The Seventh Magpie

by Nancy Chase

  “Reverend Mother,” the nun murmured.

  “Yes, Sister Anne?” The abbess glanced up from the page. “What was that shouting outside a few moments ago? Did I not make it clear that silence is a virtue we seek here at this abbey?”

  “Yes, madam.” The nun shot an angry glance at Catrin. “It was a sailor, madam. At the gate.”

  “A sailor?” The abbess dropped her pen. “You didn’t let him in, did you?”

  “Of course not!” Sister Anne huffed. “But he brought the child. The princess. Or so he claimed,” she added, skeptically eyeing Catrin’s rumpled dress and tangled hair.

  “Hmm. Yes, I see.” The abbess heaved her bulk up off the chair and shambled out from behind the desk. She was very tall and fatter even than Megan. She wore a heavy gold chain around her neck, a signet ring upon her forefinger, and a bunch of keys on a large brass ring at her belt. “Very well, Sister, you may go. Leave the child here.”

  After Sister Anne hurried from the room, the abbess took Catrin’s chin in her hand and turned Catrin’s face this way and that, examining her with a faint air of disgust. “You are the princess, are you not? You never can tell with those thieving sailors. They’ll lie to you as soon as blink at you. Well, no matter. Whoever you are, the king wants a princess, so a princess he shall get. By the time he sends for you, he’ll never know the difference anyway.”

  Catrin swallowed with difficulty, and the abbess released her chin. “It’s plain as can be that you’re little better than a savage, with your hair strewn about like a haystack and your face as filthy as a blacksmith’s apron. Why, our kitchen maid is more suitable for decent company than you are.”

  She waited for Catrin to make some response, but Catrin just stared up at her with wide, frightened eyes, clutching her book to her chest. The abbess noticed the book’s gold and gems sparkling in the candlelight. “What do you have there, child?”

  Catrin looked down. “Magic book,” she said in a tiny voice. “Mother gave me.”

  “There is no such thing as magic. Give it to me, it’s not permitted here.”

  “No.” Catrin scowled and stepped backward.

  “And don’t mumble, child. A real princess never—” The abbess broke off when she realized what Catrin had said. Her eyes narrowed, and she held out her hand. “Give me the book.”

  “It’s mine!” Catrin protested. “Mother said I mustn’t lose it. It’s very val—valuable.”

  The abbess snorted. “In that case, you’re hardly old enough to guard it properly, are you?” She scooped the book out of Catrin’s hands, then gasped and dropped it as if stung. It lay there gleaming on the ebony desk, with a kingdom’s worth of gems on its cover. She tried again to pick it up and dropped it even faster this time, with a yelp of pain. Glaring at Catrin, she pulled out a handkerchief to wrap around the book.

  “Such treasures are better left to the king, I’ll lock it up for safekeeping and send it back to him when you return home.” Careful to touch only the handkerchief, the abbess shoved the book into one of the cabinets behind her desk and locked the door. “As for you, there will be no more disobedience out of you, or I’ll put you to work in our kitchen and send Kae the kitchen maid back as the princess when your father asks for you. Do you understand me?”

  Biting her lip, Catrin nodded.

  “Good. Now Sister Anne will show you to your room.”

  That night, alone in the big, cold chamber that was to be her room, Catrin parted her bed-curtains so she could watch the moonlight flooding over the garden wall and into the orchard below her window. She wished it was the tide, pouring in to wash this whole horrible place into the sea. They couldn’t treat her this way. She thrust her small jaw forward. Her father was the king! He would defend her. She would learn to write as quickly as she could, so she could write him a letter. If he knew, he would make them give back her book. He would make them send her home.

  Her last thought was of the little sailor boy. She hoped with all her heart that he wouldn’t forget his promise.

  Time at the abbey passed slowly. At dawn and at dusk, stately as swans, the nuns filed into the chapel for prayers. In between times, they worked in the garden or spun flax into thread or wove linen cloth on the big wooden looms. They never raised their voices, never quickened their steps, and it took Catrin weeks to be able to tell them apart. The only person who ever left the abbey grounds was the freckled kitchen maid, and that was just to go down to the market in the harbor to buy fish for the stew.

