Spindle's End

by Robin McKinley

  Let her come home. Let this farce be over with. Let us welcome the young king to be, and forget Pernicia. The curse on the face of it is nonsense—has always been nonsense—and we have been fools to believe it.

  That is what she would want us to believe, said other whispers. That is also why she waited so long, for our nerve to break at the very last. Never has a queen of our country abdicated. Wait till the princess’ one-and-twentieth birthday; it is only one more year now. Wait.

  Spring in the Gig came that year with an unusual number of daffodils opening as cabbages or hollyhocks, and most of the lilacs were a rather distressing cerulean. The old cottage where Aunt and Katriona and Rosie had once lived was so infested by a species of bat, which not only left its droppings about in the way that bats do but snored thunderously, that a complete removal spell and purgation had to be done on it over the course of several days while its current tenant stayed at the pub and recovered her equanimity. The mould spirit in Med’s old house was joined by several of its cousins who decided the house wasn’t big enough for all of them, and began to colonise the houses on either side, and were fearfully rude to Katriona when she told them they either had to leave or she’d dry them to thistledown and blow them away on the wind. (After a few third cousins had bounced away as dandelion fluff, however, the rest decamped.) And the quantity of magic dust, both the chalky kind and the almost invisible twinkly kind, on the baskets of herbs Rosie brought to the smith’s yard to be rendered into ointments and tonics for her horses, was so excessive, that sometimes, when it leaped out of the basket to run away, it took the herbs with it—much to the delight of the village cats, most of whom took to hanging round the forge more than the priestling’s house, and batting at bits of nothing with their paws, which of course all cats did anyway, but the habit was much more disconcerting in a smith’s yard, which pleased the cats even more.

  Most years there was a new sort of fever that emerged from the Gig marshes as spring warmth awakened them from their cold winter dreams, but this year’s were unusually widespread and persistent; Aunt’s robins told her that it afflicted many birds and beasts as well as the human denizens of the Gig. Fwab and several other creatures both winged and earthbound told Rosie that there were far too many migrants, moving both in and out of the Gig, and that everyone was edgy and anxious for no cause they could name. Except, of course, that this was the beginning of the princess’ twenty-first year, and that her twenty-first birthday was now less than twelve months away.

  There were more reports of disturbances in the rest of the country than usual, too. Since things were always turning, or pretending to turn, into other things, or behaving disconcertingly, at least briefly, in that country, it was sometimes difficult to judge which reports needed investigating and which could be left alone. A large family of gripples was unearthed in Incorban, which explained why the civic water supply kept turning purple and then failing; the purple colour had seemed very alarming, and so the king had been applied to. “Oh, gripples,” the mayor said, heaving a sigh of combined relief and dismay; at least it was only gripples, but then gripples were a terrific nuisance, and would be expensive to dislodge.

  There was a sudden rash of sightings of merfolk in the great inland lake called Gilamdra. A merperson’s touch is poisonous, but merfolk are so beautiful there is almost always someone, most often someone young and romantic, who will try it anyway. (Priests were curiously apt to this error. The priests—those that survived—insisted that they had been trying to convert them.) It wasn’t just a question of staying away from the shore, however, because the merfolk sang, especially the women, and their singing was as beautiful as they were themselves, and as penetrating as a draught under the door. The king sent a troupe of magicians to Gilamdra, and the magicians hung an inaudibility veil round the lake, which made the lap and splash of the water weirdly silent as well, and created a kind of sticky boundary that birds flew through with a jolt and a gluey pop and a squawk of protest.

  Also in that last year before the princess’ twenty-first birthday an unusually high percentage of the first- and second-years at the Academy decided to return home and take up farming or politics; several of the oldest Academicians decided to retire; and a number of village fairies had a change of heart and became midwives or dairymaids or married the fellows who’d told them they’d be happy to marry if they’d give up this magic thing.

  Narl was still Foggy Bottom’s official horse-leech but he now would only say “Ask Rosie” any time his opinion was sought. The occasions when this pronouncement brought a desperate cry of Narl! from Rosie herself became fewer and fewer, and one of the things that came to be said about her was that at least she’d tell you what was going on and what she was doing about it, which Narl never had. She went up to Woodwold so frequently that spring that most of Lord Prendergast’s folk knew her by sight, and often, when the Master of the Horse was finished with her, she found the cowman or the shepherd, with a client on a string, waiting for her. She also spoke to the great bell-voiced hunting hounds, the swift silent sighthounds bred, it was said, from the queen’s own fleethounds, and sometimes a terrier enduring, in that well-ordered estate, an insufficiency of frustrations to go terrier-mad over. She spoke to curly, soft-eyed spaniels, and she learnt to withstand the attentions of a particular spaniel named Sunflower, who loved people, all people, so much, she could not bear to miss any opportunity for hurling herself upon them, and was so utterly beside herself with joy at finding one that could talk to her that any attempt Rosie made to try to persuade her that restraint was a virtue was lost in the tumult. Sometimes Rosie spoke to lapdogs suffering from a surfeit of tit-bits; she did not care much for most of these—too many of them didn’t have the sense they were born with—except for Lady Pren’s own hairy palm-sized mite, Throstle. Throstle was a fides terrier, more commonly called a teacup terrier. Teacup terriers were supposed to be small enough to curl up in a teacup (they were also rather the colour of tea leaves, and their rough coats had something of the same texture), and were mostly to be found up a lady’s sleeve or in her pocket, and were often rather crazed, for they had a vague racial memory that they had once been bigger. Throstle appeared to be totally unaware that he was too small to protect Lady Pren from anything larger than a medium-sized beetle, and took his position very seriously.

