It was Peony who managed to laugh a little, to say “I don’t know—I don’t know anything,” to kiss proffered cheeks and squeeze proffered hands, when the princess and her lady were briskly escorted from the smaller prison of the wrights’ yard into the travelling carriage that would take them to the larger prison of Woodwold. Rosie stared round dumbly, registering both curiosity and a sort of shocked reverence—and, on a few faces, pity—in those who had come to see them off; only Flora came boldly up to her and gave her an immense hug and then a shake, murmuring, as if to a small child, “It’s all right. Rosie, it’s all right,” and Rosie willed herself to smile. Even Fwab, materialising from nowhere, pecking her scalp and tweaking her ears, could rouse only a minimal hand flap to dislodge him.
Rosie had never ridden in a carriage before; she didn’t like it. It had a roof, and a closed door, and it was a prison, too, and the wheels and the horses’ hoofs said gone gone gone and lost lost lost. It was a low, foggy, overcast day, and cloud-streamers drifted by the carriage window—Lord Pren’s best carriage had windows made of clear glass. Rosie tapped her finger on it: it was cold and damp.
She was accustomed to the tiny, disturbing jolt as you passed the iron gates into Woodwold’s lands, but it was much stronger the day that the princess and her lady arrived, and Peony, who only knew Woodwold from feast days, had a little “Oh!” of vertigo startled out of her. Rosie thought she felt Woodwold stir; and she felt it stir again, more urgently, when they crossed the threshold of the Great Hall. Rosie, without meaning to, in a gesture rather like rubbing the nose of the gargoyle spindle end, or picking up a baby to play pat-a-cake with, called out, Merrel?
Princess, it replied, in a way that gave and included the name she thought of as her own, Rosie, and Woodwold, somehow, heard it, took it in, grasped it or swallowed it. Felt it. And responded. Prinnncessss, it said. Rooosie.
It was a hearing like no other Rosie had ever experienced, as if trees and stones had spoken. For a moment she could not move, as if, by hearing something speak that did not breathe nor have voice nor move, she herself was robbed of all these things; and another world blossomed round her, a world in which a human could not live. But then the floor rippled under her feet, a tiny ripple, no more than the lightest suggestion of motion, and she staggered on her two human legs, and came to herself again, and she looked round, and thought no one had heard what she heard, nor, perhaps, felt what she had felt.
And then Lord Prendergast himself was coming toward them, and she and Peony both swept into their best curtsies (Rosie’s much more like a bow with a little angular twitch of skirts), and were horrified to find the lord’s hands on their wrists, drawing them upright. “It is I who must bow to you,” he said, and did so, and then he looked into their white faces and said, both solemn and teasing, as if they were merely two more of his daughters, “You must learn now, you know. It will not do if you bow to your own courtiers.”
“Yes, my lord,” said Peony faintly, and then Lord Pren turned to introduce them to his wife, seizing them again by their wrists while she made her curtsy. But Rosie was preoccupied with a deep, deep note, like the last resonance of a drum, which you cannot hear, but only feel in your body, which was Woodwold repeating, Rosie. Princess. The floor shivered again, not quite imperceptibly.
“I apologise for the—er—floor,” said Lord Pren, looking awkward for the first time. “This house has sheltered my family for all the centuries it has stood here, and its loyalty is perhaps—er—tangible. We do most sincerely welcome you here, and we will do all in our power to make you comfortable, but—and—I suppose it has been over a hundred years since we have greeted royalty in this Hall, and perhaps—er—the house is remembering that you—er—merit a special respect—greater than your humble servants the Prendergasts. But—I have to say—Woodwold itself is a trifle—er—inscrutable—if that’s a word you can use on a—er—house.”
He fell silent, and they all heard the guest cups rattling on the table, and Lady Pren made a graceful pounce at the wine ewer, which was standing a little too near the edge. “It—er—its reactions are not generally this pronounced,” he added, frowning slightly, in puzzlement or wonder, and Rosie recollected a favourite Gig rumour that the Prendergasts never went to court because if they left Woodwold for any time greater than the length of a hunting trip into the mountains beyond the river, it would pull itself out of the ground and go striding over the countryside after them. “But then perhaps it has never had the glorious opportunity to be the first to greet an heir-princess taking her proper station after long concealment,” and again he bowed. Peony drew closer to Rosie, and tucked her hand under her arm.
