Aunt looked at her with interest. “No, you’re right. But it’s as much like a smell as it is like anything else, and you might as well call it that. I wouldn’t have expected you to pick it up. You have absorbed more living with Katriona and me than I thought.”
“You mean it’s a magic smell?” said Rosie, wrinkling her nose; but that may have been from the proximity of Jem, who had been outdoors rolling in something noxious, probably from watching Zogdob do it first. Flinx, following Rosie in from the garden, had already approached Jem in apparent disbelief, stuck out first his whiskers and then his tail, and stalked majestically from the room.
“Not exactly,” said Aunt, “but it’s a smell that is produced by the fact of having magic around.”
Rosie laughed. “A typical fairy answer. Even if I had turned out a fairy, I would never have got my mind round it. You’d’ve had to make a charm for me—like Snick carrying a bit of hawthorn and rowan when he plays cards—or I’d’ve gone on doing a kind of horrible baby-magic till I died of old age.”
Aunt got the look on her face that meant she was thinking about something else, and even if you asked her what it was she wouldn’t tell you. “Not necessarily. Magic usually flows to the shape of its vessel. If you would be so kind as to divest that child of his clothing, I will upend him in the bath. In his present condition he will put us all off our tea.”
When the initial force of Jem’s protest was spent, and he had declared his intention to be a fish, in the hopes of getting a reaction for having used a bad word (disappointed, he began to splash water on the floor), Rosie said thoughtfully, “But I still don’t understand. The Prendergasts aren’t fairies or magicians. They barely have baby-magic—that really fine walking forest a few years ago was the butler’s son, wasn’t it? I remember you making that enormous charm so he could stay home. They don’t even keep fairies of their own—which is why they’re always asking for you and Kat. So what is the—the smell?”
Aunt finished scrubbing Jem’s hair and dipped some water over his head. “It’s the house itself,” she said briefly. “You’ve heard the stories.”
This was not the answer Rosie wanted. The idea that something so powerful slept so lightly under the surface of the ordinary world—magic-pocked and -dishevelled as the ordinary world was—that even an ordinary person who happened to live with two fairies might notice its presence, made her very uneasy. Never mind that it always seemed to be on the brink of talking to her.
Aunt, looking at her, guessed some of this. “Think of it as a kind of watchdog,” she said. “Think of Spear.”
Rosie’s mobile face immediately relaxed as visions of large, turreted watchdogs marched solemnly across her inner eye. She had taken her first steps clinging to Spear’s tail, while Flora and Katriona washed platters and mugs and talked. While his dark coat was now almost white with age he was still the terror of rowdy drunks all over the Gig.
CHAPTER 13
What began with a minor charm gone slightly awry had set a pleasant precedent. Most noontimes Peony still came to the smith’s yard with her and Rosie’s meal hot from the fire at home or from the big communal oven between the pub and the baker’s, and she and Rosie and Narl ate together, or rather Peony and Rosie ate together and talked (Peony was more sympathetic toward some of Lord Pren’s spoilt beauties than Rosie was) while Narl wandered round the forge examining whatever he was doing or was planning to do today or this sennight or next year. Narl thought sitting down to eat was a waste of time (and hot food in the middle of a working day nearly indecent).
One day Peony was describing the collar she was embroidering for Dessy to wear at Flora’s wedding, and broke off and began to laugh. “Rosie, your face. You would rather be bent into a curve, fried in the fire, and nailed to the bottom of some horse’s foot than pick up a needle, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Rosie. Rosie had been taught basic hemming and mending from Aunt and Katriona, hated it, and while she was far too honest to try to get out of it by doing it badly, did it naturally so badly that she got out of it anyway.
“The problem is only that you’ve never learnt to like sewing. Embroidery is the way to do that,” said Peony.
Rosie periodically fell into moods of gloom because she felt she was so little help to Aunt and Katriona, who would probably rather have had her time and a clever pair of hands than the coins Woodwold’s Master of the Horse gave her, and so she was willing (if reluctantly) to think that possibly needlework could help make up for her other failings. So, that evening, while they were alone in Rosie’s kitchen, Peony brought out a few coloured threads and a bit of stiff cloth, thoughtfully chose a nice serene blue to begin with, and showed her friend two or three basic stitches.
