The grey rectangles were windows, and the reason the morning light could not get through was because of the thick tangle of thorny branches growing just outside them. Narl had designed all, and made many, of the window catches for the glass panes at Woodwold, and he pulled open the nearest casement without hesitation, and warily put his hand through it. “They’re wild roses,” he said, sounding as bewildered as Rosie had ever heard him. “Briar roses—a great hedge of them, as if they’d grown here for two hundred years.”
“Woodwold,” said Rosie, thinking of the conscious, listening presence of the house during the last three months, suspicious of what it did not understand—and it understood very little about most of the creatures that went loose upon the earth—but loyal to its family, short-lived and precariously footed though its members were, and steadfast in their defence. She remembered it murmuring, Rosie. “Woodwold is protecting us.”
Narl stood a moment longer, staring out at the wild impassable weave of rose stems, many of them as thick as his wrists, the thorns bigger than a fleethound’s fangs. “Woodwold is protecting the sleep of its people,” he said at last. “But also keeping us imprisoned. We must go after Pernicia, not only for Peony’s sake, but, I guess, if any of these people is to wake up again.”
“Us?” said Rosie. He had said that once before. Her heart rose and sank simultaneously, leaving her feeling rather dizzy; but that might have been only the remains of the fog that had held her last night—if it was last night—and the magical, poisoned sleep. “Katriona. Is Kat asleep, too?” Kat was supposed to come with me. Kat was supposed to keep me alive long enough to . . .
She turned away from the supporting wall, took a tentative step away from it and Narl, and found that her body was mostly back in her control again. She was also beginning to remember more about the end of the ball. If she had woken up where she had fallen, then Katriona should be there, too. . . .
She was. Rosie saw the sparkle of her overskirt first, the deep emerald that set off her dark hair so well; an inquisitive ray of sunlight had made its way through the rose stems and had found the green and decided to play with it, sliding down the hollows and twinkling off the gentle rise and fall of Katriona’s side. Rosie knelt beside her. Her face looked peaceful, and her breathing was the slow light snore Rosie remembered from the cottage, when the three of them shared a bedroom. One of Lord Pren’s hounds had his head comfortably pillowed on the skirt round her feet: the animals were asleep, too. Rosie took Katriona’s shoulder and shook it gently. “Kat,” she said. “Katriona.” Katriona didn’t stir.
“Rosie.” Narl, standing behind her. “I don’t—”
“No,” said Rosie, and one tear slid down her face. You were supposed to come with me, she thought. You promised. “Narl—why aren’t you asleep?”
She heard him shift, as if uneasily, but his voice, when it came, was cool and neutral. “I’ve a bit of—cold iron, that was given me, long ago. I welded it into my smith’s chain when I made the chain. It’s some protection against some things. The sleep’s hers, but Woodwold interrupted before she finished the job, I reckon. You could say she didn’t have time to notice me.”
He wasn’t lying, but he wasn’t telling her the truth either. She turned round to look at him. He wouldn’t meet her gaze, but looked instead across the twilit landscape of the room, the series of hummocks of all those sleeping bodies, the sharp angular peaks of furniture, the sparks of glancing sunlight.
She followed his gaze, and then couldn’t; it was too eerie, too—spectral. The rustle of breathing could have been the whispering of restless ghosts. She looked back at Katriona, lying sleeping with a half smile on her face. She touched her cheek, knowing she would not awaken, still half hoping she would. She thought of Aunt, somewhere in the Great Hall, and of Ikor, and of all the royal magicians and fairies—even Sigil—lying asleep, the most powerful magic wielders in the kingdom; all asleep, except for Narl. And herself, having breathed Narl’s breath.
“Narl,” she said. “Tell me the truth. The rest of it, I mean.”
Narl sank down beside her, and, to her amazement, reached for one of her hands and began to play with the fingers. This was an utterly un-Narl-like gesture. “I’m a fairy,” he said at last. “Didn’t you know?”
Didn’t she know? “I—of course I didn’t know. You can’t be a fairy,” Rosie said. “You’re a smith.”
