Spindle's End (44 page)

You loathsome child,
spat into her mind; she flinched, and might have slackened the rope, but the rope itself reached out and wrapped itself round her hands. She stood, wondering if she were trapped, seeing out of the corner of her eye Narl taking another step backward as he kept the tension on his end of the rope, feeling the pull on her own wrists, staring at her helpless hands, feeling the weight of the spindle end hanging in its pocket, tapping against her thigh.
Rope?
she said tentatively. The rope did not reply; but she no longer felt trapped, but embraced.

Rosie jerked, startled, grasping at the rope with her fingertips, looked up. Pernicia stood there, carrying something in her arms. Someone. Peony.

You cannot have her,
Rosie said without thinking, without thinking to whom or how she was speaking.
You cannot have her.

Peony lay lightly in Pernicia’s arms, as if she weighed no more than a hollow doll. Perhaps Pernicia was very strong; perhaps the uncanny air of this place bore Peony up; perhaps the magic of the poisoned sleep also robbed her flesh of its living weight. That it was Peony herself and no false semblance Rosie was sure; she did not believe that even Pernicia could make so fine a replica of her friend that Rosie would not see through it at once. There was the faintest of frowns on Peony’s face, as if she knew, somewhere in the back of her sleeping mind, that something was not quite right.

I
want
neither of you. But I will
have
both.

Her words rang or bellowed or crackled or reverberated strangely in Rosie’s head, or her ears. Rosie had never been quite sure how she spoke to animals, nor how they spoke to her, other than that something happened besides the ordinary sounds and gestures most people heard and saw animals make. And each animal had an idiom, a vernacular, a little different from every other animal; for some animals, like dogs, elaborate their speech with sneezes and barks and growls and tail waggings and ear flattenings and yawnings and pawings and bowings and many other sounds and gestures, while some animals, like most insects, had speech that was little more than a series of clicks and ticks in a kind of code Rosie happened to have the key to (mostly).

Pernicia’s speech seemed to be all of this, as if dogs and cats and cows and horses and hawks and beetles were all speaking the same things simultaneously—except that they would not use the same signals, the same expressions—and although Pernicia stood silent and motionless with Peony in her arms. With the rough discordance that should not have been comprehensible but was, there was something else, and the something else was in the grey and purple fog that slid and swirled round the castle. Rosie swayed a little, and the rope, drawn close round her wrists and forearms, held her up.

Yes, I am speaking to you in that brute speech you favour. It suits you,
said Pernicia.
It suits you so much better than any human tongue. It suits who you have become, country maid, simpleton, beast-girl. Who you are. Because is not what you have become what you are best suited for? Have you not spent many hours wondering why you are as you are, why it fits you so well, these last three months, and why the last three months did not? For that alone it was worth waiting till your final birthday, thinking of you wondering. It took me but a moment, when I realised the truth, why you had remained hidden from me for so long, when I looked for you so eagerly. I had been looking for a princess.

Rosie shook her head numbly. It was true what Pernicia said, that Rosie was not a princess, but she knew that already. She knew that Pernicia said it to hurt her, but it did not hurt her; and she wondered if the only reason Pernicia chose to speak to her in this way—in this clumsy, cacaphonic beast-speech—was to humiliate her. Pernicia would not have thought to ask the animals where to find the princess, and they would not have told her had she asked; and as she had not thought to ask them, she had neither thought to punish them for their refusal. Pernicia’s words did not hurt Rosie, but fear of what she might do—was planning to do—to Peony hurt her very much.

She could no longer see Narl, nor the animals, nor the castle; she was alone in the purple-grey murk with Pernicia, and Peony’s life lay between them.

Come to me,
said Pernicia, and her words yelped and roared and hissed and sang and clicked and tapped.
Come to me. You want to save your friend; then come and try. You will not succeed; but I have had more bother over you than you are worth and perhaps watching you fail will be some recompense for my trouble.
She bent swiftly, with little eddies of fog scuttling out of her way as she moved, and the long folds of the black-and-purple-and-cerise robe she wore rearranged themselves, and Rosie noticed there were long rents in them, as if, perhaps, they had been caught and torn by thorns. She laid Peony at her feet.

Peony sprawled, limp as a child’s toy or a sleeping baby. Her hair was coming free of the crown of inheritance the king had placed on her head, and tumbling round her, and the superabundance of her princess’ ball-gown skirts made her look tiny among them. They seemed to froth over the edge of something into nothing, although Rosie could see neither the something nor the nothing, wrapped as both were in the muddy haze.

She remembered that she had been only a few steps from the lip of the moat when Pernicia had appeared, standing, apparently, on the naked air over the moat, emerging from the unbroken wall of the castle. Was the moat still there? Was the castle still there? But then none of this landscape existed as landscape should; they had come here from leaping into the sky. But if Pernicia had dissolved all of it into this thick, grimy fog, what was she, Rosie, standing on? And if the castle was no longer there, what was the rope that still held her pulling against?

Rosie shook her head; the fog in her mouth tasted foul. She tried to free herself from the rope, but it would not let her go. You don’t exist, she thought. Go away. I have to try to reach Peony.

But it would not let her go. She stepped forward, and it writhed beneath her stepping foot. A loop felt its way round her like an arm round her shoulders. She could feel it round her ankles, leaving her just enough space to take small steps. It was strangely squashy to walk on, like a bog before you begin to sink; and she remembered the old bog-charm Aunt had wound round her long ago, and how much she had resented it. That had been before she was a princess, when she had understood her world, and been happy in it.

