Spindle's End (24 page)

Yes,
said Rosie.
Of course I will. I would be glad—honoured—to do so.

She often thought of the imprisoned merrel, after that first conversation. She decided that she could go on not knowing what the spell on herself was, and why it was there, for as long as it took Katriona’s sign to arrive. She thought of all the things she had done in twenty years that had not brought it on—whatever the spell was about. Enchanted embroidery, although it had felt very nasty at the time, as if her hands no longer belonged to her, was pretty negligible after all. Especially when you remembered the merrel.

She thought of the merrel stretching its wings, silently, in the dark peak of Lord Prendergast’s Great Hall; she thought of how carefully it moved among its cage of rafters, so that the chain around its ankle did not clink; so carefully that any of Lord Prendergast’s guests who did not know it was there would never look up to find it. (The floor beneath it was scrubbed twice a day; in moulting season it was swept three times.) She thought of the story the huntsman told her, of how it had been wounded—they guessed—by a dagger of falling ice, in the mountains where the source of the River Moan flowed, several days’ ride from Woodwold; and how Lord Prendergast’s hunting party had found it, but that he had stopped them from killing it. Even with a broken wing and half dead of starvation no one liked to approach it. The huntsman threw a net to tangle its feet, and Lord Pren himself had hooded it with soft leather cut from his own hunting waistcoat, and then had it bound and brought home, and its wing set. But the wing had not healed as it should, and so it was given the vaulted height of the Great Hall to live in, where no one dared trouble it, and it was fed by a falconer with a very long pole.

The merrel also knew its wing had not healed.
But I could reach a great height once more before it failed me,
it said.
And from there I would fold my wings and plummet to the earth as if a hare or a fawn had caught my eye; but it would be myself I stooped toward. It would be a good flight and a good death. And so I eat their dead things cut up on a pole, dreaming of my last flight.

CHAPTER 14

That spring, too, Narl gained a new apprentice. Ordinarily such an arrival would be the focus of conversation and speculation for weeks: not only had Narl accepted him, which was unusual enough, but this one was a handsome young man, and as clean shaven as Narl.

But the run of odd fevers round the Gig, especially in Foggy Bottom, which neither Aunt’s herbs nor the priest’s arcane mutterings seemed able to cure, nor even, much, to ameliorate, distracted everybody; and those who were well enough for gossip had no time for it. The fevers were not severe, but their prevalency, lack of origin, and reluctance to depart were disturbing enough to take the edge off any interest in a good-looking, well-mannered young stranger.

Katriona had less to do with the sick that season than she might have had some other year, because she had four little wielders of baby-magic to look after, including their own Gilly, who had been set off, early and spectacularly, by the birth of her little brother, Gable. (Jem had recently slid through his own incursion of baby-magic without much more than the occasional manifestation of a black, red-eyed Thing that crouched in corners breathing stertorously. Jem had insisted that it was friendly, so they had left it alone, although everyone but Jem had circled its chosen corners somewhat warily.) Gable, fortunately, was a placid baby, and never interrupted his nursing while Katriona was frantically flicking counter-spells with the arm not holding him.

Peony was constantly in demand either as a nurse or to help keep order at the wheelwright’s, and she missed her noontimes at the forge for some weeks. Rosie had told her of the new apprentice’s arrival, his name, Rowland, and the fact that he had no beard. But Rosie was not very interested in him, and so Peony wasn’t either.

Till the first day Peony returned for her usual noontime at the forge. Rosie, standing at the head of one of Lord Pren’s horses, looked up just before Rowland’s and Peony’s eyes met. “You’re here!” said Rosie. “I’m positively starving. Peony, meet Rowland. This one needs settling”—meaning the horse—“before I want to leave him. Don’t eat everything.”

By the time Narl and Rosie had left their charge with a little hay to keep him contented, Peony and Rowland had been trying to start a conversation for some while. Rosie was vaguely aware that her friend and the new apprentice were behaving out of character; Peony could talk to anyone, and Rowland had very pretty manners, much prettier than any smith’s apprentice had any business having, which made him even more conspicuous than he was already for being tall and handsome and clean shaven. But here were these two social adepts standing staring at one another, Rowland with a hammer he kept passing from hand to hand, Peony clutching the basket in front of her as if she were warding off demons with it. Rosie was used to the effect Peony had on almost everyone at first meeting, especially young men; but Peony never behaved like this.