Another silence. “It happens occasionally. You know the stories.”
“They’re all from centuries ago!”
“It doesn’t happen very often.”
Rosie, overwhelmed, fell silent. She took her hand away from him and wrapped both arms round her knees and put her head on them. She tried to find something to think about that was still itself, after the last three months, after last night, after Narl’s revelation. Oh, Gorse, she thought. You were wrong. I’m not who I am—nor is anyone else—and besides, they’re all asleep. She wanted to laugh, but she thought if once she started, she wouldn’t be able to stop.
“There are a lot of fairies asleep in this hall,” she said. “Why not you?”
“I don’t know.”
When it became obvious that he was not going to say any more, Rosie said with asperity: “This is going to be a long conversation. Why did you think I should know you are a fairy?”
“The animals know.”
Rosie digested this. It was true that the animals would know, but it was also true that it was not the sort of thing they would pass on without an animal sort of reason. They might have told her if she had asked, but it wasn’t anything it would ever have occurred to her to ask. Which meant that Narl couldn’t talk to animals himself, or he’d know all that. She flushed, and scowled—it would have been too humiliating if he hadn’t needed her to translate when he’d asked her to.
He was watching her closely, and saw the scowl. “Rosie, I’m sorry. I’ve never told anyone—not since I left home, and that was a long time ago. I barely remember it myself, most of the time.”
Rosie shook her head, still scowling. “Why not? You’re obviously—well, you must be pretty good,” and she gestured at their surroundings.
Narl grimaced. “I’m a seer.”
Oh. Seers were notoriously unreliable. Although they usually told wonderful stories—many of them earned their livings as bards. It figured that Narl hardly spoke at all. And was a blacksmith.
“But—won’t working with iron all the time give you rheumatism?”
Narl sighed. “No. It’s in my family.”
“What’s in your family,” said Rosie, holding on to her temper.
“Fairy smiths. Those old stories are mostly about my family.”
Rosie stared. The stories about fairy smiths tended to be about eight-foot giants laying out taralians with back-handed blows from the hafts of their axes, or hammering all night to shoe the horses of the king’s cavalry so they could trot across the flooded river on top of the water and meet with a very surprised invading army on the other side. . . . And then there was that story of the Prendergast seer who had decided where Woodwold would be built.
“That—bit of cold iron,” said Rosie. “Where does it come from?”
Narl pulled at the short chain round his neck, finding the link he wanted by feel. It was nothing to look at. The rest of the chain was a proper forged chain; what he held now between thumb and forefinger was a little irregular knob of iron, some broken-off, discarded bit, too small to bother salvaging for another purpose. “It came from round here,” said Narl. “Somewhere. About forty great-grandfathers ago, Lord Pren and I are cousins.”
“Is that why you came here?”
Narl shook his head. “No.” He hesitated, and added, “But then Rowland didn’t come here looking for the princess either.”
What if—? No. Narl had been in Foggy Bottom long before Katriona came home from the princess’ name-day with a baby. But . . . how much can a seer see? She thought of some of the stories the seer-bards told: by that stan
dard, a lot. How much does a seer see in a true vision, supposing he knows he’s having one? Enough to know that to save a princess—to save a kingdom—someone’s fortieth-great-grandson needed to be in the Great Hall someone was founding, eleven hundred years later?
“Does Lord Pren know?”
“No. But I think . . . Woodwold does. I think it recognises this,” and he touched the small iron nub on his chain with a finger.
He took a deep breath, like a man nerving himself for a single-handed rush at a massed enemy, and plunged into speech. “Rosie—I’m not a very good fairy. I’m a much better smith. You’d have been better off—much, much better off—with Kat. Or Aunt. Or even Ikor. The problem with Ikor is that he saw you, Rosie, as the reflection. The princess is the solid one, for him. So he never understood Rosie.”
Rosie stared at him. So far as she knew he had never met Ikor, let alone heard him talk about the princess, let alone seen them together, let alone . . . “Narl . . . how did you know that Peony . . . that I . . . that I am the princess?”
