by Jane Yolen
As they passed the moon, like dust motes through light, I had a sudden memory of the thousand stars over the Gate when Orybon had burst, and began to shiver. Grey put his arm around me, and Father went into the pavilion for one of Mother’s shawls. Mother patted my hand and said, “There! There!”
They thought it was simply the cold. Or that I was sad not to be going to the party. But it was not. “The fifteenth year, give or take a month,” I whispered, my voice further thinned out by the night air.
Father and Mother exchanged a glance. They held hands, then reached out for my hand. I reached out for Grey’s.
We closed our eyes and spoke the spell.
Far frae earth and far frae barrows,
Up to where the blue sky narrows . . .
Grey kept up. He’d always been a quick learner and never forgot a spell once he heard it.
Wind and wildness, wings and weather,
Allie-allie up together.
Now!
The Now called out all the Aunts from their houses, and Mother said—in a voice that carried but was not quite a Shout—“It’s time for the Princess Talia spell.”
None of them asked Mother how she knew.
As we all lifted into the air—Mother on one side of Father, who had no wings, and Grey on the other—I could already feel the beginnings of a magick headache coming on, and my shoulders started to hurt as well from holding them stiff against the headache pain. I relied more on the others as we barreled through the air, just as I had all those human years ago with my sprained wing.
Halfway through the journey, we met Dusty flying back the other way.
“Come with us,” Father said.
“Where?”
“To the castle.”
“But the princess sent me home.”
Father laughed. “And we are bringing you back.”
A slow smile spread over Dusty’s face. Clearly, he’d already begun to forget about the princess and was thinking of another girl. He’d mentioned a dairy maid to me.
I said, “There’s magick to be made and a spell to be finished. And with the princess asleep, there will be no thousand stars bursting.”
That made him even happier.
• • • • • • • •
By the time we landed at the palace, we knew we were late. The sleeping spell had already begun. There was a cook asleep with her hand raised to strike the scullery maid, and she, poor little wench, had been struck by sleep instead. It had happened at the moment of her only retaliation against the cook, which she got by kicking the cook’s cat. The cat, unaware of the approaching kick, was already snoring with one paw wrapped around a half-dead sleeping mouse.
Along the hallways guards slept at their posts. One had been caught in the act of cleaning his teeth with the point of his rather blunt knife, one was peeling an orange with his sword, one was scraping his boot with his javelin tip, and one was unceremoniously picking his nose.
Dressed in nightgowns and nightshirts, the partiers snored and shivered and twitched but did not wake. And in the midst of them all, lying in state, was Talia, presents piled at her feet. She blew delicate little bubbles between her partially opened lips, and under her closed eyelids, I could see the rapid scuttling of dreams.
Being immune to the spell, my siblings and cousins hovered nervously around the tableaux, and Solange fluttered above. Dusty darted in three times to steal a kiss from the sleeping Talia. But—as he admitted later—she was so unresponsive, he tired of the game.
“I’m not a necrophile, after all,” he said petulantly.
Laughing, Grey said, “Cousin, that’s a funny thing to say, since only last week you were in love with the ghost of a dairy maid buried near Miller’s Cross.”
“He neglected to say it was a dead dairy maid,” I said.
“That’s different,” Dusty countered.
“Really, Dusty?” I asked pointedly, but he refused to look at all embarrassed.
Mother put her fingers to her mouth and whistled everyone to her. “Check every corner of the castle,” she told us. “I need to know for certain that every human here is asleep. And if not, why not. Meet on the staircase when you are done.”
And away they all flew, except for me. I stuck close to Father, my head now throbbing too badly to fly about. Mother’s whistle hadn’t helped, either. But the rest of the Family went all through the king’s castle checking every room, including the garderobe.
There were sleepers in every one.
• • • • • • • •
We met on the sweeping castle stairs, and Father announced, “Time for a Family conference.” He led us out of the castle by the huge steps that ran down into the formal gardens, past the sleeping guards at the gate.
“Do you all understand what’s happened?” Mother asked.
Necrops raised his hand. “Gorse’s spell worked.”
The rest all nodded, and some said my name aloud. I shuddered.
Mallow, of course, complained. “You could at least have waited till the party was over. We never get to go to parties.”
“Don’t be an idiot. We’ve been to Talia’s birthday parties every year,” Thorn said. “And they’ve all been dreadful, because we’re not invited to them, but merely Bidden!”