Something stirred at the back of Rosie’s mind: surprise, curiosity, wonder. Dismay. And something else. “Narl,” she said quietly. “Look. What is the matter with them?”

Narl straightened up from the wash bucket, drying his hands. He still had most of his attention on the horse they had been shoeing; it was just the sort of brilliantly athletic maniac Lord Pren’s youngest son favoured—and, furthermore, it had terrible feet, with horn that wouldn’t hold a nail. However often it came in to have a thrown shoe refitted, it would never believe that this wasn’t the time that Narl was going to use the red-hot tongs and pokers on it, and not merely on its shoes. If he hadn’t had Rosie to help him—she had told him she told the crazy ones stories, as you might do with a fractious child at bedtime—he probably wouldn’t have been able to shoe it at all, however much mashed viso root he used. It looked half asleep now, musing over its hay with its ears flopping like an old pony’s. He was half tempted to suggest that it was clever enough to know a good thing when it heard it, and merely liked Rosie’s stories, but he also knew this wasn’t true; the white round its eye as he approached it and the way it held the foot he was working on, told him better. It was always the crazy ones that hated being shod who most often threw shoes.

He gave his apprentice and the wainwright’s niece a look while he passed his towel to Rosie, but he was more interested in the problem of where to put nails in a hoof already full of crumbling nail holes. His face was, as it usually was, expressionless. But Rosie was watching him as she washed her hands, and she had learnt to read his face in the years she had been hanging round the forge to a degree that perhaps Narl did not realise himself. And she saw awareness, or understanding, strike him as he looked, sharp as a knife, and where the invisible blade wounded him there bled hope and fear and longing—and something like resigned despair. This was so unexpected she almost put her hand on his arm, almost said to him, What is it? Can I help? I would do anything for you—when she realised, first, that he would not want her to have seen what she had seen, and second, that what she had barely stopped herself from saying was the truth.

She was wholly absorbed in giving her hands and forearms the scrubbing of their lives when Narl turned back to her, and she raised a carefully blank face to him. She could feel she was blushing, but she had splashed cold water on her face, too, which would do as an excuse. “They’ve just fallen in love,” he said neutrally, and his face was again as calm and unreadable as it usually was.

His face was so tranquil and his tone so mild that Rosie almost believed she had imagined what she had seen. He was Narl, and nothing ever disturbed him, nor distracted him long from cold iron. She had drawn his attention away from its usual paths, but only briefly; Narl was about to take his noon meal standing up and looking at some half-finished project, or studying bits of waste iron that would no longer be waste when he was done with them.

But then the meaning of his words sank in. “They—?” she said, bewildered. “But—”

“It happens that way sometimes,” said Narl. “Hard on them both, for he’s promised elsewhere.”

“P-promised?” said Rosie. “You mean, to wed?”

“Yes,” said Narl, and got one of those even-more-than-usually-shut-in Narl looks on his face that meant he wouldn’t say any more, and if Rosie had had her wits about her she would have wondered why he’d said anything at all; it wasn’t the sort of thing Narl usually volunteered.

“I—I must tell her,” she said, confused.

“You must not,” said Narl. “He’ll tell her. It’s their business. Let them be. Rosie,” he said, as she turned away, staring blindly into space, putting the towel down by feel and dropping it instead onto the unswept courtyard earth. “Rosie. She’s still your friend.”

And then he did put his hand on her arm, and she looked down at it, the big brown hand with the work-blackened fingers against her own sun-browned and -freckled skin. He removed his hand, and she looked up at his face again, and tried to smile, to nod. She thought she knew what she had seen in his face when he had first looked at Rowland and Peony: he was in love with Peony himself.

And Rosie had just learnt she was in love with him.

