Spindle's End (11 page)

But the uproar this caused was nothing compared with the uproar when Katriona noticed she had also cut her eyelashes. Various negotiations (including, finally, such desperate measures as “supposing you ever want to eat again”) eventually produced the grudging promise that, in return for Katriona keeping her hair cut short, she would leave her eyelashes alone.

Short hair rather suited Rosie. The bones of her square little face stood out with a clarity that seemed to reflect (or warn of) her personality. And without the distracting curls, Katriona found herself noticing more often the expressions flashing over that small candid face. . . . When she was watching Rosie with only half her attention she was often startled into full heed by a turn of Rosie’s head, a look in her eye, a tip of her chin, underscored, perhaps, by a gesture of her hand, a drop of one shoulder, a playful leap: and Katriona was reminded briefly but intensely of a fox, a badger, a wildcat, a doe. Not any fox or badger or wildcat or doe. Rosie had a humorous, wily, shrewd look Katriona remembered from a particularly kind and clever nanny goat they had met on their journey, and an earnest, ardent look that came from a sheepdog. Even Rosie’s curious ability to mimic Aunt’s robins—to the extent that the robins themselves went off into gales of good-natured robin-laughter about the nearness of her near misses—began to seem a little ominous. What, thought Katriona, did our princess drink in with the milk?

She refused to think about what she had said over the cradle during the wreck of the name-day:
. . . you can have my gift, it isn’t very useful, I can talk to animals . . .
She had only been speaking to say something, to drive away the sound of the words Pernicia had spoken; what she said hadn’t meant anything, any more than any words she or anyone else might have said could have driven off Pernicia’s curse.

She mentioned the question of the milk quietly to Aunt one evening, and Aunt looked at Rosie for a while, her fingers, and foot on the treadle, continuing unfalteringly their business of spinning. Rosie was trying to feed her unwanted supper porridge to the left-hand fire-dog, which was her favourite. Katriona couldn’t herself see the difference, but, knowing Narl, who had made the pair, there was one. Both bore hound faces, with flying-back ears lying along their necks as from a rush of wind, and open-mouthed, eager expressions. Rosie was murmuring to her friend; the only clear phrase, often repeated, was “It’s
good
for you.” Katriona, watching, saw the dog-aspect of Rosie more clearly than usual in the moving fire-shadows. There was that sheepdog, but there had been other sheepdogs; there had also been that gaunt, intense, solemn hound not unlike what must have been in Narl’s mind when he made the fire-dogs; and a large, slow, thoughtful, heavy-coated dog rather like a small bear.

“I can’t see it,” said Aunt, later, when Rosie was in bed, “which is not to say it isn’t there. I don’t know, my dear. She’s happy, she’s healthy, she’s growing . . . she is certainly growing . . . and we love her.” Katriona could hear the tiny waver in Aunt’s voice as she said “we love her,” because they did—and she was the princess.

Small spider weave, thought Katriona.
And a poem is the most I can give her, my dear, my only darling!
When will she send word?

“It will have to be enough,” said Aunt.

Mostly it was enough, except for the dreams when an assortment of terrifyingly grand or villainous-looking persons turned up on their threshold, quoting the rhyme, and demanding the princess’ return. Katriona was grateful that Rosie got
into
life so enthusiastically; this made her seem, to Katriona, like a real member of the village. But then what did Katriona know of princesses? Maybe they were all like real members of villages, except that they were princesses.

That was the year Rosie was four. It was a few weeks after Rosie cut her hair that something more disturbing happened.

CHAPTER 7

After the princess’ calamitous name-day four years ago, there had been a great upheaval at the palace, and the wife’s cousin’s sister-in-law of Aunt’s robin friend found that she no longer lived outside the queen’s quarters. And then, because the queen no longer had her chambers there, the robin found that the garden that was her territory and her delight was changed, in a robin’s opinion, very much to its detriment; and so she and her young family moved house.

Indeed, they left the palace grounds altogether. There was a thick new sadness that hung round the royal residence, and this being the country it was, it was a chalky sort of sadness, and the air was dusty grey with it, and birds preferred to nest elsewhere. Aunt and Katriona found themselves, for the first time in Katriona’s memory, depending on Cairngorm’s pub for news of the royal family.

