves away and then hoicking themselves upward, their tips rising higher yet above the walls and then diving down again to wind their way among the thick bony mat of branches already there. But the gates remained shut: all fifteen by twenty foot of them.

  Fast was running again, the last few strides he had left in him to run, surging into his speed again with his neck-cracking starting bounds: Rosie saw, out of the corner of her eye, a chain with some horrible spiked sphere on the end of it whistle harmlessly past his hindquarters as the end of the armoured line drew close to them.

  But if Narl’s gates did not open she and Fast would merely shatter themselves against the bars. The gates were too high to jump, and the bars were much too close together to squeeze between, even for a child. But Fast ran forward, ears pricked, committed to his decision, and much too near the end of his strength to have any left for a final tendon-snapping swerve to one side: and Rosie closed her eyes. Narl, she said, despairingly; but beast-speech could not carry as far as Narl was, wherever he was, nor was there anything he could do to cold wrought iron, even if he, who had no beast-speech, had heard her plea.

  With her eyes closed, she saw the animals that made up the bars of the gate turn their heads to look at her, at her and Fast. She saw them leap to their feet—the lion shaking his flower mane, and the bear his flower ruff, the hare bounding upright and the snake writhing aside like another rose stem; and the ones first on their feet turned and pressed against the slower ones, the hedgehogs and the tortoises, the toads and the badgers, and cats picked up confused kittens and dogs sleepy fox cubs, and a centaur and a unicorn herded foals and fawns; and birds seized wiry vines and tender shoots in their beaks, and moles scrabbled and beavers paddled, as if cold iron were mere earth or water; and the central bars bowed aside.

  Even so, Rosie felt iron bars scrape by her on either side, bruising her shoulders, painfully wiping her legs off Fast’s sides and tossing her feet over his rump; and then Fast staggered forward as if released by a rope breaking, falling to his knees and then lurching to his feet again, and Rosie, looking down, saw chafe marks on his shoulders, and, looking behind, on the points of his hips. But they were through; and here the hounds were as well, Tash only a bit rumpled, Froo limping, Milo with a bleeding slash in his side—and Hroc with the gargoyle spindle end in his mouth, carrying it as gently as he might have carried a straying puppy.

  There was a brief, terrible noise, like the noise someone might make if iron bars closed on them suddenly; and Rosie had to nerve herself to look round. Behind them the briar hedge rose, unbroken, the iron gates invisible among the rose stems.

  Rosie, shaking in every limb, slid off Fast and stood beside him. He stood unsteadily himself, taking deep, deep breaths, heaving in far more air than one horse could possibly hold, the steam rising off him in clouds like a cauldron boiling. Fast, said Rosie. Fast! Listen to me. You must walk. You’ve run too far, and all your muscles are going to seize up on you. Fast, can you hear me?

  He said nothing, and he was by now shivering so hard she could not see if he made any gesture of agreement. But he raised one forefoot and dropped it like a stone, and then one hind foot; and then the other two, one after the other. Rosie grabbed a handful of mane and pulled; but Fast had stopped again, and his nose dropped till it nearly touched the ground, and there was a whine in his breathing she dreaded to hear.

  Walk, damn you!

  A tiny voice, so faint she almost didn’t hear it: Can’t.

  Yes you bloody can! She thumped his shoulder with her fist, which was like thumping a block of meat on a slab, and then pinched the tender skin behind the elbow, and Fast twitched a little, and she saw his head begin to swing round and then back as he countermanded his instinct to bite the little stinging thing that was hurting him. He staggered forward again, stiff as an old cart horse, but he was walking.

  She turned away from him to see to the hounds; all but Hroc were lying full-length on the ground, panting so heavily she thought they must be bruising themselves against the hard earth. Hroc was sprawled mostly upright, with the spindle end between his front paws; he flattened his ears when he saw Rosie turn toward him. Short way, said Hroc. We did not go by the human road. No one was after us.

  Are you all right?

  Yes, said Hroc. Milo’s is just a scratch. You see to Fast. I thought we would get here first.

  Rosie would have laughed if she hadn’t been so worried. She took up the spindle end again, rubbing the dirt from its grin before she put it back in her pocket; and then she went after Fast, who was still walking, feeling for the ground with each foot as if he had gone blind.

  It was only then that she registered that the drive was clear of rose stems. The courtyard outside the stables had had no way out when she and Narl had stood there after the princess’ disastrous ball—except the way Eskwa made. She looked at the sky: it was no longer grey-purple, but cloud-grey, drizzly Gig grey, ordinary grey. She couldn’t feel very hopeful with poor Fast gasping and stumbling beside her, but when she put her hand on his shoulder for comfort she felt at least she had a little to give him. The dogs heaved themselves to their feet and followed.

  It was a long walk, and an eerie one, for the tall curtain of rose stems still hung on either side of the drive, as if they were walking down a roofless tunnel; nor was there any sound but what they made themselves. Rosie tormented herself by pretending she could see through the woven roses enough to discern a tree or two that stood just by the drive, or one of the pavilions erected for the ball; but she did not really believe she saw anything but more rose stems.

