by Peter Beagle
She weaved and sewed and embroidered new clothes for every sleeper in the castle, hundreds of people. Pages and scullery maids and mummers and knights and ladies and the chapel priest and the king’s fool, for whom she made a parti-colored doublet embroidered with small sharp thorns. She weaved clothes for the chancellor and the pastry chef and the seneschal and the falconer and the captain of the guards and the king and queen, asleep on their thrones. For herself Rose weaved a simple black dress and wore it every day. Sometimes, tugging a chemise or kirtle or leggings over an unresisting sleeping body, she almost heard voices on the summer breeze. Voices, but no words.
She spun and weaved and embroidered sixteen hours a day, for years. She frowned as she worked, and a line stitched itself across her forehead, perpendicular to the lines in her neck. Her golden hair fell forward and interferred with the spinning and so she bound it into a plait, and saw the gray among the gold, and shoved the plait behind her back.
She had finished an embroidered doublet for a sous-cook and was about to carry it to the kitchen when she heard a great noise without the walls.
Slowly, with great care, Rose laid the sous-cook’s doublet neatly on the polished Gallery floor. Slowly, leaning against the stone wall to ease her arthritic left knee, she climbed the circular stairwell to her bedchamber in the tower.
He attacked the Hedge from the northwest, and he had brought a great retinue. At least two dozen young men hacked and slashed, while squires and pages waited behind. Flags snapped in the wind; horses pawed the ground; a trumpet blared. Rose had no trouble distinguishing the prince. He wore a gold circlet in his glossy dark hair, and the bridle of his golden horse was set with black diamonds. His sword hacked and slashed faster than the others’, and even from the high tower, Rose could see that he smiled.
She unfurled the banner she had embroidered, fierce yellow on black, with the two curt words: BE GONE! None of the young men looked up. Rose flapped the banner, and a picture flashed through her mind, quick as the prince’s sword: her old nurse, shaking a rug above the moat, freeing it of dust.
The prince and his men continued to hack at the Hedge. Rose called out—after all, she could hear them, should they not be able to hear her? Her voice sounded thin, pale. She hadn’t spoken in years. The ghostly words disappeared in the other voices, the wordless ones on the summer wind. No one noticed her.
The prince fell into the Hedge, and the screaming began, and Rose bowed her head and prayed for them, the lost souls, the ones for whom she would never spin doublets or breeches or whispered smiles like the one on the woman with hacked-off hair asleep in her shared bed in the north chamber.
Her other dead.
After years, decades, everyone in the castle was clothed, and dusted, and pillowed on embroidered cushions rich with intricate designs in jewelled-colored thread. The pewter in the kitchen gleamed. The wooden floor of the Long Gallery shone. Tapestries hung bright and clean on the walls.
Rose no longer sat at the spinning wheel. Her fingers were knotted and twisted, the flesh between them thin and tough as snakeskin. Her hair, too, had thinned but not toughened, its lustrous silver fine as spun flax. When she brushed it at night, it fell around her sagging breasts like a shower of light.
Something was happening to the voices on the wind. They spun their wordless threads more strongly, more distinctly, especially outside the castle. Rose slept little now, and often she sat in the stableyard through the long unchanging summer afternoon, listening. Corwin slept beside her, his long lashes throwing shadows on his downy cheeks. She watched him, and listened to the spinning wind, and sometimes her lined face turned slowly in a day-long arc, as if following a different sun than the one that never moved.
“Corwin,” she said in her quavery voice, “did you hear that?”
The wind hummed over the cobblestones, stirred the forelock of the sleeping roan.
“There are almost words, Corwin. No, better than words.”
His chest rose and fell.
“I am old, Corwin. Too old. Princes are much younger men.”
Sunlight tangled in his fresh black curls.
“They aren’t really supposed to be words. Are they.”
Rose creaked to her feet. She walked to the stableyard well. The oak bucket swung suspended from its windlass, empty. Rose put a hand on the winch, which had become very hard for her twisted hands to turn, and closed her eyes. The wind spun past her, then through her. Her ears roared. The bucket descended of itself, filled with water. Cranked back up. Rose opened her eyes.
“Ah,” she said quietly. And then, “So.”
The wind blew.
She hobbled through the stableyard gate to the Hedge. One hand she laid on it, and closed her eyes. The wind hummed in her head, barely rustling the summer grass.
When she opened her eyes, nothing about the Hedge had changed.
“So,” Rose said, and went back into the bailey, to dust the royal guard.
But each day she sat in the wordless wind, or the wind whose words were not what mattered, or in her own mind. And listened.
No prince had arrived for decades. A generation, Rose decided; a generation who knew the members of the retinue led by the young royal on the black horse. But that generation must grow older, and marry, and give birth to children, and one day a trumpet sounded and men shouted and banners snapped in the wind.
It took Rose a long time to climb the tower staircase. Often she paused to rest, leaning against the cool stone, hand pressed to her heart. At the top she paused again, to look curiously around her old room, the one place she never cleaned. The bedclothes lay dirty and sodden on the stained floor. Rose picked them up, folded them across the bed, and hobbled to a stone window.