But Woodwold quieted at his words, as if they had been the acknowledgement it wished or needed; and after a minute or two Lady Pren began to pour. But Rosie, as she sipped the weak sweetened wine, felt an alertness round her that had not been here any of the times she had come before, and she went on feeling it, some not-quite-inanimate something watching for some enemy, fretfully aware, as no human in the house seemed to be, of some deception performed under its roof, even if the floor no longer shuddered. Rosie hoped that no one else heard its abyssal whispers, Princess. Rosie. Or that if anyone did, they would not realise that only one person was being named.
The princess and her unlikely lady-in-waiting were installed at Woodwold at the top of a tower that stood at the peak of a kind of culminating swirl—you couldn’t call it a corner, Rosie thought—of wall. Woodwold’s many ells and additions followed their own logic through half or one-and-a-half flights up and down and precipitate twists and confusing passages and unexpected alcoves, and ceilings that swooped toward you and then just as suddenly flew up into domes and peaks. Their tower rooms, two above and two below with a stair between, were small by Woodwold’s standards but big by Foggy Bottom’s; their bedroom, one of the upper two rooms, was as big as any of the village cottages’ entire downstairs floor. The room opposite was a parlour, and below there was an honest-to-goodness bathroom, with shining, well-rubbed piping Rosie might have found fascinating in other circumstances, and a dressing room; and opposite it (over a little hallway for privacy) was a room for guards and chaperones and the kind of paraphernalia they accrued. From the lower pair of rooms a wriggle of wedge-shaped stairs led down into the main body of the house.
Ikor hung his sabre, Eskwa, over the lintel of the door frame into their bedroom. “Eskwa both binds and cuts,” Ikor told Rosie. “If you have need of either, he will answer to your hand.”
The Prendergasts had been told that the princess and her lady would prefer to share a room for the sake of their own comfort and reassurance; and the Prendergasts, who had six children of their own and were very tender to the young women suddenly thrust upon them, found this not in the least odd. “After a shock like that poor girl has had, I should think she’d want her best friend by her side,” said Lady Pren. That was true enough, even if not as Lady Pren understood it.
“I’m sorry, R—my princess,” Ikor had said, upon returning from that first interview with the lord and his lady, and who, after less than a day in Rosie’s blunt and matter-of-fact company, was showing signs of finding it as impossible to call her by her title as she found accepting it. “And Peony. But you must be bound together as tightly as we can bind you; and you cannot leave Woodwold till after the princess’ birthday. Do you understand?”
They understood. They had understood even before Katriona told them it would not work if they weren’t friends already. “Not just friends: if you hadn’t already left deep marks on each other’s lives. Peony, do you know that you have Rosie’s gesture of running your hand through your hair? You didn’t when we first moved here. And Rosie, you’ve picked up the head shake Peony uses to settle her hair back into place again, which you never used to do when we lived in the cottage—and when you haven’t got hair to settle in place besides. You finish each other’s sentences half the time—or sometimes, if you think no one else is listening, you
don’t bother to finish them because you both know what you were going to say. If one of the rest of us needs to know, we have to ask. That fox cub wasn’t so far wrong when he jumped into your arms, Peony, instead of braving the menagerie in our house. He knew you were—you were part of the same thing.” They had been sitting at the hearth in the wheelwright’s kitchen; it was evening. The name-day ribbons and rosettes were spread out on the table; they were still crumpled from their twenty-year-old journey at the bottom of Katriona’s pocket, but were only a little faded, and they looked like what they were: ornamental badges from some royal rite. Rosie and Peony were to be escorted to Woodwold the following morning.
