Spindle's End

by Robin McKinley

  CHAPTER 2

  The shape of the country was rectangular, but there was a long wiggling finger of land that struck down southeast and a sort of tapering lump that struck up northwest. The southeast bit was called the Finger; the northwest lump was called the Gig, because it might be guessed to have some resemblance to the shape of a two-wheeled vehicle with its shafts tipped forward to touch the ground. The royal city lay a little north of the Finger, in the southeast corner, nearly a month’s journey, even with frequent changes of horses and a good sprinkling of fairy dust for speed, to the base of the Gig.

  The highways that bound most of the rest of the country together gave out at the beginning of the Gig. The local peer, Lord Prendergast, said, reasonably, that he (or his forebears) would have built a highway if there had ever been any need, but there never had been. Nothing exciting ever happened in the Gig, or at least hadn’t since the invasion of the fire-wyrms about eleven hundred years ago, before the days of highway-building. So if you wanted to go there you went on cart tracks. (The lord’s own travelling carriages were very well sprung, and he would upon occasion send them to fetch his less well equipped, or more easily bruised, friends and associates outside the Gig.)

  And what you needed, muttered the royal herald, bearer of a little pouch of cheat-proof lots (almost empty now) and important tidings about the princess’ name-day, was not swift horses but six-legged flat-footed ponies that could see in thick mist and the green darkness of trees. He had given up riding, after his fancy thoroughbred had put its foot in a gap of root and stumbled, for the umpty-millionth time, and he was now leading it, half an eye anxiously upon it, for he thought it was going a bit lame. He sneezed. Also needed were human beings impervious to cold and damp. The Gig was a damp sort of place, and most of its village names reflected this: Foggy Bottom, Smoke River, Dewglass, Rain-hill, Mistweir. Moonshadow didn’t sound very promising either, although at least it didn’t utterly guarantee wet; and the last village of the Gig, right out next to the wild lands where no one went, was called Treelight. He had thought this was a very funny name when he was setting out from the royal city. It was less funny now, with the leaves overhead dripping down his neck, and he not yet arrived at the first village of this soggy province. He sneezed again.

  To think that Lord Prendergast preferred to live out here and leave his seat at court empty from year’s end to year’s end! There must be some truth in the stories about that family, and the house they lived in, Woodwold, a vast mysterious place, a thousand years old or more, full of tales and echoes of tales, and with some uncanny connection with the people that lived in it. But it was still a grand and beautiful house—grand enough for a highway to have been built to get to it. Except it hadn’t been.

  The herald blinked, distracted. The sun had suddenly cut through the leaf cover and a gold-green shaft of light fell across his path. He looked at the sunbeam, scowling; there was no reason, this far off the highway and with soggy leaf-mould the chief road surface, for there to be so much dust to dance in a sunbeam. The thick dust and moist air would conspire to leave ineradicable chalky smudges on his livery. He sighed again. Maybe Foggy Bottom—which should be the first village he came to—would have a blacksmith who could look at his horse’s foot.

  Foggy Bottom had heard of the princess’ birth as quickly as the rest of the country; one of the village fairies had a particular friend who was a robin whose wife’s cousin’s sister-in-law was closely related to a family of robins that lived in a bush below the queen’s bedroom window, and had heard the princess’ first startled cry. Foggy Bottom was expecting something like the herald (and was accustomed to travellers who had never been to the Gig before, by the time they reached Foggy Bottom, looking cross and rather the worse for wear), but were not at all expecting his announcement.

  They had turned out eagerly to hear him—this was one of those villages where the herald stood at the public watering-trough to make his proclamation—but they were only expecting some cushiony, royal adjectives to ornament the known fact of the young princess’ birth. They were so startled by the invitation to the name-day they forgot to relish her name.

  “From every village?” said Cairngorm, who ran the pub. There was a square, although it was not square, at the centre of the village, and the watering-trough stood across from the blacksmith’s, with the pub at ninety degrees, and the wrights’ yard opposite. The herald stood next to the watering-trough, as he said the familiar words, his natural inclination toward the pub in this case counterbalanced by his anxiety to learn if his horse was sound enough to go on.