The prince had just begun to hack at the Hedge. He was the handsomest one yet: hair and beard of deep burnished bronze, dark blue doublet strained across strong shoulders, silver fittings on epaulets and sash. Rose’s vision had actually improved with age; she could see his eyes. They were the green of stained-glass windows in bright sun.
She knew better, now, than to call to him. She stared at his hacking and slashing, at the deadly Hedge, and then closed her eyes. She let the wind roar in her ears, and through her head, and into the places that had not existed when she was young. Not even when she heard him scream did she open her eyes.
But finally, when the screams stopped as quickly as they had come, she leaned through the tower window and scanned the ground far below. The prince lay on the trampled grass, circled by kneeling, shouting men. Rose watched him wave them away, rise unsteadily, and remount his horse. She saw the horrified gaze he bent upon the Hedge.
Later, after they had all ridden away, she made her way back down the steps, over the drawbridge, across the grass to the Hedge. It loomed as dark, as thick, as impenetrable as ever. The black thorns pointed in all directions, in and out, and nothing she could do with the wind could change them at all.
But then, one day, the Hedge melted.
Rose was very old. Her silver plait had become a bother and she’d cut it, trimming her hair into a neat white cap. There were ten hairs on her chin, which sometimes she remembered to pull out and sometimes she didn’t. Her body had gone skinny as a bird’s, with thin bird bones, except for a soft rounded belly that fluttered when she snored. The arthritis in her hands had eased and they, too, were skinny, long darting hands, worn and capable as a spinning shuttle. Her sunken blue eyes spun power.
She was sitting on the unchanging grass when she heard the tumult behind the Hedge. Creakily she rose to start for the tower. But there was no need. Before her eyes the black thorns melted, running into the ground like so much dirty water from washing the kitchen floor. And then the rest of the Hedge melted. Beside her a sleeping groom stirred, and beside the drawbridge, another.
The prince rode through the dissolving Hedge as if it had never been. He had brown hair, gold sash, a chestnut horse. As he dismounted, the solid mass of muscle in his thighs shifted above
his high polished boots.
“The bedchamber of the princess—where is it?”
Rose pointed at the highest tower.
He strode past her, trailed by his retinue. When the last squire had crossed the drawbridge, Rose followed.
All was commotion. Guards sprang forward, found themselves dressed in embroidered velvet, and spun around, bewildered, drawn swords in their hand. Ladies bellowed for pages. The falconer dashed from the mews, wearing a doublet of white satin slashed over crimson, the peregrine on his wrist fitted with gold-trimmed jesses with ivory bells.
Rose hobbled to the stableyard. The king’s roan pawed and snorted. Men ran to and fro. A serving wench lowered the bucket into the well, on her head a coif sewn with gold lace.
Only Corwin noticed Rose. He stood a whole head taller than she—surely it had only been a half head difference, once? He glanced at her, away, and then back again, puzzlement on his fresh, handsome face. His eyes, she saw, were gray.
“Do I know you, good dame?”
“No,” Rose said.
“Did you come, then, with the visitors?”
“No, lad.”
He studied her neat black dress, cropped hair, wrinkled face. Her eyes. “I thought I knew everyone who lived in the castle.”
She didn’t answer. A slow flush started in his smooth brown cheeks. “Where do you live, mistress?”
She said, “I live nowhere you have ever been, lad. Nor could go.” His puzzlement only deepened, but she turned and hobbled away. There was no way she could explain.
There was shouting now, in the high tower, drifted down on the warm summer air. Through the open windows of the Long Gallery, Rose saw the queen rush past, her long velvet skirts swept over her arm. A nearly bald woman in a lace nightdress rushed from the north bedchamber, screaming. Soon they would start to search, to ask questions, to close the drawbridge.
She hobbled over it, through the place where the Hedge had been, now a bare circle like a second, drier moat. And they were waiting for her just beyond, half concealed in a grove of trees, seven of them. Old women like her, power in their glances, voices like the spinning wind.
Rose said, “Is this all there is, then, for the life I have lost? This magic?”
“Yes,” one of them said.
“It is no little thing,” another said quietly. “You have brought a prince back to life. You have clothed a fiefdom. You have seen, as few do, what and who you are.”
Rose thought about that. The woman who had spoken, her spine curved like a bow, gazed steadily back.
The first old woman repeated sharply, “It is no little thing you have gained, sister.”
Rose said, “I would rather have had my lost life.”
And to that there was no answer. The women shrugged, and linked arms with Rose, and the eight set out into the world that hardly, as yet, recognized how badly it needed them. And perhaps never would.
Stronger than Time
by
Patricia C. Wrede
The keep rose high above the brush and briars that choked the once-clear lawns around its base, and cast a cold shadow across the forest beyond. Arven hated walking through that somber dimness, though it was the shortest way home. Whenever he could, he swung wide around the far side of the keep to avoid its shadow. Most people avoided the keep altogether, but Arven found its sunlit face fascinating. The light colored the stone according to the time of day and the shifting of the seasons, now milk-white and shining, now tinged with autumn gold or rosy with reflected sunset, now a grim winter-grey. The shadowed side was always black and ominous.