She blundered away, toward Peony and Peony’s basket. She had been hungry, only a very few minutes ago. She concentrated on remembering that she was hungry. I am all right, she said to herself. I am all right. This was not easy, for dissembling was a skill foreign to her nature, but her wish not to cause distress to her friends was as strong—stronger—than her own distress.

They all got through the meal somehow, Peony, Rowland, and Rosie. Narl was invisible in the shadows under the roofed end of the forge; Rosie’s eyes sought for him occasionally, looking for the shadow that moved, from where they sat in sunlight. The sunlight seemed unusually dazzling that day, full of little twinkly bits that got in your eyes and made you blink, or even made you flap your hand in front of your face, as if they were something you could brush away. She wondered how long . . . she wondered if Narl had ever thought of making his feelings known. Rosie thought she knew the reason for his silence; Peony was not in love with him, and Narl had none of the suitor about him to woo her.

None of the three ate much. Narl’s meal disappeared, but whether he ate it or fed it to one of the town dogs, no one knew but Narl.

 

“Narl said people do fall in love in an instant sometimes,” said Rosie, her voice muffled, since she had her arms on the table and her head in her arms. Katriona and Aunt were making and binding charms together, and Rosie had just finished whittling a top for Jem, who would have it in the morning. Gable was asleep in the cradle Katriona rocked with one foot, and Jem and Gilly and the small boarders were asleep upstairs, and in the kitchen they were waiting for Barder and Joeb to come in to supper.

The shutters rattled. It was a cold summer, and there was a searching, prying wind that sniggled round houses, under closed doors, and down the backs of necks. The fog-sprites were in an unusually bad mood, hanging so much dew on spiderwebs that the webs broke, and making day-old bread soggy rather than stale. Even the mice, whose households were always plagued by draughts, complained of the cold.

“That’s true,” said Aunt. “I’ve never seen it happen, but it does.”

“Nor have I seen it,” said Katriona, “but I’ve always wondered if there isn’t some fate in it. Not necessarily magic, like that poor queen who fell in love with her husband’s best knight, but fate, something that happens to you, like being born one day rather than another in this village rather than that one.”

Rosie stood up and moved restlessly round the kitchen, stopping at Aunt’s spinning wheel to rub the nose of the gargoyle on the spindle end. She’d picked the habit up from Katriona so long ago she could remember steadying herself with one hand on the frame of the wheel while she stretched to reach the spindle end. The little face always seemed to grin a fraction wider for a moment after you’d rubbed its nose.

“You aren’t in love with Rowland yourself, are you?” said Katriona in a carefully bland tone—reasonably sure that the answer was no, but sure as well that there was something further troubling Rosie than Peony’s romance. One of the many things Katriona had worried about as Rosie grew older was the likelihood of her falling in love with somebody; Katriona had known that she wanted Barder or no one by the time she was twelve, and Flora had found her Gimmel at sixteen, though it had taken them another ten years to be able to afford to marry. Rosie had never shown any signs of falling in love, although Katriona had lately wondered a little about Woodwold’s Master of the Horse, and what on earth and under sky she could say if he put his suit forward and Rosie was inclined to listen; but it hadn’t happened, and . . . the princess’ one-and-twentieth birthday was eight months away.

A kind of numb, dislocated bewilderment had settled down over Katriona with the turning of this last year toward that birthday. She found herself remembering the events of the year the princess was born with great—and obtrusive—vividness: this was when they had heard of the princess’ birth, this is when the herald had come and made his announcement of the invitations to the name-day and she, Katriona, had drawn the long lot. . . .

Three times in the last twenty years someone—some magic—had almost found Rosie, and three times Aunt and Katriona had deflected or confounded it. The fourth time had brought, not a tale of another assault on another of the king’s strongholds, but a hippogriff flying over the Gig; and while the rest of the villagers relaxed as soon as there were no more sightings of it, the Gig fairies could feel that it had left something behind. Something it had, presumably, come here to leave. Something that might be causing the fevers and the weather . . . Small spider weave! thought Katriona angrily—not for the first time. It is not the
wearer
who is lost! Why have you never sent word! We are only two village fairies and she is your princess!