Spindle's End

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

SPINDLE’S END
A
New York Times
Bestseller

 

“Full of humor and romance as well as magic and adventure . . . with an ending that has a decided twist . . . Spellbinding.”

—
Booklist
(starred review)

 

“Dense with sensual detail. The author sets her simple but elegant plot along the boundary line between fairy tale and fantasy. . . . A believable, fully imagined fantasy world . . . The fun lies in following McKinley’s meandering garden path all the way till the end . . . A rich and rewarding read.”

 

“A captivating tale, rich in lush imagery and replete with startling, engrossing characters . . . McKinley’s greatest gift lies in her liquid language, so full of heart and evocative images that the reader is spellbound.”
—Voice of Youth Advocates

 

 

ROSE DAUGHTER
A
Booklist
Editor’s Choice

 

“[A] heady mix of fairy tale, magic and romance that has the power to exhilarate.”
—Publishers Weekly

 

“This luxuriant retelling of the story of the Beauty and the Beast . . . is full of silvery images.”
—Kirkus Reviews

 

“Readers will be enchanted, in the best sense of the word.”

 

“Every sentence and every occurrence seems infused by magic.”
—Fantasy & Science Fiction

 

 

THE HERO AND THE CROWN
A Newbery Medal Book
An ALA Best Book for Young Adults
An ALA Notable Book

 

“Refreshing . . . haunting . . . an utterly engrossing fantasy.”

 

“A work of considerable imaginative power.”

 

“McKinley knows her geography of fantasy, the nuances of language, the atmosphere of magic.”
—The Washington Post

 

“McKinley has created an epic heroine in Aerin . . . a powerful fantasy.”
—Fantasy Review

 

“Beautifully rendered . . . McKinley’s battle scenes are galvanizing and her romantic ones stirring.”
—Booklist

 

“As richly detailed and elegant as a medieval tapestry . . . vibrant, witty, compelling, the story is the stuff of which true dreams are made.”
—Horn Book

 

“Robin McKinley’s Damar books are among the finest sword and sorcery being written today.”
—Locus

 

 

THE BLUE SWORD

“A new language, a new landscape, and a new people—all unforgettable.”
—Horn Book

 

“Any book that, at one point or another, reminded me of
The Sheikh, Gunga Din, Islandia,
and
The Lord of the Rings
can’t be anything but a true original.”
—Asimov’s Science Fiction

 

 

THE OUTLAWS OF SHERWOOD

“[McKinley] richly restores the textures that time has worn to bare narrative threads.”
—The New York Times

 

“In the tradition of T. H. White’s reincarnation of King Arthur, a novel that brings Robin Hood . . . delightfully to life.”

 

 

THE DOOR IN THE HEDGE

“Robin McKinley paints a magical landscape that will delight and enchant hearts young and old.”—Joan D. Vinge

 

“
The Door in the Hedge
opens onto a world of magic that is both muscular and enchanting. Robin McKinley obviously loves the music of the old tales, but she adds melodies all her own, and that is what makes these stories so very very special and so very very unforgettable.”—Jane Yolen

 

“This collection should interest readers of all ages who never tire of wizards and fairyland.”
—The Washington Post

 

“McKinley, in these stories, is afraid neither of great beauty nor of great evil. She has the gift of taking these stories and retelling them with love.”
—Science Fiction Review

 

“Adds subtlety, complexity, and suspense to what is only tersely stated in Grimm. Like a musical theme and variation the telling is full of digressions and decorations—arpeggios of ideas and language—that add new depth to an old tale.”

 

 

DEERSKIN

“A fierce and beautiful story of rage and compassion, betrayal and loyalty, damage and love . . . A fairy tale for adults, one you’ll never forget.”
—
Alice Hoffman

 

“I did so much enjoy Robin McKinley’s
Deerskin
. . . I respect her writing and reread her constantly, finding new perceptions each time.”—Anne McCaffrey

 

“An enormously powerful novel . . . dreamlike, urgent, inexplicable. . . . Robin McKinley has created a world where nightmare and hope exist side by side.”

—Patricia A. McKillip

 

 

“A wonderful story, wonderfully told.”

 

 

“Award-winning author McKinley turns her storytelling acumen and stylistic grace toward an adult audience . . . a classic journey-tale and a parable for modern times.”

 

 

“Superlative.”
—Booklist

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

SPINDLE’S END

 

An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author

 

 

All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2000 by Robin McKinley

 

This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission. For information address: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

 

The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is
www.penguinputnam.com

 

eISBN : 978-1-440-62494-0

 

ACE
^®
Ace Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
ACE and the “A” design
are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

Part One

CHAPTER 1

The magic in that country was so thick and tenacious that it settled over the land like chalk-dust and over floors and shelves like slightly sticky plaster-dust. (Housecleaners in that country earned unusually good wages.) If you lived in that country, you had to de-scale your kettle of its encrusta tion of magic at least once a week, because if you didn’t, you might find yourself pouring hissing snakes or pond slime into your teapot instead of water. (It didn’t have to be anything scary or unpleasant, like snakes or slime, especially in a cheerful household—magic tended to reflect the atmosphere of the place in which it found itself—but if you want a cup of tea, a cup of lavender-and-gold pansies or ivory thimbles is unsatisfactory. And while the pansies—put dry in a vase—would probably last a day, looking like ordinary pansies, before they went greyish-dun and collapsed into magic dust, something like an ivory thimble would begin to smudge and crumble as soon as you picked it up.)

The best way to do it was to have a fairy as a member of your household, because she (it was usually a she) could lay a finger on the kettle just as it came to a boil (absentminded fairies could often be recognised by a pad of scar-tissue on the finger they favoured for kettle-cleaning) and murmur a few counter-magical words. There would be a tiny inaudible
thock
, like a seed-pod bursting, and the water would stay water for another week or (maybe) ten days.

De-magicking a kettle was much too little and fussy and frequent a job for any professional fairy to be willing to be hired to do it, so if you weren’t related to one you had to dig up a root of the dja vine, and dry it, and grate it, producing a white powder rather like plaster dust or magic, and add a pinch of that to your kettle once a week. More often than that would give everyone in the household cramp. You could tell the households that didn’t have a fairy by the dja vines growing over them. Possibly because they were always having their roots disturbed, djas developed a reputation for being tricky to grow, and prone to sudden collapse; fortunately they rerooted easily from cuttings. “She’d give me her last dja root” was a common saying about a good friend.

People either loved that country and couldn’t imagine living anywhere else, or hated it, left it as soon as they could, and never came back. If you loved it, you loved coming over the last hill before your village one day in early autumn and hearing the corn-field singing madrigals, and that day became a story you told your grandchildren, the way in other countries other grandparents told the story of the day they won the betting pool at the pub, or their applecake won first place at the local fete. If you lived there, you learned what you had to do, like putting a pinch of dried dja vine in your kettle once a week, like asking your loaf of bread to remain a loaf of bread before you struck it with a knife. (The people of this country had developed a reputation among outsiders for being unusually pious, because of the number of things they appeared to mutter a blessing over before they did them; but in most cases this was merely the asking of things it was safer to ask to remain nonmagical first, while work or play or food preparation or whatever was being got on with. Nobody had ever heard of a loaf of bread turning into a flock of starlings for anyone they knew, but the nursery tale was well known, and in that country it didn’t pay to take chances. The muttered words were usually only some phrase such as “Bread, stay bread” or, in upper-class households, “Bread, please oblige me,” which was a less wise form, since an especially impish gust of magic could choose to translate “oblige” just as it chose.)