Spindle's End

by Robin McKinley

  She grew another inch in the ten weeks between Barder’s formal visit to the cottage and the wedding, and Aunt basted another strip of material round the hem of the dress Rosie was wearing so that it still came to her ankles the way it was supposed to—and so that the scruffy third-hand boots that were the only shoes that fit her didn’t show any more than they had to.

  Rosie was unusually docile, which was convenient, but Katriona thought she would rather have had her banging doors and shouting that she didn’t want to live in a town with everybody else’s smoke and cooking smells and the dust from the road complicating the always complicated housekeeping in a fairy’s home. But she didn’t. She didn’t even protest wearing a skirt to the wedding, and she hated dresses almost as much as she hated her hair; she’d worn trousers since she could walk.

  The best Katriona could think of to do was to ask Narl to keep an eye on her.

  Katriona was well-versed in Narl’s grunts by this time, and the grunt that answered this request told her that Narl had also noticed the change in Rosie, and had been thinking about it himself. Rosie came home a day or two after this and told them, looking and sounding more like herself than she had in several weeks, that Narl had begun to teach her horse doctoring.

  Girls were less often apprenticed than boys, and no one expected Rosie to need apprenticing away from home, since sooner or later she would turn out to be a fairy, and meanwhile there was always work for another pair of hands. Narl had had temporary apprentices occasionally—not the usual sort, for which he said, when pressed, that he had no time, but men (female smiths were rarer than male fairies) who already knew their business and were interested in learning to do fancy work, like Aunt’s fire-dogs and Lord Prendergast’s gates. But while Narl did a fair amount of horse doctoring, as all smiths did, and was good at it, as many smiths were not, he had never offered to teach anyone what he knew. Till Rosie.

  Their unlikely alliance had intrigued the villagers for years, and the information that Narl was now teaching her horse doctoring only heightened this interest. Dessy, who was something of a romantic, once said to Flora that if you ever saw them talking to each other, Narl looked younger than usual (although no one knew how old he was), and Rosie looked older. Flora knew what she meant—it was something about the way they looked at each other, as if they were not merely friends but old friends, partners, peers. But Dessy’s tendency to daydream was a nuisance round the pub when there was always too much to be done, and so Flora said quellingly, “Talk to each other? You’re thinking of somebody else. Rosie talks enough for six, and Narl doesn’t talk at all.”

  It was also an odd thing that a smith should be teaching a future fairy a smith’s pragmatic horse-leech skills because the reason smiths were popular as horse doctors was because most horses didn’t respond well to magic—you laid a gentling charm over a skittish colt and he left off shying at leaves and rabbits and shadows and threw a proper tantrum about the charm. Blowing the fumes of mashed vizo root up his nostrils was easier, and more likely to work. Foggy Bottom, which by this time was rather accustomed to being frustrated by both Narl and Rosie, decided that the facts were merely that Narl and Rosie were odd, and let them get on with it. But Katriona wondered, grateful as she was for Narl’s meddling, if Narl had any particular reason to believe that Rosie was not going to grow up to be a fairy.

  By the day of the wedding Rosie was enough of her old self to protest violently having flowers stuck in her hair. Aunt had the argument with her about it. Katriona was elsewhere, with Flora, twittering over the food, and worrying that there wasn’t going to be enough (there was enough to feed everyone in the Gig three times over, as Flora was endeavouring to point out).

  “I haven’t got enough hair to stick flowers in anyway!” said Rosie passionately. This was perhaps not absolutely true; it was a little longer than it had been after her first self-inflicted haircut at the age of four. But not much. When she was excited about something, and had been running her hands through it, it was still short enough to stand out like a fuzzy halo. It was still markedly curly, too, but too short to twist itself into ringlets, as anyone could see it longed to do.

  Aunt considered for a moment and said, “I’ll make a bargain with you. You should wear a proper helmet of flowers—remember Soora at Garly’s wedding last year?—but I’ll weave you just a little, er, crown of them,” thinking, this is just what I need, another last-minute job, I wish I had six hands, “will that do?”

