Aunt’s robins had, of course, had their own version of the events at Fordingbridge, and their own guesses about what had caused them. (Most of the Gig fairies, whether they had animal familiars or not, consulted Aunt about what her robins had told her. Aunt said that this was only because her robins were more comprehensible than most, but Katriona thought it was that Aunt was the best translator.) Any animal with a fairy to talk to would bring her at once any apparent news of the princess who still lived with the king and queen, and any animal’s news of that princess would be passed on till it reached an animal with a fairy to tell it to. Part of the secret of the princess’ whereabouts (among those who knew and those who guessed something was up besides the strongholds and the magicians and the regiments) was that that tale of that other princess should continue to be believed. And furthermore, wherever the princess was, Pernicia was a problem belonging to the human world, and the humans were expected to sort it out.
But there never was any news of Pernicia. There was not even any news definitely of her in the tale of the breaking of Fordingbridge, just a horrid, murky, muzzy sense of bad magic. Many of the birds who had been close to Fordingbridge when it had happened—whatever, precisely, it was that had happened—were moulting out of season. (Nurgle’s fish said that the water round Fordingbridge now tasted very nasty, and everything that lived underwater had left the area. Nurgle’s fish was the worst-kept secret in Foggy Bottom, although, strictly speaking, the laws against contact with fish didn’t specifically mention friendship.) What had Pernicia learnt during her self-imposed exile, that she could hide herself so completely when all the countryside was roused and looking for her?
Aunt and Katriona had celebrated Rosie’s birthday the day after the princess’ birthday from the first. This had been Katriona’s idea, saying that it was one more detail making Rosie Rosie and not the princess; but both Katriona and her aunt knew that what it was they were celebrating was coming through one more of the princess’ birthdays safely. Although Aunt had made a point of telling her niece-apprentice that Pernicia’s additional last-minute spite—that the spell could kill the princess at any time that Pernicia chose—was almost certainly untrue.
“Almost?” said Katriona; but Aunt ignored her, carrying on in her dry, teachery voice, as if what she said was in the same category as the proportions of paregoric.
“She would have set it up for a birthday, because someone’s birthday is always when they are most susceptible to magic, good or bad—a name-day is quite good too, but a birthday is best. If she said she’d set it up for the one-and-twentieth, then she almost certainly did—”
“Almost,” muttered Katriona.
“Especially because she had obviously set it up to connect somehow with the well-meant gifts already given, and that would be enough complexity to have to deal with on the day. Saying it aloud like that, however, especially with an audience, will have helped to settle it into place. Magic likes being announced. Of course that will also have given it added strength. . . .”
During the latter half of the year that Katriona had once sat on the foot of the queen’s bed and told her about her daughter, the queen was seen even less than she had been since her daughter disappeared. Everyone said that it was on account of the shock of discovering that Fordingbridge was penetrable, the shock of the possibility that even the king’s best stronghold and best troops and best magicians—and fairies, although guardianship was not, generally speaking, considered the less biddable fairy magic’s forte—were not enough to protect the princess against Pernicia. That it had, perhaps, only been luck that they had brought her away safely this time.
But ten months and eighteen days from the night Katriona had sat on the queen’s bed, a royal herald on a tired horse trotted into Foggy Bottom and announced that the queen had given birth to twin sons five weeks before.
“It’s getting to be a habit with her, not letting on what’s coming, ain’t it?” said Grey, but Cairngorm said swiftly, “Can you blame her? She’d been fifteen years having the first, and look what happened.”
“Yes, but that was the first, and a girl,” said Bol, the barman.
“Lay your odds they’ll have a private name-day, and no one will know about it till it’s over,” said Gash eagerly, but there were no takers. Gash was right. Four months afterward, Shon came with the news that the two little princes were called Colin and Terberus; and that there had been so few people invited to the very private name-day that the bishop had been insulted.
There were no fairy godparents for the little princes.
The queen had a third son the year Rosie was eight, and her brothers were three. The baby was named Osmer, and this time just enough people were invited to the name-day to satisfy the bishop. Colin and Terberus were there, and everyone spoke of what beautiful manners they had, and what quiet, self-possessed children they were, even at three and a half.
