Spindle's End (9 page)

What had she told the poor king and queen?

The last thing before Katriona fell asleep every morning, she recited to herself the verse the small fairy had taught her. She often fell asleep murmuring, weave your grey web nearer. . . . And woke up murmuring, lost, lost, lost is the wearer. . . . “Your golden crown is certainly lost,” she said under her breath one evening, dunking the grubby baby in a shallow pond, fairly warm after the sun had been on it all afternoon. The grubby baby laughed, and pulled up a handful of bottom-of-shallow-pond mud and decomposing slime, and rubbed it into her hair. This was excellent fun, so she pulled up another. “Oh, you’re a lot of help, you are,” said Katriona, making a dive at her with a reasonably clean piece of flannel, and rubbing her face. The princess put up with this indignity stoically. “Sometimes I think I miss soap even more than bread. But, you know, we’ll be home soon.” She paused, and the baby, catching her mood, also paused, and looked at her anxiously. “Home for you, too,” Katriona said, catching one of the muddy hands and applying her flannel to it. “Home for you, too.”

It rained steadily the last day and a half to Foggy Bottom. Katriona used the weather as an excuse not to stop either. She had run out of ha’pennies a sennight ago—despite how frugally she had hoarded them—and was hungrier than ever; and she was too tired to do anything but stay on the main cart track into the Gig when the dawn came. It had been empty all night, and she managed to get off the road before any of the other occasional travellers saw her during the day.

Her aunt would know how to tell everyone that Katriona had come back from the princess’ name-day with a baby of a suspicious age (she assumed that the news of the princess’ disappearance would have flown round the country as quickly as the news of her birth had); although could anyone entertain so ludicrous a notion as that someone like Katriona had successfully kidnapped the princess? If the princess had disappeared on account of the threat from Pernicia, it was because she had been hurried off to some royal stronghold where the most powerful magicians, the wisest fairies, cleverest scouts, and sharpest troops could keep her safe.

When Katriona felt she couldn’t walk any farther, she stopped and sat down under a tree for a few minutes, and leant against it, and fell into a kind of semi-conscious drowse; and as soon as she could struggle to her feet again she did so. The princess, for the first time, was not feeling well, and wasn’t hungry, but was restless and whimpery, and Katriona was therefore even more anxious to get her home to her aunt. Oh, Aunt, she thought. You won’t believe how much I have to tell you. . . .

The rain and wind among the leaves made enough of a din on the second evening that she couldn’t hear her own footsteps, although she could feel the mud sucking at her feet, trying to pull her shoes off, trying to unbalance her till she fell down. She often stumbled. She kept the edge of her cloak pulled over the feverish baby, for it was wool, and warm even as wet as it was; but, being wool, it also became heavier and heavier as it grew wetter and wetter. Katriona sneezed. It’s summer, she thought drearily; I shouldn’t have a head-cold in high summer.

She knew all the back ways in and out of Foggy Bottom, but she was too tired to choose; she took the first turning off the main road that would lead her to her aunt’s house—to her house. If she met anyone she knew, she didn’t know what she would say, with the baby in her arms. She didn’t know, and she was too tired to care. She was home at last. She was nearly home at last.

Her aunt had the door open, and was looking out. “Oh, Katriona,” she breathed, and embraced her before she was over the threshold, and in spite of the rain—and the baby. She made room for the baby in her hug as she might have made room for any other impediment. Katriona sneezed again.

“I’ll give you something for that,” said her aunt, and pulled her filthy wet cloak off her, and drew her to the fire; and Katriona felt the fingers at the back of her neck, untying the ragged scarf that had valiantly withstood its unsuitable occupation as baby-sling for so long, and still her aunt asked no question and made no exclamation. As the sling came loose, and Katriona settled the princess in her lap in the way she had settled her in her lap any number of times over the last three and a half months (but in a chair! said a small internal voice refusing to be daunted by head-colds and exhaustion. In a
chair
! In a chair you will be able to sit in again tomorrow, and the day after that!), she reached up and grasped her aunt’s hand—her aunt was occupied drawing the little table and another chair to the fire.

“Aunt,” said Katriona, and her voice shook a little. “Aunt—this is the princess. They—they
gave
her to me.” And then all the last three and a half months rose up together and fell on her, and she put her free arm on the table and leant her head against it and cried and cried and cried and cried, and she only stopped at last because the princess started crying, too. When Katriona had reassured her and the princess had fallen into a heavy doze (drooling fondly down Katriona’s neck), Katriona told her aunt everything she could remember about the name-day, about Pernicia, about the small drably dressed fairy and the verse she had taught her, about the king and queen, about the sabre-bearer and his amulet, about the gold and white and lavender streamers with the pink and white rosettes, which were still, ruinously wrinkled, in the bottom of one of her pockets, and how she hadn’t been able to bear to throw them away. About how she had been afraid to send any message to her aunt. And about how it was that while Katriona had often gone hungry, the princess had always had her milk.

Her aunt listened to everything, occasionally patting Katriona’s hand, and apparently not noticing the increasing reek of wet unwashed person and wet unwashed baby that rose from Katriona and the princess as the fire warmed them and the rain came off them as steam. Katriona was still talking, hoarsely, when she fell asleep.

 

When she woke up, she was both clean and in bed. In her own bed. In
any
bed. For a moment she thought she had dreamed; and she struggled not to wake up . . . no. She felt her way down to the foot of her bed and looked over the rim of the loft and saw the cradle by the fire. There had never been a cradle by the fire since Katriona could remember; and she could see her aunt’s foot rocking it gently. Most of her aunt was hidden behind the back of her chair; but she must have heard her niece stir, because she put her head round the chair and saw her sitting up and looking down.