But Rosie’s fingers, once the needle and cloth had been turned over to them for practise, as if they each had minds of their own and been perfectly drilled in teamwork since birth, started flying across the little stretch of linen, dipping the needle in and out and producing, as if from out of the air, the most wonderful landscape of bright flowers and butterflies.
Rosie’s fingers came to the end of the bit of material and turned it ninety degrees to begin the next row; but the rest of Rosie jerked violently back, like a person on a runaway horse might pull on the reins, and the little square of cloth fell to the floor, needle and thread trailing behind it. Rosie tucked her hands under her arms and sat, trembling and shoulders hunched, in her chair, while Peony bent down and picked up the scrap of cloth, and stretched it gently between her hands.
“But Rosie, it’s beautiful,” she said. “When did you learn to embroider like this? I thought you told me you didn’t know how.”
“I don’t know how,” said Rosie in a muffled tone.
“Well, it doesn’t matter,” said Peony, meaning to be soothing. “You do know how, and this is one of the prettiest bits of work I can remember seeing—far beyond anything I can do. I don’t even understand one or two of the stitches you’ve used. Your work will be in terrific demand the moment I show this to anyone—”
“You can’t,” said Rosie, making half a snatch at it where Peony was holding it up, and pulling her hand back at the last moment as if she were unwilling to touch it. “You’re not allowed to show it to anyone. I forbid it.”
“But—” said poor Peony, bewildered. “But—aren’t you going to do more? Don’t you understand how good you are?”
“I’m not good at it!” shouted Rosie. “I don’t know what happened! It’s got nothing to do with me! Don’t you dare tell anyone! I am never going to touch another needle as long as I live!” And she burst into tears and rushed out of the room, narrowly avoiding bumping into Aunt, who had come to see what the commotion was about.
In a little while Rosie, with her head under her pillow, felt, by the gentle flexing of the floorboards communicated through her bed frame, someone come into her room. A familiar hand touched her shoulder, and a familiar weight sat on the edge of her bed. Rosie, without taking her head from under the pillow, reached out one of her dangerous, traitorous hands, and grasped Katriona’s hand.
Katriona could feel the fingers still trembling, and her professional fairy’s mind noted the signs of aftershock. An old enchantment suddenly brought into use often made its subject tremble uncontrollably; it was another example of the force of Rosie’s personality and will that she had managed to raise the latch on a door, thunder upstairs, put a pillow over her head, and reach out to cling to Katriona’s hand as if that clasp was all that was saving her from falling into a chasm.
An old enchantment suddenly brought into use also left a trail in the air, like smoke from a fire, for anyone to see, if they were looking. No Gig fairy would think twice about it, coming from this house, any more than any passer-by would think twice about ordinary smoke from a house chimney. Aunt was, even now, hastily lighting a larger magical fire to obscure the faint trace of the accident that had befallen Rosie.
Just as their own relative poverty protected Rosi
e from learning how well she might make sweetmeats, so her loathing for needlework would, Aunt and Katriona had allowed themselves to think, protect her from her gift for embroidery. Who could have anticipated a loving, patient and domestic friend like Peony for Rosie? Katriona sighed. Would Peony want to show Rosie how to dance and play the flute next? They couldn’t risk putting the tiniest charm against it on Peony; it would be impossible to make such a charm invisible without making its unseen presence even more obtrusive in other ways.
Katriona thought of several occasions earlier in Rosie’s life and thought, This is such a small mistake. Surely we’ll be lucky this time. We must be.
Katriona stroked Rosie’s shoulder briefly with her free hand and then pulled a little tuft of herbs tied together with string out of her apron pocket. “This will help the shakes,” she said to the head under the pillow. “If you will come out from under there and sniff it.”
Rosie sat up and shed the pillow like a bear emerging from hibernation. She clamped her shaking hands together on the tuft that Katriona offered her, and sniffed. Her eyes were wet and red. When she spoke her voice was not quite steady. “There’s something wrong with me, isn’t there?” she said. “There’s something I can’t quite remember about—about before I lived with you. I know I was too young to remember anything, but I do. Well . . . it’s not exactly a memory. It’s just . . . knowing that something doesn’t fit.”