The rope still grasped her hands, but now it seemed to lead her on, as Rosie might have led a skittish horse. It held her steadily, gravely, confidently. She took another step forward, and another—if the moat was still there, she was now over it—but walking was more difficult now, and her feet seemed to grope from one swaying, spongy, irregularly placed loop of rope to the next, sliding anxiously along, fearing that the in-between would not hold her securely enough, that her foot would slip over the edge into nowhere. She was panting for breath, and now she gripped the rope as strongly as it gripped her, leaning against it, feeling for its narrow yielding roundness against her feet, pressing its coils against her sides.

But she was still sinking, or perhaps she had not climbed high enough; when she neared Pernicia and Peony, her face was nearly level with Peony’s as she lay at Pernicia’s feet. Rosie reached out with her rope-tangled hands to touch Peony’s face, and heard Pernicia shout an
AHH!
that made whatever Rosie was standing on vibrate like a young tree in a strong wind; and then she stooped.

Pernicia’s stooping seemed to take a very long time, as if she were a merrel plummeting down upon its prey from half a league overhead, and Rosie watched those long-fingered hands reaching to seize her as she scrabbled Peony toward her—Peony slid as if she were still lying on the polished wooden floor of Woodwold’s Great Hall—and together Rosie and Peony fell backward into the pliant rope with Peony half on Rosie’s lap and half in her still-pinioned arms. With some part of her mind Rosie registered that Pernicia’s hands were covered with scratches, as if she had recently had to fight her way out of a briar. But she felt one of those hands brush her shoulder, and she cried out, for that fleeting touch felt like the slash of a knife, and she glanced toward it, expecting to see blood soaking through her sleeve; and then there was a rustle and a rush and a whispery, tickly blur, and Pernicia screamed, a hoarse, horrible scream, in rage and surprise, and threw herself backward; and there was a small terrier clamped to the hand that had just touched Rosie, and two mice dangling from her cheek and chin.

And then Rosie was falling, falling, clutching Peony as best she could, falling against the soft rope, as soft against her face as if she lay against Narl’s hair, and then she staggered, for the coils had given way to two human arms, and her feet had struck the ground. She twisted one ankle painfully, but the arms held her safe, her and Peony. Together they laid Peony gently on the ground, Rosie straightening up just in time not to be knocked onto her friend’s body by a horse’s foreleg banging into her side. The fog had thinned, now racing by her in streaks and tatters on the capricious gusts of wind that also clawed through her hair, and made the little huddle of animals and people all lurch against each other; but she could see very little, only more racing fog. And now here was Narl, offering to throw her up onto the back of the horse: Fast.

“The castle’s gone,” Narl said, raising his voice to be heard over the low evil howl of the wind. “Your rope pulled the top off, and this wind is taking the rest. I’m not sure what happens now, but it won’t be friendly. She’ll pull this wind to her soon and . . . You must get away from here. If anyone can save you, Fast can,” he said, but his words were almost blown away before she could hear them. He said something else: about the animals holding the way. “Go on.”

“She wants both of us,” shouted Rosie, leaning against Fast and grasping his mane against the increasing buffeting. . . . The wind was full of voices now, yammering and bellowing and clattering: Were they all Pernicia’s voice?

Narl knelt and grasped her ankle and heaved, flinging her up Fast’s side and down across his back with a jerk that hurt her hip joint. “Can’t you hear them on the wind? It’s you they’re after—she’s after. She only took Peony as a hostage—because she missed you. They’ll follow you, and leave us, and I can just about make them think we aren’t here anyway. We all have to leave this place—it’s breaking up round us. Stay on the human road! Remember! Now go. Go!”

She had just enough time to wind both hands in Fast’s mane; as she laid herself as best she could along his back she felt the wild strength of him bound into his full speed within a few strides, the wind trying to peel her off his back like a knife pares an apple. All round them she heard the evil magic in Pernicia’s thwarted fury rising and rising to a pitch that might yet shatter the world.

Fast can save me? From what? For what?

For a little while she was wholly absorbed in the experience of Fast’s running: the power, the terrifying power of it, the surge of the hindquarters, the stretch of the stride, the bunching together in preparation for the next surge, all compacted into a single motion and translated into the torrent of his speed. She had seen him run many times, for after her successful interference on the subject of his manners, she had been invited to watch him train; and, upon its being very obvious to the Master of the Horse how pleased he was to see her, she was also invited, as a kind of good-luck charm, to the occasional match-race that some other owners of some other horses misguidedly begged Lord Prendergast for. There was a flat clear stretch along the riverbank of about a league and a half that was used as a racecourse, for Lord Pren would not send Fast away to race elsewhere; he said
he
had no doubts about Fast’s speed. And Fast was so clearly faster than any other horse he had ever run against that no other owner dared cry foul.

Rosie remembered standing beside Fast just before one of these contests—she wasn’t bothering to try to talk to him; his mind was full of spinning glittery fragments of running, wanting to run, waiting to run, being nothing but running with a bay coat stretched over it—and looking up into his rider’s face, and seeing a curious expression of determination settle upon it as he picked up the reins: the look of a man who is about to jump over a precipice.

She hadn’t understood it at the time. She understood it now.

But someone—many someones—were running with them, even as Fast outstripped them. Dimly she could see sleek bodies beside them: other horses, dogs, wolves, foxes, wildcats, deer; Fast ran past all of these. She caught glimpses of slower animals: cows and sheep, bears and badgers, and of smaller animals, otters and martens and rabbits and hedgehogs and cats; and there were tiny streaks of motion she thought were mice and voles and squirrels. Overhead she could just make out the shapes of birds flying among the rags of cloud, and darting shapes that might be bats.

She thought they were all running and flying in the same direction, Fast driving among them like a ship through the sea, although she could be sure of very little, for the wind of Fast’s speed whipped tears from her eyes. But as they ran she realised that those that ran with them were in fact opening and holding a way for them, and that beyond the animals that were her friends were other creatures that were not her friends, who would stop her if they could.