  Rosie spoke to the half-wild birds in the mews, who answered in images as sharp as knives and flung as quickly as a falcon seizing a smaller bird out of the air. They spoke of death and of food, and of their handlers, whom they both hated and loved, for they were only half wild, and they knew it.

  And one spring day when the sky was so bright and hard you felt you could rap on it with your knuckles and it would sing like beaten metal (a very rare sort of day in the misty, clammy Gig), she spoke for the first time to the great white merrel, with its ten-foot wingspan, which lived in the rafters of Woodwold’s Great Hall where it shone from the darkness like a moon from a cloud; and it told her that the incomprehensible noise of banquets and their smothering smells, and the cheeping and scurrying of servants, were a poor trade for the freedom of its forest.

  The Great Hall, even almost empty, as it was whenever Rosie had occasion to be in it, seemed to her nearly overwhelming. She did not come here often, and rarely lingered. It was so tall that the ceiling was lost in shadows with the shutters open and sunlight streaming in across the pale scrubbed planking of the floor; and it was large enough that you wouldn’t be able to recognise the face of someone half its width away from you if the person were your dearest friend. Lord Prendergast held his judicial sittings here with an eye to intimidating miscreants.

  Rosie thought she could have grown accustomed to the mere size of it. But the loomingness of Woodwold was especially acute here, and it seemed to her there was a kind of weight upon her as soon as she crossed its threshold, the weight, perhaps, of the long years of its existence, for this was the oldest part of Woodwold; but more, of its strange half-waking awareness.
The pressure eased when she went farther in, to Lady Prendergast and her ladies’ rooms, to talk to lapdogs and canaries, or downstairs to the kitchens to negotiate an invasion of squirrels. (Squirrels did not, in fact, negotiate. They believed that they were too quick and too clever for anything ever to catch them, or to keep them away from anything they wanted, unless they were having a bad day, and it was up to Rosie to convince them that “having a bad day” is a flexible concept, especially if there were enough ferrets and tunnel-hounds involved.)

  I am sorry, Rosie said to the merrel. I do not think I can ask them to give you your freedom.

  I know you cannot, said the merrel. But you asked and I have answered.

  She asked, humbly, half expecting the creature to break its chain and fall on her with its beak and talons in a fury of frustration: Is there anything else I can do for you?

  There was a silence like the pit of winter, and then, as if from a very long way away, she heard a small voice like a fledgling’s say wistfully, Will you come and talk to me again some time?

  Yes, said Rosie. Of course I will. I would be glad—honoured—to do so.

  She often thought of the imprisoned merrel, after that first conversation. She decided that she could go on not knowing what the spell on herself was, and why it was there, for as long as it took Katriona’s sign to arrive. She thought of all the things she had done in twenty years that had not brought it on—whatever the spell was about. Enchanted embroidery, although it had felt very nasty at the time, as if her hands no longer belonged to her, was pretty negligible after all. Especially when you remembered the merrel.

  She thought of the merrel stretching its wings, silently, in the dark peak of Lord Prendergast’s Great Hall; she thought of how carefully it moved among its cage of rafters, so that the chain around its ankle did not clink; so carefully that any of Lord Prendergast’s guests who did not know it was there would never look up to find it. (The floor beneath it was scrubbed twice a day; in moulting season it was swept three times.) She thought of the story the huntsman told her, of how it had been wounded—they guessed—by a dagger of falling ice, in the mountains where the source of the River Moan flowed, several days’ ride from Woodwold; and how Lord Prendergast’s hunting party had found it, but that he had stopped them from killing it. Even with a broken wing and half dead of starvation no one liked to approach it. The huntsman threw a net to tangle its feet, and Lord Pren himself had hooded it with soft leather cut from his own hunting waistcoat, and then had it bound and brought home, and its wing set. But the wing had not healed as it should, and so it was given the vaulted height of the Great Hall to live in, where no one dared trouble it, and it was fed by a falconer with a very long pole.

  The merrel also knew its wing had not healed. But I could reach a great height once more before it failed me, it said. And from there I would fold my wings and plummet to the earth as if a hare or a fawn had caught my eye; but it would be myself I stooped toward. It would be a good flight and a good death. And so I eat their dead things cut up on a pole, dreaming of my last flight.

  CHAPTER 14

  That spring, too, Narl gained a new apprentice. Ordinarily such an arrival would be the focus of conversation and speculation for weeks: not only had Narl accepted him, which was unusual enough, but this one was a handsome young man, and as clean shaven as Narl.