He spoke as if he were now in the midst of battle, and his every word was an arrow that flew at him. “I’ve always known. I knew there was something about you that first day you walked into the forge—knee-high to the horse I was shoeing and more chatter than a squirrel. Seers see, you know, and even bad ones learn when they’re seeing right even though they mostly see wrong. And—things are true, in a smith’s yard. It’s like there were two of you—the solid one that talked all the time and loved horses and all the other beasts, and a sort of . . . radiance, that followed you, human shaped, like a shadow, only rainbow coloured, which did everything you did. I don’t know when I understood what it meant. By the time I knew I already had known”—he made Rosie’s gesture of frustration at that point, running his hand through his hair. “It was like finally having a name for a bird or a flower you see every day or every season. Rosie. Princess.” He paused for a moment and added, “The—the princessness of you only shone out like that at the forge. I looked. That’s why I never said anything to Aunt or Kat about it. All I did was—er—I arranged it that my forge is unusually prone to disturbing the vision of other fairies with rainbows and foxfire. Even Nurgle sees them when she brings the laundry. Anyone who saw you trailing your radiance would think it was that. That’s something a seer can do: give other people visions as false as his own.” He paused again and then said heavily: “I will help you the best I can, you see, but it won’t be a very good best.”
Rosie shook her head. “That’s not how the stories go. Fairy smiths are always terribly powerful.”
“Those are fairy tales,” said Narl. “I’m real.”
“Just like me,” said Rosie sadly. “I’m real, too. I just don’t know, real what.”
Narl made a gesture toward her, hastily cut off, that Rosie couldn’t identify. She unclasped her hands, straightened her legs out, and looked at her crumpled, dusty, once-fine skirts. “If we’re going to go—wherever we’re going to go, I need some other clothes,” she said. She looked across the long stretch of floor to the stairs, and shivered.
“I’ll come with you,” said Narl.
The journey to the princess’ tower was made without incident, though it was not pleasant. The corridors were all too long and too dark and too silent, and Rosie was still suffering the aftereffects of her poisoned sleep, and felt cold and strengthless. The last long flight of stairs was very long indeed, and without Narl’s hand under her arm, half lifting her up each riser, she thought she might have sat down at its foot and never moved again.
Even the princess’ tower room was dark with the stark coils of late-winter rose stems wrapped round its windows, and the fire asleep in the hearth. Rosie staggered feebly to her window seat and pulled herself up the step to look out. “Narl,” she said.
Narl had remained by the door, looking up, perhaps at Eskwa, still hanging over the lintel. He joined her and together they peered through the thorny barricade to a great opaque weave of grey rose stems stretching away from them, swelling and falling over the invisible walls and roofs of Woodwold. It was a bleak landscape, as alien and frightening as the Great Hall and its sleepers, and far more unfamiliar, for every landmark, every familiar roof line, had disappeared, and a cold hard grey light lay over everything like a sheen of water. “I’ve looked out this window several times a day every day for three months,” she said, shoving gingerly at a hindering rose stem, a mere thumb’s breadth in diameter, in the hopes of improving her view, “and I can’t even tell you what we’re looking at.” Could it be a heavy dew that made the light glare so? “I can’t see anything but the rose stems, can you? I can’t even see where the park begins. It’s almost as if we’re floating in a cloud, or an island in a bog.”
“I hope not,” said Narl.
The spiderweb hung empty in the corner of the window frame. Rosie looked at it intently, willing herself to find one tiny bobble at some gossamer crossroad which was a tightly curled, sleeping spider, but she could not find one. “What is it?” said Narl.
“Nothing,” muttered Rosie. “I can’t find the spider. She’s been here right along—since we came here three months ago.”
“Maybe she decided to go downstairs and see the ball,” said Narl.
“I hope she started in time to find a good window frame first,” said Rosie.
