It was, perhaps, again something to do with the magic that was drawing them all toward what would happen some time that day, some time that night, when the ball to celebrate the princess’ twenty-first birthday was at its height. Peony seemed to draw strength into herself after that first meeting with the queen, and she was as royal as any princess had ever been for the rest of the day. She seemed to know instinctively how to speak and what to do, and Rosie could see, through a fog that seemed to be thickening about herself, that almost everyone loved her immediately, even her eldest brother, who would not be king—even her youngest brother, rather against his will, who was used to being the centre of attention, and wasn’t best pleased at being displaced.
As lady-in-waiting Rosie heard a few of the whispered asides from the Prendergasts’ folk, about how kind and charming and wise Peony was, how despite the tensions and fears of the last three months she had grown no less kind or charming or wise; if anything, more, as if what she had been all along was merely being allowed to come to the surface at last.
She will make us a great queen, the murmurs went.
Rosie was growing dizzy. She put her hand behind her, to find a chair to steady herself against. It was some time in the afternoon, she thought, looking at the sunlight slanting in through the windows of the Great Hall; somehow she could not remember much very distinctly since the royal party had arrived. It’s just the noise and confusion, Rosie said to herself. Even the merrel had withdrawn from her. But as she felt for a chair, or a table, or any steady, unmagical piece of furniture to grip, she felt someone take her arm, and she blinked her eyes hard till she could focus them: Ikor.
She hadn’t let herself notice—or perhaps he had thrown some glamour over himself which today he had discarded—how haggard he had become; his skin was as grey as charcoal, and his cheeks were hollow; his purple-shadowed eyes seemed to stare at her from a great distance, but the look in them was as sharp as ever.
“Pardon me,” said Rosie faintly. “Am I too far away from Peony?” She turned her head to look; but Ikor shook his head, and muttered a few words at her. The fog cleared a little; she could stand up again, but she could feel it waiting to re-engulf her, and she knew that whatever held it off now would not hold it long.
Ikor nodded and moved away from her. Rosie lost him for a moment or two, and then someone moved, and she saw him bending over Peony, whispering a few words in her ear; Peony smiled and nodded, courteous and agreeable as ever; and Ikor then left the Hall. But not long after, Peony put a hand to her forehead; recovered herself; lolled back in her chair; recovered herself not quite so quickly—and then her favourite lady-in-waiting was at her side, asking her what she could do for her, and the king was saying that it was not at all surprising that this was all a little too much, and that she should go upstairs and rest until the evening; and he drew her to him tenderly and kissed her forehead. The queen kissed her, too, but again the queen’s eyes strayed to the lady-in-waiting who hovered at the princess’ elbow, ready to assist her upstairs.
They did not go alone, of course, and Rosie fought the returning fog, so that she could be the one that Peony leaned on; and when they finally entered their room, she made her voice strong enough to dismiss everyone else, saying that she would look after Peony herself. Everyone left, although Rosie knew there would be more than the usual number of soldiers and magicians posted outside their door. She wondered if any of them knew why they were there, or if they believed they were only doing honour to the princess, who would be crowned heir by the king this evening. She thought of Eskwa over the lintel, and for the first time she was grateful for his presence. Eskwa both binds and cuts; if you have need of either, he will answer to your hand. Supposing she could make her hand work to grasp; supposing she knew what to do with a sabre, even one heavy and self-willed with magic. She was just beginning to unlace Peony’s skirt, so she could lie down, when she felt her fingers growing clumsy from the numbing, stifling fog; and then she felt Peony turning round and catching her, Rosie, and giving her a shoulder to lean on as she drew her to the bed.
“I’m perfectly all right,” said Peony. “Well—perhaps not perfectly. This is a terrible day, and I wish it were over. But Ikor told me you had to get away, and so I pretended to be fainting. I was not sorry for the excuse. We’ll both lie down, in case anyone comes to check on us, but if you need anything, ask me. I’m right here.” She gave a dry little laugh. “I’m right here, just as I have been, these last three months. Oh, Rosie, it is a terrible day, but think of it, tonight it will be over. It will all, all, be over.”
