Spindle's End

by Robin McKinley

  The thought of the queen, in particular, hurt Katriona so badly she began to talk to her in her head. The king at least had his ruling to get on with; the queen was only his consort, when it came down to it, a foreigner in her husband’s country, there to be his wife—and to bear and raise his children.

  At first the things she thought of to say to the queen were no more than a kind of mental pushing-away of discomfort; she said them in the same crisp, no-nonsense way that one might say a charm to a water nymph of uncertain temper known to reside there before crossing her stream; you do it, and you go on. But that didn’t work for long, and as Rosie grew older, and there were more things to tell, Katriona began to organise little stories about her, about how clever and charming and infuriating and darling she was, stories to give a mother’s love somewhere to go, somewhere to live, something to do besides endlessly grieve. . . .

  Katriona fell into the habit of doing this at night, in bed, as she felt sleep creeping near her, because it comforted her to pretend to comfort the queen; and she had, over the years, built up a fantasy of the queen, whom she remembered a little from the fateful name-day, although she had not been anything like close enough to see that she had eyes just like Rosie’s (although her eyelashes were not so long), and her nose had a tiny bump in it, and there was a small mole low on her left cheek, which was how she saw her now.

  She imagined a bedroom for her, too, because she imagined the queen falling asleep as she was, and Katriona’s drowsy words slipping into her mind in that cloudy gap between waking and sleep. The bedroom was not large, but it was tall and light, with big windows that would make it very bright by day, when the curtains were drawn back; even late at night, the few dim lamps that stood in niches between the windows lit up the whitewashed walls and the white hangings round the queen’s bed. It was never fully dark in the queen’s bedroom; whether that was the queen’s choice or that of those who guarded her, Katriona had never decided. It was a surprisingly small and bare room for a queen, but Katriona thought that must be her own inability to imagine what a queen might have in her bedroom. It was just as small and bare when it was sometimes some other room, whitewashed still, and lit by small lamps in niches, but with small, high, barred windows, as if the queen were in some fastness, pretending to keep her daughter company.

  Katriona snuggled down in her own bed, looking, behind her shut eyes, at the queen lying on her pillow, her long hair in a single plait and the neck of her nightgown as white and plain as her bed hangings. Rosie was very busy watching the dragonflies today, Katriona told the queen. She loved the colours of them, and the darting way they moved, and the way they can stop in the air, as if they were looking back at you. I was glad of the excuse to do no more, for a moment, than stand there with her and watch dragonflies, too, as if I were another child.

  The queen had been smiling about Rosie and the dragonflies, but as Katriona said I was glad of the excuse to do no more than stand there with her, her face crumpled, and tears crept out from under her closed eyelids. “Oh, Queen,” said Katriona in distress, and, in her mind, reached out to brush the tears away—and the queen opened her eyes, sat up in bed, and grasped Katriona’s hand.

  Katriona felt the queen’s hand on hers, felt the strength of it, the reality of it—her own fingers a little pinched together, the queen’s fingers across the back of her hand, and the bar of her thumb across Katriona’s palm.

  Katriona gave a little throttled squeak; she would have liked to say something, something like, Oh, help, what have I done? but her voice wouldn’t come. The queen seized her other hand and leaned forward to look into her face, and whispered, “I know you. I have seen you many nights since I lost my daughter, and you have told me of her. Sigil told me how she sent my daughter away to save her, and I remember Pernicia’s face and I know Sigil was right; but oh—I miss my child so much! I feel as if the very strength of my longing for her must make me guilty of risking her life. I have thought—feared—believed I only dreamed you, for how could it be otherwise: My longing would have created you, if you had not come.

  “Tell me you are real. I dare not ask nor hear your name, nor where you live, nor how you come here. But tell me, while my waking eyes are on you, and I can feel your blood beating under my fingers, that you are real, that it is you who have my daughter, that the stories you tell of her are true stories—for by them I know that you love her—that it is for love of her that you have the pity to come to me. Speak—you must speak—but keep your voice low, for my waiting-women are always near, because I do not sleep well, not any night since I lost my daughter. Speak words that I can remember—then it will be worth it to me to have lost you, too—for after this you cannot come again.”

