Spindle's End (10 page)

If the tale about a wicked fairy with a name like Pernicia was more than just a tale, and if that Pernicia had returned from her long exile, then the country was in the gravest danger it had been in since the plague of fire-wyrms had set upon it from the north. Pernicia had nearly defeated the queen she had faced long ago, and if the queen had been merely an ordinary queen, she would have defeated her. And if Pernicia had learnt the secret of long life, she would have spent the years while she waited for her opportunity learning new wickedness, and nursing her hatred. King Harald had thrown the fire-wyrms back, but the Gig’s terrain still showed the scars of the conflict in high tors and sudden valleys where the battles had been fought, and the fire-wyrms had melted the landscape in fury when the magician-wrought armour of Harald’s regiments withstood them. What might Pernicia do that would batter and buckle the entire country?

The princess must be kept safe, not only for her own sake, but for the sake of the country. Even the king’s conniving cousins, who had gone home in disgust upon the birth of the princess, showed no signs of wishing to return to the court now that she had disappeared. The princess yet lived; Pernicia’s own disappearance proved that. But the princess must be kept safe—wherever the king and queen had her hidden. The heralds had no news about that; but then the people did not expect it. It was not a thing to speak aloud, with Pernicia listening.

Everyone all over the country went home after hearing the heralds’ announcement, and at once knocked the pointed ends off their spindles and threw them on the fire, or bashed them with mallets and gave them to their local smiths who threw them on the hotter smithy fires; and then they looked sadly at the mutilated spindles. Weavers temporarily found their thread supplies short, while spinners adapted to shorter and thicker spindles. Later on spinners and toolmakers began to develop new spindles and new ways to cast their thread on and off them; over time, in a mixture of anger and fear and resentment, and a fuzzy but sincere desire to show support for their royal family, a new art form was born: spindle ends.

At first these were only rough shapings of the beheaded ends, merely to make them look less wrong. Spindles became readily detachable from wheels and handles, so that one shape or another could be tried and fiddled with and remade and tried again. Iron spindles were discarded altogether. Spindles and spindle ends became objects interesting in their own right; people argued as passionately over which woods made the best spindle ends as they did over which made the best bows and hafts.

Over more time—and obstinacy—the new spindle ends became not merely necessary adaptations of an old system, but the way things were: and the offhand whittling of them became both elaborate and beautiful. A spindle was now a rounded, palm-sized end tapering to a slim graceful rod no thinner than a three-month-old baby’s forefinger. Little loops began to appear on spindle posts, where out-of-use spindles were dropped, point down; doorways and chimneypieces sprouted similar loops for hand spindles. Spinners grew much more organised about finishing off, so that their spindle ends were free for display when not in active use; the broad blunt ends of wheel spindles, in particular, were intricately carved.

Eventually, in later generations, a hand-carved spindle end was a favourite wedding gift, believed to confer good luck and healthy children on the bride and groom; and especially fine examples of the spindle-carving art were highly prized heirlooms. In neighbouring countries, people who saw the spindle ends that people of this country began carrying with them for luck adapted their own spinning wheels so that they too could use their neighbours’ beautiful spindle ends, and spindle ends became one of this country’s most sought-after exports. No one outside seemed able to learn the knack, although many tried; but in areas that had never seen a carved spindle end they still picked up the phrase, used of someone or something the speaker treasured: “sound as a good spindle’s end.”

 

But that was much later. While Aunt threw her spindle point into the fire, and prodded it into the heart of the flames, Katriona took off the amulet she was still wearing hidden under her clothing, and held it between her two hands. The disturbed fire flared up and the hot red light fell across the amulet, and it flared, too, and Katriona almost dropped it, as if it were a chain of embers and would burn her. She remembered the sense of it pulsing between her fingers on the princess’ name-day; it had lain quietly since then, till this moment. The fire-coloured light flickered in the same rhythm as the vibration against her fingers, and the amulet sparkled along its whole length, even where the shadow of her fingers fell across it. “I think,” she said slowly, “I think I will not wear you any more.”

