Spindle's End (6 page)

Katriona wished her aunt were there. She found herself thinking over all the charms her aunt had given her, wondering if there were anything she could give to the princess. Would she like, when she was a little older, to be able to sleep in a tree? While they’re at it, she thought sourly, hearing the bestowal of eyelashes as long and fine and silky as the hairs at the tip of a fleethound’s tail, they could at least give her fingernails that never break off below the quick, eyes that never get dust in them, a digestion that is never upset. They hadn’t guaranteed her not to have flat feet yet either; weren’t they worried they’d end up with a princess with feet like a duck’s? . . . “Her embroidery shall be peerless”; “her sweetmeats sublime.”

Poor princess. Was Katriona imagining it, or did the queen look the tiniest bit dismayed? Did she shiver? Or was that only the wind? Katriona remembered the popular story that the queen had been in her father’s kitchens overseeing dinner when the emissary had come to offer her the king’s hand in marriage; perhaps she had been looking forward to teaching her daughter her own recipe for sweetmeats.

As the twentieth gift was uttered—something to do with spinning woolen thread as fine and strong as the slender reedy leaves of the maundry, much loved by basket-weavers—there was a burst of thunder so near overhead that everyone, except possibly the king, ducked; a number of people stretched themselves flat on the ground, with the concomitant effect of a lot of boots going into a lot of faces; cries of pain and protest combined with the next blast of thunder. Katriona was suddenly the only one near the barrier still sitting up; and she clutched the sabre-bearer’s amulet with both hands.

In the aisle in front of Katriona, just before the boundary, a black cloud was creating itself. Its centre twisted and writhed and began to take on a shape somewhat human, and as it did so, the outside of the cloud began to organise itself into a long grey cloak, and the cloak began to send up streaks of purple and magenta and cerise from its hem, as if the air were a vat of dye it trailed in. And then the human form within it gave a final jerk and shudder, and a woman stood there, a woman as tall as the king, and with a face more dangerous than an army waiting for the command to attack, and she wore black and grey streaked with purple and magenta and cerise, and a necklace of black stones.

She turned slowly in a circle, holding the edges of her cloak against her bent arms so that the material hung down like wings; and as she finished her circuit and again faced the dais, she dropped her hands and arms, and laughed.

“So: a fine day for a princess’ name-day, and a fine crowd to see. Well! I wanted to see, too—but I was not invited. I live alone near a wood—perhaps not quite alone—but no herald came to me; and when one-and-twenty fairy godmothers were chosen I was not among them. But I wished to see the princess’ name-day—and so I came.”

She paused, but no one said anything. Even the First Magicians sat as if stricken; perhaps they were. The queen had bent over the cradle as the black cloud formed itself out of nothing, but she seemed frozen, reaching for her child but not able to touch her. One of the courtiers, at the end of the table by the aisle Katriona sat beside, held a bit of bread to his mouth, but he neither ate it, nor laid it down, nor closed his mouth. Katriona was rigid in what she thought was nothing but sheer terror; if she moved, the tall woman might notice her.

As the black cloud had become a woman, Katriona had watched the magic barrier behind the ordinary barrier flame up till the faces of the people she saw through it were patched and mottled with its colours: reds and red-purples and mauves and greys. As the tall woman spoke, each word seemed to glance off that undulating barrier, but it left a little black streak behind it, so that the barrier began to look spotted, like fine sheer cloth with soot.

When she finished speaking, the tall woman reached out a hand toward the barrier, and the sooty black streaks extended into smudges and dapples, till the barrier became piebald, and the clear colours were all shadowed. But she dropped her hand at last, and the shadows began to fade; but Katriona fancied, as they faded, that they shimmered grey-brown, like wet shale, and that instead of spots and mottles, they were woven, like cord or rope. The woman laughed again, but it was a laugh like the sudden knowledge of your own death, and many of the people who lay on the ground whimpered or cried out.

“I, too, have a gift for the princess,” said the tall woman, “and while it pleases you not to seek it, I will give it to her nonetheless; but perhaps . . .” and here the woman’s voice grew silky with malevolence, “perhaps I will alter it just a little. I was not in a good mood when I arrived, you know, for I had expected an invitation to the name-day; I was still hoping right up until this morning that this would be put right. I might still have forgiven you, this morning.

