Spindle's End

by Robin McKinley

  She met the midwife, wrapping her cloak round her for her homeward journey, crossing the forecourt; Arnisa smiled at her, and patted her arm. “A fine big boy,” she said. Rosie went in the kitchen door and exchanged a long look with Flinx, who was guarding the door from the kitchen to the rest of the house and, for once, failing to present himself as utterly indifferent to circumstances. She went slowly upstairs to Barder and Katriona’s bedroom, making a wide circle round a bundle of stained bedding and soiled straw standing by the door.

  “Come in,” said Aunt’s voice. “I thought you wouldn’t be asleep.”

  “I knew the mice would tell you,” said Katriona faintly, as Rosie timidly pushed the door open. “Come see.” Katriona looked exhausted, but her face had been washed and her hair combed. The bedclothes still smelled of the herbs in the linen cupboard, but there was another, stronger smell in the room. Barder stood up from Katriona’s side and came toward Rosie, offering her the little bundle he carried. It took her a moment to realise that he was expecting her to take it in her arms, and not just peer at the little red squinched-up face at one end of it. “This is Jem,” said Barder. “He’s your—I’m not sure what the name of it is, but he’s your family.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Rosie wasn’t so sure about babies, whatever Fwab said, but she didn’t feel superfluous and displaced so much as suddenly one of the grown-ups who were all in this mess together. The empty, lost feeling that had troubled her before Katriona’s wedding had been mostly filled up or pushed aside by her new life and new responsibilities—but Jem squashed the remains of it flat. Jem took up as much time as there was time. “Is it because he’s a fairy?” said Rosie, baffled, to Aunt.

  “No, dear, it’s just because he’s a baby,” said Aunt, refraining, with heroic self-control, from remarking that Rosie had been a baby just like him (if not more so) not so very long ago. When Rosie was eighteen and Jem was two, and walking, and beginning to talk, and while he was a total little pest (thought Rosie) he was also almost recognisable as a future human being, Katriona had Gilly, and it started all over again.

  One evening when Rosie was walking Gilly, who was going through an unfortunate phase when she would only consent to sleep if she was in some grown-up’s arms and that grown-up was walking the floor with her, Rosie thought: We haven’t heard any rumours about Pernicia in . . . in . . . since the wedding. Shon doesn’t tell us stories about the king’s magicians any more—and we haven’t seen some poor cavalry lieutenant through here on a wild-goose chase in a long time. Rosie looked into Gilly’s little sleeping face—she had gone all limp and squashy, like bread dough that has absorbed too much water—and tried to be pleased. But Rosie at eighteen was too old to believe that something out of sight was something safe; and from nowhere a cold tendril of fear touched her.

  “Thank you, love,” said Katriona, coming through the door yawning from her nap; “I’ll take her now.”

  “Kat—” said Rosie, handing the baby over delicately, but not so delicately that she didn’t grizzle and threaten to wake up and cry properly, “Kat, we haven’t heard about Pernicia in years. Even Gismo doesn’t have any stories about anybody but the three princes any more.”

  “No,” said Katriona, beginning to walk round the kitchen as Rosie had walked. The kitchen was their biggest room, and well laid out for walking, with the long table down its centre and the spinning wheel in the corner by the door. “No, we haven’t.” Her eyes went to a little three-legged iron pot that now held a roll of charm string. Rosie had never found out what had happened to Katriona’s necklace; only that its loss had distressed her greatly.

  “But what about the poor princess?” said Rosie.

  “I don’t know,” said Katriona, looking back at Rosie, and Rosie saw that she was sad and frightened and worried, and Rosie thought, how like Kat, to love someone she’s never met because she has a curse hanging over her and it must be really awful for her. Poor princess. I wish I could tell her she has someone like Kat on her side. I hope the royal fairies are nice to her, but they can’t be half as nice as Kat. “Maybe Pernicia’s given up,” she suggested, “and the princess will go home tomorrow.”