  Every day, Catrin frowned over her lessons, her tightly clutched nubbin of chalk scratching painfully on her slate, while the abbess scolded her to sit up straight, keep her elbows off the table, and for goodness sake not to scowl so.

  As the long months passed, the white snowdrops in the garden gave way to pink lilacs, then red roses. One evening, when the trees in the orchard hung heavy with fruit, the first migrating wild geese of the autumn flew across the sky in perfect arrowhead formation, bugling their distant, lonely calls. Catrin leaned on her windowsill to watch, envying them their strong wings that carried them high on the wind across the sea to her own country. It seemed unfair that a goose was free to go wherever it would when a princess could not.

  That morning she had stolen a bit of parchment and an old quill pen. Now, biting her tongue in concentration, she struggled to write her first wobbly letter: “Papa, I want to come home.”

  At the sound of a soft knock at her door, Catrin sat up and hid the letter in the front of her dress, but it was only Kae the kitchen maid who shyly sidled in.

  The girl kept her eyes downcast and nervously twisted one copper-colored braid between her fingers. “If you please, Princess, I didn’t like to disturb you, and you can send him away if you don’t want to see him, only I met him in the market, and he said you asked for him. He said he promised.”

  “Who promised?” Catrin demanded. “What do you mean?”

  Kae raised her eyes. “I didn’t tell the abbess. She doesn’t allow visitors. But he’s waiting by the orchard wall for you. If you go now, while she’s at prayers, she’ll never know. It has to be tonight, you see, ’cause the ship sails in the morning.”

  “The ship! Do you mean the ship that brought me here? And the sailor boy is here to take my message?”

  Before the startled kitchen maid could reply, Catrin flung her arms around her neck and kissed her. “Kae, thank you, thank you! I’ll never forget you for this as long as I live!”

  She fairly flew over the cool, damp grass. Light as a thought, she hoisted her skirts up to her knees, kicked off her dainty shoes, and clambered up the one crooked old apple tree that leaned over the garden wall. Apples drooped, ripe and fragrant, all around her, and the great arc of sky bloomed with stars overhead.

  She paused, wind and leaves in her hair, then looked down. There at the base of the wall stood the very same sailor boy. “You came back.”

  She couldn’t think of the words to convey her gratitude. Finally, overcome by shyness, she mumbled, “I have a letter. Will you deliver it?” She extracted it from the front of her dress and tossed it down to him.

  He picked it up and tucked it inside his shirt, then stepped back from the wall, his bare feet silent on the dusty path. “You will come back?” Catrin asked, trying not to plead. “To bring my father’s reply? You won’t forget?”

  His teeth flashed white in the moonlight when he smiled. “I promise.”

  The following morning, Catrin tried to help Kae with her chores. At home in the scullery, the kitchen maid was anything but shy, gossiping and laughing as she scrubbed the pots, swept the floors, and gathered the firewood. She could breathe a fire to life on the hearth from the faintest of sparks, fold a bed sheet neatly without letting it touch the floor, and carry two full buckets from the well without spilling a drop.

  When the abbess caught them together, she thrashed Kae with a willow stick and sent Catrin to bed without supper. The following day, she doubled Catrin’s studies to inc
lude history, geography, and etiquette. Since the princess had nothing better to do than to bother the servants and spoil an expensive gown, she said, it was high time she began to learn more fit accomplishments for a woman of noble birth. Playing in the kitchen was strictly forbidden.

  But at night, when the bright moon kept her awake, Catrin slipped out of bed and crept down the stairs to the straw pallet beside the hearth where Kae slept. “I hate being a princess,” she whispered. “They won’t let me do anything. What’s the use of knowing the names of places I’ll never see or how to curtsy to people I’ll never meet? I want my magic book back. And oh, I want so much to go home!”

  Drowsing in the light of the dying embers, the kitchen maid wrapped her tattered wool blanket around the princess and let her steady breathing lull them both to sleep.

