Spindle's End

by Robin McKinley

  When Rosie had begun speaking in paragraphs everyone but Aunt and Katriona waited for some spectacular outbreak of baby-magic. None occurred. The villagers teased Katriona and her aunt about it, but teased them rather crossly, because they felt cheated of some good and deserved entertainment. Even with two experienced fairies watching her like hawks, Rosie, knowing Rosie, should have been able to get off at least one marvel before they bagged her. There were bets on it, and the odds were on Rosie. The two fairies smiled at anyone who brought the subject of Rosie’s likely fairyhood up, Aunt placidly, Katriona nervously, because Katriona suspected Rosie was up to almost anything, even magic, even though she didn’t have any.

  Aunt was never forthcoming about her family but she let it be understood that the sister who was Rosie’s mother had had no magic herself, and had married a man from an entirely magicless family, and that everyone’s interest was misplaced. (Aunt wasn’t from the Gig. The story was that there had been a terrible row with her parents when the young Sophronia had decided to apprentice herself to a professional fairy; she had been expected to satisfy herself with descaling kettles, and to get on with ordinary life. No one knew if the story was true, although Katriona knew that the reason she herself had come to Aunt was that she had been thrown into so severe an irruption of baby-magic as a result of the shock of her parents’ death that all the local fairies working together had been unable to cope with her, and had informed the reluctant family that someone of her own blood had the best chance of doing so.)

  Many of the village households contained a minor, non-professional fairy who could tend the family water vessels and mild outbreaks of baby-magic in little fairies no more powerful than they were themselves; but it seemed to Foggy Bottom a bit rich that a family which had produced Aunt and Katriona could also have produced a little thug like Rosie if she wasn’t a fairy, too. But Rosie did no baby-magic.

  The nearest she came to it was befriending Narl, the village smith. Narl was odd even as smiths went, and most smiths were odd.

  In a country as magic-ridden as that one, you had to be a particular kind of very tough egg to choose to go into smithery. Fairies could and did, of course, live with and handle cold iron every day, but no fairy would choose to be a smith. (It was suggested that the reason so many fairies burnt themselves on kettles they were clearing was because those kettles were so often made of iron, and contact with iron made fairies absentminded.) It was not only that even a drop of fairy blood in a smith could cripple him with rheumatism while he was still young; magic hated cold iron, and tended to hang around smithies for a chance to make trouble, which, though only rarely successful, made the atmosphere round a forge rather thick. Fairies who visited forges almost always found themselves flapping their hands sharply in front of their faces as if troubled by midges, and even ordinary people sometimes batted away invisible specks that weren’t there. (Since Rosie’s conversation was vigorously illustrated with hand gestures, in and out of the smith’s yard, it was impossible to say if she was waving at invisible specks or not.)

  There was another more intriguing bit of folklore that said that truth was truth in a smith’s yard, but this had not been very rigorously tested, at least not for many years. There was an ancient story of the king, sixteen or eighteen generations ago, dragging his rival to a smith’s yard to demonstrate that he was the true heir and the other an impostor, but the story didn’t say what the demonstration had consisted of. And there was a tradition of moving deadlocked legal struggles to a smith’s yard for the truth to be discovered that way; but this was not at all popular with the smith whose yard it was, since legal truths have a way of emerging with excrutiating slowness.

  There was a more dubious bit of folklore concerning fairy smiths, but this was so manifestly nonsense that even children soon grew out of asking for tales of them, although the tales were good exciting ones full of adventures.

  Smiths were also the only men who were not expected to keep themselves clean shaven. This wasn’t precisely a law, as no contact with fish was a law, but it was rather more than a fashion, as it was rather more than a fashion to shave outdoors on the street (this was less strictly observed during hard winters), where anyone watching (although no one did, because it was something that happened every day) could see that proper sharpened steel was being used. If a man habitually shaved indoors and in private, there might be a story that went round that he was a fairy, and using copper, in case of accidents; and there was just that unease about strange or un-admitted fairy powers that this would not be well thought of. Fairies were fine, more or less, and you wouldn’t get through life in this country without their help; but you wanted to know when one was around. Wild magic and a bad heart, after all, had produced Pernicia.

  A boy’s first shave was an important rite of adulthood because it said that he put his baby-magic, if any, behind him permanently; and a man with a beard was as good as saying he was a fairy. Men with beards could expect to be asked for fairy aid, and to rouse anger if it were withheld, as if the man had lied or cheated. If you had a beard, you were a fairy—or a smith. And if you were a smith you wore an iron chain round your neck any time you were away from your own village, so that people recognised you.

  But Narl was clean shaven. His nickname—never repeated in his hearing—was Ironface, because his expression rarely varied, and he never spoke more than he had to.

  He was also notoriously resistant to children. This was hard luck on the young of Foggy Bottom, who would have hung round the forge to talk to the horses, if they could have. Rosie’s befriending him was more like real magic than baby-magic, and the more inexplicable for that. Especially since Rosie was generally talking nineteen to the dozen when Aunt or Katriona, having mislaid her, knew to try the forge first, and came to rescue her—or rather, him. Katriona, red faced, tried to apologise, the first time.