And Rosie and Peony knew, in a way they discussed with no one else and did not need to discuss with each other, that the deception would not have worked if they had not already been such friends, if they had not already known so much about each other that each fitted instinctively to the shape of the other’s habits, customs, life. They would not have been able to bear the further binding that Ikor now settled round them, that Eskwa oversaw from the lintel of their bedroom at Woodwold. It was not merely that they were rarely out of each other’s sight now, never farther than a room or a dividing wall distant; it was that they could feel the—the—the whatever it was, the magic, the magic that had drawn Rowland to Foggy Bottom and Ikor after him, the magic that was now rushing them all toward the princess’ one-and-twentieth birthday.
They could feel Ikor plucking at the bond between them, taking tucks in it as one might take tucks in a dress passed from a bigger owner to a smaller, or as one pulls the unworn edges of sheet together and creates a new centre seam. Rosie began to feel that neither she nor Peony alone was quite real. When Peony smiled, her own lips turned up; when Peony waved her arm in the air, a ghost-shadow flew between her arm and Rosie’s. As the weeks passed, Rosie saw more and more of these ghost-shadows; and she felt some kind of resonance between them and the heavy inaudible mutter of the house that sheltered and shadowed them. She felt as if her flesh, her self, were thinning, dissolving, like honey stirred into water, dissolving into the strange air of Woodwold, and into the passionate awareness of the presence of the princess in the people round the two of them.
It did not try their friendship; curiously, it made them cling to each other, for the knowledge of each other’s solidity was the greatest comfort against ghosts. Katriona and Aunt spent as much time as either could spare with them, for the companionship of a third broke up the ghost-shadows as sunlight breaks up real ones, and Aunt and Katriona had long been known and welcome at Woodwold. Ikor, seemingly, could not find a way to settle in their company—perhaps since, once they had removed to Woodwold, he was very careful to address Peony as “princess” and Rosie as “lady”—and he was mostly as reticent as any of the awestruck servants of Woodwold were. But Katriona and Aunt and Ikor really had no time to spare, and mostly Rosie and Peony were alone together in the consciousness of what they did and who they were.
During those three months of zealous human preparation Woodwold remained restlessly half roused; Rosie felt its awareness following her through the corridors, up and down the stairs; sometimes she felt a quiver like an animal’s skin when she touched a wall or a latch with her bare hand. She tried to say to it, Sleep, sleep. I am nothing to you, but she knew it did not heed her. And, on the night before the princess’ birthday, with all the animals silent, Rosie could hear the murmur of Woodwold in the creaks of great beams and vast rock-slabs infinitesimally shifting against each other, and the nearly noiseless accumulation of dust: Rosie, it said. Rosie.
It’s only the last name of the princess, Rosie said to herself. It’s a house, even if it is big enough to be its own country. Houses don’t memorise long human names—any more than I do, she thought, a little wistfully. Peony can remember it all, but I can’t. The—the syllables I seem to hear are nothing but—a sort of draught, with a puff at the end that sounds like the name of—the name of a flower, or of a princess. It’s nothing. It’s a current of air.
She stared out at the clouded landscape, drawing swirls with her finger through the faint haze of chalky powder on the windowsill. The room was swept and dusted twice a day, but nothing could keep the princess’ bedroom clean—although no one but the conspirators thought this was anything more ominous than every fairy and magician in the country sending her their best wishes. And perhaps the persistence of the spiderweb in the upper left corner of Rosie’s favourite window had something to do with the room being the top of a tower, and, until three months ago, little used. Rosie saw the spider often; it usually emerged from its corner when Rosie curled up on the seat and put her elbows on the sill to look out. In the absence of her usual animal companions, she had come to think of it as company, though it never spoke to her.
Rosie, muttered the rafters. Rosie, whispered the roof tiles.