  The sailor boy kept his promise. Each spring and fall when the wild geese called, his ship would return, and Catrin would steal away to meet him by the garden wall. She sent letter after pleading letter, which her father never answered. But each year the sailor boy was taller and more handsome, with hair dark as thunder and eyes like the sea.

  “Boy,” Catrin asked him finally, “what is your name?”

  “It’s Geoffrey, Princess,” he said, smiling. “What’s yours?”

  After that, whenever he visited he would sit on the wall and talk to her until the ship’s bell and the changing tide called him away. Once she asked him, “How can you bear it? When I am grown, I am going to live far from the sea. It’s cruel and dark, and it has no pity.” Her eyes clouded as she remembered her mother.

  “Oh no,” he said. “The sea is vast and playful and swifter than the finest horse. No one can cage the sea or those who travel it.”

  Catrin thought about this and said no more. Geoffrey never mentioned her fear, but afterward he would bring her little gifts from the sea: a curled pink shell, a starfish, a blue-speckled gull’s egg. And each time, before he left, she would toss him an apple from the crooked tree.

  One autumn, when Catrin thrust her usual letter into his hand, Geoffrey shook his head sadly. “Another letter to the king?”

  “I want to go home! Why won’t he send for me?”

  “I don’t wish to worry you,” Geoffrey said, “but there have been rumors.” He bit his lip, uncertain whether he should continue.

  “What kind of rumors?”

  “That your father’s kingdom is faltering. People speak of storms and crop failures, hunger and broken alliances. Trade in the port has declined, and the people seem unhappy.”

  “If things are so bad, why doesn’t he send for me? Perhaps I could help. Anything would be better than staying here in this prison.”

  “Princess.” Geoffrey touched her sleeve. “Do they mistreat you here? Every year you are more thin and pale than the year before. Every year you write letters that your father never answers. Is there anything I can do to help you?”

  To hide the stinging in her eyes, she pretended to watch the slow, looping flight of a hawk that was soaring overhead. “Can you get me the key to the cabinet where the abbess has locked my magic book?”

  “No.”

  The hawk was a distant speck now, circling higher and higher, rising beyond the limits of her sight. “If you were a prince, you could ride up on your white horse and rescue me. If you were a sorcerer, you could change me into a bird so I could fly over these walls and back to my home where I belong.”

  Geoffrey looked at his feet. “We can’t change who we are, Princess.”

  She sighed. “No. Not without magic. And real princesses don’t believe in magic. That’s what the abbess says.”

  “Do you believe in magic?”

  She didn’t answer at first. She picked a wild rose from a scraggly bush that twined up the sunny side of the wall and, twisting its thorny stem between her fingers, bent her head to inhale the scent. “What is your most precious thing in the world?”

  “My ship. She’s all sunlight and wind, and the water sings beneath her prow. With no more than a breath and a thought, she can carry me anywhere I want to go.”

  “Yes,” Catrin said. “And what would you do if she was taken from you?”

  He grew silent, and their eyes met. “I’ll deliver your message to the king,” he muttered, turning away.

  “Geoffrey!” Catrin called. “Thank you.” This time she tossed him the red rose instead of an apple.

  But when the spring tides brought his ship back to the harbor, he would not look her in the eye. “Your father has sent word to the abbess to pack your belongings and send you back on this voyage with us. You’re to be married.”

  On the morning of Catrin’s departure, the abbess listened stonily to the princess’s pleas. At last she waved her hand for silence. “Have you learned nothing in all these years? A true princess has no need of magic books. Believing in magic is for children and peasants. Since you are neither, the king will expect better from you, and so do I.”

  “But my mother told me I would die if I lost it,” Catrin protested. Even wearing the grownup gown of dove-gray silk her father had sent, with pearls plaited into her hair, somehow she couldn’t keep the childish desperation out of her voice.

  “Superstitious nonsense! Of course, the book itself is very valuable, otherwise I would have burnt it years ago. But as it is, I shall pack it up safely in a box and entrust the key to one of the sailors, so that he may return it to His Majesty. No! No more arguments. A true princess does not argue. Are you a true princess or not?”

