Spindle's End (23 page)

Rosie, who could only, barely, with the greatest effort of intellect, imagine what it was like for the rest of the human world not to talk to animals, and couldn’t even begin to imagine what it was like for Katriona to have had beast-speech and lost it, gave a deep sigh, leaned forward, and kissed her on the cheek. “Thanks for the herbs. I have to go find Peony, and apologise.”

 

Peony had been so distressed at causing her friend pain that she barely heard the apology because she was so busy proffering her own; and that was the end of it, except that she tried never to mention embroidery in Rosie’s hearing again. And when, months afterward, she had offered to teach Rosie the steps of the commonest round dance that everyone (except Rosie, Narl, and old Penfaron, who had a wooden leg) danced on feast and festival days, and Aunt and Katriona who, this time, were in the room when the offer was made, said “No!” simultaneously and rather too loud, neither Peony nor Rosie asked for any explanation.

About a week after Peony had showed Rosie a few basic embroidery stitches, a hippogriff was seen flying over the Gig. Hippogriffs were generally creatures of ill repute, unless you were a magician, and it was bad news to have one in your neighbourhood. It might mean that the wrong sort of magic was about to follow it; and this one, certainly, seemed to be looking for something. People grew alarmed, and there was a run on aversion charms, which made you, more or less, depending on how good the fairy who made them was at the job, beneath the notice of any wandering magic looking for someone to seize onto. Aunt’s and Katriona’s were very good charms, and by the time the hippogriff had not been seen again for a fortnight and people were beginning to hope the Gig was to be spared after all, they had no more charms to sell, and no chance of making more till winter, when the deer’s-foot vine turned red and the salia berries yellow. In the general unease it seemed surprising to no one that Aunt and Katriona gave aversion charms to Rosie and Peony.

But the hippogriff did go away, and the only bad news the Gig heard that winter was of an invasion of taralians, which were large striped cats of fierce intelligence and fiercer appetite (a full-grown taralian could eat a horse in one go) and which the king himself had led the army against. The army had been victorious, and the remaining taralians had been driven back across the border into the wild wasteland of the south where they had come from, but the king had been wounded, and while the wound was slight, he was slow to recover his strength, and there were murmurs of a spell. Why had the taralians come into human-settled areas in the first place? They were savage on their own ground, but they rarely left it, and the winter was not a hard one.

The king, it was said, had symptoms very like those of the soldiers and courtiers who had been thrown down by the enchanted sleep at Fordingbridge and Flury: headaches, lingering lethargy, inability to concentrate or to make decisions, insomnia, nightmares. It was all the more disturbing not only because he was the king, but because everyone knew this king to be a robust, phlegmatic man who ruled thoughtfully and kindly, and with a reassuring lack of imagination.

The danger to his daughter had sapped him at last, the whispers went. Too much of the king’s resources have been spent to protect her; were still being spent to protect her—wherever she was. Too much more was spent looking for Pernicia: too much wasted. Pernicia had been not only wicked and powerful but clever; twenty years of helpless fear had worn the country down, the king most of all. When Pernicia sprang her trap at last he and his magicians and his armies would have no strength to resist her, and she would have not only the princess, but the country—just as the old tales of her had predicted. But she would not have done it this way if she had been able to seize all at once, which meant she was not so powerful as she pretended: let us, said these whispers, return to normal now, when there is still a little time left. Who has seen Pernicia since the name-day? She would not bide her time so if there were a faster way. Perhaps the curse on the princess is not what Pernicia declared it: it is, instead, that those around her will fall ill of some mysterious illness that bleeds off health and strength and will and courage. Bring her home now—and let her pass the crown to Prince Colin, whom the people know and love. Let them rally round him, this last year before the princess’ twenty-first birthday, till there is no trap for Pernicia to spring. The curse never was that the princess should die of the prick of a spindle end; and there are no such spindle ends left anywhere in the country.

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?