The stories about Woodwold, which for many generations had interested no one but scholars and the citizens of the Gig, had been brought out of the backs of people’s minds; except that there were so many gaps there was very little story after all (discounting, in the cause of temperate truth, the more elaborate flights of the Gig’s bards), except that it was an odd old house, one of the largest and oldest and perhaps the oddest in the entire country, and it lay very near the edge of nowhere, on the bank of the River Moan. Some tales could be told of the Prendergasts: that they were even older than their house, that their forefathers and foremothers, fore-aunts and fore-uncles, had come to their ruler’s call whenever their ruler had had need of them; they had stood by the queen when she foiled Pernicia the first time; they had fought at the side of the king when he drove the fire-wyrms out of the Gig. It was half remembered, half believed that it was at that time that the Prendergasts had fallen in love with the Gig and had decided to stay there, and that it was in thanks for their valour against the fire-wyrms that the king had deeded it to them.
There was a crumb of a story about why Woodwold had been founded where it had; something to do with a seer’s vision. Forecasters’ visions were the least reliable of the practical magics, and the longer-term a forecast the less reliable; few people would choose to build a house from something a seer had said. But the crumb of story insisted that the seer had been a member of the Prendergasts himself, which was curious, since seeing, however useless, required very strong magic, and the Prendergasts were not a magical family. Perhaps they had been, and it had left them over the generations.
There were no recent stories of the Prendergasts, unless you were horse-mad. The odd, damp little bit of country under their stewardship did, it was true, prosper, but fine hides and wool and weaving and ironmongery and carved spindle ends—and horses—did not make interesting stories.
People said, I wonder what the princes will make of their elder sister?
Everyone said, What shall we make of our future queen?
Ikor had removed to Woodwold with the princess; as a stranger to the Gig and a member of the royal court (and, perhaps, as a negligent wearer of naked sabres) he had an authority that the humans of Woodwold were glad to rely on (the animals were less impressed, and, Rosie feared, the house failed to notice at all). Aunt and Katriona remained—except for too-infrequent visits—in Foggy Bottom, and tried to seem no more and no differently distressed than Peony’s aunt and uncle.
Peony’s aunt and uncle were in considerable confusion of mind, waking, as they now believed themselves to be, from a long dream, in which Peony had been their niece. Their only sorrow now was that they could not quite remember how it had come about that they had been so astonishingly chosen to raise the secret princess. They felt they had the vaguest wisp of memory of someone, a fairy or a magician (“magician, I think,” said Hroslinga. “Wasn’t he tall, solemn, and dressed all in black?”), giving them a child to be raised as their niece: (“I remember him telling us he had to make us forget his visit,” said Hroslinga. “I remember his hand coming toward my forehead to rub out the memory. I do.”) “W
e always knew we were ordinary,” said Crantab, “but we didn’t know we were perfectly ordinary!” He loved his joke so much he had to tell it several times a day, but people were inclined to be indulgent to the man who had raised the princess, and went on laughing at it to please him. Crantab and Hroslinga were happy not to be called up to Woodwold; they were happy to leave all that to Katriona and Aunt, and to the mesmerising and rather scary Ikor.
But Hroslinga, one day, having told the story of the black-robed magician all over again for the dozenth time to Katriona (the story, with a little help, was becoming ever more interestingly detailed—“Although, by the fates, she doesn’t need much help,” Katriona said to Aunt), said something else. They had been folding sheets together, and remembering that this had been one of the jobs Rosie and Peony had done. A silence had fallen as Katriona tucked little sprigs of lavender between the folds, and gathered up Hroslinga’s sheets to hand to her, and Hroslinga, musingly, as she accepted the bundle, said, “It is a great relief to me now, to know that she isn’t my own kin. I was never as fond of her as I knew I should be; and this has troubled me all her life.”
She was too deep in her own thoughts to see how Katriona’s hands shook as Hroslinga accepted the weight of the sheets; and she had no way of knowing that Katriona shut herself up as soon as she left, so she could burst into tears without anyone knowing. When she came out again a few minutes later, wiping her eyes, she went out into the yard, where her three children were playing under Barder’s preoccupied but probably watchful enough eye, and hugged them all fiercely in turn (“Oh, mum,” said Jem disgustedly). She never told anyone what Hroslinga had said, not even Aunt or Barder, and, contrary to all her usual scruples, laid a mild enchantment on Hroslinga, that she might never say it again.