There they heard, a month or two after the visit from the second herald, that the queen and princess, immediately after the terrible name-day, had been smuggled away from the court in the royal city to a stronghold called Fordingbridge in the western mountains, and that three-quarters of the royal magicians and the two finest regiments of the army had gone with them. It was a good sign, everyone said, that the king and queen felt secure enough in their provisions for their daughter’s protection to let it be known where she was held. The king had stayed in the royal city, where he could best rule his country; but he visited his family often. Sometimes the queen returned with him to the city for a little while, for her new sorrow and dignity made her husband’s people love her more than they had when she had merely been a good listener to boring speeches; and they begged to see her. She was known not to be in the best of health, but everyone but Katriona and Aunt believed that she had her little daughter under her care.

Although there was a hiatus in Aunt’s private sources of information, the animal kingdom was, in fact, keenly interested in what was happening to the royal family. There had been robins, and sparrows, and starlings, and rabbits, and mice, and beetles, and many other easily overlooked creatures, who had seen Pernicia’s appearance at the princess’ name-day, and they didn’t have to understand human language to recognise very bad news for everybody when they saw it. The dog-fox Katriona first met had reached his own conclusions independently but most of the other animals that helped her and the princess on their long journey knew perfectly well whom they were helping and, even if they didn’t know the human tale of the old enmity between Pernicia and a queen of long ago, why. Secrets were something animals were naturally good at (something humans had had to give up when they became humans, like a decent sense of smell). The fox was ashamed of himself later (as much as foxes are ever ashamed), when he heard the full story. He had known he was talking out of turn.

The princess’ flight across the country was well concealed in the minds and memories of the animals before Katriona, wet and sneezing, arrived at Aunt’s door with a baby in a sling. Even the robins had refrained, with heroic, unrobinlike discretion, from telling Aunt why Katriona was so long on the way, although they had kept her informed of her niece’s curiously slow progress—and it had been obvious enough to Aunt from the explosive air of repressed excitement that some considerable mystery was involved.

Robins’ endless discussion of infractions of their territorial boundaries are chiefly an excuse to exchange news and gossip. The communication line broken by the robins moving out of the palace garden was rearranged and reconnected. Via an uncle’s third cousin twice removed, one of Aunt’s robins, too young to have been involved in the baby princess’ hairs-breadth escape, innocently brought the news, shortly after Rosie first learned to walk, that there was something very odd about the way the stronghold where the princess was now living felt, and that when the king and queen returned there after some time away, even the thought of seeing their daughter again seemed unable to lift their spirits, and they rode through the fortress gate as bow-shouldered as they had ridden out.

The thought of the queen, in particular, hurt Katriona so badly she began to talk to her in her head. The king at least had his ruling to get on with; the queen was only his consort, when it came down to it, a foreigner in her husband’s country, there to be his wife—and to bear and raise his children.

At first the things she thought of to say to the queen were no more than a kind of mental pushing-away of discomfort; she said them in the same crisp, no-nonsense way that one might say a charm to a water nymph of uncertain temper known to reside there before crossing her stream; you do it, and you go on. But that didn’t work for long, and as Rosie grew older, and there were more things to tell, Katriona began to organise little stories about her, about how clever and charming and infuriating and darling she was, stories to give a mother’s love somewhere to go, somewhere to live, something to do besides endlessly grieve. . . .

Katriona fell into the habit of doing this at night, in bed, as she felt sleep creeping near her, because it comforted her to pretend to comfort the queen; and she had, over the years, built up a fantasy of the queen, whom she remembered a little from the fateful name-day, although she had not been anything like close enough to see that she had eyes just like Rosie’s (although her eyelashes were not so long), and her nose had a tiny bump in it, and there was a small mole low on her left cheek, which was how she saw her now.