  Katriona made a great effort, for however it was that she sat on the queen’s bed, she was also lying in her own bed many leagues distant. Her heart was beating too fast, and she was having trouble breathing, as if her body were suddenly too big for her heart and lungs, and the pressure of the coverlet on the queen’s bed against the backs of her legs made her feel queasy. She spoke as if each word were a new thing that had to be created out of chaos: “I—I took her away with me, your daughter, on her name-day. It was I. I am real. I took her home. I have her still, I and my aunt. We love her. The stories you have heard me tell over the last four years are true stories. She is as safe with us as . . . as ordinariness can make her. We will not give her up. . . .”

  And then the queen, and the queen’s bedchamber, were gone, and she was gasping like a wood-spirit whose tree has just been cut down; and Aunt’s arms were round her. When her breath steadied, Aunt said, “I want you thoroughly awake before you try again to sleep. Come downstairs; I will make up the fire and brew you a tisane.”

  Katriona came, shivering with shock, her head still pounding and her breast aching, as if she had had to hold her breath for a long time. She sat in her usual chair, with her head flung back, and her eyes were drawn to the niche where the little iron cauldron stood; and it seemed to glow red in the near-darkness, though it might only have been the firelight, which Aunt had stirred again to brightness. Katriona lowered her head, to watch Aunt move around, choosing a few leaves from a little basket and a drop from a little bottle, adding water from the big kettle that always sat over the fire; and she saw that Aunt looked grim and haggard.

  When she handed Katriona the cup, Katriona drank it immediately, although it burned her mouth; but her head felt clearer. “I am sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know . . .” But then she thought of the queen’s grief, and she said, “I didn’t know. But I am not sure I am sorry.”

  Aunt was staring into the reviving flames. “I had no idea your magic was so strong yet,” she said. “I knew—I knew since they brought you to me—such a little thing you were, small for your age, and being shaken to bits by what was in you. That is, if you want to know, why I wrestled you away from your other aunts and uncles, who wished to reclaim you after—after the fits stopped. I knew what was in you would come out for good or ill; and I wished it to be for good.” She smiled a little. “I might have tried anyway, because I loved you, but I would have feared I was only being selfish.”

  Katriona’s eyes filled with tears. “Aunt . . . my magic isn’t really coming in. I have wanted you to be right, that I am a fairy like you—how I have wanted it—” The tears overflowed and fell down Katriona’s face. “But you are wasting your time, teaching me things, and you should have a real apprentice, not a . . . not because I am your niece. The magic . . . I do feel it, sometimes. But it just drains through me—it doesn’t stay. I can’t even talk to animals as I used to—you know that—maybe I did give it away, somehow, on that awful name-day—I’m glad it lasted long enough to get us home. It’s almost gone now, except for cats, and a fox, once or twice. I’ve thought that if a familiar found me . . . or like your robins . . . but no one has, and doesn’t that mean . . . for the rest, it’s just a great dark emptiness with a few broken scraps I can use when I can find them. The
things you teach me are still all easy, Aunt; you don’t know yet that I can’t go on; and I haven’t had the courage to tell you.”

  “My darling, I am the one to apologise. I have wondered what your magic has been doing with itself, because I have felt its presence; but I have also known it was not available to you somehow. I thought only to leave you alone a little longer, not to press you, as one does not ask much work out of a child who has outgrown its strength. I had no idea. . . . My fault. I should have been more suspicious. Kat, the things I teach you are not all easy.

  “What you describe is how it happens to everyone: magic does slide through you, and disappear, and come back later looking like something else. And I’m sorry to tell you this, but where your magic lives will always be a great dark space with scraps you fumble for. You must learn to sniff them out in the dark.