Katriona looked at Rosie and shook her head. “You aren’t—er—doing anything, are you?” she said to her aunt.
Aunt had, she knew, cast a glamour over Rosie’s arrival, so that everyone remembered Aunt going off to fetch Rosie about a week after Katriona’s return from the princess’ name-day. (“I have to,” she had said. “I wish I didn’t. I will make it as small and confusing a glamour as possible.” When Katriona’s magic had strengthened she had looked into this, and was impressed by her aunt’s creative imagination. The glamour that obscured Rosie’s arrival was so entangled in a fictitious bardic tale-spinning competition in Smoke River that what little of it you could make out, which wasn’t much, seemed only to be one of the tales, about as likely as any of the rest, which included large silver carriages with long stiff wings that flew through the air like birds, long-distance speaking devices involving no magic, and a family of fire-wyrms asking the king for a permanent peace, and offering to live in the palace cellars and replace the central heating. The tale did not say what happened to all the human loggers and colliers and stokers this would put out of a job.)
Aunt shook her head. “No. Rosie’s—er—strength of character is nothing to do with me. It’s interesting, though. I wouldn’t have expected it from that family. I thought they were bred for amenableness as much as for lack of magic.”
They were outdoors, in the garden, setting out seedlings, Aunt’s weather-guesser having promised faithfully that there would be no late frosts that spring. The cottage they lived in was a brisk quarter-hour’s walk from the village, on its own little track just before the fork in the road that led, to the right, to Lord Prendergast’s great spooky house Woodwold, and to the left, to Smoke River. It had its own garden, conveniently, rather than rights to one of the bits of common land beyond the cluster of village houses and outbuildings and barns. Aunt had done Lord Prendergast some particular favour, long ago, and permanent tenancy of this cottage, for so long as she wanted it, had been the reward.
That it had been this reward rather than some other may have been because Lord Prendergast, thoughtful liege lord that he was, knew that people generally preferred to have powerful fairies at a little distance. Neighbours of a professionally practising fairy have more than a usually severe dust problem, and their dja vines, supposing they have dja vines, grow about a league a year in all directions, and require severe and frequent pruning; and a well-grown dja vine has spines on it that make the thorns of a briar rose look like they’re not trying. Fairies’ residences also attract odd bits of weather—small wind-spouts and dust storms, funny-coloured fogs, and minor plagues of enchanted or half-enchanted creatures, drawn by the magic pulsing under their own skins, and who can behave in ways very disconcerting to ordinary people, who furthermore cannot disenchant them or make them go away. Of course the fairy can and does, in the interests of good relations, but it may not be quite soon enough for the neighbours.
“They can’t—er—what do you mean, bred for amenableness?” Katriona said, her mind suddenly filled with a vision of councillors bent over parchment sheets of geneal
ogies, like Lord Prendergast deciding which mares were worthy of his celebrated stallions’ efforts. “You can’t—you can’t measure for amenableness, like you can for—”
“Height and weight and magic?” said Aunt. “True. But show me a committee of councillors anywhere who would choose a self-reliant, strong-willed spouse for their reigning monarch over a mild, biddable one, should the choice exist. I wonder if perhaps we got more in our queen than we realised.”
Thinking about the queen always made Katriona irritable and unhappy. She began banging seedlings into the row she was creating so that the soil stood up in ridges round each tiny, startled-looking plant, and miniature battles seemed to have been fought between these redoubts. “Twenty-one of them!” Katriona burst out suddenly. “One-and-twenty of the most powerful and important fairies in the country! They could have made her invulnerable to curses! They could have made her invisible to anyone who wished her harm! They could have—they could—and they gave her golden hair!”
Aunt made no answer. They could hear Rosie singing—tunelessly—to herself, or possibly to Poppy and Fiend, their cows, pastured on the far side of the cottage. Fiend used to belong to Grey, but Grey had grown tired of calling Aunt, or, later, Katriona, out to his farm to re-spell her to be a nice cow and let down her milk and not knock milkmaids and farmers and buckets and stools over like spillikins. On a day that Katriona had had Rosie with her, and Grey had been a little long in pouring out his woes, possibly because Katriona had heard them less often than Aunt, when the two of them had gone at last into the barnyard they found six-year-old Rosie pulling mightily with both hands on one teat—she having first arranged Fiend over a convenient bucket, which was too heavy for her to move far—and producing a thin but respectable stream of milk.