  By the time they could see the courtyard opening out at the end of the way (much to Rosie’s relief), while Fast was still taking small clumsy steps, he no longer stumbled, his nose had come a few inches up off the ground, and his breathing was no more than hoarse. When they came within sight of the stables, Rosie ran forward as quickly as she could, which wasn’t very, looking despairingly at the liveried groom who still lay sprawled in sleep in the corridor just outside Fast’s door, and pulled down the beautifully folded horse blanket that hung on it. Fast was nearly at the door when she met him with her armful. No, she said. You have to keep moving. Where was Spear? She discovered she could take on yet one more worry: Had something happened to Spear? She threw the blanket over Fast and buckled it. The dogs all collapsed again. Spear?

  And there he was, trotting stiffly toward her. Spear—can you keep Fast moving? I’m sorry. He must walk—so must the others, she added, looking round at heaps of panting dogs. But Fast specially. Tepid water, little and often—but he must-n’t stop moving—she was chivvying him down the aisle and into the courtyard as she spoke—Spear, can you do it?

  The four-legged scourge of obstreperous human drunks gave the seventeen-hand horse and the way-worn fleethounds a measuring glance and answered mildly, Of course I can do it.

  I’ll be back as soon as I can.

  Rosie started off hurrying and then thought, Back soon? From what? What do I have to hurry toward?

  She stopped on the
far side of the courtyard, a few steps before she had to. Because while the drive was open, Woodwold was still swaddled in rose stems, just as she had left it. She looked up at the sky again, but drizzly Gig grey no longer comforted her. She listened to the silence, knowing what it meant; knowing what she would find when she went back into the Great Hall. I should be hurrying, she thought, for the danger is no less than it was; I have merely eluded it again, for the moment. But I do not know my course. I haven’t even rescued Peony—I don’t know where she is, nor Narl and the others. It’s all very well, what Hroc said—no one was after us—but I’m now inside the briar hedge again, and they’re still out there, with Pernicia’s army, who will be a lot quicker to grab the next lot because the first ones got away.

  What have I done, after all? she thought. What have I done? I suppose Pernicia will just come for me again; and I may have killed Fast. Maybe Narl can get Peony right away . . . maybe if they go far enough, Peony will wake up . . . then, at least, out of all of us, Narl and Peony . . .

  She sat slowly down at the edge of the courtyard, and wrapped her arms round her pulled-up knees, and rocked back and forth, her mind empty. She hardly noticed when two hounds came up to her and pressed themselves round her, rather as they had done at the princess’ ball, as if they were holding her together, as if they were aware that she needed holding together. Vaguely she felt Hroc licking one ear, and someone else—Froo, she thought—licking the other.

  She was half asleep when the words—if, after all, they were words—entered her understanding. She could not say she heard them, for the taking in of meaning was as much deeper in and other-than-human than animal speech as animal speech was deeper in and other-than than human. It was as though meaning grew somewhere in the centre of her body, as if the marrow of her bones were talking to her.

  She felt in her body that Pernicia’s castle was gone. She felt that there had been a hard place that hurt her—she could almost feel where it had been, low under her left ribs—that had disintegrated, fallen back to the earth it was made from; that the sun and the rain upon it would make good earth of it in time to come, not merely the crumbled remains of the castle as it was now, lying like a shattered vase upon a floor, still glinting with the paint the maker of it had laid upon it, a tint of dark magic. For now the important thing was that it was no longer a castle, could no longer be a castle; its maker would not put it together again. And Rosie had done this, Narl had done this, Flinx and Sunflower and Zel and Hroc and Throstle and all of them had done this. Weaker, Rosie thought, very dimly, for it was difficult, in this deep-in place, to put anything in human words. We have weakened her.

  It was not everything, but it was something. They had, all of them together, done something.

  She felt the effort round her, under her and over her, the effort to speak so that she could hear, and know that she was not alone with five hounds and a horse, willing and loyal though they were, little, flimsy, squashy creatures, almost as fragile and insubstantial as she was herself.

  Woodwold. Woodwold was talking to her. Rosie. Princess. I am here, too. Woodwold was awake.

  Slowly she uncurled herself, finding it strange that she could do so, that she appeared to be this light, airy, bendable creature; she weighed so little it seemed to her surprising that she did not float away like a leaf. How precarious, to stand on feet, to carry what substance one had in this scanty and attenuated manner. . . .

  She shook herself and took a deep breath. Hroc and Froo came to their feet and looked at her expectantly. She turned to look toward where the Great Hall lay behind its embrace of rose stems, and then found her own feet and ordered them to take her there. She went unerringly to a certain snarly mess of rose stems, visibly no different from any other along the great hummocky hills of rose stems beneath which lay Woodwold, and prised them apart with her hands; and they permitted themselves to be prised.

