“P-promised?” said Rosie. “You mean, to wed?”
“Yes,” said Narl, and got one of those even-more-than-usually-shut-in Narl looks on his face that meant he wouldn’t say any more, and if Rosie had had her wits about her she would have wondered why he’d said anything at all; it wasn’t the sort of thing Narl usually volunteered.
“I—I must tell her,” she said, confused.
“You must not,” said Narl. “He’ll tell her. It’s their business. Let them be. Rosie,” he said, as she turned away, staring blindly into space, putting the towel down by feel and dropping it instead onto the unswept courtyard earth. “Rosie. She’s still your friend.”
And then he did put his hand on her arm, and she looked down at it, the big brown hand with the work-blackened fingers against her own sun-browned and -freckled skin. He removed his hand, and she looked up at his face again, and tried to smile, to nod. She thought she knew what she had seen in his face when he had first looked at Rowland and Peony: he was in love with Peony himself.
And Rosie had just learnt she was in love with him.
She blundered away, toward Peony and Peony’s basket. She had been hungry, only a very few minutes ago. She concentrated on remembering that she was hungry. I am all right, she said to herself. I am all right. This was not easy, for dissembling was a skill foreign to her nature, but her wish not to cause distress to her friends was as strong—stronger—than her own distress.
They all got through the meal somehow, Peony, Rowland, and Rosie. Narl was invisible in the shadows under the roofed end of the forge; Rosie’s eyes sought for him occasionally, looking for the shadow that moved, from where they sat in sunlight. The sunlight seemed unusually dazzling that day, full of little twinkly bits that got in your eyes and made you blink, or even made you flap your hand in front of your face, as if they were something you could brush away. She wondered how long . . . she wondered if Narl had ever thought of making his feelings known. Rosie thought she knew the reason for his silence; Peony was not in love with him, and Narl had none of the suitor about him to woo her.
None of the three ate much. Narl’s meal disappeared, but whether he ate it or fed it to one of the town dogs, no one knew but Narl.
“Narl said people do fall in love in an instant sometimes,” said Rosie, her voice muffled, since she had her arms on the table and her head in her arms. Katriona and Aunt were making and binding charms together, and Rosie had just finished whittling a top for Jem, who would have it in the morning. Gable was asleep in the cradle Katriona rocked with one foot, and Jem and Gilly and the small boarders were asleep upstairs, and in the kitchen they were waiting for Barder and Joeb to come in to supper.
The shutters rattled. It was a cold summer, and there was a searching, prying wind that sniggled round houses, under closed doors, and down the backs of necks. The fog-sprites were in an unusually bad mood, hanging so much dew on spiderwebs that the webs broke, and making day-old bread soggy rather than stale. Even the mice, whose households were always plagued by draughts, complained of the cold.
“That’s true,” said Aunt. “I’ve never seen it happen, but it does.”
“Nor have I seen it,” said Katriona, “but I’ve always wondered if there isn’t some fate in it. Not necessarily magic, like that poor queen who fell in love with her husband’s best knight, but fate, something that happens to you, like being born one day rather than another in this village rather than that one.”
Rosie stood up and moved restlessly round the kitchen, stopping at Aunt’s spinning wheel to rub the nose of the gargoyle on the spindle end. She’d picked the habit up from Katriona so long ago she could remember steadying herself with one hand on the frame of the wheel while she stretched to reach the spindle end. The little face always seemed to grin a fraction wider for a moment after you’d rubbed its nose.
“You aren’t in love with Rowland yourself, are you?” said Katriona in a carefully bland tone—reasonably sure that the answer was no, but sure as well that there was something further troubling Rosie than Peony’s romance. One of the many things Katriona had worried about as Rosie grew older was the likelihood of her falling in love with somebody; Katriona had known that she wanted Barder or no one by the time she was twelve, and Flora had found her Gimmel at sixteen, though it had taken them another ten years to be able to afford to marry. Rosie had never shown any signs of falling in love, although Katriona had lately wondered a little about Woodwold’s Master of the Horse, and what on earth and under sky she could say if he put his suit forward and Rosie was inclined to listen; but it hadn’t happened, and . . . the princess’ one-and-twentieth birthday was eight months away.