She climbed down from the window seat and rummaged among the boxes under her side of the bed. She had forbidden the maids to touch her old clothing, but after the first week she hadn’t checked; looking at her beloved boots and trousers and the leather waistcoat darkened by the damp affections of hundreds of horses and scratched by the enthusiasm of many small and medium-sized clawed feet, only made her more miserable. She held her breath as she tipped the lid back. . . . Yes, there they were, folded far more neatly than she had left them. She had so longed for the opportunity—the excuse—to put them back on. . . . She pulled the things out and began to dress. She noticed that everything (except the waistcoat, which was beyond recovery) had been beautifully cleaned before it had been stowed away, and this only made her more wretched. Last she rescued her spindle end from the pocket of her ball gown, and slipped it into her trousers. She muttered, “Let’s go” in a muffled voice, and kept her eyes resolutely on Narl’s feet as he turned away from the window to join her again.
She felt a slight resistance as she stepped across the threshold into the hall, as if the air had gathered itself together and pushed back at her. She paused and looked up, as Narl had looked up.
It was dark in the hall, and darker still above the door; but Eskwa glittered in the darkness. Eskwa both binds and cuts. If you have need of either, he will answer to your hand. She could barely reach the lower edge of the blade, even standing on tiptoe; she would need a stool or something to stand on, to unhook it from whatever held it. But as she thought to go in search of the stool, the sabre came softly away from the wall and slid into her hands. She stood staring at it; swords and sabres were outside her practical experience. “It will do as a lamp,” she said, turning the blade a little as one might turn a faceted gem in candlelight, “even if I don’t know anything else to do with it. Do you?”
Narl shook his head. “I have no warrior training. And it is your hand it came to.”
No one awake, their footsteps seemed to say to her as they descended again. She had loosened her belt and cautiously tucked Eskwa through it, and the blade laid a little track of light in front of their feet. No one awake. No one awake. No one awake but Narl and me. No one awake. Down they went, down and down, as they had gone up, with no other sound but their footsteps, until they heard the soft tidal sound of hundreds of people breathing in their sleep as they turned onto the final flight of stairs.
They paused at the foot of those last stairs. To their right ran a corridor and a series of smaller parlours Lady Pren had set up as places where weary and overwhelmed party-goers might retreat; by the faint moan of breathing, some people had. To the left were the
series of corridors that led at last to the kitchens and cellars. Rosie dreaded reentering the Hall, but that was where the main doors were. “I suppose we should try the front doors first? It doesn’t seem very likely, but it . . . who knows what the rules are in a fairy tale?”
Narl nodded, and they made their way as quickly as possible across the floor, Rosie half trying not to look at any of the figures she scuttled round, half hoping to see Aunt, or Barder, or even Ikor or Rowland. Or Sigil. She did see Lord Prendergast, inelegantly sprawled, one leg somehow thrown over the body of someone who could only be one of the royal magicians, and an important one, too, by the jewels at his breast, and the beribboned gold chain in his hair. One of the ribbons had fallen into his open mouth, and he made a slight gagging noise as he breathed. Rosie stopped and brushed it clear.
Their path did not take them near the dais where the king and queen had still been standing when Pernicia appeared; Rosie would have avoided it even if that had been the shortest way.
Despite icy-dank early-spring draughts (and a collision of incompatible smoke-suppressing spells that caused great ashy belches from one of the enormous fireplaces) the huge central doors of the Hall had been left open since the official beginning of the ball, so that people could come and go as they pleased, including members of the royal family walking out to the tents in the park. (Ikor had hated this, but agreed that it was the sort of thing the princess they had created would do.) The big doors, which opened outwards, were now closed; slammed shut, Rosie wondered, by the force of an explosion of rose stems? The doors might now as well have been walls; they barely creaked when Narl and Rosie pushed unhopefully against them. There was a small door cut out of one of the big ones, which opened inwards, and it still opened, but outside the rose stems were so thick not even sunlight could break through. Rosie looked at Eskwa, as if the sabre might tell her what to do, but it said nothing; and she did not wish to try Ikor’s blade against Woodwold’s defence. It wasn’t till then that one more implication of the breathing silence came to her: Woodwold itself was asleep. There were no whispers of Rosie. The doors were sealed against them as well as against Pernicia. No one awake.