Once, when he was a young man and foolish (he had thought himself brave then, of course), Arven had dressed in his soft wool breeches and the fine linen shirt his mother had embroidered for him, and gone to the very edge of the briars that surrounded the keep. He had searched all along the sunny side for an opening, a path, a place where the briars grew less thickly, but he had found nothing. He had circled, reluctantly, to the shadowed side. Looking back toward the light he had just quitted, he had seen white bones hanging inside the hedge, invisible from any other angle. They shivered in the wind, and leaned toward him, and he had run away. He had never told anyone about it, not even Una, but he still had nightmares in which weather-bleached bones hung swaying in the wind. And ever since, he had avoided the shadow of the keep as much as he could.
Sometimes, however, he miscalculated the time it would take to fell and trim a tree, and then he had to take the short way or else arrive home long after the sun was down. It made him feel like a fool to hurry through the shadows, glancing up now and again at the keep looming above him, and when he reached his cottage he was always in a bad temper. So he was not in the best of humors when, one autumn evening after such a trip, he found a young man in a voluminous cloak and a wide-brimmed hat sitting on his doorstep, obviously waiting.
“Who are you?” Arven growled, hefting his ax to show that his white hair was evidence of mere age and not infirmity.
“A traveler,” the man said softly without moving. His voice was tired, bone-tired, and Arven wondered suddenly whether he was older than he appeared. Twilight could be more than kind to a man or woman approaching middle age; Arven had known those who could pass, at twilight, for ten or fifteen fewer years than what the midwife attested to.
“Why are you here?” Arven demanded. “The road to Prenshow is six miles to the east. There’s nothing to bring a traveler up on this mountain.”
“Except the keep,” said the man in the same soft tone.
Arven took an involuntary step backward, raising his ax as if to ward off a threat, though the man still had not moved. “Go back where you came from,” Arven said. “Leave honest men to their work and the keep to crumble. Go!”
The man climbed slowly to his feet. “Please,” he said, his voice full of desperation. “Please, listen to me. Don’t send me away. You’re the only one left.”
No, I was mistaken, Arven thought. He’s no more than twenty, whatever the shadows hint. Such intensity belongs only to the young. “What do you mean?”
“No one else will even talk about the keep. I need—I need to learn more, I need to find out how it is. You live on the mountain; the keep is less than half a mile away. Surely you know something about it.”
“I know enough to avoid it,” Arven said mendaciously. He set his ax against the wall and looked at the youth, who was now a grey blur in the deepening shadows. “Stay away from the keep, lad. It’s a cursed place.”
“I know.” The words were almost too faint to catch, even in the evening stillness. “I’ve…studied the subject. Someone has to break the curse, or it will go on and on and…Tell me about the keep. Please.”
“No.”
“But you must! I can’t—” The young man stopped. “You’re the only one who…who might help me.”
Arven shook his head. “And I won’t help you kill yourself. Didn’t those books you read tell about the men who’ve died up there? The briars are full of bones. Don’t add yours to the collection.”
There was a moment of silence, then the youth raised his chin. “They all went alone, didn’t they? Alone, and in daylight, and so the thorns killed them. I know better than that.”
“You want to go up to the keep at night?” Arven stared into the growing darkness, willing his eyes to penetrate it and show him the expression on the other’s face.
“At night, with you. It’s the only way left to break the curse.”
“You’re mad.” But something stirred within Arven, a longing for adventure he had thought buried with Una, and the image of the keep, shining golden in the autumn sun, rose temptingly in his mind. He shook his head to drive away the memories and pushed open the door of his cottage.
“Wait! I shouldn’t have said that, I know, but at least let me explain.”
Arven hesitated. There was no harm in listening, and perhaps he could talk the young fool out of his suicidal resolve. “Come in, then, and ex
plain,” he said at last.
The young man held back. “I’d rather talk here.”
“If you want to talk at all, you’ll have to do it indoors,” Arven growled, regretting his momentary sympathy. “I’m an old man, and I want my dinner and a fire and something warm to drink.”
“An old man?” The other’s voice was startled, and not a little dismayed. “You can’t be! It didn’t take that long—” He stepped forward and peered at Arven, and Arven saw the outline of his shoulders sag. “I’ve been a fool. I won’t trouble you further, sir.”
“My name is Arven.” Now that the younger man was turning to go, he felt a perverse desire to keep him there. “It’s a long walk down the mountain. Come in and share my meal, and tell me your story. I like a good tale.”
“I wouldn’t call it a good one,” the young man said, but he turned back and followed Arven into the cottage.
Inside, he stood uneasily beside the door while Arven lit the fire and got out the cider and some bread and cheese. Una had always had something warm ready when Arven came in from the mountain, a savory stew or thick soup when times were good, a vegetable pottage when things were lean, but since her death he had grown accustomed to a small, simple meal of an evening. The young man did not appear to notice or care until Arven set a second mug of warm cider rather too emphatically on the table and said, “Your story, scholar?”
The young man shivered like a sleepwalker awakened abruptly from his dreams. “I’m not a scholar.”
“Then what are you?”