  “As for your beast-speech, I always suspected it was a form of baby-magic; not all baby-magic is chaotic, nor lasts only a few months or a year or two. That yours was both coherent and long-lasting—have I ever told you about my baby-magic?—told me again that I was right about you. But you became an adult, willy-nilly, when you broke through the boundary to rescue the princess, and so your baby-magic left you. It means nothing that you do not yet have your familiar; Cresitanova, one of the greatest fairies this country has ever had, did not find hers till she was forty-five.

  “Tonight—this is a tremendous magic you’ve done. It is no wonder there has been so little for us to work with here. For this was not the first time you have talked with the queen, is it?”

  Katriona shook her head miserably. “Almost from the beginning—more often later. But I thought I was just making it up. I thought I was just making it up. . . .”

  Aunt said, “It was generously meant, and where magic is concerned, well-intentioned mistakes are slightly less likely to catch you out later on. Did you tell her your name?”

  “No. She told me not to, nor where I came from; and she said I must not come again.”

  Aunt, for the first time, relaxed a little. “That was wise of her—wiser than you could expect of a mother speaking to a stranger who has her child. Did you tell her Rosie lived with two fairies?”

  “No. But she’ll have to know there was magic involved, won’t she?”

  “It is not the queen we must worry about, but Pernicia. But Pernicia may underestimate the queen, and, should she come to learn of the magic that sat on the queen’s bed tonight, she may guess it was some phantasm drawn up by some royal magician, to soothe the queen’s fears. After all, it had no name and no home. It is for this we will hope.”

  They did not know what Pernicia learnt or guessed of that night, but it was barely six weeks later when the news reached Foggy Bottom that someone or something had broken into the deep place in the western mountains, and that while the princess had been successfully defended and taken unharmed away, Fordingbridge was understood to be no longer secure or securable.

  “And,” said Shon, the carter from Turanga, the nearest city outside the Gig, “they’re not telling us where they’re keeping her, this time. They’re equipping and fortifying several strongholds, and they’ll defend ’em all, and maybe they’ll keep her at one or maybe they’ll move her round from one to another in secret—or maybe they’ll have other ones no one knows about and keep her there. They’re a-hiring more soldiers, and several of the biggest Academicians have left the Academy to work for the king, and they all figure it’s all going to be worth it to ’em, dividing up their brains and muscle like that”—because foremost in everyone’s minds was the fact that this first stronghold had been held by the the two best regiments of the army and the majority of the court magicians, and that this had not been enough.

  There was an interested murmur among the listeners—Shon’s appearance in the village always drew a few people, hopeful of news, to the pub—but it was Cairngorm’s voice Katriona heard clearly: “She’s safe now,” Cairngorm repeated, loyal subject of their majesties and mother of two daughters. “She is safe now.”

  “Yes,” said Shon positively. “The magicians saw what was coming, and the soldiers got her away. She’s fine.”

  This was said over the head of Rosie, who was making her determined way through furniture- and people-legs toward Cairngorm’s big ginger cat, Corso, who, eyes half shut and watchful, permitted her approach. Katriona had come in for a jug of the pub’s excellent cider. Flora had drawn it for her, and now, trying not to clutch it as if it were a baby in danger of kidnapping, Katriona gave Rosie a minute to say hello before she went after her. She felt at such a moment even saying Rosie’s name aloud would draw the wrong sort of attention to her. (Rosie squatted down with her knees under her chin, peering, but courteously sidelong, into Corso’s face. Corso turned his head just enough to make it easy for her but not too easy. Katriona had noticed before that Rosie, unlike most small children, did not make the mistake of trying to fondle an animal when it had given no indication of any desire to be fondled by a small child. It seemed to Katriona ironic that Rosie apparently had a better grasp of animal etiquette than human.)