  Rosie, no fool, knowing she was being got round—and that Aunt had more than enough to do already—thought of Katriona, who probably would like her attendant to be wearing flowers in her hair. She remembered Soora’s headdress; she had looked like a walking shrubbery, and Rosie had wanted to laugh. “Um.” For Katriona, she reminded herself. “Um. I’ll finish the gate ribbons for you.”

  Aunt sighed. “Thank you.” Wedding gate ribbons were, in most parts of that country, a decorative detail only, but the Gig still took them seriously, possibly because the Gig, by its climate, was plagued by fog-sprites, which gate ribbons successfully confused. More solid spirits of mischief had to be kept out of important rites by brush and branches.

  The crown suited Rosie—and crown it was. Katriona, having permitted herself to be reassured by the several tonnes of food distributed on tables both inside and outside the pub (the weather having been declared secure, without magical interference, by both Aunt and the weather-guesser), would have said she was wholly preoccupied with the immediate prospect of being wed to Barder. But she was struck by the sight of Rosie in her little crown of flowers, patched-on hem-line, old boots and all. There was a dignity about her Katriona had not seen before, which was, although Katriona didn’t know it, a combination of the newness of her increasing height and her first glimpse into the darker depths of what it means to be human, plus a resolution to bear herself well for the wedding of the person she loved best in the world, which—though she appreciated that Aunt had done her tactful best—included not snatching the stupid circlet off her head and stamping on it. This last was what was making her stand up quite so straight and proud. It looked like poise.

  Rosie had her own room at the wheelwright’s. At the cottage they had all slept upstairs at one end of the long cottage attic, while various stores, both magical and ordinary, took up the rest of the space, hanging from the roof, or neatly stacked and packaged on shelves and piled in corners. It was rather exciting to have a room of your own. But what did you do with it?

  It was a small room, tucked in a corner of the ell that thrust out toward the common land that backed the village, and looking out over the shed that contained a bemused Poppy, a wary Fiend, and ten chickens in a sulk. Their sensibilities had been outraged by the move, and they were refusing to lay. Where Rosie knelt by her window she could see Flinx lying on the shed roof, a blobby sort of shadow against the flat darkness of the roof. She hadn’t been sure that Flinx would come with them into town, although she had long ago figured out that any important situation containing Katriona would have Flinx somewhere lurking on the edges and pretending to be thinking about something else.

  At present Flinx, having (briefly) met the wainwright’s dog, Zogdob, was showing a preference for high places. There were several of the town cats with him on the roof, all of whom had attended the wedding, with unusual decorous-ness for cats, but then they were all fond of Katriona. (Cats hung round temples and priests’ houses unless the priests positively drove them away. The priests’ religion rather appealed to cats; they borrowed bits of it to work into their ideas of augury and metaphysics.) They were discussing the wedding in a desultory and solipsistic manner, but Rosie had the feeling that some of the sillier remarks were being made for her benefit, so she stopped listening.

  She turned round and sat on the floor, leaning her shoulders against the sill, looking at her new room. All those freshly whitewashed walls seemed to expect something, like a waiting audience expects something, unlike the dark rough planking of the
cottage attic (which you never got very near anyway because of the steep pitch of the roof), and Rosie had little personal gear to occupy space. She wondered who Lord Pren would give their cottage to. Who would sleep in that loft, cook over that fire? How long would it take them to learn the trick of making the pot hook swing smoothly when it had a laden pot on it, without spraying the floor and the shins of the unhappy server with boiling soup or scalding stew? Even Aunt hadn’t come up with a charm for it. “Iron against iron is too difficult,” she said. “If it were a matter of life and death I’d work something out, but it isn’t.”

  After Rosie had been introduced to her glistening, expectant room she had briefly considered claiming to be afraid of the dark so she didn’t have to face occupying it alone, but she knew no one would believe her—and after the silent echoes of the last few weeks which told her she wasn’t who she’d always believed she was she didn’t have the heart for deliberate impersonation. Besides, it wasn’t exactly that she wanted to share a room with Aunt; she was just worried about how everything was changing.