“Yes,” whispered Rosie from the fog, knowing that it would not be, not for her. There were nasty little hairy things nibbling at the edges of the fog and squeaking. They were a little like rats, but their bodies were snakier.
Peony took her hands. “You and Kat and Aunt and Ikor and Sigil must win. You must.”
Rosie looked up at Peony’s loving, anxious, hopeful face, and said, “Of course we must. Of course. And the princess’ first royal decree will be a dowry to the Foggy Bottom wainwright’s niece, so she can marry the son of the prince of Erlion.” She fell asleep so quickly she did not see the expression on Peony’s face.
She woke knowing that someone was sitting in a chair next to her bed; knowing who it was before she opened her eyes. “Kat,” she said, almost falling out of bed in her haste to put her arms round her. “Kat, I haven’t seen you in forever.”
“I know, dear, I haven’t liked it either. But both Aunt and Ikor thought it for the best. We couldn’t risk my binding to you confusing or lessening the connection between you and Peony as we came near this day and—and—this evening. If we’ve got the bond between you and Peony wrong, nothing else matters.”
“We breathe together,” said Rosie. “And if we stand next to each other we only cast one shadow. A few weeks ago we had to start being careful not to walk in meadows—away from trees or something tall—when the sun is low, for fear someone would notice.” The fog was much thinner than it had been that afternoon; this must be from Katriona’s presence. But it meant she could see only too clearly the marks of strain in Kat’s face, as harsh as they were on Ikor’s.
Katriona patted her hand. “It’ll be over soon now.”
“Tonight,” said Rosie. “Tonight.” She closed her eyes. She could still see the hairy, snaky things, but she could not hear them squeaking. She opened her eyes again.
“I don’t like this fog round you, Rosie,” said Katriona.
“It’s better now,” said Rosie. “It was bad earlier, when we came upstairs.”
“It’s better because I’m holding it off—as Ikor did. But if there’s a fog, I should need to be holding it off both of you, not one of you—especially not you, Rosie.” She paused, and then said, in a tone she tried hard to make light, “I brought you something. I don’t really know why. It just seemed like a good idea, in the middle of all our strict plotting and planning, to allow a small harmless whim; and I remembered what you told me afterward about wishing you’d had it the night Jem was born.” And she held out the shiny-nosed gargoyle spindle end.
Rosie took it and held it a moment cupped in her hands, and then tucked the spindle between her knees, and rubbed her thumbs over the little thing’s cheeks, its slightly protruberant teeth and eyes, and finally its shiny nose. For a moment she was in the kitchen of the wheelwright’s house in Foggy Bottom—for a moment she was home.
And then she was back in the princess’ tower room at Woodwold on the night of the princess’ twenty-first birthday. She was silent a moment longer, staring at the familiar, friendly, ugly, spindle’s-end face, and then she said: “The queen knows. I don’t know why, but she looked at us, and she knew.” She hesitated, and then added: “It was right after that that the fog began.”
Katriona shivered. “That’s probably my fault,” she said. “I told you—when you were little, it hurt me to think about the queen, so I . . . And if she remembers . . . of course she rem
embers . . . the stories don’t match. I told her her daughter lived with me and my aunt. We knew that I mustn’t meet the queen now, but . . . It’s going wrong. It’s already going wrong. Oh, why does compassion weaken us?”
“It doesn’t really,” said Rosie, not because she had any idea about it, but because she refused to let it be true. “It doesn’t really. Somewhere where it all balances out—don’t the philosophers have a name for it, the perfect place, the place where the answers live?—if we could go there, you could see it doesn’t. It only looks, a little bit, like it does, from here, like an ant at the foot of an oak tree. He doesn’t have a clue that it’s a tree; it’s the beginning of the wall round the world, to him. And besides—doesn’t Aunt keep saying that mistakes made in good faith are less likely to catch you out?”
But then Peony slipped through the door, and Rosie fell silent. Peony sat on the bed next to Rosie and squeezed her hand. They sat for a moment in silence, and then there was a tap on the door. Rosie sat up hastily, pretending that she had not been asleep till a few minutes before, and Peony said, “Come in.”