  Flora, who had taken Katriona’s silence as politeness, laughed, as her friend sidled out of the door with the jug in one hand and a smaller, stickier hand in the other. “You’re acting as if they could be interrupted,” she said. “You could beat them all over the head with a stick, yelling ‘fire!’ and they wouldn’t turn a hair. This is news, Kat. Don’t you understand about news?”

  “It’s just so awful for the king and queen,” muttered Katriona. “I keep thinking, if it were my—I used to dream about the queen, sometimes.”

  Flora sobered. “Yes, you’re right. But the princess is alive and well and safe, Kat. Remember that. The queen is probably giving her an amazing high tea right now—has done every day since they escaped—just in relief that everything came out all right. All the jam scones she can eat, and three kinds of cake.”

  “Yes, probably,” said Katriona.

  Spear, returning from outdoor dog business, paused beside them and deigned to bow his head to be kissed on the nose: Rosie was only just tall enough. Still clinging to one of Spear’s ears with her free hand, she said alertly, “Cake?”

  “We’re going home to tea now,” Katriona told her.

  “We’re going to have cake,” said Rosie. “Like the princess.”

  “You tell ’em,” said Flora.

  Rosie, sensing Katriona’s mood (and with a mind to the possibility of cake), permitted her hand to be held for quite three minutes after they had left the pub. Once they were off the short village main street Katriona allowed her to drag herself free and run off to speak to a small huddle of village sheep, which had wandered to this edge of the common. Katriona could see a small boy with a stick who, she suspected, was fast asleep, but the sheepdog with him was awake and aware. Several of the sheep left their grazing long enough to butt gently against Rosie; some faces she petted, also gently, and some backs she scratched (her small arm disappearing nearly to the shoulder in the soon-for-shearing wool), as if she knew which each sheep would like best; and none of them baaed or stamped or defiantly urinated in the way of sheep wishing to see off an intruder. “Come on then,” Katriona said, when Rosie had greeted all the sheep in the little group surrounding her. “Don’t you want your tea?”

  “Cake!” said Rosie happily, and came. “Don’t frown,” she said, looking up. “We can have a picnic, and pretend we’re the king and the queen and the princess. You can be the princess. I’m going to be the king.”

  She is as safe with us as ordinariness can make her. What a pathetic defence!

  CHAPTER 8

  Katriona had always worried that some one of the fairy gifts she hadn’t heard was a crucial one, and some day it would expose Rosie for what she was and that would be that: and that night, after Rosie was asleep (full of gingerbread, which she had accepted as a reasonable substitute for cake), she blurted this out to Aunt.

  Aunt answered so qu
ickly Katriona knew she had thought of this herself. “It is unlikely that any of the wishes you did not hear were substantially unlike those you did. But I think you should also have a little more faith in our Rosie. Look at how many of the wishes she has vitiated merely by being herself. Since she seems unable to carry a tune, the undoubted sweetness of her singing voice is irrelevant; that roar that serves her for a laugh might be bell-like if one could find a bell suitable for comparison purposes. What would it be made of, one wonders? Most of the village children before they’re her age are already trying to learn the round dances on the feast days; you know Rosie’s views on dancing.”

  (“Stupid,” were Rosie’s views, and, if not bound by potent promises, she would disappear into the shadows at the edge of the feast-day bonfire, looking for better sport.)

  “I feel certain she’ll feel the same about flute playing. We can omit teaching her to embroider or to—to spin, which omission will please her; we will ask Barder to teach her to whittle instead, in a few more years. There are no golden ringlets, although I admit the eyelashes are a little conspicuous. That astonishing skin of hers only makes her moods transparent—which you have to admit is useful, although she will dislike it very much when she is older—and with that complexion I think she’d have the lips anyway. The teeth, I feel, are rather attractive.”

  Aunt was right, except perhaps about the teeth, which glowed in the dark very slightly; but by the time Rosie had a husband, who was likely to be the only other person in a position to notice, presumably she would be a princess again, and the teeth could be explained.