She stopped, because she wasn’t going to tell Katriona about the time just before the wedding, when Katriona had been so happy, because it might take something away from the memory of that happiness to know that Rosie hadn’t been. “It never bothered me. But . . . that was an enchantment, just now. Peony may not know it—she didn’t grow up with two fairies—but I know it. Why did someone put a spell on me? A spell to do embroidery? What am I? What’s the rest of the spell? Do you know?” What she wasn’t saying was: Am I dangerous to you and Aunt, to Barder and Jem and Gilly—and Peony? What do you know about what I can’t remember? Aunt always says that my mother had no magic and my father’s entire family had never had any magic. Then why enchant me?
What she wasn’t saying was: I am your cousin and Aunt’s niece, aren’t I?
Katriona was shaking her head, not because she wished to lie to Rosie any more explicitly than the last nineteen years had been a kind of lying to her, but because she had no idea what to say. If she had not been so preoccupied, she would have heard the unspoken questions, and would have known that a warm flood of reassurance would drown the awkward ones most effectively; but she didn’t hear them.
Katriona still often dreamed of the princess’ name-day, and about small spiders weaving grey webs on velvet sleeves, and woke up suddenly as if she’d heard the words spoken aloud, finding herself in her own bedroom with Barder’s warm, gently snoring body lying comfortingly next to her. She didn’t like remembering. She didn’t see it couldn’t mean that Rosie would, one day, be taken away from them; and—as Barder had said the night Jem was born—she didn’t know what you called it, but they were her family. Rosie was theirs. But since Katriona had married, and especially since she had had children of her own, her dread of the memory of Rosie’s origin became almost intolerable.
The three of them who knew never discussed it. Aunt and Katriona were rarely alone together any more, but even when they were, the subject of Rosie did not come up as it used to. Rosie was an adult: she had her work and a life of her own. Their old discussions of how to manage her were no longer necessary; and what else there was to discuss . . . did not bear discussion. Not with her twenty-first birthday now so near. Barder never mentioned it, although, Katriona thought sometimes, watching him tease Rosie, or teach her a new ballad, or a better way to arrive at the effect she wanted on something she was whittling, that he was restraining the same sort of fierce possessiveness about her that Katriona herself felt: Rosie was one of them. But as Rosie grew older, so grew nearer that inevitable parting, a parting so profound Katriona thought it would be like seeing her die. . . .
And what if they could not, finally, defeat Pernicia? They had two years left: and still no word, no robin-borne whisper, nothing, from Sigil. Only two years. Katriona plunged into speech, to get away from that most appalling thought.
“I—we—it will only make things worse, to tell you now,” she said. “I’m sorry—darling, I’m sorry—I’m not just being mysterious, you do believe me, don’t you? We have been waiting for—for a sign. I do not know why it is so long in coming.”
There was a silence. Rosie was still sniffing, half tearily, half dutifully, at the herbs in her hands. But her colour was better, and her hands no longer shook. She heard in Katriona’s voice that they had been waiting years. Nineteen years? You are so helpless when things happen to you when you were a baby. You can’t even remember what they were. You can only sort of half guess they were there. . . . She thought of the echoes in the darkness, before the wedding, before Jem’s birth, telling her that she was not who she believed herself to be, that she did not belong to these people she loved. “The Beast at least knew why he had been turned into a beast,” she said finally, referring to a tale she had made Barder tell her over and over when she was very small, and Katriona, her nerves overstretched with sorrow and anxiety and indecision, gave a shout of laughter.
Rosie smiled reluctantly. “If it weren’t fairy business, I’d fight you about it,” she said. “But if I do, we’ll both get cross, and then Aunt will have to make peace between us, and I still won’t have learnt anything, so I won’t.” She handed the herb bundle back to Katriona. “Thank you.”
She brooded. “This is the first time I can ever remember wanting—just a little—to be a fairy. So I could know.”