  Poppy had said comfortably that it would all turn out for the best, but Poppy usually said that about everything, and she was also heavily in calf which always made her sentimental. Fiend, also in calf, was less sanguine; but she was at her most pessimistic when she had a baby due, believing that wolves would be conjured out of the air by the effort of her labour. The chickens only said that the dust was all wrong and the bugs were all wrong and the shape of their coop was all wrong and how could any human think they could lay under these conditions?

  Rosie turned round again, and looked back at the night. Even the sky looked different from her new window, although (she supposed) it was the same sky. The other cats had left, and Flinx had moved a little nearer the window of the bedroom Katriona now shared with Barder. The moon was full tonight—it was supposed to be good luck to marry during a full moon—and the sky was bright with stars. The usual Gig ground mist hadn’t risen above the first storey where Rosie leaned her elbows on her windowsill.

  All three of the humans from the cottage, Aunt, Katriona, and Rosie, were sleeping in the wheelwright’s house for the first time tonight—all three of them, who were now four because of Barder (five really, for Joeb had another little room in the corner between the house and the shop), and she guessed they would soon be more than that, because Barder and Katriona would have children. And there was a baby-magic boarder coming tomorrow; Aunt had been holding her family’s frail control over her together with a series of charms, but had promised to take her in the moment the wedding was over. It was late, and Rosie was exhausted, but she wasn’t ready to lie down and sleep, and risk waking up and not knowing where she was, now that she was somewhere she didn’t know.

  She wondered if she would like living in town. The air smelled so different here; the fields and woods and garden and animal smells she was used to were still there, but so were the chimney and cooking smells of houses other than their own, the slight whiff of lime that told of rigorously clean priveys (the village council were adamant about this), the drift of strange and varied stable smells from the animal pens, and the dust and dung smells of the road. She could even hear a murmur of people talking, and there was a burst of not-so-distant laughter, where a few people who had outstayed the wedding party were still at the pub.

  Feeling misplaced and astray had become familiar in the last ten weeks. At least this strangeness seemed friendly. She began telling over in her head some of the latest of Narl’s teachings as something to ground herself with. This was only partially successful, since few of his recipes were exact; you added enough staggleroot to make the paste stick together, for example, except that the berries’ stickiness varied from year to year on account of the weather, and if you added too many then when the paste dried on the horse’s leg it wouldn’t come off.

  She knew it couldn’t be accidental that Narl had chosen just now to start teaching her, and she only hoped he meant it, that it wasn’t a sort of toy to distract a bewildered child. Even as she thought this she realised how offensive such a suggestion would be to Narl, and she almost laughed, but laughing was too difficult just now. Laughter would rattle her bones apart.

  Maybe she’d ask Aunt for a few bunches of dried herbs to hang in her bedroom—they’d make a nice smell, and would dim the awful whiteness of the walls. Barder had whitewashed the bedrooms himself, to make them light and cheerful; she couldn’t say she preferred gloom. She’d get used to the sounds and smells, and a room of her own. She looked round the room once more, and pulled the shutters closed, ready to go to bed. At least it was her own bed, carted in from the cottage, and her own clothes hanging on pegs by the door. She might have had a candle, but if this was to be her room, she wanted to know her way in the dark.

  Part Three

  CHAPTER 11

  Rosie had an additional reason for being doubtful about the move to town. While Barder was offering them their own house, his shop shared a courtyard with the wainwright, and the wainwright had a niece, Peony. Rosie had thought after Flinx’s dramatic meeting with Zogdob, you’re the lucky one, you’re allowed to run away.

  Peony was nearly the same age as Rosie, and an only child in a house of adults not her parents, for she lived with her aunt and uncle. But there the similarity between them ended. Peony had long golden curls—although of a softer shade than Rosie’s short defiant hair—and limpid blue eyes that smiled even when her face was solemn. Grown-ups had never patronised her; she was too graceful and too self-possessed, even as a baby, and as she grew older she was too sweet-natured. Condescension would have slid right off her, like snow on a warm roof. She was rarely disobedient, and when she was, it was generally to do with her lingering to give delight or some more practical aid by her presence, when her aunt and uncle expected her to perform some errand quickly.