A kind of numb, dislocated bewilderment had settled down over Katriona with the turning of this last year toward that birthday. She found herself remembering the events of the year the princess was born with great—and obtrusive—vividness: this was when they had heard of the princess’ birth, this is when the herald had come and made his announcement of the invitations to the name-day and she, Katriona, had drawn the long lot. . . .
Three times in the last twenty years someone—some magic—had almost found Rosie, and three times Aunt and Katriona had deflected or confounded it. The fourth time had brought, not a tale of another assault on another of the king’s strongholds, but a hippogriff flying over the Gig; and while the rest of the villagers relaxed as soon as there were no more sightings of it, the Gig fairies could feel that it had left something behind. Something it had, presumably, come here to leave. Something that might be causing the fevers and the weather . . . Small spider weave! thought Katriona angrily—not for the first time. It is not the wearer who is lost! Why have you never sent word! We are only two village fairies and she is your princess!
Eight months.
“In love with Rowland ?” said Rosie with a little of her usual force. “No. He’s nice enough, but he’s . . . he’s . . . oh, he’s boring.” Her voice was plainly telling the truth, but her thoughts were on something else, and she turned her lips in and bit down on them, as if preventing herself from saying anything further.
Barder came in just before the silence among the three women became sticky, threw himself into a chair, and sighed. “Joeb will be along as soon as he’s washed,” he said. “I’m sorry we’re late again. Every wheeled vehicle in the Gig seems to be having the most extraordinary bad luck. Spokes break, rims pop, axles crack—I don’t understand it. Crantab says the same. He has a waggon in for repair now that looks like it simply made up its mind to burst. We could both take on new apprentices now—there’s plenty of work for them—but this isn’t the way it should be, and it’s not the sort of work you feel really happy doing. . . .”
His voice tailed away because the suspicion had to arise that the unusual level of breakages was due to some kind of magic, and cleaning up magical messes was not considered wholesome or honest labour. “The only thing no one has brought me for mending is a spindle’s end,” he said, trying to make a joke of it. He looked at the two fairies. “Usually you tell me when it’s something that concerns me or my work,” he said.
Joeb entered at that moment, looked round, took the plate Aunt offered him, but instead of sitting down as he usually did, said hastily that there was something he wanted another look at tonight, and went back outdoors. In the silence of the kitchen they heard his footsteps retreating on the hard-packed earth of the yard.
“Kat,” said Barder.
“We don’t know,” she said, but as if the words were wrung out of her. “It feels like a searching spell. Something that knows it has been searching for the wrong thing for a long time.” Too long a time, she thought. Searching spells don’t last twenty years, but this one had. It was a gallimaufry, a patchwork, a bristling, ragged confusion of the shreds of many days, days stretching into years, worked and reworked and turned back on themselves, the frayed ends teased out and bound together again, every failure stitched into the body of the thing, so that it would not be repeated,
till at last it would find what it wanted because there would be nowhere else left to look. And it was almost undetectable; it was the shaggy greyish fringe at the edge of your vision when you had gone too long without sleep. It was—probably—a senseless series of fevers and breakages. Katriona couldn’t have made such a spell. She didn’t know any fairy who could have. It was so outlandish neither Katriona nor Aunt could fully believe it existed; and they were the only two of the Gig fairies who could so much as guess at it.
She is as safe as ordinariness can make her. Ordinariness and beast-speech, that rare fairy talent.
Aunt said: “Your waggon probably did burst.”
Barder picked up the bread knife and examined it as if deciding what it was for. “Do you know what it wants?” he said.
“No,” said Katriona. “Yes,” said Aunt. “Sort of,” said Katriona, speaking so nearly simultaneously that the four words came out as a kind of burst: “Noyessortof.”
There was another pause, and Barder said slowly, “I see,” and then the three of them exchanged a look so fraught with unsaid understanding—a look that appeared to bind them not merely all together but also to prevent their looking at something else—that Rosie began to pay attention.