  “Don’t,” he said. “She’s welcome here.” There was a pause. Katriona could think of no suitable reply to this wholly uncharacteristic remark, and then Narl added, “I like her talk.”

  Katriona closed her hanging jaw with a snap, swallowed hard, said, “Oh—well—thank you,” and took Rosie (still talking) away with her. “He didn’t at all look like he was enjoying her company,” she said to Aunt later. “Of course he never does look like he’s enjoying anything. Or not enjoying anything, for that matter. But when he turns to you, with that great black apron and all that black hair, for a moment it’s a shock, as if he’s a bit of his own work come to life. You would think a small child would be afraid of him.”

  “Not Rosie,” said Aunt.

  “No,” agreed Katriona, half proud and half perplexed. “Not Rosie.” The soft thump of Aunt’s treadle continued undisturbed for several minutes and then Katriona said, “You know—about truth in a smith’s yard. You don’t think—”

  “No,” said Aunt. “I think she is probably safer with Narl than anywhere else. If it had occurred to me that such a friendship were possible, I would probably have tried to help it happen—which almost certainly would have been a mistake.”

  Katriona gave a muffled laugh; it was hard to imagine anyone influencing Narl to do anything, even Aunt. And Rosie herself was about as influenceable as the waxing and waning of the moon.

  After that first time, while Rosie was not exactly encouraged to run off and pester the smith, Katriona didn’t immediately go after her when she headed purposefully in that direction. But, after a good deal of wrestling with her conscience, she went to their priestling, the one who had written Rosie onto the Foggy Bottom register, and paid him to pray for her safety while in the smith’s yard: that she would not cut or bruise herself on cold iron, nor burn herself on hot, nor stand in just the wrong place when the fire, unbearably goaded by mischief-seeking magic, suddenly flared; nor any of the other things that can happen to a child in the way of grown-ups’ work. Katriona would have preferred a nice straightforward charm, but nice straightforward charms rarely worked in a smith’s yard. Any f
airy who discovered how to build a charm that would reliably pump a smith’s bellows, for example, would be set up for life; every smith in the country would want one. No one had. A priest’s prayers were better than nothing, and infinitely preferable to trying to dissuade Rosie from doing something she wanted to do. Prohibition was always a last resort in dealing with Rosie. Furthermore, Katriona had come to like the Foggy Bottom priest, because he was so obviously fond of Rosie; and the fact that she liked him, too, sweetened Katriona’s attitude still more, although the truth was that Rosie liked almost everybody.

  The betting on Rosie’s baby-magic was eventually wound up, to the great grief and frustration of everyone involved, and villagers found other things to gossip about. But what few people realised for some time was that Rosie really was talking to animals. And that they were really talking back.

  She had begun chattering to them as soon as she began talking, but she was a friendly little thing, and there were more animals than people round Aunt’s cottage, with the forest on one side and some of Lord Prendergast’s fields on the other. Although she spoke to animals no differently than she spoke to people, this was the sort of thing many children did, and if it was more marked in Rosie than in most children, there were many things about Rosie that were more marked than in most children.

  Rosie, as she grew older, more and more evidently waited for the animals she addressed to answer her—her face, with its transparent complexion, told any watcher that she believed they did answer her. The oddest thing, however, to the villagers’ minds, was that she slowly stopped speaking human language to animals. She would be found sitting or standing near Corso or Spear (the pub’s tall majestic wolfhound and best peacekeeper) or any of her other many animal friends, often both silent and not doing anything. Everyone knew Rosie never spent any time silent and not doing anything.

  Katriona came to fetch Rosie away from Narl’s one afternoon and discovered her looking into the eyes of a sweating, shivering colt, whose nose rested in her cupped hands. Katriona could see her fingers gently stroking the little knob under its chin. Narl squatted beside her, his empty hands dangling between his knees, his head level with hers, looking into the colt’s face as intently as she was.

  Rosie let out her breath in a long sigh, sounding very much like a horse herself, with a whuffle on the end of it; and as she moved, she moved as a horse moves, and bowed her head as a horse bows its head, for all that she had only two legs and a short human neck. The colt turned its head, and tentatively reached its nose toward Narl, who turned his own face to lay his cheek against its cheek. “I’ve told him you’re nice,” said Rosie. “It’s because you’re clean shaven, you see. He’s not going to stand around on three legs and let a clean shaven man do weird human things to his feet. Clean shaven men yell at you and yank your girth up too tight and flop onto your back as if they think they don’t weigh anything, and jab you in the belly with their feet.”

  “He’s not getting that handling from Pren’s folk,” murmured Narl, while the colt investigated his face with its lips. Its ears were easing, and beginning to prick forward.

  “No, but he did at his first place,” said Rosie, “and their blacksmith had a beard. Oh, hello, Kat. You’ll be all right now,” she said, as if to both Narl and the colt, and turned to Katriona. “I hope it’s teatime,” she said. “I’m hungry.”

  CHAPTER 9

  . . .And it was nothing to Narl. They were just having a conversation. Aunt, it was baby-magic! And her family has no magic! I don’t understand!”