  Catrin’s lip quivered. “I don’t know.”

  “Catrin! Do you want the king to be ashamed of you?”

  “No,” she whispered. But she did not cry.

  The tears didn’t even fall when she said goodbye to Kae. They hugged and kissed like sisters, and Kae handed Catrin a small roll of cloth, saying, “It’s only a little peasant charm, for luck. It has a crust of bread, a candle stub, and a tinderbox, so wherever you are, you’ll never be without food or light or warmth.” She hugged Catrin hard one more time. “Don’t be afraid to fight for what’s yours, Princess. Sometimes that’s the only way to keep anything at all.”

  Geoffrey carried all of Catrin’s belongings down to the ship, and from the abbess he accepted the key to the box that held the golden book. They set sail, and Geoffrey did not speak to Catrin again for many days.

  The capricious sea curled and tossed beneath the ship, sometimes flinging playful whitecaps against the hull, sometimes shouldering it roughly like a blind, sullen beast. All of the crates and bundles of silks and spices had to be lashed down to keep them from toppling over. Somewhere in that cargo was her golden book.

  The other sailors, remembering Catrin’s first voyage, mistook her pallor for fear and tried to comfort her. “No harm will come, Princess, don’t worry. This ship has magic sails. Not even the Seven Magpies could sink ’er.”

  They played merry tunes on their little silver whistles to try to make her smile. They told gruesome stories of the legendary Drowned Woman who, dressed in rags and wearing seaweed for hair, came up from the depths on stormy nights to drag sailors to their doom. One sailor even proudly rolled up his sleeve to point out the mark of Catrin’s teeth where she had bitten him all those years ago. But the princess’s mind was not on the sea or the ship.

  At last she could stand it no longer. She searched the whole ship for Geoffrey until finally she cornered him on the lower deck. “Why are you angry?” she demanded piteously. “What do you want from me?”

  “Nothing, Princess,” was all he would say. He went back to mending a piece of canvas, and would not look at her any more.

  “It’s not my fault I’m to be married,” she told herself. “He’s just a sailor.” But she remembered lying awake long winter nights with the pink shell he had brought her cupped in her hand.

  “Father would never permit it,” she argued. But her father was many miles away. Soon she could neither eat nor sleep.

  “I’m a princess, I�
��m not supposed to tell my feelings first. What if he doesn’t love me? He has the key to my golden book, and now he won’t even speak to me.”

  When she remembered what Kae had said about fighting for what was hers, she sat biting her lip, then sprang up without a word to anyone and tiptoed to Geoffrey’s cabin. “I can’t fight for his love if he won’t give it to me, but I can find that key if I have to search till suppertime.”

  She didn’t know where to look or exactly what to expect in a man’s room, but it seemed so sparse there couldn’t be many hiding places. After a quick glance at the bunk with one blanket, the chest full of clothes, and the small writing table strewn with maps, she pulled open the drawer of the writing table.

  She frowned in disappointment that there was no key inside until she realized what the drawer did contain. There, dry and brittle with age but carefully saved, lay the rose she had given Geoffrey at the abbey the previous autumn.

  She took it and ran all the way to the forecastle, where she found him polishing a piece of brass with a rag. “I love you, too,” she exclaimed.

  He gaped at the rose, and his cheeks flushed red. He threw down the rag and tried to retreat, but she blocked his path. “I am a sailor,” he protested. “You are a princess. It can never be.”

  “That doesn’t matter. Marry me, and I will make you a prince.”

  “You don’t understand,” he said miserably. “I like being a sailor.”

  “Oh.” Catrin didn’t know what to say. “Oh. Well, in that case, I—In that case, you will go on being a sailor, and I will be a sailor’s wife. I will learn how. I won’t mind. We’ll have the captain marry us tomorrow.”

  Geoffrey shook his head. “No, Princess. There isn’t going to be a tomorrow.” He pointed to a jagged pinnacle of rock thrusting up out of the sea ahead of them. “Look, there’s Magpie Island, and beyond it is the mainland. By tomorrow you will be safe in your father’s castle.”