“King’s, queen’s, princes’, Lord and Lady Prendergasts’, and, oh, hundreds of people’s compliments, Princess,” said one of the Claralindas or Dulcibellas or Sacharissas, “and it’s time to dress for the ball.”
CHAPTER 19
Katriona had a grand dress to wear, too, emerald and sage green, and she liked it almost as little as Rosie liked hers, which was grey and silver and twinkly, and far too like the gown she had found herself in on the night that Ikor had told her her name, and she had wanted to run away. But this wasn’t anything she could explain to the royal dressmakers, who were very proud of their work.
Several of the Claralindas shook the green dress out carefully from the bundle Katriona had brought it in and “oohed” and “aahed,” admiring, if a little dumbfounded. (Some of the Claralindas who had been at Woodwold the longest were beginning to get used to the surprising things the yokels could do. Make ball gowns, for example. The Prendergasts had bought out Turanga’s entire stock of fine cloth and leather and thread and trimmings, and made it available to any Gig resident who wanted it. The local plain tailors and seamstresses, accustomed to the needs of ordinary Gig life and work, would never quite recover from the fevered glory of those few months of sewing for the princess’ ball.) “Hroslinga did most of it,” said Katriona; there was a look on her face Rosie couldn’t read, and, amid the Claralindas, couldn’t ask. “She seems to think she owes our family some tremendous debt. But indeed I haven’t had time to do it myself, and holding it together with magic seemed like a bad idea under the circumstances.”
Barder would be on his way as soon as he finished taking the children to the pub, where they would sleep upstairs with Flora’s two, and Cairngorm would look after them—Flora and her husband were going to the ball. “There’ll be a few people who’ll want a quiet drink at the pub,” said Cairngorm, “instead of a princess and a lot of noise; and there should be someone here to give it to them.” She had granted Bol, the usual barkeep, the night off; in his quiet, methodical way he was looking forward to the noise and the princess, even though she was only Peony, whom he’d known from a baby. Dessy, on the other hand, had been useless for weeks, dreaming of the great party, and incapable of talking about anything else. (Jem and Gilly had some idea they were missing something, but they did not mourn the ball once Barder had explained they would have had to go dressed in good clothes, and stayed clean and tidy for several hours.) Katriona didn’t mention Narl; the fact that she didn’t seemed to Rosie to be the answer to the question she didn’t want to ask.
One of the Claralindas was combing Rosie’s hair, making tiny sighs of exasperation. “Look,” said Rosie. “It is short, there isn’t anything to do with it, so why don’t you give it up and go join the others?”
Rosie ran her hands through her hair once or twice (pulling out and glaring at a jewelled clasp the Claralinda had resourcefully managed to find enough hair to hold in place), and went over to her window embrasure for one last look at the landscape before it disappeared in the darkness of the night of her twenty-first birthday. The spider crept slowly to the centre of the web, moving its legs one at a time, seemingly with enormous effort, as if it were very tired; but once arrived, it gave a gallant little swing like a salute. In its weariness it seemed like another one of the conspirators; if spiders had faces, no doubt this one’s would be haggard and hollow-eyed.
Rosie thought that with the enormous dislocations of this birthday was one tiny one: that it was a day earlier than all her other birthdays they had welcomed in all the other years. It is the princess’ birthday, she thought, not mine. My birthday is tomorrow. Her fingers strayed to a pocket hidden in the sweep of her ball-gown skirt, and found the gargoyle’s nose.
Princess, murmured the windowsill. Rosie, whispered the thickness of the wall. Some great diffuse understanding seemed to flow down, like a cloud from a mountaintop, or up, like mist from a bog; some tremendous effort of insight struggled to gather itself together into a definable shape. It could not quite find itself words, but Rosie knew what it searched for: Soon. Immediately. Tonight. Now.
She suddenly knelt and flung back the lid of the wooden step that let you mount to the stone seat, and gave you somewhere to put your feet while you sat there. Inside were the spindle ends she had carved in the last weeks, and on the top was the one she wanted, the one of the princess, the one of herself-and-Peony as one face, one human face smiling quietly to itself over some secret. She held it cupped in her hand for a moment, and then waited for a pause in the bustle around Peony.