She raised her head and saw Aunt looking at her, the poker still in her hand. “I’ll give you something to wrap it in,” said Aunt, and Katriona knew she meant something that would disguise it from magic-seeing eyes. There was a little iron cup that stood on its own three tiny legs, like a miniature cauldron, in a niche high in the stone chimney. It had held other small magics safe from prying eyes, but it was empty now. Katriona pulled a stool in front of the hearth and stood on it so she could reach the niche and the cup. The cloth Aunt handed her was white, and when Katriona laid the amulet on it, she half expected the whiteness to blacken and char; but it did not. She folded the cloth round it carefully, and curled her thin package twice around the inside of the cup, till it lay flat.

“Should I lid it with iron, too?” said Katriona.

Aunt thought. “No,” she said after a moment. “I don’t think there’ll be enough leak to notice, not in this house. Let the poor thing breathe. Something like that—likely it’ll be happier if it can keep its eye on us, too.”

“On Rosie,” said Katriona.

 

The local chief priest came calling to inquire self-importantly about Rosie’s name-day and dedication. Aunt was ready for him, and polite to him, neither of which was true of Katriona, till Aunt sent her on an imaginary errand to rid herself of the distracting series of muffled objections, which were Katriona’s only contribution to the conversation, stiff as it was already. Part of the vehemence of her feeling was based on the fact that the Gig’s chief priest was a pompous ass (the Gig was too obscure to have its own bishop), although the sleekest and most worldly-wise priest, of which the chief priest of the Gig was neither, was never perfectly at ease with the meekest and least active professional fairy—of which Aunt was neither.

It was not an easy vocation, being a priest in that country, where magic was vibrantly everywhere, maddening and unquenchable, and the gods were assumed to be a kind of super-fairy except that you never saw them nor were offered any concrete proof of what the priests claimed they had done for you. Possibly because of the rampaging dailiness of the magic of that country, its natives could rarely be persuaded to spend any serious time or thought on questions of how the world began or what it was for, or why people were people instead of stick insects or pondweed, or any of the other standard varieties of religious inquiry. For the ethics restraining you from bashing your neighbour and stealing his land or his money or his daughter there were centuries of instilled belief that these were bad things to do, and a strong government that, for as many centuries, had agreed. And for ecstatic visions there was the illegal eating of fish.

Aunt’s theory about priests was that religion had emigrated from some other, less magical country, and its missionaries, while of good stout disbeliever-thumping stock, had never really adapted to the peculiar conditions of this country, and therefore, while they had managed to rig a sort of clumsy administrative scaffolding, it had never, so to speak, had its walls and roof put on, and developed a vernacular architecture. The priests had gained some ground, over the generations, with certain cabals of magicians; but priests and fairies remained like oil and water.

Katriona returned from her errand to find Aunt alone, amusing Rosie by swinging on its thin coloured string the tiny god-charm the priest had blessed her with. Rosie sat on the floor and made snatches at it (falling over at intervals). “Fairy godparents might have been quite a good notion toward a truce between us,” Aunt said thoughtfully. “It’s a pity the possible precedent was such a disaster.”

“He just wants the money!” Katriona said, outraged that Aunt had agreed to a second (abbreviated) name-day for Rosie—as if her first one had not been more than enough for anyone.

Aunt sighed. The priest was not a pleasant companion, and talking to him had given her a headache. “Yes, of course he does, but he’ll use it to buy food and firewood for those who need it. Don’t worry; I’ve already explained that my sister had Rosie dedicated before she died; she won’t have the words spoken over her again.” (You wanted to be careful about the super-fairies, just in case their magic was anything like the usual stuff, where doing the same spell twice could create serious havoc.) “But I couldn’t afford to insist against it—what if he tried to trace my supposed sister’s supposed priest to make sure the ceremony was done? Priests have more contacts than robins.” Katriona subsided, but with an ill grace.

Foggy Bottom’s priestling earned his title—and a certain grudging respect, even from Katriona—by nursing the sick and the indigent, but he was afraid of Aunt, as if religion and magic might ricochet off each other to the harm of innocent bystanders. While he was ready to do his duty by all his parishioners, even to the extent of rubbing the dedication herbs and oils into the potentially combustible foreheads of babies related to Aunt by blood, he was certainly not going to go out of his way to pursue her about it. After his chief’s visit, he was only too visibly relieved to be let off the actual rite, and accepted the promised fee for adding Rosie to Foggy Bottom’s church registry with a hand that shook only a little.

