Spindle's End (15 page)

CHAPTER 9

. . .And it was nothing to Narl. They were just having a conversation. Aunt, it was baby-magic! And her family has no magic! I don’t understand!”

“Nor do I,” said Aunt, “but this has been going on under our noses for some time—probably from the beginning. Have you really not let yourself see?”

Katriona’s eyes went involuntarily to the spinning wheel against the wall, with its blunt spindle. Barder had long ago made them a spindle end shaped like a little grinning gargoyle with wide-open and slightly popping eyes. It had a quite incredible number of teeth, but looking at it you had the impression it was a sort of watchdog, loyally protecting hearth and home. Katriona had laughed out loud with delight when Barder first handed it to her; since the little ashwood egret (which she wore round her neck on a bit of ribbon), Barder had been carving spoon and knife handles, but this was far more ambitious. Rosie had still been a baby, not quite crawling, in little danger yet of spindles and spindle ends. “It’s lovely!” Katriona said.

“I’ve been practising,” Barder said, obviously pleased. Barder’s usual chair at their hearthside had a bit of rag hung over the back, to be unfolded and put on the floor under him the moment his pocket-knife appeared, to catch the shavings. “And Narl’s been showing me some stuff about faces. I could see this little fellow staring out at me as soon as I picked up the wood burl.”

She had stood, still smiling, turning it over and over in her hands; the spindle, the business end, was as sleek as the coat of a well-bred horse, and her fingers lingered over it appreciatively; the little face at the opposite end was so bright and alive it was hard not to expect it to blink and say something. “Thank you. I—I’ve been wondering if I could go on having a spinning wheel in the house.”

Barder had glanced down at Rosie, who had, in the mysterious way of sitting up, not-quite-crawling babies, managed to move herself half across the long room to attach herself to his trouser leg. “Aaaah!” she said, which meant, “Pick me up and throw me in the air, please.”

“I know,” he had said, stooping to oblige. “That’s why I made it. Half the farmers round here wouldn’t know how to pay you if they couldn’t give you fleece to spin.”

Katriona now stood up restlessly and went over to run a finger down the gargoyle’s small lumpy nose. This was a kind of semi-conscious good-luck charm for her, and the gargoyle’s nose was shiny with stroking. She was aware that as the years passed it was slowly accreting all those bodiless wishes into a real charm, the way enough deposited silt will eventually become a peninsula, but she doubted it would keep Pernicia away.

Rosie’s eleventh birthday was coming up soon. Katriona rubbed the gargoyle’s nose harder.
Magic makes any keeper of it more perceptible to any other keeper. No one looking for a member of the royal family would look for someone who bore magic. It isn’t magic because it can’t be.
Eleven: they were over halfway to one-and-twenty.

When the rest of Foggy Bottom caught on to the fact that Rosie really did have beast-speech (Narl had known from the beginning, but of course hadn’t said anything about it), they enjoyed it very much. It was not as good as baby-magic—for one thing it was useful, which baby-magic rarely was—but it was something at last, something to make jokes about, and making jokes about your fairies is one of the ways ordinary people live with the magic they have to live with, and both the ordinary people and the fairies know it.

It distressed Katriona, because Rosie wasn’t a fairy, and she shouldn’t be treated like one; it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t her fault she lived with two fairies. Ordinary people didn’t need to defend themselves against her by making jokes that turned her into something other than themselves. Well, thought Katriona, flinching away from the reality of Rosie’s ordinariness, she isn’t a
fairy
. Even the fact that her beast-speech proved to everyone’s satisfaction that she was exactly who Aunt and Katriona claimed she was, because beast-speech was uncommon even among fairies and two unrelated examples of it in the same village were impossible, wasn’t enough to comfort her.

But the recognition of Rosie’s beast-speech also reawakened some old gossip from eleven years ago.

Ordinary people sometimes have a funny reaction to glamours, like the glamour Aunt had thrown over Rosie’s arrival in Foggy Bottom, a persistent, fidgety feeling that something wasn’t quite right. In this case it had produced a rumour that Rosie was Katriona’s daughter.

