Spinning Thorns

by Anna Sheehan

  ‘What sort of gossip?’

  He shrugged. ‘Some blow up in court. Hiedelen king. We’ll know more in a bit. Always easy pickings when the Hiedel king’s over for a state visit.’

  I shook the snow off my coat and hung it over my arm. ‘Who else is about?’

  ‘Oh, the witch and the whore are arguing over love spells somewhere,’ Shadow told me. ‘And I saw that holier-than-thou sparkly flitting about earlier.’

  I nodded. The ‘sparkly’ would be Junco Winnowinn, a faerie of the Winnowinn clan, visiting from his northern fastness. Though low in his clan order, he was still a faerie. He very rarely came down from the mountain. ‘What’s he doing here?’

  ‘Damned if I know. I’m vanishing. See you around.’

  ‘See you, Shadow.’

  ‘No you won’t.’ Shadow muttered his spell, stepped sideways, and vanished into the gloom. It was a good spell. I could just make him out with my faerie eyes, but only if I already knew he was there. I could barely detect him slipping out the door.

  I left the kitchen and heard shrill voices arguing in what had once been the drawing room. But I was accosted by a bright glow in the hall.

  Junco lurked by the rickety stairs. Faeries lurk badly, unless they’re Nameless like me. Junco didn’t quite cast a cheerful glow through the hallway, but he shone quite clearly out of the darkness. The Winnowinn clan were white and blue in colouring, with white wings like snow angels. I always felt like I was speaking to ice when I spoke to Junco. ‘Well, well,’ he said, smirking. ‘If it isn’t the Nameless one.’

  ‘I’d thank you to keep your voice down!’ I hissed. No one else here knew I was a faerie, and I wanted to keep it that way. The club might be full of thieves and cutpurses and disreputable whores, but they were all human. Magic might be accepted here. The Nameless were not.

  ‘Oh, they can’t hear me,’ Junco said, jerking his head toward the argument in the drawing room. ‘Aren’t you dead yet?’

  ‘I’m sure that would give you great satisfaction,’ I snapped, ‘but no, I’m not.’

  ‘I wouldn’t feel anything, satisfaction or otherwise,’ Junco said.

  ‘Then why do you even talk to me?’

  ‘Perhaps I enjoy watching your envy,’ Junco said icily.

  I suppressed a growl. I did envy Junco. I hated every faerie who wasn’t disgraced like myself. But hostile as I was toward him, Junco had never revealed who I was to the others, for which I was grudgingly grateful. I suppose he had that, There, but for faerie grace, go I, feeling about me. I doubted he liked me at all, though it was hard to tell. The Winnowinn clan was known for their icy countenance, and Junco had a sense of humour that was difficult to detect. ‘What are you here for, anyway? I was under the vain hope that you and your clan were iced into that glacier permanently.’

  ‘Clan Mistress Isolde thought someone should come down and see the young Prince Ferdinand. Rumour was he was a magician.’

  ‘A magician?’ This was the first I’d heard of that. ‘The princess’s husband is a magician?’ That would change everything. Or would it? Princess Willow apparently dabbled in magic, and no one knew about that, either.

  ‘Not her husband yet,’ Junco reminded me. ‘And not a magician. He earned himself some faerie gifts is all, one of the clans in Illaria, where he comes from.’

  ‘He has faerie gifts?’

  ‘Just the typical questing beasts. The horse that can outrun the wind, the hound that can track through water, the hawk that can tell you the route to take. Their magic is all expired by now, of course. Fool still clings to them like a child’s doll. Still, they won’t throw bad offspring, he’s not wrong to keep them.’

  ‘You were at court?’ I asked.

  ‘No, strictly incommunicado, this visit. Only keeping the clan abreast of the changes in the wind.’

  ‘You don’t sense any change in the opinion on magic?’

  ‘Not a whiff,’ Junco said. ‘This new prince’s affection for faerie magic might even make things harder on those like us, since he seems to be causing some political troubles. Scratch that, things can’t get much harder for you.’

  ‘Thanks ever such,’ I muttered.

  ‘The death of Prince Dani and Princess Lavender’s betrothal to Ferdinand has caused some tension between the Lyndar and the Hiedel. Apparently King Lesli has come up himself for Midwinters.’