  The herald stopped thinking about his horse and nodded. He still enjoyed this part, enjoyed creating astonishment, enjoyed watching the faces in front of him shift from pleased anticipation to surprise, even shock, enjoyed handing out the special cheat-proof long straw that would instantly look like all the other, ordinary straws as soon as it was laid among them. In the bigger villages the straw had to go to the mayor; the little villages were his call. He favoured pub proprietors; he thought Cairngorm would do nicely. “Every village. Heralds have been sent to every village—at least,” he amended, “every village we know about from the last census.”

  “If that don’t beat all,” said Grey, who had a farm outside the village and was only in town today because he had a broken plough-handle that had to be mended before he could get on with business. “Well, I can’t go.”

  “Make yourself popular by selling your lot!” shouted a friend across the heads of the crowd; several people laughed, and then the conversation became animated and general. Katriona, who had been standing with Cairngorm’s elder daughter, Flora, the two girls holding each other’s hands in excitement, said to her friend, “I must go!” ducked under a few arms and round a few bodies and fled back to her aunt’s house. “I told her she should come for the herald’s announcement!” she muttered between breaths. “I told her!”

  But when she burst in through the door and babbled out her news, her aunt was unflustered, and her hand holding the spindle, and her foot on the pedal, never faltered, and the woolen thread went on spinning itself fine and true. “I’m not at all surprised,” she said, although she let her wheel come to a stop so she could hug her frantic niece into some calm. “I’ve always liked the queen; robins don’t nest outside just anyone’s window.” Katriona’s aunt was the fairy whose robin friend had told her of the princess’ birth. She was generally considered the best fairy in Foggy Bottom; some said in the entire Gig.

  The herald was gone the next day after a merry evening telling stories about the royal family (some of them true) in Cairngorm’s pub, and a beautiful sleep in her best feather mattress. He had been able to give himself over to jollity because the blacksmith had told him his horse would, after all, be able to go on the next day—although he had had a funny way of putting it, almost as if some magic would be worked overnight, which in a smith’s forge was, of course, nonsense. Smiths were often rather enigmatic—it was one of the perquisites of the job—as was the face-obscuring thatch of beard which this smith did not have. Perhaps that was the reason the herald had found him odd; he had never seen a clean-shaven smith before.

  The herald was a little sorry about the early start in the morning—wistfully recalling the beer of the night before, thinking that perhaps there was something to be said for some bits of the back of beyond—but his horse was waiting for him, snorting red-nostrilled at dust motes and dancing round on all four feet uniformly. The herald looked at him a bit waspishly; he wanted a riding-animal, not an adventure. The smith said neutrally: “He’ll have got used to our roads by now. You just climb on and point him.” And hang on, thought the herald, and was catapulted down the village street in the direction of Smoke River.

  The lot-drawing was held that same evening in Foggy Bottom. There was some joshing with Katriona’s aunt and Nurgle, the laundress, and especially Snick, who wasn’t a real fairy but couldn’t help winning at cards, and one or two other of the local fairies
, about not using magic to mind how the lots went—and with Katriona herself, although she kept shaking her head and saying, “I don’t do that, you know I don’t do that,” while her aunt, who could but wouldn’t (and was privately rather disparaging about the magicians’ supposedly tamper-proof lot), only smiled and said something bland, and Snick, who didn’t think he could but wasn’t sure and couldn’t do anything about it if he did, looked worried. Foggy Bottom liked its fairies—Nurgle was even married—and didn’t make them hold sprigs of hawthorn and rowan as charms against magical meddling, as some towns had done—although Snick had a bit of both in his pocket, just in case.

  There was a hush as everyone drew—Grey held the straws, because he had declined either to have a lot or to bestow it on anyone else—and as more and more were drawn, and fewer and fewer were left in Grey’s fist, the tension was pulled tighter and tighter. But Gash, who had drawn last, held up his straw, the same length as all the other losing straws, and said, “Then who has it?”