  Katriona tried to smile. “I wish.” She went on, quietly, not to disturb the baby, but as if she had thought about it a long time: “Curses tend to wear out, of course; but she’d know that. She’d have set up something to bind over the passage of time before she came to the name-day. Sometimes crossing the threshold from child to adult may break even a powerful curse, as it did for Lord Curran many years ago”—Rosie nodded; Barder had taught her the ballad about it—“we hoped . . . but she must have found a way round that too. Aunt has always said it’s been the twenty-first birthday from the beginning; the rest is just cruelty, as if the curse weren’t cruel enough. . . .”

  “Maybe . . . maybe it is only cruelty,” said Rosie hesitantly. “Maybe it is only that one birthday. Maybe the princess could go home tomorrow. Till the night before her twenty-first birthday.”

  “No,” said Katriona. She was frowning slightly, and her eyes were focussed on something Rosie couldn’t see—something that Rosie wouldn’t have been able to see even if she’d turned round and looked. “No. Sig—the queen’s fairy would know if it were safe.” She blinked, and now she was looking at a spider letting itself down cautiously from a ceiling beam. Rosie looked at the spider, too. It swung back and forth indecisively, gleaming a tiny chitinous gleam in the lamplight, and then ran back up its invisible thread, and disappeared into the shadows.

  Katriona rearranged Gilly slightly. “I’m only half awake, Rosie, don’t listen to me maunder on.”

  “I wish I knew the princess would win out in the end,” said Rosie.

  “So do I,” said Katriona.

  By then Rosie was very absorbed with her work as a horse doctor—and occasionally cow, sheep, pig, goat, dog, bird, cat, and almost anything else that wasn’t human doctor. Aunt and Katriona had tried to tease her about all the business she was taking away from them, but she was so distressed by this they stopped. (Barder still occasionally told her that she should stay home more and whittle spindle ends, but since this was usually a lead-in to his showing her another deft little trick with knife and wood, she allowed this.) Often enough the answer to some ailment came from a joint consultation. Most animals, for example (unlike most humans), knew when they were being haunted; this saved diagnosis time, because Rosie could relay the information. But Rosie couldn’t do anything about an earth sprite causing mud fever or a water imp causing rain scald, although once, on an occasion of the former, she discovered half by accident that the earth sprite was in a temper because all his best tunnels had been knocked through and redug by a mole, and managed to talk the mole into moving its efforts to the other side of the field.

  She had seen the two grooms in Lord Pren’s livery arrive at the wrights’ yard across the square from the smith’s one morning, and had guessed they were calling for Aunt and Katriona, and was a little intrigued at what sort of thing Lord Pren would feel required both of them; but when she saw Aunt coming across the square toward the smith’s yard with the two grooms following, leading their horses, her heart sank, because she was afraid she was going to be asked to baby-sit.

  “They want me?” she said.

  “You,” said Aunt, smiling.

  “Told you,” said Narl, through a mouthful of nails. “Been waiting till you turn eighteen.” Eighteen was the official age when you could declare you weren’t an apprentice any more, or at least that you could begin to take on work of your own, even if you stayed with your master, and if he or she did not object to it.

  Rosie, for once speechless, climbed up behind the second groom, and juddered back to Woodwold at a cracking trot. She didn’t much like riding horses; it seemed rude. Pardon me, she said to the horse. My pleasure, replied the horse, who fancied himself quite sophisticated in the customs of humans.

  She had been to Woodwold before. Lord Pren invited the entir
e Gig to dinner on certain feast days every year (and the town councillors sat at the Prendergasts’ own table), and then the park all round the vast conglomeration of buildings and towers and corners and crannies that was Woodwold was covered with stalls selling sweetmeats and charms and ribbons and weaving and toys and spindle ends (Barder’s had fetched the best price now for several years, but Rosie’s were beginning to come close), and there were always bards and mastersingers, and dancing, especially as the sun went down and the beer, ale and cider consumption went up. Even then, with hundreds of people around, you could feel the great bulk of Woodwold watching you, but Woodwold was the only really big building anywhere in the Gig and the only one therefore that most Gig citizens had ever seen; and while there were tales about Woodwold, well, there would be. It would be very disappointing if your lord didn’t have tales spun round him and his family and his holdings; and the Prendergasts themselves had all been so tediously normal and solid and responsible for so many generations it was a good thing that Woodwold existed to give the bards something to work with. But if it loomed over you, well, presumably all large buildings loomed; they couldn’t help it; and the watchfulness of it was probably just a surfeit of bards’ tales (and possibly of beer).