They started squabbling about it, until Willow said, “Why are we quarreling amongst ourselves? We should make Gorse—”
Grey interrupted her. “It may be Gorse’s spell,” he said, “but that does not mean it is Gorse’s fault.”
“Actually,” said Mother, “the sleeping part of the spell is mine. And they are going to sleep for a hundred years.”
Everyone gasped at that, and after—for a moment—they hushed. It was one thing to want to blame me for the whole mess, but no one dared blame Mother.
“Why a hundred years?” Grey asked, and Necrops explained.
“That’s the longest amount of time any spell is allowed to last.” He turned to Mother. “Right?”
She nodded. “And you’re forgetting the most important thing,” she reminded them.
They looked at one another and, not seeing that most important thing written on anyone’s face, turned to Mother, and said in chorus, “What?”
Only Grey and I were silent because we had both guessed what she meant. We’d discussed it often as we sat in the meadow, he reading poetry aloud to me as I plaited daisies into chains. Mother had confirmed it as we’d flown to the castle.
“The knot in the thread, children, you must remember the knot.” She shook her head as if she’d found them all wanting. And I suppose she had.
Father held a finger up. “The Laws of Correspondence and Balance . . . ?” he prompted.
The Aunts looked at one child after another, waiting for the answer.
I couldn’t stand the silence a moment longer. “Father means, of course, that to balance such an important spell, a similar knot must be set around the castle.”
“Ohhhhhhh.” It was a communal sigh.
Grey reached out and held my hand. Dusty grabbed his other hand. The rest all situated themselves in a great circle and held the hands of the person on either side. Only I at one end, and Mother where we would have touched hands, did not complete the circle. Instead, we each waved our free hand widdershins.
A great wind began to blow from the north. It plucked out the pepper seeds from Dusty’s pockets, and picked the seeds from the queen’s thorn that stood in the raised center of a grand fountain. The wind gathered rose hips and acorns and flung them into the air. Faster and faster the maelstrom blew, a great black tunnel of air that was like and unlike the vortex that had whirled away the years of Grey’s exile.
In a voice as wild as the wind, Mother said, “A hundred times, children. One for each year the princess and her
court shall sleep.”
And then she and I spoke the spell, for she’d taught it to me as we’d sped through the skies to the castle:
Blow and sow
This fertile ground
Until the knot
Be all unwound.
It was spare, and perfect. Some day, I thought, I want to be able to make spells as compact and perfect as that. Though it’s probably not a learned thing, but a gift.
On the second round, Father and Grey and Dusty spoke the words as well. On the third, the rest of the Family joined in, though Arian managed only the rhyme word at the end of the second and fourth line. But then, it didn’t matter. The spell was wound up even without him.
By the time we had reached the seventies, my head felt as if someone had split it with an iron bar. In the eighties, I was nauseated. By the nineties, I was shaking like aspen leaves in a puzzling wind.
Before we actually reached one hundred, I’d stopped speaking the spell aloud and just whispered the words.
Mother ended the spell with the loudest Shout I’d ever heard her make. It was so loud, the earth itself was shocked and opened up dozens and dozens of little mouths. Into every one of those tiny mouths popped a seed or rose hip or nut and, in moments, they began to grow. We watched as the growing years were compressed into seconds, green shoots leaping upward toward the sky.
By the time the last echo of Mother’s Shout had died away, a great forest of mammoth oaks and thorny vines, rosy briars and pepper trees surrounded the palace. Only one small passage overhead remained open, where the moon beamed down a narrow light. Inside the rest of the knotted wood, it was as dark as a dream, as deep as a hundred-year sleep.
“Come, children,” Father said.
We rode the moonbeam up and out, Mother dragging Father, and Grey carrying me, for I was almost as comatose as the inhabitants of the castle, felled by the amount of magick around me.
As the last of us—Arian, of course—passed through the hole, the thorns sewed themselves shut over the deathlike silence.
• 18 •
AND AFTER
Will a hundred years be enough?” I asked Mother the next day when she brought me a tisane for my headache and was fussing around my bed.
“It was the most I was allowed,” she said.
“I know that.” I drank a bit of the tisane. It was elderberry, my favorite. “But near the end, couldn’t we go and knot the spell anew?”
“Really, Gorse, it’s all that’s needed,” she said, shaking her head at me. And out she went.
I was still puzzling this when Grey came in with a book from the H’s—History.