Grey lost his temper and told Katriona to take the wretched cow home with her. Fortunately the cottage had a dairy and a larder; even magic would have had difficulty keeping up with Fiend when she was in a positive frame of mind. (Grey had softened enough to have her put to his bull, and to take in her daughters.) Meanwhile she was still called Fiend, because Rosie, under the impression that a fiend was a sort of flower, thought it was a pretty name.
Aunt and Katriona kept a few chickens, but the only other domestic animal they had—if either “domestic” or “had” was applicable—was Flinx, their not-a-house-cat. He was presently a fat tortoiseshell puddle sprawled in the sunlight a few rows over. Since he was only crushing a few nonessential greens, which would regrow anyway, they let him be.
Cats were often familiars to workers of magic because to anyone used to wrestling with self-willed, wayward, devious magic—which was what all magic was—it was rather soothing to have all the same qualities wrapped up in a small, furry, generally attractive bundle that looked more or less the same from day to day and might, if it were in a good mood, sit on your knee and purr. Magic never sat on anybody’s knee and purred. Cats were the easiest of the beasts for humans to talk to, if you could call it talking, and most fairies could carry on some kind of colloquy with a cat. But conversations with cats were always more or less riddle games, and if you were getting the answer too quickly, the cat merely changed the ground on you. Katriona’s theory was that cats were one of the few members of the animal kingdom who had a strong artistic sense, and that aggravated chaos was the chief feline art form, but she had never coaxed a straight enough answer out of a cat to be sure. It was the sort of thing a cat would like a human to think, particularly if it weren’t true.
A few months before the birth of the princess, Katriona had woken before dawn on a sleety winter day to the sound of a kitten acknowledging to the world it was about to leave that it was dying, and had gone outdoors to rescue it. That was Flinx. Flinx had never decided if as a result he adored Katriona without qualification, or resented her for having heard him yielding up his final dignity that way and interrupted by saving him. He was never very far away from her when she was near the cottage or in the village (and he had been deeply offended by her five-month absence six years ago), but he wasn’t a house cat, nor was he going to be mixed up with anything that might disrupt the regularity of his meals. The word fairies had just now caught his ear and he was ready to withdraw smoothly if the conversation was about to turn magical. He knew a few of the human words that applied to his least favourite subject, but what he knew better was the spiky, bristly, meditation-disturbing feeling that the results of those human words gave off. He had never understood why any cat would stoop to being a familiar.
The sun was warm and the smell of spring was sweet on the air (they were upwind of the muck heap which, even with magic to muffle it, was still discernibly what it was) and Rosie was, for yet a few more minutes or weeks or years, safe. Katriona had decided that Aunt was going to let her outburst on the subject of fairy godparents pass as needing no response. Aunt often did on outbursts concerning Rosie. But now Aunt said: “Magic gifts are tricky. You stay connected with any magic you’ve ever performed.” That’s why no sensible person will have anything to do with bad magic, added Katriona silently, knowing that they were both thinking about Pernicia. “Furthermore, magic needs something to grip onto. It would find precious little purchase on any of the royals. If you want to give someone a piece of strong magic when they have no magic themselves, usually you invest a thing, like giving a spell-wrought sword to the fellow you want to win the battle.” Aunt paused and looked a little wry. “Well, you’d wind your spell into the jewel on its hilt, perhaps. Evil magic will bind to cold iron better than good, but even so . . .” Aunt’s voice trailed away, and Katriona knew they were both thinking of Pernicia again.
“Choosing a spindle was just . . . just showing off.” Aunt spoke with a kind of forced resolve. The very antitheticalness of magic and cold iron meant that on the rare occasions when the two were successfully bound the weapon produced—since the only occasions anyone knew of had produced weapons—was almost inconceivably powerful.