  But Rosie felt differently about Woodwold when she started coming out alone with Narl as part of her apprenticeship.

  After the fork in the road out of Foggy Bottom the way broadened from a carriage width to twice that, and just before you got to the big gates it went twice its double width to a great round space like a courtyard, except there was nothing there but the gates and the stone wall, twelve foot high, stretching out on either side farther than your eyes could see. The gates themselves were twice as tall as the tallest carriage and wrought with an intricacy Rosie found amazing. (The Gig, and many of the Prendergasts’ outside visitors, said of them that they were so beautiful they might have been magic, if magic could ever have stuck to cold iron, or a blacksmith work it.) When you crossed the invisible line from outside Woodwold’s grounds to inside your stomach gave a tiny lurch as if you’d been briefly turned upside down and then right side up again, and your horse’s hoofs and cart wheels, or even your own feet, threw up surprising clouds of dust, just for a few steps. (Lady Prendergast always ordered long chains of dust-laying spells before the feast days, which were draped gracefully over the open gates.)

  Then the drive went on and on and on, because the park went on and on and on, and there were beautiful trees and small russet-coloured deer nothing like the large ordinary deer in the Gig forests (including the fact that they were half tame and looked forward to the days after the open feast days, when there were always excellent gleanings to be had round where the food stalls had stood) and sudden vistas with queer little buildings or statues at the ends of them. About the time you decided you’d wandered into some kind of enchantment and were beginning to wonder if you could get out again, there were the stables, on the outskirts of Woodwold.

  Woodwold always seemed to stand against the sun whichever way you were facing as you looked at it, and wherever the sun was in the sky. It was built of both stone and wood, and both had darkened over the centuries and, seemingly, grown into each other, till it was impossible to tell where one left off and the other began. If you tried to analyse it, it was a very uneven house, with a wing here and an out-building there, an extra storey in this bit but not in that, six windows on this side of this door but seven on the other. But its impression was nonetheless of great centredness, of some profound organising spirit or principle that informed it from the least and lowest scullery to the tip of the tallest tower, where the Prendergasts’ standard flew.

  Which is to say it felt alive. Or at least it felt alive to Rosie. She always half expected it to talk to her—she could half feel the sense, whatever it was, she used to talk to animals, straining for some contact with it. The stone wall was the boundary; she would have known where she was as soon as she passed the gates if she’d come blindfolded. She would have felt Woodwold’s presence.

  It seemed bigger that day, without Narl. Narl was a greater neutraliser of unknown potencies even than Aunt.

  She felt she was lucky, that first time by herself. Gorse, Lord Pren’s favourite stallion, was off his feed. They treat me like a parade saddle, Gorse told her. To be polished and polished and polished, and then hung on a hook until there’s a parade. Gorse was sixteen and a half hands tall and as golden as late-afternoon sunlight; just standing near him made you feel prouder and nobler.

  Your manners are too good, said Rosie. If you’d bite people occasionally, and throw tantrums, they’d get the idea.

  Gorse bowed his head so he could look into her face—if Gorse had a fault, it was that his sense of humour was a little stately—and she could look in his. The resigned sadness in his dark eye made her brusquer than she would have been if she’d remembered whom she was talking to, and that her future might depend on what she said next. “Take him hunting,” Rosie said aloud. “Let him get sweaty and dirty and tired and frightened. He’s gone all hollow inside; he needs something to do.”

  “He—he is put to the finest mares in the country,” said the Master of the Horse, rattled and anxious. He thought of being angry, but the look on the horse’s face—and on Rosie’s—stopped him.