  She could sew, cook, and clean; she wrote a good clear hand and did sums accurately. She could carry a tune, she could dance, and play upon what variety of musical instruments the village offered. She was also beautiful. (She had long curling golden eyelashes, although not so long as Rosie’s.) It was all too much. Rosie had thought so for years, and avoided her.

  Nonetheless, they met up occasionally. The village was too small for everyone not to know each other, and furthermore, Peony was only seven months older than Rosie, and most grown-ups seemed to think that accidents of chronology should oblige children to get along. Rosie was too good-natured herself to hate anyone without serious cause, but in Peony’s case she had considered it. Rosie had heard rather too much about Peony’s manifold perfections from the village folk, especially after some one or another of Rosie’s more tactless imbroglios. It was all the harder for poor Rosie because she and Peony were the only girls of their age in Foggy Bottom; everyone else was several years older or younger.

  Rosie’s good nature had been sorely tested when that particular implication of Barder’s suit sank in. Since all three grown-ups, Aunt, Katriona, and Barder himself, were watching her anxiously, they saw her start, and heard her grunt, as if from a physical blow, a few moments after the initial announcement. What they did not know was that the grunt was a valiantly suppressed “Next door to Peony? I’d rather live in Med’s old house, with the mould spirit. Maybe Lord Pren’s new tenant will need a cowherd.”

  She’d managed to elude Peony during the busy weeks leading up to the wedding although Peony had often been underfoot, brightly offering to do anything she could do to help, and saying disgusting things to Rosie like, “Oh, I do hope we can be sisters.” Rosie had been able to pretend she hadn’t heard. She wouldn’t be able to go on ignoring her now that she actually lived here.

  But the confrontation didn’t go as Rosie expected, although it had begun as unpromisingly as she could have desired. Everyone had slept late the day after the wedding (Rosie had staggered out to feed the cows and the chickens and then gone back to bed) and it was midmorning before Rosie ventured into the forecourt. She had been dri
ven there by Aunt, who recognised Rosie’s lurking about the kitchen for what it was, and knew that Peony was outside doing her own hopeful lurking. “My dear,” said Aunt, with a sympathy Rosie couldn’t help but hear, “you are going to have to come to some kind of terms with her. I know she is—she is not at all like you. But she is probably not all bad, even if she is a paragon.”

  Peony, of course, stopped whatever she had been doing, and came up to Rosie with her best, most winning smile, and said, “Well, now that all the fuss is over, perhaps we can begin to know each other.”

  Rosie, looking for allies, had glanced around hopefully for Zogdob, but Zogdob was curled up at the very back of the courtyard, pretending to be asleep. “Um,” said Rosie unencouragingly, standing like a soldier on parade, back stiff and eyes straight ahead. She stood up as much as she could around Peony, because standing she was half a head taller than the older girl.

  “You know,” said Peony thoughtfully, looking up at Rosie, “you have the longest eyelashes I have ever seen—”

  “Get dead,” said Rosie furiously, abandoning her imitation of a statue: “I hate my eyelashes.”

  Peony stared at her with her mouth open, and then she burst out laughing. She put her hand on Rosie’s arm, and to Rosie’s own astonishment she did not resent the touch; she heard in Peony’s laughter that Peony was as worried about her new neighbour as Rosie was about being her neighbour, and that Peony had been sure she would say the wrong thing to Rosie, and it was a great relief to have done so and got it over with. Rosie began to laugh, too.

  Her chest felt tight from weeks of work and change and fear and resentment and hope, and the first laugh hurt; but then she pulled in a great deep breath that filled her right up, and she laughed with Peony till they both had to sit down, right where they were, in the middle of the forecourt, and Peony’s uncle, Crantab, had to shout at them to move out of the way. When they finished laughing they were on their way to being not just friends, but the dearest of friends, the sort of friends whose lives are shaped by the friendship.