  There was a silence, and Katriona burst into tears. Cairngorm made her way to the girl’s side—her aunt already had an arm around her—and prised her fingers open. There lay the single long straw.

  “You knew,” Katriona said to her aunt later, when they were back home again. Katriona was sitting so close to the fire that her face was starting to scorch and in a minute her heavy petticoats would start to burn her legs. The heat and brightness were reassuring, as if she were about to be drawn away to some cold dark unguessable fate. The tap and whir of her aunt’s spinning wheel went on behind her. “You knew. I thought it was funny you came to the drawing. I knew you’d never go to the name-day even if you drew the long straw. You knew I was going to.”

  “Well, yes,” admitted her aunt. “It was a surprise to me—knowing, I mean; I haven’t had a pre-vision since you were a tiny child and I saw you would come to me. I hadn’t known about the invitation till you told me, but it stood out so very clearly that you would draw the long lot I knew it must be true. I thought it might come as rather a shock to you, and I wanted to be there when it happened.”

  “Maybe I won’t go.”

  Tap. Whirr. “Why not?”

  “You admitted you wouldn’t go.”

  Her aunt laughed. “I’m an old lady, and I like to sleep in the same bed every night, and . . . I hear more from my robin than I tell you, not because I don’t want to, but because I can’t.” Katriona knew about this. Beast-speech often didn’t translate even when you’d think it should. “I know as much about the royal family as I need to. I think you’ll like the little princess. I think you should go.”

  “I won’t get near enough to like or dislike her,” said Katriona. “She’ll just be a lot of gold and white and lavender silk with pink and white rosettes.” One of the translatable things the robin had told her aunt was how the cradle would be decorated.

  “I’ll give you a safety charm,” said her aunt. “So you won’t be eaten by bears or attacked by robbers. I can even give you a charm so that there are never stones under your blanket when you lie down to sleep at night.” Katriona laughed, but the laugh quickly faded and her face was moody as she stared into the fire. “My dear,” said her aunt. “It’s a rather overwhelming enterprise, I know.”

  Katriona moved abruptly away from the fire and began to flap the front of her skirt to cool it off. “I haven’t been farther than Treelight since . . . since . . .”

  “Since your parents died and you came to live with me,” her aunt said gently. “Yes, I know.”

  “And I’ve never been off the Gig since then.”

  “What better reason to go farther than the invitation to the princess’ name-day? You go, dear. Go and have a wonderful time. I’ll be very interested to hear what you have to say about everything. Robins tend to see the big and the little and leave out all the human-sized bits in the middle.”

  And so Katriona went.

  Barder, who was the wheelwright’s First Apprentice, offered to go with her—“Not the whole way,” he said, peering at her anxiously. “I’m not trying to take what isn’t offered,” —although the herald had made the usual unofficial announcement that a friend or two of the person with the long lot would not be turned away. “But—it’s a long road, all on your own. He’d let me off, if I asked,” he added, meaning his master, Sarkon.

  “Thanks,” she said. “But I’ll be all right. Aunt’s giving me charms for everything, from robbers to midges.”

  Barder smiled. The entire village called Katriona’s aunt Aunt; hardly anyone remembered her real name, which was Sophronia.

  “Luck, then,” he said, and held out his hand, the fingers curled round something. Katriona held out her own, and felt the something dropped gently in her palm, and then his fingers closed hers over whatever it was he had given her. She resisted the urge to look at it immediately, but felt herself blush, for they were not declared sweethearts. Barder said lightly, “Did Aunt give you a memory charm so you’ll remember everything to tell us when you come back?”

  “I’ll ask her for one.”