She was aware that all had not been well in the Gig this year. She knew about the fevers and the breakages, and the steady high run on minor squaring charms, which kept ordinary things what they were. It was only yesterday that Dessy, having had the third mug in a row turn into a frog when she tried to put beer in it, and despite her having murmured “mug, stay mug” over each as she took it down from the shelf, burst into tears and swore she was going to run away to Turanga and find a job in anything that wasn’t a pub. Rosie had happened to enter the pub while Dessy was still weeping and threatening to leave, and had got down on her hands and knees to talk the beer-mug frogs out from under the bar, where they were huddling, confused and frightened, and longing for something, so far as Rosie could make out, that seemed to be a sort of swamp made of beer and sausages.
But her real attention was elsewhere. She’d never before had a problem she could neither forget nor do something about. She wanted never to have seen that look on Narl’s face; she wanted never to have found out what that look meant to her. She wanted not to watch Peony moving through elation and misery a dozen times a minute. She had wanted to blame Rowland for everything, but found she couldn’t, because he was a friend. He was patient and thoughtful and funny (in a way that as she’d gotten to know him better reminded her of Peony. It didn’t surprise her that they’d fallen in love, but she wondered how they’d managed to do it in an instant). He was interested in animals, not only the horses and oxen a blacksmith shoes. He learnt the names of all the village dogs, even the medium-sized hairy brownish ones that all looked alike to most people, and he stopped to listen to birdsong. And the cats liked him. They called him Sweet-breath and Aroouua, which was a cat word indicating that you had supple joints. They rarely said aroouua of human beings. They called Narl Stone-Eye and Block.
He wasn’t really boring. She just wasn’t in love with him.
She’d been listening idly to the conversation, wrestling unwillingly with her own thoughts, and she looked up just in time to intercept the charged glance among the other three. If I’d held a stick between them at that moment, she thought, it would have sizzled.
Rosie said to Flinx, lying near the cradle so he could play a kind of dicing with death between his tail and the cradle rockers, You could tell us something, couldn’t you? You cats know something’s up; even the priest’s cats are worried. She couldn’t be sure, then, if he let his tail be pinched deliberately, or whether, stiffening all over in outrage at Rosie’s question—a cat does not submit to interrogation—he merely forgot, and left it in a dangerous location; but pinched it was, and he bounded to his feet with a shriek and darted out of the room. “Oh, Flinx,” sighed Katriona. “You could lie somewhere else.”
“That cat doesn’t come indoors to lie near the fire because he’s getting old,” said Aunt. “He does it to prove that he should never come indoors at all.” The conversation was turned; but supper was a haunted meal that evening.
Like most lunches were at the forge now, Rosie thought the next day: haunted. Rowland and Peony seemed hardly to talk to each other, and when they did speak it was like Aunt and Katriona and Barder last night; as if what they were really saying was happening somewhere behind their words. Rosie had begun to imagine—she hoped she was imagining—that whatever irresistible force was drawing Rowland and Peony together, there seemed to be another, nearly as powerful, that was dragging them apart. Rosie half wanted to watch them, and half wanted never to look at them at all. She developed Narl’s habit of wandering round the forge staring at things, although she was careful not to choose the same things to stare at that Narl himself did.
She wondered why the air between Rowland and Peony seemed to twinkle sometimes, and that when they were together they seemed more troubled by magic-midges than people who weren’t fairies, sitting in a forge, ought to be; and she pretended that her own skin didn’t seem to tingle and buzz if she sat long near them. She had never paid much attention to people in love before—except Katriona and Barder, but they’d been in love since before she was born, and presumably all the itchy unsettledness of it had worn out by the time Aunt had fetched her home to live with her and Kat. Maybe this is just what love—that first burst of mutual love—was like. Magic did tend to be drawn to excitements and upheavals. She thought of asking Aunt, but she didn’t have the heart for it.