“Darling, it doesn’t work like that,” Katriona said gently, trying not to start laughing again, because she knew it would hurt Rosie’s feelings, when the laughter would be at herself, for her frustrated unknowing. Rosie was giving her a you’re-just-saying-that-to-make-me-feel-better look, and Katriona added truthfully, “I’m still waiting for my familiar animal to find me, you know. I’m a fairy, and I don’t know.”
Rosie, who could only, barely, with the greatest effort of intellect, imagine what it was like for the rest of the human world not to talk to animals, and couldn’t even begin to imagine what it was like for Katriona to have had beast-speech and lost it, gave a deep sigh, leaned forward, and kissed her on the cheek. “Thanks for the herbs. I have to go find Peony, and apologise.”
Peony had been so distressed at causing her friend pain that she barely heard the apology because she was so busy proffering her own; and that was the end of it, except that she tried never to mention embroidery in Rosie’s hearing again. And when, months afterward, she had offered to teach Rosie the steps of the commonest round dance that everyone (except Rosie, Narl, and old Penfaron, who had a wooden leg) danced on feast and festival days, and Aunt and Katriona who, this time, were in the room when the offer was made, said “No!” simultaneously and rather too loud, neither Peony nor Rosie asked for any explanation.
About a week after Peony had showed Rosie a few basic embroidery stitches, a hippogriff was seen flying over the Gig. Hippogriffs were generally creatures of ill repute, unless you were a magician, and it was bad news to have one in your neighbourhood. It might mean that the wrong sort of magic was about to follow it; and this one, certainly, seemed to be looking for something. People grew alarmed, and there was a run on aversion charms, which made you, more or less, depending on how good the fairy who made them was at the job, beneath the notice of any wandering magic looking for someone to seize onto. Aunt’s and Katriona’s were very good charms, and by the time the hippogriff had not been seen again for a fortnight and people were beginning to hope the Gig was to be spared after all, they had no more charms to sell, and no chance of making more till winter, when the deer’s-foot vine turned red and the salia berries yellow. In the general unease it seemed surprising to no one that Aunt and Katriona gave ave
rsion charms to Rosie and Peony.
But the hippogriff did go away, and the only bad news the Gig heard that winter was of an invasion of taralians, which were large striped cats of fierce intelligence and fiercer appetite (a full-grown taralian could eat a horse in one go) and which the king himself had led the army against. The army had been victorious, and the remaining taralians had been driven back across the border into the wild wasteland of the south where they had come from, but the king had been wounded, and while the wound was slight, he was slow to recover his strength, and there were murmurs of a spell. Why had the taralians come into human-settled areas in the first place? They were savage on their own ground, but they rarely left it, and the winter was not a hard one.
The king, it was said, had symptoms very like those of the soldiers and courtiers who had been thrown down by the enchanted sleep at Fordingbridge and Flury: headaches, lingering lethargy, inability to concentrate or to make decisions, insomnia, nightmares. It was all the more disturbing not only because he was the king, but because everyone knew this king to be a robust, phlegmatic man who ruled thoughtfully and kindly, and with a reassuring lack of imagination.
The danger to his daughter had sapped him at last, the whispers went. Too much of the king’s resources have been spent to protect her; were still being spent to protect her—wherever she was. Too much more was spent looking for Pernicia: too much wasted. Pernicia had been not only wicked and powerful but clever; twenty years of helpless fear had worn the country down, the king most of all. When Pernicia sprang her trap at last he and his magicians and his armies would have no strength to resist her, and she would have not only the princess, but the country—just as the old tales of her had predicted. But she would not have done it this way if she had been able to seize all at once, which meant she was not so powerful as she pretended: let us, said these whispers, return to normal now, when there is still a little time left. Who has seen Pernicia since the name-day? She would not bide her time so if there were a faster way. Perhaps the curse on the princess is not what Pernicia declared it: it is, instead, that those around her will fall ill of some mysterious illness that bleeds off health and strength and will and courage. Bring her home now—and let her pass the crown to Prince Colin, whom the people know and love. Let them rally round him, this last year before the princess’ twenty-first birthday, till there is no trap for Pernicia to spring. The curse never was that the princess should die of the prick of a spindle end; and there are no such spindle ends left anywhere in the country.