  ‘Hope he starts a war,’ I muttered.

  ‘He may,’ Junco told me. ‘At least that’s what his guards are thinking. You might want to scout out a place to hole up if that happens.’

  I glared at him. ‘I suppose you expect me to thank you.’

  ‘No,’ Junco said. ‘Not you.’

  ‘God of Death!’ shouted someone from the kitchen. A half-rate middle-aged necromancer we called Riverbottom, due to both his area of operations and his personality, came running through the hallway, nearly crashing into both of us. Without pausing to apologize he waved a broadsheet in the air and dived into the drawing room shouting, ‘Witch! Get over here, you’ve got to hear this!’

  Junco and I glanced at each other, and then followed after him. I let Junco go first, and when we entered the dilapidated drawing room I stayed as far from him as possible. I may not be obviously a faerie, but I wasn’t so dull-witted as to stand beside one and let people notice the similarities.

  The whore stood in the centre of the drawing room staring at the broadsheet, which she had clearly snatched from Riverbottom. The whore was less than twenty, and used glamour to entice her customers. She was actually quite hideously ugly, her face pockmarked, with a long, crooked nose, a cleft palate and several teeth knocked out by her drunken father. But when she put on her glamour, even I found my eyes drawn to her, and I could see through it if I squinted. Today she was wearing an image that was almost, but not quite, the mirror of the Princess Lavender, her autumn-colored hair twisted into a bun to show her graceful neck. ‘Read this!’ she was saying to the witch. The witch perused the broadsheet and rolled her eyes. ‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘Just gossip.’

  ‘Oh, do it!’ Riverbottom said. ‘You read better than I do.’

  ‘Come on!’ the whore pleaded. ‘Have a little pity. Read it aloud.’ The whore, like most of the lower classes, couldn’t read. I was fortunate in that my mother had taught me how. Nameless we may have been, but our clan had once held good standing in Lyndaria.

  The witch sighed. ‘I didn’t learn to read so I could spill worthless gossip at street urchins,’ she muttered, but she turned her eyes back to the broadsheet. ‘Princess Willow Takes Ill at Court,’ she read. She looked up. ‘That enough for you?’

  ‘You know it’s not,’ the whore squealed. ‘Read the whole thing!’

  ‘It’s worth it,’ Riverbottom said with a chuckle.

  The witch sighed. She believed she was better than most of the rabble at the club, and she was probably right. She was a middle-aged herbwoman who was once an apothecary’s apprentice, but was banished from the guild for poisoning someone. (I never knew if it was on accident or by design.) Now she eked out a meagre living by mixing small charms, most of which were pure fancy, but some of which smelled nice. The whore bounced up and down with excitement. She preferred news about the heiress, but Princess Willow was almost as exciting. I had to admit, I was a bit curious myself. Had the Princess been ill? Was that why she was looking at magic?

  ‘Queen Amaranth’s youngest daughter Willow was taken ill with brain fever today at the reception of Hiedelen’s king, and Lyndaria’s one-time regent, King Lesli.’ The article continued on about the history of the two families, but I tuned most of that out trying to arrange myself across the room from Junco, somewhere in a shadow.

  ‘Princess Willow was heard to question, “Why waste the revenue in revitalizing forests?” thereby proving her ignorance of the pertinent issues. Later on she was heard to sound her opinion for war, citing needed revenue as a legitimate reason. It is in the opinion of this chronicler that our “Princ
ess Will” should be “Princess Won’t”.’

  More than half the room groaned at the pun. The tale went on that Princess Willow began to feel flushed and faint, and the queen and Princess Lavender led her into the antechamber to try and refresh her. ‘Whereupon the princess, shrieking at hallucinated demons, fell senseless to the floor. There was some speculation that the Great Sleep had again come to the palace, but it quickly became apparent that the only problem was with Witless Willow herself.’

  I didn’t listen to the rest of the agony sheet, which had clearly been written as salaciously as possible. The idea of the Princess Willow falling into a dead faint had caused the wheel to spin in my mind. ‘Excuse me,’ I muttered to no one in particular, and skirted back up the stairs to the collapsed room we called ‘the observatory’.