  She ducked, and stepped underneath, and began, carefully, to part those that now wound across her way; and they, too, permitted themselves to be moved aside. She caught herself on a thorn, once, and a drop of blood fell from the tip of her forefinger; and she held her breath, and thought of Peony, and then she put her hands out again to pull at the next layer of rose stems, and saw another drop of blood fall twinklingly from her finger and onto a hunched brown elbow of stem; and then she was through the next low, twisted arch, and reaching for the next beyond it.

  She came after some little time to the old doors of the Great Hall, and here she stood on tiptoes and brushed at the stems that hung round it as if they were no more than cobwebs; and they broke and fell aside at her touch as if they were cobwebs indeed. The sunlight seemed to fall on her more strongly than it had before, and she turned round and saw behind her two hounds, and a great tall arch stretching through the rose hedge; and yet, as she had made her way through it, the partings she had made had only been enough to let her through if she crouched and held her arms close to her sides; and once Froo had yelped as, following her, he misjudged. She took a deep breath, and turned back to the doors, and flung them open—the old doors that had been opened for the first time in over a century for the princess’ one-and-twentieth birthday, and which had required four men on each to persuade them—and the light rushed in to brighten as much of the floor as it could reach.

  But most of the Great Hall was still dark from the gnarled rose stems over its windows. That’s the first thing, she thought. She went to the tall window nearest her, scrambled up to stand on its sill, fumbled with the latch, and put her hands through against the rose stems, pushing at them as if they were no more than an odd sort of curtain, but pushing gingerly, on account of the thorns; her finger still throbbed where she had caught it before. The thick branches creaked, and gave, and she pushed a little more vigorously, and they rustled as they parted, and the sunlight came in, and she noticed that it looked like sunlight, that it was no longer grey and gloomy, and when she peered up, the sky was blue, and the shreds of cloud that drifted across it were white. And when she looked again at the rose stems, she noticed that they were now covered with leaves, which was why they had rustled; but they had been bare and brown but minutes before.

  She clambered down from the windowsill and went on to the next, and pushed back the suddenly green rose stems from that window, and then the next, and the next; and when she came to the last, she saw flower buds among the leaves, although the princess’ birthday was in early spring.

  Only when there were no more windows to free from their blindfolds did she turn to look into the Hall.

  It was almost worse, being able to see, because it emphasised how wrong what she saw was. She found Katriona at once, and knelt beside her again, stroked her hair. She was still breathing. She was still asleep.

  The deep, bone-marrow knowledge stirred in her, and she knew that from this sleep, magical and malicious as it was, the sleepers would take no harm, unlike the sleepers found in the broken fastnesses, years ago, where the princess might have been. Woodwold could do this much for the little creatures that walked under its roofs; it had watched over other little creatures for hundreds of years, and it understood hurt and harm and the will to do evil. But it did not comprehend sleeping and waking any more than it comprehended walking and breathing; this was why (Rosie thought) Pernicia’s sleep had first confused it, but had failed to hold it.

  Woodwold had done what it could. Now she must lead the way.

  Rosie stood up, looking round her wildly. She was taking deep, involuntary breaths, and at first she thought she had made more of an effort climbing window frames than she had realised, and then she thought she must be fighting off some lingering odour of the sleep-spell, and then she thought she was probably frightened; but as she sucked in the air and expelled it violently she knew that none of these things were the real reason she stood and panted: what she was was angry.

  She couldn’t ever remember being so angry—not even when she had knocked down the man who had been beating his horse instea
d of trying to free the trapped wheel of the cart—not even when she had found the whip scars, invisible under the sleek hair unless you were looking, on the colt who had been afraid of Narl because he had no beard—not even when she had first begun to realise what Ikor’s message meant to her, to Katriona and Aunt and Barder—and Peony and Rowland and Narl—and Jem and Gilly and Gable, and Crantab and Hroslinga—and all of the Gig—the whole country—not even then. She was bursting with anger; her skull throbbed with it; her hands, hanging at her sides, felt hot and swollen with it.

  Pernicia, she shouted. We have business, you and I.

  There was a low laugh, and Rosie spun round, and saw Pernicia walking in through the open door of the Hall. “How very sweet of you to be angry with me,” she said. “Such an invitation, anger. I might have been delayed a little longer, else.” She was carrying a cane in her left hand, which Rosie had not seen before, and there were several red marks on her cheek, and she had her right hand tucked into her long dark-streaked robe with the thorn tears in it; and Rosie’s deep knowledge reminded her of the ruined castle, of what the destruction of that castle meant. We have weakened her.

  “I could almost—er—adopt you for that; the last one-and-twenty years have been difficult for me too, and I could use a good lieutenant. I have never had a good one.”

  Rosie made a spitting, inarticulate noise.

  “But it has gone too far for that now, has it not? That is almost a pity. One of us must die, you know; the magic will pull your whole dreary Gig apart else; I couldn’t stop that now even if I wished to. Although I don’t wish to, you know; I want it—and the country—nice and whole. To do as I like with.