  “Nor do I,” said Aunt, “but this has been going on under our noses for some time—probably from the beginning. Have you really not let yourself see?”

  Katriona’s eyes went involuntarily to the spinning wheel against the wall, with its blunt spindle. Barder had long ago made them a spindle end shaped like a little grinning gargoyle with wide-open and slightly popping eyes. It had a quite incredible number of teeth, but looking at it you had the impression it was a sort of watchdog, loyally protecting hearth and home. Katriona had laughed out loud with delight when Barder first handed it to her; since the little ashwood egret (which she wore round her neck on a bit of ribbon), Barder had been carving spoon and knife handles, but this was far more ambitious. Rosie had still been a baby, not quite crawling, in little danger yet of spindles and spindle ends. “It’s lovely!” Katriona said.

  “I’ve been practising,” Barder said, obviously pleased. Barder’s usual chair at their hearthside had a bit of rag hung over the back, to be unfolded and put on the floor under him the moment his pocket-knife appeared, to catch the shavings. “And Narl’s been showing me some stuff about faces. I could see this little fellow staring out at me as soon as I picked up the wood burl.”

  She had stood, still smiling, turning it over and over in her hands; the spindle, the business end, was as sleek as the coat of a well-bred horse, and her fingers lingered over it appreciatively; the little face at the opposite end was so bright and alive it was hard not to expect it to blink and say something. “Thank you. I—I’ve been wondering if I could go on having a spinning wheel in the house.”

  Barder had glanced down at Rosie, who had, in the mysterious way of sitting up, not-quite-crawling babies, managed to move herself half across the long room to attach herself to his trouser leg. “Aaaah!” she said, which meant, “Pick me up and throw me in the air, please.”

  “I know,” he had said, stooping to oblige. “That’s why I made it. Half the farmers round here wouldn’t know how to pay you if they couldn’t give you fleece to spin.”

  Katriona now stood up restlessly and went over to run a finger down the gargoyle’s small lumpy nose. This was a kind of semi-conscious good-luck charm for her, and the gargoyle’s nose was shiny with stroking. She was aware that as the years passed it was slowly accreting all those bodiless wishes into a real charm, the way enough deposited silt will eventually become a peninsula, but she doubted it would keep Pernicia away.

  Rosie’s eleventh birthday was coming up soon. Katriona rubbed the gargoyle’s nose harder. Magic makes any keeper of it more perceptible to any other keeper. No one looking for a member of the royal family would look for someone who bore magic. It isn’t magic because it can’t be. Eleven: they were over halfway to one-and-twenty.

  When the rest of Foggy Bottom caught on to the fact that Rosie really did have beast-speech (Narl had known from the beginning, but of course hadn’t said anything about it), they enjoyed it very much. It was not as good as baby-magic—for one thing it was useful, which baby-magic rarely was—but it was something at last, something to make jokes about, and making jokes about your fairies is one of the ways ordinary people live with the magic they have to live with, and both the ordinary people and the fairies know it.

  It distressed Katriona, because Rosie wasn’t a fairy, and she shouldn’t be treated like one; it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t her fault she lived with two fairies. Ordinary people didn’t need to defend themselves against her by making jokes that turned her into something other than themselves. Well, thought Katriona, flinching away from the reality of Rosie’s ordinariness, she isn’t a fairy. Even the fact that her beast-speech proved to everyone’s satisfaction that she was exactly who Aunt and Katriona claimed she was, because beast-speech was uncommon even among fairies and two unrelated examples of it in the same village were impossible, wasn’t enough to comfort her.

  But the recognition of Rosie’s beast-speech also reawakened some old gossip from eleven years ago.

  Ordinary people sometimes have a funny reaction to glamours, like the glamour Aunt had thrown over Rosie’s arrival in Foggy Bottom, a persistent, fidgety feeling that something wasn’t quite right. In this case it had produced a rumour that Rosie was Katriona’s daughter.

  The question Katriona had really feared was not whether Rosie was her daughter—which she would have denied very convincingly—but whether she was her cousin. Barder, who was the only person Katriona felt had the right to ask, had
never asked, and the rumour had died a natural death years ago—so Katriona assumed. Eleven years later she would have had to make an effort to remember that it had ever existed at all.

  She and Rosie were crossing the square from the forge to the pub, toward their road home again, late one afternoon. It was drizzling rain, and Katriona was tired. Since she had stopped visiting the queen, the strength of her magic had come into her with a thunderous crash, like swallowing an anvil. The dark empty confusing place where she went for scraps of magic she could use was no longer empty, but finding what she needed was perhaps more difficult than ever—in the first place because she knew it was probably there if she looked long enough, and second because it was like trying to locate one particular pebble in a boulder field, with a great storm wind rolling everything about, including you. Aunt said it eventually got easier. Katriona hoped so. She had performed a tricky exorcism that day—if they’d known how tricky, Aunt would have come with her—ridding a field of an old battle which had suddenly woken up again, and the reperformance of which was scaring Matthew’s sheep.