“How are you feeling?” said her aunt.

“Good,” said Katriona, after a moment, in surprise. “Better than I’ve felt since—since the name-day. Aunt, I’ve had a
bath
.”

Her aunt smiled. “Only as much as I could arrange. You can have a proper bath later; there’s only so much you can do with an unconscious, snoring body, even with cooperative water. And I had to save some of my energy for persuading the ladder to carry you up to the loft. But I thought you’d be more comfortable, clean and in your own bed. How’s the cold?”

“Gone, I think.” She stood up, waveringly. “I’m so hungry I can’t think.”

“Don’t think, eat,” said her aunt. “We’ll think together later.”

There was bread and chutney and a salad of greens and new potatoes on the table, and Katriona ate it all. Only then did she approach the cradle.

She knelt beside it. The princess, also looking very clean, was asleep. For the first time Katriona really noticed that her hair was blond and curly, her skin pale but rosy; and she looked lovingly at the long silken eyelashes lying sweetly against the little satin cheek. “Aunt,” she said softly, “I don’t even know what to call her. Her name is Casta Albinia Allegra Dove Minerva Fidelia Aletta Blythe Domnia Delicia Aurelia Grace Isabel Griselda Gwyneth Pearl Ruby Coral Lily Iris Briar-Rose. I’ve been calling her baby, or—when we were far enough away from everyone—princess, because I didn’t want—I didn’t want her to forget, I know that’s silly when she’s only a baby, but—and besides, you can’t call a princess by name, can you?”

“Briar-Rose,” said her aunt. “Rose. Rosie. Rosie is a good name for a little village maiden. We’ll call her Rosie.”

Part Two

CHAPTER 6

The next time a royal herald appeared in Foggy Bottom, shortly after the arrival of Aunt’s second niece, Rosie, it was a far more subdued and apprehensive occasion. The villages of the Gig had heard of the events of the princess’ name-day from the returning attendees—fortunately no one asked Katriona why it had taken her better than twice as long to make the journey home as it had the journey away—and had looked at their spinning wheels and hand spindles in alarm and dismay. Every home in the Gig had at least one tool for spinning; the weavers in Smoke River paid real coin for good thread, and Lord Prendergast, as well as most of the local smallholders, raised sheep.

The herald brought instructions that no spindle, iron or wood, should have a point on it thinner than the forefinger of a three-month-old baby—which had been the age of the princess on her name-day—and the herald here brandished a wooden peg that looked unsettlingly like a baby’s forefinger. Katriona shivered, and needlessly rearranged the contentedly sleeping princess in her new baby-sling. The princess gave a little moan of objection and lapsed back into unconsciousness.

Aunt had said firmly that the entire village was ordered to attend the herald’s announcement, and that the entire village had to be there—including Katriona and Rosie.

“I’ll carry her, if you wish, but be there you both must be.” She looked into Katriona’s drawn, unhappy face and said, “My dear, think about it. No sane grown-up would leave a baby home alone, and the one thing we absolutely cannot do is call attention to ourselves by staying away. There is nothing about Rosie to suggest she is anything but our Rosie.”

Katriona took comfort in the presence of several other women clutching babies of various ages and looking frightened—and in the reassuringly large and solid proximity of Barder, who had worked his way through the crowd to stand next to her for the herald’s proclamation. This herald, too, was gone the next day, but there was no celebration in the pub the previous evening.

The herald had brought other news: that the king and queen were offering a fantastic reward for any news of Pernicia, of her whereabouts, her situation, her plans, her powers—anything—any news at all. Squadrons of the king’s armies and parties of the king’s magicians were still scouring the countryside for any trace of her; but so far as the herald, and Aunt’s robins, knew, they had found nothing.

Nor had anyone else. No one had come forward to claim a portion of the king’s reward. No one was able to say anything about where she had been before the name-day, nor where she was and what she was doing now. No one. Not one of all the court fairies and magicians, who were among the most powerful in that country; not one of the magisterial seniors at the Academy, not one of the dangerously wayward fairies of the wild lands who could see through stone and talk to fire-wyrms and hear the stars singing.

Pernicia, people murmured. Wasn’t that the name of—? There were tales that people’s grandparents and great-grandparents had told them, that they had had from their grandparents and great-grandparents. The story was of a wicked fairy with a name like Pernicia, who had sworn revenge on the queen of their country, many generations ago, a queen who had been unusually clear-sighted and unshakable by any magical means, even for a queen. Pernicia—if that had been her name—had said to her, “It is true, you have defeated me for now; but one day I will throw your heirs’ heir down, and shatter your country with the shock, till no stone stands on any other stone that human hand set together, and the animals flee underground to the deepest roots of the mountains, and the birds will not sit in the trees, and the trees themselves bear no leaves and no fruit.”

And the wicked fairy—whose name might have been something like Pernicia—went away into some wilderness where no one could find her, for she set magical guardians around it, so that the wilderness appeared even wilder than it was, and people stayed away without knowing why they stayed away. And—the stories said—she set herself to learning how to live past the usual span of human years, so she might have her revenge in the time that suited her best, and that she should be there in the full strength of her pride and malice to enjoy it. Perhaps she was powerful enough, and wicked enough, to have learnt it; for it was said that if you were powerful enough, and wicked enough, there was a way.

But that country was full of magical wildernesses where no one went; and even if you did go there—even if you were a very clever fairy or a very wise magician—you were very unlikely to see or to find everything that was there.

And that country was full of tales of fairies and magicians and magic. Many of them were just tales.

But Katriona remembered the small fairy saying to her:
Oh 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.