There was another, longer pause, and then Aunt continued: “Babies are malleable as clay, and even foresight is almost useless till a child is at least a few years old.” Katriona brought her mind back with an effort from the implications of Pernicia’s choice of a spindle to contain her curse to the question of the fairy godmothers’ gifts. “No one wants to—to suggest anything that might bind a baby from growing into who she was meant to be.
“Your one-and-twenty godparents also had to come up with their gifts knowing there were twenty others doing the same. Some of the silliest gifts, you may be sure, were last-minute changes when what the poor fairy had planned was given by someone else first. It would have been impolite to ask anyone what they were giving the princess before they gave it, and last-minute changes are never satisfactory. That may be why some of the wishes seem to be going—er—a little wrong. Although given wishes stay given.”
Given wishes stay given, thought Katriona. She remembered the queen’s fairy, Sigil, saying, My dear, do you have any idea what you have done? But it was only baby-magic, Katriona pleaded in her mind. There was nothing there to give: clouds and confusion. She has no magic, and magic needs something to grip onto, just as Aunt said. Rosie just likes animals. That’s all.
Magic makes any keeper of it more perceptible to any other keeper. Magic perceptions are a little different from the usual five senses most humans use to perceive the world around them. Magic is more likely to tell the perceiver who your parents are than what colour your hair is.
Pernicia knows about the royal family. She would never look for anyone bearing magic.
“‘The fairest lady I ever did see,’” sang Rosie. “‘Her golden crown she gave to me. . . .’” Her voice both sweet and flat made a faintly eerie sound through the soft hush of wind in the trees that stood behind their house. The sharper sounds of birdsong might have been the harmony, if Rosie had been singing in tune. Katriona knew the ballad: the lady was giving her crown away in preparation for drowning herself, because her father was forcing her
to marry a man she hated. The lady was a princess. Barder probably wouldn’t have taught her the end of it, Katriona thought, but I don’t think I can tell him not to teach her songs about princesses who come to a bad end. I’ll teach her “The Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night.” Why can’t she just sing nonsense like other children?
The usual thing with fairies was that when they first began speaking in whole sentences that followed one from another in a way that grown-ups could sometimes understand, they spent a few months doing baby-magic, and if a nonmagical family were so unfortunate as to find their little one turning the cooking pots into elephants and making the time in that house never bedtime, they had to find a fairy to take it till the worst was over. (One of the many curiosities about this situation was that while grown-up practising fairies were almost all women, baby-magic was about equally distributed between little boys and little girls. Magicians, who themselves almost never suffered baby-magic although magicianry ran in families just as fairyhood did, had done complicated studies of this phenomenon but had reached no useful conclusions.) Sometimes a general sort of containment charm would do, but most often a three- or four-year-old fairy needed a grown-up fairy to prevent it from doing itself (or the unmagical members of its family) any actual harm. Aunt and Katriona were the fairies of choice for this task all over the Gig (somewhat to their dismay; a lot of other things don’t get done when one is minding small children).
But Aunt had never lost her ascendency over even the severest attack of baby-magic, which had sometimes happened elsewhere. The pub gossips still told the story of Haveral, who hadn’t practised in thirty years by the time Rosie was born, who lost control over a young fairy named Gobar. Gobar had turned herself into a giant stremcopus, which is a sort of tree-shaped creature that eats people, and Haveral into a small spotted terrier with only one ear. The first anyone knew about this was the stremcopus (which, fortunately, showed no sign of eating anyone) marching through Smoke River on its long rooty feet, roaring in a highly unstremcopus-like way, and waving its long branchy arms (most stremcopuses have at least six). Panting behind it came a small spotted terrier with only one ear, far too out of breath from trying to keep a pace more suited to eight-foot legs than eight-inch ones, to speak any counter-charms. As the ill-assorted pair disappeared down the road toward Foggy Bottom and Woodwold, another fairy blinked a few times and said wonderingly, “That was Haveral.” “The stremcopus?” “No, of course not—the terrier.” Versions differed, but it took Haveral several days, or possibly a week, to turn Gobar back into a small girl again, by which time they had passed through all the Gig’s towns several times.