Rosie, who had to be present for this transaction, smiled at him benevolently, and would have pulled his priest’s plait, except that he flicked it out of her way in time, and proffered the string of his hood as substitute. She pulled with glee and made happy little chirps at each tug. “She sounds like one of your robins,” said the priest, thinking that she was a difficult baby not to like, whomever she might be related to.

“Not when she wants something and thinks it’s not coming fast enough,” said Aunt drily.

 

Rosie grew up square and strong and stubborn and inquisitive, with a limitlessness of both energy and persistence that meant she was a great trial to Aunt and Katriona while she was still young enough to require constant watching. “Mind you,” said Aunt, “little children are like this”—Aunt was the eldest of eleven and spoke from long experience—“but I’ve never seen one that was Rosie’s equal for sheer pigheaded-ness. With all due respect to pigs.”

Katriona sighed. She wanted children of her own (even if it turned out that Aunt was right and she was wrong, and she was a real fairy herself), but the experience of raising Rosie was making her feel that perhaps she wanted fewer than she had previously imagined. Even when Aunt had one or two small boarders to stay, as she often did, till their baby-magic ran its course and they were safe to return to their families, Rosie was deflected from her purposes not a whit by prognosticating furniture, clothing that giggled and ran away when you tried to put it on, nor a ravening panther just outside the door apparently waiting to swallow the first person it saw. (It was something like a panther; manifestations of baby-magic are only as good as the imagination of the child, and this one’s understanding of natural history was not so great as his desire for mayhem.)

This was convenient in one way, as a more nervous and dependent child would have been made miserable by baby-magic jokes and ruses; but Katriona sometimes thought it might have been worth it. Katriona had been officially sworn and contracted as Aunt’s apprentice shortly after Rosie had come to live with them, which in theory meant that Katriona could be sent instead of Aunt to attend to any fairy task Aunt thought her capable of; but in fact Katriona found learning basic fairy craft something of a struggle, despite her zealous dedication. At first the only clear manifestation of her aptitude for any magic at all was her ability to throw (so to speak) cold water on the various conflagrations of baby-magic, and there was no plan or subtlety to that; it was just a reflex, like grabbing the milk jug before Rosie knocked it over or a boarder turned it into a wasps’ nest. The early years of her apprenticeship felt like a kind of frantic juggling act, and the only real difference between handling magic and handling Rosie, she thought despairingly, was that there was no malice in Rosie.

Rosie hated her curly golden hair. When she was old enough to hold minimal conversations, the itsy-bitsy-cutesycoo sort of grown-ups would pull the soft ringlets gently and tell her what a pretty little girl she was. She would stare at this sort of grown-up and say, “I am not pretty. I am intelligent. And brave.” The grown-ups usually thought this was darling, which only made her angry, perhaps partly because she was speaking the truth, although it was tricky to differentiate between “brave” and “foolhardy” at three or four years old. (Fortunately her faith in grown-ups other than Aunt and Katriona was founded on people like Barder. Barder had a ritual of picking her up, saying “Oof,” followed by, “So, you’re a strapping lass. Are you going to grow up to be a blacksmith like Narl or a wheelwright like me?” and tossing her in the air. She adored Barder from the beginning, and was magnanimous about the fact that as the years passed he threw her less and less high.) But aside from her hair, she was not pretty—all those fairy godmothers giving her lips like cherries and teeth like pearls and skin like silk and they forgot to make her pretty, thought Katriona—and she was intelligent.

She was intelligent enough, for example, to grasp that Aunt’s prized scissors (the only pair in the village) were a much more precise cutting tool than a knife—neither of which, in theory, she was allowed access to. She nonetheless came indoors for tea one day with her hair lopped off to about half a hand’s breadth all over her head. It stood out like the corolla of a ragged sunflower. Aunt and Katriona were initially so stunned that Rosie had time to put the scissors carefully back where they belonged, with an easy familiarity that proved she’d done it often before.