  The observatory was an upstairs chamber on which the roof and one wall had fallen in. It enabled one to look out over the city, but more importantly, to my mind, it enabled me to look out at Rose Palace, looming over the rest of the town like a great spiky dragon.

  I pulled out my drop spindle and dug in my bag to measure my wool. I didn’t have much. I usually tried to save it, portion it out sparingly. It was a consistent nudge in my mind – unspun wool made me uncomfortable. Even to think of it was to make my hands itch to spin it into thread. But to spin it up meant I could not spin it into spells, and that left me helpless. What I wouldn’t have given for a immense flock of sheep, an entire barn full of wool or flax, enough to keep me spinning until my fingers bled and I itched all over with loose fibres.

  I’d have given even more for a true spinning wheel. When I was a child, our ma still kept one, before hardship and fear had broken her. We’d had to leave it behind in one of our moves, and I remembered seeing it thrown on the fire. It had felt as if I’d lost a member of the family. I hadn’t seen another spinning wheel from that day to this. I made do with the drop spindles I made myself. I still ached for the feel of a wheel at my fingertips, for a treadle to push, the gentle whirr-click of the footman turning the wheel.

  No matter. There was only one spinning wheel left in the entire kingdom of Lyndaria, and it was under lock and key at the palace. And I had no flock of sheep, no acres of land on which to plant flax. I had only what wool I could rescue from thorn bushes. Once I’d stolen a whole bag of fleece from a shipment that was on its way to Hiedelen for processing. That had been a glorious year, with enough wool to keep me in spells to my heart’s content, so long as I was careful. But the wool had been used up all too soon.

  All the wool I had in my shirt was all the wool I had in the world. And all the wool I would have until spring, when, with luck, I could steal a fleece, or at least follow the flocks to pull wool from the brambles again. It wasn’t much wool at all, and even carded as carefully as I could manage it, it was very poor quality. But maybe, if I used all of it, it would be enough.

  I was going to take my revenge on the Lyndar line. I wasn’t cruel. I wasn’t going to kill them. But they deserved to be punished for my life, for the kit’s life, for every terrible thing that they and their laws and their supposed morality had taken from me. They deserved to hurt. And I would make them hurt. I would remind them of our power, and I would make them hurt.

  I pulled the thread that I had already spun off my spindle and folded it carefully into a skein. Sometimes I could do things with the thread itself, though it was easier to only spin the magic, rather than try to twist it out of already established thread. There was nothing wrong with the thread I’d already spun, except that it was spun sunwards, toward my right. I knew, for this kind of curse, I would need to spin widdershins.

  Widdershins meant turning the spindle to the left, and was better for darker and more sinister magic. I didn’t use it very often, usually only for defensive spells to protect myself or my family. Using a piece of thread from my old spinning I attached a leader thread to the spindle. I drew the fibres out from the wool and set the spindle off. The leader thread slowly unwound, then rewound widdershins, drawing the new wool with it. The spell drew itself from me as the thread drew itself from the wool.

  The spell took me with it as the thread wound tight. I didn’t simply spin a sleep. I spun my hatred. I spun in every stone that had ever been thrown at me, I spun every woman who had ever spurned me, I spun every cold, wet night without shelter. I spun in my fear for the kit and my anger at my father, who had abandoned me just when I needed him most. I spun in my resentment of my mother, who refused, blatantly refused to spin to make us safe. I spun in hunger. I spun in fear. I spun in despair. I even spun in that terrible day in the meadow, though it nearly made me sick to think of it. I spun all of this into the wool and wrapped it around and around the spindle.

  By the time I was done I could barely look at the thing. It fairly reeked of my hatred. This wasn’t simply spinning magic. This was a Nameless spell. I could see that Light would not shine upon this thread. I wanted to smile at my handiwork, but it made me feel ill. I was exhausted, and rightly so. I’d woven half my life to date into that thread of sleep. A thread of sleep with dreams. Those who fell victim to my sleep would not be granted peace. They would suffer the nightmare of my existence, the horror of Namelessness, the brunt of all the bigotry, the pain of every jibe and jab, every stick and stone. It was high time they knew how it felt. Them with their palace and their high name and their fancy victuals.