She imagined a bedroom for her, too, because she imagined the queen falling asleep as she was, and Katriona’s drowsy words slipping into her mind in that cloudy gap between waking and sleep. The bedroom was not large, but it was tall and light, with big windows that would make it very bright by day, when the curtains were drawn back; even late at night, the few dim lamps that stood in niches between the windows lit up the whitewashed walls and the white hangings round the queen’s bed. It was never fully dark in the queen’s bedroom; whether that was the queen’s choice or that of those who guarded her, Katriona had never decided. It was a surprisingly small and bare room for a queen, but Katriona thought that must be her own inability to imagine what a queen might have in her bedroom. It was just as small and bare when it was sometimes some other room, whitewashed still, and lit by small lamps in niches, but with small, high, barred windows, as if the queen were in some fastness, pretending to keep her daughter company.

Katriona snuggled down in her own bed, looking, behind her shut eyes, at the queen lying on her pillow, her long hair in a single plait and the neck of her nightgown as white and plain as her bed hangings.
Rosie was very busy watching the dragonflies today,
Katriona told the queen.
She loved the colours of them, and the darting way they moved, and the way they can stop in the air, as if they were looking back at you. I was glad of the excuse to do no more, for a moment, than stand there with her and watch dragonflies, too, as if I were another child.

The queen had been smiling about Rosie and the dragonflies, but as Katriona said
I was glad of the excuse to do no more than stand there with her,
her face crumpled, and tears crept out from under her closed eyelids. “Oh, Queen,” said Katriona in distress, and, in her mind, reached out to brush the tears away—and the queen opened her eyes, sat up in bed, and grasped Katriona’s hand.

Katriona felt the queen’s hand on hers, felt the strength of it, the reality of it—her own fingers a little pinched together, the queen’s fingers across the back of her hand, and the bar of her thumb across Katriona’s palm.

Katriona gave a little throttled squeak; she would have liked to say something, something like, Oh, help, what have I done? but her voice wouldn’t come. The queen seized her other hand and leaned forward to look into her face, and whispered, “I know you. I have seen you many nights since I lost my daughter, and you have told me of her. Sigil told me how she sent my daughter away to save her, and I remember Pernicia’s face and I know Sigil was right; but oh—I miss my child so much! I feel as if the very strength of my longing for her must make me guilty of risking her life. I have thought—feared—believed I only dreamed you, for how could it be otherwise: My longing would have created you, if you had not come.

“Tell me you are real. I dare not ask nor hear your name, nor where you live, nor how you come here. But tell me, while my waking eyes are on you, and I can feel your blood beating under my fingers, that you are real, that it is you who have my daughter, that the stories you tell of her are true stories—for by them I know that you love her—that it is for love of her that you have the pity to come to me. Speak—you must speak—but keep your voice low, for my waiting-women are always near, because I do not sleep well, not any night since I lost my daughter. Speak words that I can remember—then it will be worth it to me to have lost you, too—for after this you cannot come again.”

Katriona made a great effort, for however it was that she sat on the queen’s bed, she was also lying in her own bed many leagues distant. Her heart was beating too fast, and she was having trouble breathing, as if her body were suddenly too big for her heart and lungs, and the pressure of the coverlet on the queen’s bed against the backs of her legs made her feel queasy. She spoke as if each word were a new thing that had to be created out of chaos: “I—I took her away with me, your daughter, on her name-day. It was I. I am real. I took her home. I have her still, I and my aunt. We love her. The stories you have heard me tell over the last four years are true stories. She is as safe with us as . . . as ordinariness can make her. We will not give her up. . . .”

And then the queen, and the queen’s bedchamber, were gone, and she was gasping like a wood-spirit whose tree has just been cut down; and Aunt’s arms were round her. When her breath steadied, Aunt said, “I want you thoroughly awake before you try again to sleep. Come downstairs; I will make up the fire and brew you a tisane.”

Katriona came, shivering with shock, her head still pounding and her breast aching, as if she had had to hold her breath for a long time. She sat in her usual chair, with her head flung back, and her eyes were drawn to the niche where the little iron cauldron stood; and it seemed to glow red in the near-darkness, though it might only have been the firelight, which Aunt had stirred again to brightness. Katriona lowered her head, to watch Aunt move around, choosing a few leaves from a little basket and a drop from a little bottle, adding water from the big kettle that always sat over the fire; and she saw that Aunt looked grim and haggard.