Of course the village found out about Rowland and Peony. Peony’s beauty and sweetness had made her prospective marriage the liveliest odds at the pub since Rosie’s disappointing show of baby-magic, and far more heatedly contested, since at least half the men (young and old, married and unmarried) laying their wagers were in love with her themselves.
“So, Narl, are you ready to take on another man permanently?” said Grey one day. Narl only grunted, but Grey would have been astonished if he had answered so frivolous a question. But Brinet, from whom Rowland rented a room and in whose kitchen he had his breakfast, asked Rosie one day if Peony’s aunt had started measuring the family wedding dress against her niece’s figure; and Rosie, expressionless, grunted, and walked away.
“Grunted at me just like Narl! Not a word! Not a nod or a smile!” said Brinet, much offended, to Cairngorm, later that day. “I don’t think working with a man like Narl is good for a young woman, however clever she is with beasts!”
But Rosie felt herself to be at full stretch and had no slack for dealing with busybodies. A few days after she had declined to answer Brinet, she found Peony weeping into a pan of potatoes she was peeling, and sat down and put an arm round her. “I—I’m sorry,” said Peony. “It’s just—suddenly too much.”
“Can’t you marry him then?” said Rosie, remembering what Narl had said, and guessing what was suddenly too much.
“No,” said Peony, and when the single syllable made her tears stop Rosie knew how hopeless it was—knew, perhaps, because of all the tears she herself had not shed into her own pillow recently. “No. He’s pledged to—to someone else. Someone he’s never met. She—she has a curse on her, and it makes her very lonely and sad.”
Rosie’s heart sank. “It’s a family thing then?” What is a blacksmith doing with the kind of family that pledges its sons to other people’s daughters sight unseen? Especially daughters with curses on them? That explains his manners, of course, if he comes from that kind of family, but then what is he doing as a blacksmith? Because he is a blacksmith. Even I can see he knows what he’s doing, and Narl would never have taken him if he didn’t. Couldn’t he chuck it all over and be a blacksmith?
Magic, thought Rosie, and frowned. Was this part of what Aunt and Katriona were talking about the other night, when Barder was trying to squeeze some answers out of them? But if the searching spell wanted Rowland, wasn’t he right there? Maybe not, surrounde
d by cold iron.
“Oh, Rosie,” said Peony, picking up a potato. “I hope you never fall in love with the wrong man—the wrong man that you know is the right man.
“It isn’t for much longer,” she added, after a pause. “He must go home soon and—l-live up to his oath. They are to be married shortly after her—her birthday, which is in spring, when the crocuses come out. Like the princess, and you, Rosie.”
Rosie grunted a Narl grunt. She was back that day from Woodwold. Lord Prendergast’s hounds had broken away from the huntsman, which had never happened before in anyone’s memory, and Lord Pren had had to forbid the man to quit his post, and set a spy on him that he couldn’t creep off and disappear, so devastated was he. Rosie was called out to talk to the dogs, who were all deeply ashamed by their ignoble behaviour, and grovelled abjectly to the huntsman, whom they loved, at every opportunity.
I don’t know, said Huwreer, one of the oldest and wisest hounds. I’ve never felt anything like it. It was like being six months old again, but crazy. I’ve known crazy dogs. They can’t learn and they don’t care they can’t learn, and that’s worse, and if your huntsman doesn’t know his job, one crazy dog can ruin the pack, because when we’re running—Huwreer paused. Rosie knew what she meant. When a dog’s brain is full of prey-smell there isn’t a lot of room for independent thinking.
Storm coming, the merrel had said, sitting in the darkness in the roof of Lord Prendergast’s Hall. Storm coming. The weather, advancing toward autumn, was as restless and volatile as Lord Pren’s youngest son’s horses; but bad weather had never sent the dogs mad before.
Rosie felt she was surrounded by bad weather—her own and everyone else’s. Rain and wind hardly came into it. Rowland couldn’t really have anything to do with the princess, but it still seemed so very odd that her own private world should be trying its best to crack up during this last, tense, distracted year before the princess’ one-and-twentieth birthday. If this is what it felt like in the Gig, it must be really dreadful where she was.