The question Katriona had really feared was not whether Rosie was her daughter—which she would have denied very convincingly—but whether she was her cousin. Barder, who was the only person Katriona felt had the right to ask, had never asked, and the rumour had died a natural death years ago—so Katriona assumed. Eleven years later she would have had to make an effort to remember that it had ever existed at all.

She and Rosie were crossing the square from the forge to the pub, toward their road home again, late one afternoon. It was drizzling rain, and Katriona was tired. Since she had stopped visiting the queen, the strength of her magic had come into her with a thunderous crash, like swallowing an anvil. The dark empty confusing place where she went for scraps of magic she could use was no longer empty, but finding what she needed was perhaps more difficult than ever—in the first place because she knew it was probably there if she looked long enough, and second because it was like trying to locate one particular pebble in a boulder field, with a great storm wind rolling everything about, including you. Aunt said it eventually got easier. Katriona hoped so. She had performed a tricky exorcism that day—if they’d known how tricky, Aunt would have come with her—ridding a field of an old battle which had suddenly woken up again, and the reperformance of which was scaring Matthew’s sheep.

It was Barder’s half day today, and he usually came out to the cottage for the evening, and she was almost too tired to enjoy his company. A cup of tea will help, she thought. It might have been any voice she heard, or perhaps it was a voice that had made itself out of the air of Foggy Bottom and what some people said out of her hearing. As they passed the pub, Katriona waving briefly without looking up, the voice was saying, “. . . should have married her eleven years ago, or no reason to marry her at all.”

In the first shock she thought she might have imagined it, but she hadn’t imagined it, because there was Barder suddenly beside her, and she could see in his face that he had heard the voice, too. She saw that he was angry, and for all that she had known and loved him for most of her life, she did not dare ask why. The three of them walked to the cottage together, Rosie chattering about birds and horses and earthworms, and the other two silent, although Barder usually talked easily to Rosie, and as if nothing she said surprised him (like that earthworms have no eyes but see the earth they creep through in beautiful visions, like the sort of visions people hope to have from eating fish). Aunt met them at the garden gate, looked into their faces, and told Rosie to go feed the cows and chickens. Rosie usually did this anyway, but she paused a moment, looking at the other three, knowing that she was about to miss something she would be interested in, and knowing also that it wouldn’t happen if she hung around. She went off at a dragging, un-Rosie-like pace, her shoulders hunched and her head down.

“I don’t understand,” said Barder, as soon as the cottage door closed behind them. “It seems to me just meanness, and Foggy Bottom isn’t usually mean without cause. I would have knocked that useless blockhead down”—by which Katriona guessed he had recognised the voice or the speaker—“but I thought you would not like it. Dear heart, I know you are not Rosie’s mother. I remember the skinny little stick you were when you left for the princess’ name-day, and you were the same skinny little stick when you came back with that enormous bundle of half-grown baby.” He did not at first notice how still Aunt and Katriona became at his words. “I can’t say I wouldn’t have cared if you’d had a baby who—who wasn’t mine; I would have cared a great deal. But—I would have asked—if I hadn’t known she couldn’t be.”

“Aunt went to fetch her after I came back,” Katriona said faintly.

Barder stared. “But—no she didn’t—I saw you. You looked like you’d been dragged backwards through every hedge and spinney between here and the royal city. I heard you sneeze. I was coming back from Treelight, the short way, across Lord Pren’s fields. It’s not exactly the short way. I—I’m afraid I had a habit of finding an excuse to walk past your cottage while you were away, just to look, even though I knew I’d hear as soon as you got back. I saw the light when Aunt opened the door.”

Aunt said sharply, “Did you tell anyone what you’d seen?”

Barder shook his head, slowly, bewilderedly. “No. My aunt—my mother’s sister—was ill; that’s why I’d been in Treelight. It was my half day. They only wanted to hear about her, at home, and by the next day I thought, what is there to tell? Kat’s had a rough journey; let her recover in peace. We’ll all hear about it soon enough. I waited till I’d seen Kat in town again, and then I came to see you, and there was Rosie. And then there was this story about how Aunt had gone to fetch her. I just thought people were remembering wrong—we were all mostly thinking about the princess then, and about Pernicia—it wasn’t worth arguing about. Perhaps it was fairy business; you don’t argue about fairy business. But
you
would remember. . . .” He looked at the two of them, and his gaze settled on Aunt, and Katriona could see him working it out. Stop! she wanted to shout. Don’t think about it!