“But I am quite a . . . quite an important fairy, and you cannot have overlooked me, except by deliberation. I do not like to be overlooked. And now, when I have humbled myself to you by coming anyway, not only do you not ask me to sit at the high table, you hold me here with your rabble of subjects. . . . No, I am not in a good mood.

“I wish the country to remember me, too, as one of the fairies who gave the princess a gift on her name-day.” She had been facing the barrier, but now she turned round, toward the crowd—the rabble of subjects—and threw her arms out wide. “My original gift was this: that the princess will grow in all those beauties and virtues she has been so adorned with this day. But on the day she reaches her majority—on the day that her father should crown her his heir—on her one-and-twentieth birthday, she shall fall down in a poisoned sleep, and die, and nothing anyone can do will save her.”

Katriona stopped breathing.

“But that now seems to me so—simple. And so I think I will alter it—a little. What was it I heard some magic-trifling buffoon giving her as I arrived? Some sublime ability to spin the dense stinking hair of a sheep into something resembling the thin drab tumescences of an unlovely marsh plant? How charming. I think I shall say—on her one-and-twentieth birthday she shall prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel; and this prick shall cause her to fall into that poisoned sleep from which no one shall rouse her.”

Not breathing wasn’t enough; Katriona wanted to be a grass blade, a lump of gravel, an earthworm, anything but a person listening to this curse, shaping itself implacably over the baby princess’ tiny, oblivious head.

“Perhaps you will say that is mere ornamentation. And it does still give you one-and-twenty years to enjoy her. I think . . . I think it shall be that
my disposition of her future may happen at any time
.” Again the woman laughed, and the people lying on the ground outside the barrier writhed and flinched as if the laugh were a lash across their flesh. “Perhaps I shall even come to her, in secret, tonight, and pick her up out of her cradle, and press her tiny soft hand against the sharp spindle end. . . .”

Thunder groaned in the distance in a terrible harmony to the moans of the crowd; the queen gave one shriek, and fell fainting across the cradle. The king, moving as if he were tearing himself free from iron chains, stooped beside her, and took her in his arms. The tall woman smiled. “Burn all the spinning wheels in the kingdom, should you choose; it will not save her. Lock her up in your deepest dungeon for the rest of her short life, and that will not save her either. Delight in your princess while you can, for you shall not have her long!”

The tall woman threw up her hands, and she was a black cloud again, tumultuous as a tornado, spinning, spinning, spinning like a kind of maniacal wheel, where she had been standing, and the banners above the dais were torn free, and the poles that had held the silken hangings crashed down upon the king and the queen and the cradle with the princess still in it—and Katriona, with no recollection of how she got there, found herself kneeling by the cradle and snatching up the now-crying princess in her own arms and patting the little back and stroking the little head and saying, over and over, “No, no, it shall not happen, it can’t happen, they won’t let it happen, you can have all my aunt’s charms, I’m not much of a fairy yet although my aunt says I will be, but you can have my gift, it’s only baby-magic so it won’t last, and it isn’t very useful anyway, I can talk to animals, sometimes it is a little useful, and it is the only useful gift anyone has given you all day, sometimes if someone has put a spell on you or on something round you, if you have an animal you can ask, animals aren’t so mixed up by magic as we are, it’s only baby-magic, it’s only—but you’re only a baby yourself, oh, oh, it
cannot
happen,” and she realised the tears were streaming down her face and down the back of the princess’ neck, which might be part of why the princess was crying so hard. The sabre-bearer’s amulet thrummed against her breast like the beating of many small heavy hammers, and as she rocked the princess she saw that there were shreds of red and red-purple and mauve and grey draped over her arms and strung through her fingers like torn fabric she had clawed her way through, and streamers of it hung as well from her hair and tickled her face, but she had no hand free to brush them away.