  The only problem was how to set it? The spell was wound into the wool, but how to turn my sleep loose upon the palace? My aunt had used a spinning wheel with a sharp spindle, a pointed metal tip which would work the spell into the blood. I couldn’t do that, not with a wooden drop spindle. But what could I do?

  The answer came as I let the spindle go. The top of the thread came unwound, and some of the spell weakened with it. That was it! I took the remainder of my wool and spun in a catchment. When the thread was unwound the spell would take. Without being able to bring it into the bloodstream it would only work for a day and a night, but that was enough. A day and a night of contagious sleep, and all who woke would have suffered the same nightmare. Until the thread was destroyed, it would keep weaving its way into its occupants, knocking them to sleep again and again. Perhaps it would take some days to discover that my thread was the source of the spell. Perhaps people would keep falling into nightmares, on and off, for months. I liked that idea. I hoped it would take Queen Amaranth. And that foolish clod of a husband of hers, too. And that prissy little Lavender and her dashing swain. They deserved a taste of my fate.

  I could trust that curious dabbler of a younger princess to wonder what the spindle was, and unwrap some of the thread. She wouldn’t even know what a drop spindle looked like, most likely. She’d think it was an ordinary spool, such as was imported all the time. All I’d have to do was plant it on her, and hope she’d wait until she got to the palace before anyone discovered it.

  I felt pretty good about myself as I left the club. Of course, it would all depend on whether or not the wretched little princess would show up at all.

  Chapter 6

  Will

  Will was carried to her bedroom, changed into a fresh, warm dayrobe, tucked into bed, fussed and fretted over, poked at by a leech, and finally diagnosed ‘overtired’ and surrounded by warm blankets. She artfully opened her eyes when the healer came by, so that things wouldn’t get too out of control. Then she pretended to get back to sleep until everyone left.

  Almost everyone. Someone remained, waiting by the fire. Will opened her eyes, expecting to see her chambermaid, but it was her father. ‘Don’t they need you downstairs?’ she asked quietly.

  Ragi smiled. ‘Despite having known the man since I was born, your mother is far more gifted at diplomacy with King Lesli. Possibly because of that, actually. He hasn’t liked me since I spilled cider on his throne when I was four. He sat down before he’d noticed it.’ Ragi pulled his chair over to Will’s bed and lifted her non-injured hand. Her right hand still felt like it was on fire, but it
hurt less than the pain of simply being Will. ‘How are you?’

  ‘My hand hurts.’

  ‘Let’s see what we can do about that.’ He went to the window and swung it open on its hinges. ‘Ah!’ He took Will’s face bowl and filled it with snow from the windowsill. ‘Here,’ he said, bringing it back. ‘Put your hand in this.’

  Will did. He was right. The pain diminished almost instantly. The cold hurt, but not nearly as badly. ‘Thanks,’ Will said. ‘Does Mother know you’re here?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. He sat at the edge of her bed and pushed a tendril of hair off her brow. ‘Now that no one’s trying to make you apologize, you want to tell me what happened this afternoon?’

  ‘You don’t want me to apologize?’

  He looked away for a moment. ‘Politically speaking, it would probably be best,’ he said. ‘Though I’m not so sure. It might just bring everything back up again. Your mother has a much more generous opinion of Uncle Les.’

  That made sense. ‘Do you think this will start a war?’

  ‘Not since your artful faint,’ Ragi laughed. ‘It might make things difficult with Lavender, though. If you aren’t a fit consort for Narvi, that would count against her.’

  Will groaned, her heart breaking in three separate pieces. She often hated her sister just for being as perfect as she was, but she was still her sister. Will loved her, too. Between her and Ferdinand and the good of the country, Will felt in the worst possible situation. ‘What can I do?’ Will asked.

  Ragi shook his head. ‘I honestly don’t know.’ He patted her hand. ‘You don’t really want to marry Narvi, do you.’

  Will sighed. ‘I don’t hate him or anything.’

  ‘But how can you love a young boy?’ he asked. ‘It must seem as if Lavender gets everything, doesn’t it?’