“This looks like something that might interest you,” he said.
The book was about the rise of a religion called Democracy, which believes in neither monarchs nor magick. He read it to me all day and in the evening he came to a passage about how “Democracy encourages the common man.”
“Nothing common about you,” I told him.
“Nor you,” he said.
“I’m not a man,” I said, a little more loudly than I’d meant to.
“I’ve noticed,” he said in the sweetest way, startling me. He put down the book then and we just looked at one another for a long while.
• • • • • • • •
Afterward, Father and Mother explained to Grey and me that the hundred years was the amount of time the kingdom had to remain without a king of the royal blood ruling over it before the kingdom could legally be declared no longer his.
“I finally found it about a month ago,” Father said. “All along, it was in one of the books that Great-aunt Gilda had from her Mother, a piece of paper signed by King Carmody sewn into the book’s lining. It’s all about how a king or his family must rule the land for a hundred years with his immediate line continuing after him. Your Mother called me brilliant, and I guess I am.” He chuckled.
“He is,” said Mother, gazing at him with the kind of love I’d always missed seeing. “No one else in the Family could have figured it out. It’s why I put the hundred years in the spell.”
“And that means what?” asked Grey.
“Ah,” said Father, raising his finger, which is how he signals that he has come to the point of a story.
But I understood before he had time to say another word. “If the king no longer owns the kingdom or the land,” I explained to Grey, “he no longer owns us.” I looked at Father. “Am I right?”
“You are the brilliant one,” Father said, nodding.
“Then all the ties will be severed!” I stood up and danced around the room.
Grey stood up and danced with me for a moment, but suddenly stopped mid-step. “But what if in a hundred years a prince comes, gets in through the briar hedge, and marries the princess?”
Mother looked at Father, and Father looked down at the floor.
“Wait!” I cried. “Wait! Grey has already found the solution.”
He looked stunned. “I have?”
That was when I showed them the passage in the Democracy book about the rise of the common man.
“Interesting,” said Father.
“I don’t see why,” Mother said. “We aren’t common—we’re fey.”
I sat up in bed. “Really, Mother, think!” I didn’t realize how much I was sounding like Father then, but now Grey was doing the chuckling. “In a hundred years, even if some enterprising young prince manages to arrive just as the knot of the briary wood is unraveling, I shall be there, in the Cloak of Invisibility. Even if he decides to marry her without her money and her kingdom, he will be too late to tie us to the land. Besides, I will whisper the Rote of Revolution in his ear. And if the Cloak works long enough, Talia will seem to him only a musty relic of a bygone era, with a voice like a saw cutting wood. Her bedclothes will reek of decadence and her bubbly breath of decay. He will wed the scullery maid out of compassion and learn . . .” I tried to think of what he would learn.
“Computer science,” Grey said.
“What’s that?”
“Something very complicated and magickal,” he said. “Just the sort of thing I like.”
I nodded. “Computer science it is. The only Biddings we shall ever have to answer to from now on will be our own. And we shall be allowed to travel outside the kingdom’s borders.” I was thinking of the Great Wall of China, of the iced mountains of the Antarctic, of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
Mother laughed at me as if she’d read my thoughts. “You have such odd longings, child. I am so glad you will get your Wishes.”
“And you, too, my darling,” Father said, his hand on her arm. “Though I always hoped, I never dared to truly believe it would happen.”
I was stunned by his admission but said nothing about it directly. I told him instead, “Sometimes freedom is simply won by a long patience, something that works far better than any magick spell.”
“And it’s all because of you, my darling daughter,” Father said. “Who came into the castle veiled by the Cloak. Who reappeared out of a deep dark space and liberated the ancient troll race. Who flew again on new wings to sever every bond and tie.”
Mother’s mouth was agape. “The prophecy.”
Father nodded.
“Well,” said Mother, “I always thought she might be the One!”
“I actually thought it might be Grey,” I said, glancing over at him. “New wings, liberating the trolls, and all.”
“No, my darling thirteenth child,” said Mother, “I always knew you were the One, though no one else believed me!”
“She is indeed,” said Grey, “the One.” And the smile he gave me lit up the entire room.
But I knew what the others didn’t even suspect. The magick came not from being the One, but being the Two, for One and One together
—like arrows in a quiver being stronger than a single one on its own—meant that Grey and I were stronger together than apart for . . . well, for as ever after as is possible.
• • • • • • • •
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