There was an uproar round her, and to the extent that she was thinking clearly about anything, she was expecting the princess to be taken away from her at once; but what happened instead was someone’s arm round her waist, helping her to her feet, hustling her, with the princess still in her arms, down the back of the dais, and under the wreck of the poles and the name-day hangings. Here there was a little corner of quiet, and the hustling stopped, and Katriona found herself looking down into the face of the small drab person who had carried the princess and stood behind the queen, and her face, too, was streaked with tears.

“My dear, do you have any idea what you have done? I would thank you for it, only I doubt that you do know.”

Katriona balanced the princess awkwardly so that she could sweep the worst of the flapping, confusing streamers out of her face with one hand; she might have thought to offer the princess to the small person, but she did not, and the small person did not offer to take her. The small person did, as the amulet was revealed from behind the now only whimpering baby, reach out and touch it delicately with one finger. “Well. That explains one thing.”

Katriona found herself smiling, the desperate smile of someone who has no idea what is going on, is frightened, and wishes to please or at least to placate. The small person’s eyes rose from the amulet to Katriona’s face, and she smiled back, but it was a gentle and understanding smile. “You are still only a child yourself. My poor dear. . . . Oh, I do not know what to do!” The small person’s face lost its smile as if it would never find it again, and she pressed a hand briefly over her eyes, and a few tears crept out from under her palm. Speaking as if to herself, she said, “What I told the queen is only the truth—I’m too bound up in this family—over many years and three generations of kings and queens I have sunk my power deep here, too deep to be got back. . . . There were to have been one-and-twenty gifts, and only twenty were given when Pernicia appeared—Oh yes,” she said, speaking directly to Katriona again, “yes, I know who she is; but I did not know she was so powerful. I hoped, as one always does hope until catastrophe strikes, that it would not come. I hoped that the years had worn her out, the years since our last queen . . .

“Listen. There is no time. I will try to see to it that no one remembers you. Take the princess and go—take her and go. That is her only chance—because by the time it is quiet enough that one might be able to think, it will be too late. I will give you a charm so that you can escape the royal city unseen; then you are on your own. I dare not let you carry any smell of me or my magic beyond the walls of the city—ah! I dare not so much as kiss her good-bye; I dare not touch her again, now that you have taken her—Do not tell me where you are going, do not say it aloud in this place, in this air, that Pernicia so recently disturbed for her own ends. The fewer traces you leave the more easily I can erase them.”

“I—but—” began Katriona, appalled, but unconsciously easing the princess against her till she fit comfortably against her own breast and shoulder. The princess had one small fist wrapped in the neckline of Katriona’s dress, and was beginning to experiment with pulling her hair with the other one.

“Yes, I know,” said the small drab fairy. “I’m sorry. But you will do it, will you not? I cannot force you any more than I can keep her safe myself. But it is truly the princess’ only hope. Take her home with you. Raise her as if she were your own.”

“
Raise
her? But what—”

“You will hear from me later. I will find you when I can—when I dare. It may not be for some time. Pernicia is . . . we must find out everything about her, and this will not be easy. Listen to this—memorise it—anyone coming from me will tell it to you, and that is how you will know who they are. Words are the only token we can risk. And—and—a poem is the most I can give her, my dear, my only darling!” The fairy’s voice faltered, but then went on firmly: “ ‘Small spider weave on a silver sleeve/Oh weave your grey web nearer./ From a golden crown let your silk hang down/ For lost, lost, lost is the wearer.’ ”

“ ‘. . . is the wearer,’ ” repeated Katriona obediently. “But what will you tell the poor queen?”

But she never knew the answer, for as she raised her head from the effort of memorisation—her mind felt like a field of rabbits bolting in panic from the sight of the hunter—to look again at the small person who had just destroyed her life and given her some other, far more dangerous life for which she was totally unprepared, she found herself on the outskirts of the royal city, in a small stand of oak trees. It was near sunset, and the princess was asleep on her shoulder.

CHAPTER 4

Small spider weave . . .” Katriona murmured; by the sun, the small fairy had recited the poem for her to learn several hours ago. She gave a hitch upward with the arm that bore the weight of the sleeping princess; babies always weighed more than you thought they would. And . . . she would be carrying this one for a long time.