“You laid it on us,” he said to Aunt. “But why?” He smiled. “Anyone would think you’d stolen the princess.”

The gargoyle spindle end blazed with sudden light, and three of Aunt’s little bottles fell over
—ping, ping—
and the third one dropped off its shelf and shattered on the hearth. A sharp green smell invaded the room, and then all three of them were in a wild landscape, surrounded by irregular ranks of tall, wry, standing stones, bent and distorted in strange postures. Among the stones was a low, scrubby, creeping growth whose tiny pointed leaves gave off the harsh smell of Aunt’s little bottle.

It was twilight, almost dark. To one side of them at a little distance trees began to mingle with the standing stones till—in the dimness they could not be sure—it seemed that the boles moved together into the darkness of a forest. There was a horrible feeling of unfriendly eyes watching. Opposite this wood, if it was a wood, on their other side, the standing stones and the low creeper grew sparser till the rough land was bare; but far away there was a tall bulk on the horizon, tall but narrow for its height—some immense standing stone? Or some bleak fortress built by human hands?

The sun had gone behind it, whatever it was, and the sky was still purple in the memory of the sunset, the sky and the castle. It was a castle. The castle, indeed, as Katriona stared at it, seemed to send up streaks of purple from its base, as she had once seen a cloak do. . . .

“No,”
she said, and, somehow, she did not know how, flung herself and her two companions back into the cottage, where the fire still burnt on the hearth, and the gargoyle still gleamed honey-golden, as if it were a faceted gemstone instead of wood, and a light shone through it, and a dark sticky puddle, purple in the firelight, lay on the floor, glittering with shards of broken glass. Aunt was already picking up the ash bucket and throwing spadefuls on the puddle; by the time Katriona remembered to breathe, the green smell was almost gone, smothered in a fug of cold ash. Katriona coughed.

“P—” began Katriona.

“Don’t say her name,”
said Aunt, and Katriona saw that Aunt’s hands were shaking. Aunt turned her head as if looking for something and unable to remember where it was; she laid down the bucket and shovel and put her hands to her forehead as if her head ached. Katriona heard Barder sit heavily down; his chair legs bucked briefly against the floor. But she was already pulling the stool near the chimney and groping for the little iron cauldron that sat in a niche high up on its face. She felt its presence before her fingers found it, turning the cauldron on its side so it spilled into her hand. She climbed down, holding it still wrapped in its cloth, and then unrolled it and flung it quickly round the gargoyle’s thick little neck, above the loop on the spinning wheel the spindle went through.

The translucent beads of the sabre-bearer’s amulet gleamed like the gargoyle’s face, only a creamy, swirly white, like fresh milk with the cream still on it, instead of the yellowy-coppery glow of wood; they swung gently against the frame of the spinning wheel. The cottage and the three people in it jolted back into normality, like the end of an earthquake, or the sudden departure of fever.

Aunt dropped her hands and Barder sat up. Katriona went behind Barder’s chair and bent over him, wrapping her arms round his chest and putting her cheek to his; he crossed his own arms the better to seize hers, and pressed her to him. After a moment she kissed his cheek, and he released her; and then the three of them sat down near enough to each other that they could hold one another’s hands.

“Thank the fates Rosie was outdoors,” said Aunt.

“Then it’s—true,” said Barder.

“I’m afraid so,” said Katriona. “But I didn’t steal her; she was—er—given to me.”

Barder nodded as if this were a perfectly reasonable explanation.

There was a little silence, and then Katriona said, “Is it because Barder saw me that the glamour didn’t work, Aunt? Do we have to worry about anyone else who might have seen me? I had thought no one had seen me—but I was so tired by then—”

“Don’t blame yourself,” said Aunt. “You did extraordinarily well. And I don’t think that’s why it didn’t work. I’m afraid glamours work best where there are fewest connections—and Barder cared far too much. I imagine Flora might have a little difficulty deciding when Rosie arrived, too, if she had any reason to think about it, but she doesn’t. Barder, I’m sorry. This really isn’t the sort of thing that happens just because you’re—er—a little fond of someone who’s a fairy.”