“Put it in your pocket,” she said. “They’ve left you a pocket, haven’t they? It’s probably silly of me, but Kat just gave me our old spindle end, you remember, the gargoyle, and it feels like a little bit of good luck, and I thought you should have one, too. I’m sorry it’s only new.”
“I’ve always wanted you to make me a spindle end, Rosie,” said Peony; “I’ve had this fancy I might finally learn to spin, if you did, but it seemed too silly to ask; and after I—I tried to teach you to embroider, I didn’t dare.” She tried to smile. “I—I guess I won’t have time to start practising tonight. . . .”
There was another tap on the door, and Aunt walked in, dazzling in dark red and gold, which set off her white hair, and with a gold chain round her neck, which was a present from the queen; she was carrying another similar one for Katriona. The four of them stood looking at one another, princess, her best friend from her country childhood, and the friend’s aunt and cousin who were important fairies in spite of where they lived, and tonight looked it; and the Claralindas fell silent. Aunt opened the door again and curtsied, and Peony, her cheeks bright from having Aunt curtsy to her, raised her chin and swept out, followed by Rosie, Katriona, and then Aunt herself, and last the subdued Claralindas.
The guards upon the stairs stood to attention, and at the foot of the princess’ tower were various other courtiers, and more ladies-in-waiting, bright as butterflies, both gay and solemn at being chosen to be in the princess’ train on this night of all nights; and as the princess went lightly and gracefully downstairs she had a smile and a wave or a word for everyone who peeped out of a side corridor at her (including the Prendergasts’ eldest grandson, who should have been in bed, and his perspiring nanny). Six footmen and twelve buglers announced her arrival in the Great Hall; but the princess drew all eyes by the simple fact of who she was, and that she was lovely and brave and clear minded, and her people had fallen in love with her; and many ordinary citizens at the ball that evening took private vows with themselves to protect her with their own lives, if it came to that; though there was nothing to protect her from, any more. That was all over; that was all in the past.
The Great Hall, busier in the last three months than it had been in centuries, had become more splendid every day as more visitors came with gifts for the princess, all of which Lady Prendergast scrupulously displayed in
the public rooms. Peony had refused to wear any of the jewelry, and, after attempting to remonstrate with her, Lady Pren had decided that the many soldiers sent to Woodwold out of respect for the presence of the princess could perform a useful function (as opposed to eating their heads off and flirting with the younger and prettier maidservants, which seemed to be their chief occupations) and guard the necklaces and earrings and brooches and bracelets that she hung on the walls like tapestries. Even so, the Hall’s decorations for the princess’ ball were a revelation. The Hall seemed almost small, for the number of people and objects it now contained; and yet it also seemed bigger than it ever had, and, as Rosie made her entrance behind Peony’s shoulder, the opposite wall—above which the merrel sat concealed—was too far to see, as if it lay in another country. If Woodwold trembled underfoot, it was only the weight of many feet; and if its walls whispered Rosie, no one heard.
For the first few hours of the ball, Rosie felt more or less herself—as much as she had ever felt herself as the princess’ lady-in-waiting. Surely it wasn’t surprising to feel a little dazed and isolated at your first royal ball, especially when you were pretending that it wasn’t in your honour when it was, and when you were one of only half a dozen people out of hundreds who knew that there was someone lurking in the shadows somewhere waiting to kill you. She watched the people watching Peony and saw in many of their eyes that private vow they had sworn, and wondered if any of them had any inkling of the darkness round them, round the princess’ birthday ball. She spoke to the Master of the Horse, whose face shone with dedication to his future sovereign; she spoke to Lady Prendergast, who could hardly take her eyes off her protégée. She spoke to Callin, who said, in her forthright way, “Horrid for her, everybody gloating over her like this. I think I’ll go push that icky little man’s face in”—the icky little man was the Duke of Iraminon’s ambassador. Rosie watched, amused, as Callin sidled up to the ambassador, and, looking at him through her eyelashes, asked him some question he was obviously only too willing to answer at length—securing Peony’s escape.