  Rosie gave a little jerk of laughter. “That isn’t what you do,” she said. “Is it?” She liked Lord Pren’s Master of the Horse, and, more important, he liked her. He’d always been very polite to her when she had been there with Narl, and even contracted apprentices, which she was not, were not necessarily treated with much regard. She now looked the Master full in the face, saw him take in what she had said, and then a reluctant smile relaxed his expression. “You’re every bit as blunt as Narl,” he said. “He seems to have trained you thoroughly. Very well, I shall tell Lord Prendergast that he should take the most valuable horse in his stables out hunting. There’s a boar hunt soon, for the rogue that has been tearing up Mistweir; will that do?”

  Woodwold’s Master of the Horse began calling her “my Rosie” when talking about her to other horsefolk, and seemed to look on her as something between a protégeé and a daughter. But her particular gift was not merely that she could talk to the horses, but hear and be heard by them. She was called out one day when Fast, a big blood-bay racer, had developed his dislike of moving shadows to a point when he would throw himself over backward rather than leave his stall—and then take his stall to bits because he felt restless and shut in.

  You self-absorbed brat, she said, flinging his stall door open. You try one of your melodramas on me and I’ll hit you over the head with a plank. What is it you think you want? To be king of the world? That would get boring too, you know, making decisions about who’s right and who’s wrong when your citizens disagree, and trying to figure out who’s plotting against you and what to do about it. Get it through your thick head that there are other creatures here who are just as important as you are, whatever you may think, and start behaving like it, or I’ll tell the huntsman to turn you into a hearth rug.

  Fast, who had reared up as soon as the door opened, dropped back to earth again looking rather dazed. Rosie felt a very little bit guilty, because he was very young, and very, very fast, and his grooms and riders had all been taught to treat his every whim with great deference. It was not entirely his fault that he’d started stirring things up because he could. But he still had to be made to stop. Lord Pren would neither have a dangerous horse in his stables, nor sell a brute on. Rosie told herself she was saving Fast’s life, crossed her arms, and scowled at him ferociously.

  She could feel him thinking, but he gave her no words. After about a minute of tumultuous silence he bowed his neck and made small humble chewing noises, like a distressed foal. Rosie unfolded her arms and reached to rub his forehead. Want to go for a walk? she said. It’s a lovely afternoon.

  She told Narl about the confrontation with Fast while she watched him working on the new good-luck
medallion to hang behind the bar at the pub. They’d had a silver one that had belonged to Cairngorm’s grandmother, but it had exploded, a few weeks ago, which had unnerved everyone very much, especially Cairngorm, who didn’t think she had any enemies that either disliked her that much or could afford to do anything so histrionic about it. But she decided to take no chances, and ordered its replacement in cold iron. Barder had lately been teaching Narl fancy knot-work, and the medallion looked like a great weave of black rope.

  Rosie had taken Fast for his walk down the drive to the gates, and had stood staring at them for several minutes while Fast browsed for more interesting grasses than grew in Woodwold’s flawlessly kept paddocks. At a distance you saw uprights with three crosspieces near the top and three more at the bottom, but when you stood close and peered, the framework disappeared in a seethe of plants and animals, all wound and folded together like a heap of sleeping puppies, so that lions’ faces emerged from twists of clematis vines, a leaping hare arched its belly over a curl of snake, and pansies and roses grew like a mane down the backbone of a bear. She had reawoken to her surroundings when Fast came up behind her and nibbled at the nape of her neck.

  “Narl . . .” she began, and he glanced up at her, and she thought, you wretch, you’ve already decided not to answer whatever it is I ask. “Is it true Lord Pren brought you here to make those gates?”

  “No,” said Narl, and returned to his medallion. Rosie sighed, and headed for home, to weed the herb garden.

  She was still thinking about Woodwold when Aunt called her in to help get tea ready. She couldn’t quite bring herself to say “I keep waiting for it to speak to me” so instead she said, “There’s a funny . . . almost . . . smell to the place,” she said. “Isn’t there? Of course they’ve got some kind of barrier up at the gate, and the jolt of crossing it almost makes me think I’m smelling hot mead or cellar mould or something. But after you’re well inside . . . it gets more distinct, not less, except that you can’t think of anything it smells like. It’s not even really a smell . . . I think.”