  Barder’s gift was a little flat medallion of ash, carved, like the plaque over the door of Cairngorm’s pub, in the shape of an egret; but while the pub’s egret stood, gazing over the green marsh at its feet, Barder’s egret curled into the small oval space, its long neck folded gracefully back against its body, its long legs tucked out of sight. Even in so tiny an area Barder had cut the feathers to perfection; Katriona half-expected them to yield under her touch as she stroked them. “A memory charm, eh?” said Aunt, admiring the egret. “He’s given you his own charm, I think, a charm for remembering where to come back to.”

  “Barder isn’t—”

  “Not that kind of magic,” said Aunt. “But real for all that.”

  There was quite a little party gathered outside the pub to see Katriona off; she would rather not have been seen off by anyone but Aunt, but too many people asked when she was leaving, and Aunt said, “You’re going for all of us, you know. You can bear a few extra hopes and wishes.”

  She was going on foot; she carried a blanket and a few extra clothes, and she would be swifter on her own feet than on any pony she and her aunt could afford to hire. Local beasts (barring Lord Prendergast’s) tended to be the stolid sort. What money they could spare was done up in a small secret parcel hidden in her petticoat. Her major encumbrance, though they were no burden, were her aunt’s charms; there were so many of them she had tied them to her belt with bits of string, and they fanned and dangled and shimmered out round her as if she wore an extra skirt curiously made of what looked like the contents of a magpie’s nest. But these would feed and comfort and protect her on her journey; and of course she had her own odd talent, although she had rarely found it what anyone could call useful, herself especially. She waved self-consciously as she turned to go, and everyone waved back. Even the smith, whose name was Narl, came to the front of his yard and lifted the sledge he was carrying in acknowledgement of her adventure.

  The long green tree-tunnel the herald hadn’t liked was pleasant to her; when she came upon the first highway at the end of the Gig and the beginning of the great sprawl of her native land, she was amazed. The plains before her seemed to stretch out forever, or almost forever, for there were mountains at one end of them, and she had never seen mountains before. Nor had she ever seen anything like the meandering muddle of buildings and yards that made up the towns she passed through. She had been too young to remember the journey to her aunt in the Gig after her parents died, but she would have sworn she had never seen anything like what she saw now in her life.

  She met other people on their way to the name-day, although she was the only one she saw who went alone, a fact that gave her a certain dubious satisfaction; some people seemed to have brought their entire villages with them, or at least their entire families. Many people were well hung round with charms from their own fairies; she began to suspect that first-time travellers were recognisable by the number an
d elaborateness of their charms.

  Katriona made good time. She was a quick walker, and deft, and easily wove her way through slower, larger, and clumsier processions. When the high roads were too crowded she took to the fields and forests; animals never troubled her, and she was too well-bred a country girl to tread on anyone’s crop. At first she foraged for her food, but the closer she came to the royal city the fewer wild lands there were; she was not sorry for the excuse to buy herself the occasional hot cooked meal at a pub or inn, but mostly she fed herself from market stalls. One of her aunt’s charms let her know which stall-keepers were honest.

  Another of her aunt’s charms let her sleep in trees without rolling out, so when she could find no haystack nor barn nor hedgerow she liked the look of, she found a tree instead. Sleeping in trees always gave her a stiff neck, but she preferred this to sleeping unhidden on the ground, marauder-charms notwithstanding.

  It took her fifty-one days to reach the royal city, where, possibly on account of the excellence of another of her aunt’s charms, she found herself a tiny cubby of a private room at a pub on the outskirts of the royal city, and prepared to wait the nine remaining days till the name-day.

  The cubby gave her claustrophobia, but the swarming streets were worse; she was by turns glad she was alone, and longed for a familiar face. She thought oftenest of Barder and Flora as companions, but she missed her aunt the worst. The noise of the crowd went on even at night. Every street performer in the entire country seemed to be here: tumblers, actors and singers; and the constant rising excitement of holiday with the known culmination of the royal name-day meant that more and more people got drunk and lively every night as well. Katriona took to sleeping with a pillow over her head, but it wasn’t enough. The pub gave her a special rate on her cubby in exchange for dish-washing and assisting the cook, and this helped to preserve her tiny stock of cash and to pass the time.