  But the run of odd fevers round the Gig, especially in Foggy Bottom, which neither Aunt’s herbs nor the priest’s arcane mutterings seemed able to cure, nor even, much, to ameliorate, distracted everybody; and those who were well enough for gossip had no time for it. The fevers were not severe, but their prevalency, lack of origin, and reluctance to depart were disturbing enough to take the edge off any interest in a good-looking, well-mannered young stranger.

  Katriona had less to do with the sick that season than she might have had some other year, because she had four little wielders of baby-magic to look after, including their own Gilly, who had been set off, early and spectacularly, by the birth of her little brother, Gable. (Jem had recently slid through his own incursion of baby-magic without much more than the occasional manifestation of a black, red-eyed Thing that crouched in corners breathing stertorously. Jem had insisted that it was friendly, so they had left it alone, although everyone but Jem had circled its chosen corners somewhat warily.) Gable, fortunately, was a placid baby, and never interrupted his nursing while Katriona was frantically flicking counter-spells with the arm not holding him.

  Peony was constantly in demand either as a nurse or to help keep order at the wheelwright’s, and she missed her noontimes at the forge for some weeks. Rosie had told her of the new apprentice’s arrival, his name, Rowland, and the fact that he had no beard. But Rosie was not very interested in him, and so Peony wasn’t either.

  Till the first day Peony returned for her usual noontime at the forge. Rosie, standing at the head of one of Lord Pren’s horses, looked up just before Rowland’s and Peony’s eyes met. “You’re here!” said Rosie. “I’m positively starving. Peony, meet Rowland. This one needs settling”—meaning the horse—“before I want to leave him. Don’t eat everything.”

  By the time Narl and Rosie had left their charge with a little hay to keep him contented, Peony and Rowland had been trying to start a conversation for some while. Rosie was vaguely aware that her friend and the new apprentice were behaving out of character; Peony could talk to anyone, and Rowland had very pretty manners, much prettier than any smith’s apprentice had any business having, which made him even more conspicuous than he was already for being tall and handsome and clean shaven. But here were these two social adepts standing staring at one another, Rowland with a hammer he kept passing from hand to hand, Peony clutching the basket in front of her as if she were warding off demons with it. Rosie was used to the effect Peony had on almost everyone at first meeting, especially young men; but Peony never behaved like this.

  Something stirred at the back of Rosie’s mind: surprise, curiosity, wonder. Dismay. And something else. “Narl,” she said quietly. “Look. What is the matter with them?”

  Narl straightened up from the wash bucket, drying his hands. He still had most of his attention on the horse they had been shoeing; it was just the sort of brilliantly athletic maniac Lord Pren’s youngest son favoured—and, furthermore, it had terrible feet, with horn that wouldn’t hold a nail. However often it came in to have a thrown shoe refitted, it would never believe that this wasn’t the time that Narl was going to use the red-hot tongs and pokers on it, and not merely on its shoes. If he hadn’t had Rosie to help him—she had told him she told the crazy ones stories, as you might do with a fractious child at bedtime—he probably wouldn’t have been able to shoe it at all, however much mashed viso root he used. It looked half asleep now, musing over its hay with its ears flopping like an old pony’s. He was half tempted to suggest that it was clever enough to know a good thing when it heard it, and merely liked Rosie’s stories, but he also knew this wasn’t true; the white round its eye as he approached it and the way it held the foot he was working on, told him better. It was always the crazy ones that hated being shod who most often threw shoes.

  He gave his apprentice and the wainwright’s niece a look while he passed his towel to Rosie, but he was more interested in the problem of where to put nails in a hoof already full of crumbling nail holes. His face was, as it usually was, expressionless. But Rosie was watching him as she washed her hands, and she had learnt to read his face in the years she had been hanging round the forge to a degree that perhaps Narl did not realise himself. And she saw awareness, or understanding, strike him as he looked, sharp as a knife, and where the invisible blade wounded him there bled hope and fear and longing—and something like resigned despair. This was so unexpected she almost put her hand on his arm, almost said to him, What is it? Can I help? I would do anything for you—when she realised, first, that he would not want her to have seen what she had seen, and second, that what she had barely stopped herself from
saying was the truth.

  She was wholly absorbed in giving her hands and forearms the scrubbing of their lives when Narl turned back to her, and she raised a carefully blank face to him. She could feel she was blushing, but she had splashed cold water on her face, too, which would do as an excuse. “They’ve just fallen in love,” he said neutrally, and his face was again as calm and unreadable as it usually was.

  His face was so tranquil and his tone so mild that Rosie almost believed she had imagined what she had seen. He was Narl, and nothing ever disturbed him, nor distracted him long from cold iron. She had drawn his attention away from its usual paths, but only briefly; Narl was about to take his noon meal standing up and looking at some half-finished project, or studying bits of waste iron that would no longer be waste when he was done with them.

  But then the meaning of his words sank in. “They—?” she said, bewildered. “But—”

  “It happens that way sometimes,” said Narl. “Hard on them both, for he’s promised elsewhere.”