“But I hadn’t expected there to be two of you; my mistake. I almost wonder if it might be worth saving one of you—do I mean saving? Perhaps not quite as you would mean it. But—no. I’m sure it has gone too far for that. . . .” She raised the cane, waving it gently in the air like a fan, and then paused, and dropped its tip a handsbreadth or so—
Fairies didn’t carry wands. Except in direst need.
—as if to aim it like a weapon.
Magic can’t do everything. Rosie hurled herself upon her, seizing her throat between her hands.
CHAPTER 22
As the two of them struck the floor, Pernicia underneath, Woodwold cried out, a shriek of wood and iron and stone, a convulsion like an earthquake; and sleeping bodies slid across the heaving floor, rebounding off each other and off pieces of equally unsettled furniture, and there were muffled, confused cries, as of sleepers caught in a nightmare.
Rosie was dimly aware that something was going on round the two of them, but she had no consciousness to spare for thinking about it; her entire focus was in keeping her hands round Pernicia’s throat. She knew she had succeeded so far only because Pernicia had not imagined anyone attacking her directly, and had had no immediate ward against it; but Rosie could feel hundreds of tiny threads of magic, tickly and horrid like centipede legs, pulling at her fingers; and the cane, the wand, whatever it was, was beating at her back, and every time it hit her there was a nasty, miserable sensation like hitting your elbow on a door, and every time it was raised it left behind it a feeling like burning. She tried to hold in her mind that image of the castle she and Narl and the animals had pulled down; she tried to remember that they had weakened her; she told herself Pernicia hadn’t turned her into a paving stone or an octopus yet; and as long as she had her hands locked where they were, she wasn’t going to be able to prick her finger on a spindle. . . .
But Rosie would not last long in the strangling cloud of Pernicia’s magic. She could already no longer see what she held; sometimes it seemed to be a fire-wyrm, or a goblin, or a taralian; sometimes it was only a wild-faced woman with hatred in her black eyes as they stared into Rosie’s; and Rosie had only just enough strength left not to be drawn to return her gaze. Rosie’s back was on fire from the blows, and the numb, banged-elbow feeling was creeping slowly down her arms, and she would soon no longer be able to keep her fingers closed; and her hands furthermore seemed to be increasingly weighed down and muffled with something like slug slime and spider silk. She thought she heard voices, but she could not tell if they were animal or human, nor if they were speaking to her or to Pernicia. She thought she saw human figures moving, but her eyes seemed obscured, as if sticky webs were being woven across her face as well as round her hands, and these humans, if that was what they were, moved oddly, gropingly, uncertainly, as if they were not sure if they were awake or asleep and dreaming.
She thought she heard the clatter of iron-shod hoofs.
Gorse flung himself through the open door to the Great Hall as he had flung himself through the hole in the hedge and the just-horse-width bow in the iron bars in the gate that had greeted Narl’s great fiend-scattering shout as they had borne down upon that confused and unhappy army. The bars bounced off Narl’s knees with a sound like wet dough being slapped on a kneading board as Gorse leaped through, but Narl, Peony still in his arms, stayed on his back; perhaps the gate was growing accustomed to the work, or perhaps it recognised its maker, and stretched wider. Narl had followed the hounds, the short way, but he had known—or at least guessed—that Rosie and Fast had won their way through because as they neared Woodwold they met more and more unfriendly creatures, but which were less and less inclined to interfere with them, as if their commander had forgotten about them while greater matters pressed elsewhere.
Gorse’s iron shoes slipped on the dancing-floor, and he scrambled to keep his footing, and to prevent himself from stepping on any of the half-awake people who lay there, bewildered, and slow from a too-heavy sleep, unable to get out of his way; he gave a short, raspy neigh that in a human would have been “oh no” and he put his head right down, to see where he was sliding to, and his hindquarters down for balance. Both he and the humans were further dismayed and disoriented by the fact that the floor itself was moving, in abrupt little heaves and eddies like water striking rocks or discomfited by wind. One or two people had managed to climb to their feet, seeming to have difficulty deciding whether they needed worse to cling to some support or to clutch at their heads, as if the heads seemed riskily loose on the shoulders.
Rowland hauled himself upright by grasping a table edge, and then grappled his way from chair to chair to fall against Gorse’s shoulder; even half awake he had recognised the burden that Narl bore before him. Peony was still wholly asleep; she did not stir, while many round her were stirring. Narl slid off the sweating Gorse, and carried her to the nearest table—the floor was now only making tiny tremours, like a horse shaking its skin free of a fly—and laid her down gently. Rowland snatched two pillows off two chairs and placed them, clumsily, for his hands were still not quite his own, under her head.
Narl turned to the two struggling figures he knew to be Rosie and Pernicia, though he could see neither. Pernicia’s magic and Rosie’s fury wrapped them round, and he could not tell the one from the other, nor much more than make them out as two vaguely human shapes in the fiery turbulence of their battle. Fate and all the gods! he said silently to himself, too frantic to say anything aloud, incapable of coherent words, and sure as well that there was nothing he could say that would be of the slightest use, and so he need not try: Rosie! Could you not have waited till there was someone to help you? He knew that whatever was happening, Rosie had little time left; his only wonder was that her rage and despair had protected her this long.
Where was Katriona? Or Ikor? Or Aunt? He looked wildly round, and that was when he noticed that not everyone in the Hall was waking; no fairy nor magician was doing so, not only those of the Gig, but those of the royal party as well. Katriona herself lay nearly at his feet; he knelt down beside her. Woodwold’s pain and distress had rolled her onto her back; her mouth was a little open and her face was drawn and unhappy, as if she were half remembering something important left undone. He touched her cheek, sending his thought toward her, wherever she might be, and knew at once he could not rouse her. He tried a moment or two longer, thinking to find at least a clue to what held her; but she was too far away, and he could feel that what stood watch over her would clutch at him, too, if he stayed, for he, too, was a fairy.
As it was, he was already half lost; he could feel the Great Hall round him, and the twitching floor under his knees; but he could not take his hand away from Katriona’s face, and he could not stand up and turn round; there was a great cold weight on him, bearing him down. With a great effort he brought his other hand to the iron chain he wore round his neck, and seized the little ancient knob of it that he had welded there; and with the touch of it he could jerk his other hand back with a gasp.
It would need some great magic to rescue these sleepers. And all those who could wield it slept. Pernicia had planned well. If she won, there would be that many fewer real and potential rivals or enemies for her to dispose of; if she lost . . . she still won, because this country would be uninhabitable without its fairies and magicians to negotiate the long tricky series of truces with its native magics. And three-quarters of the best fairies and magicians had been in Lord Prendergast’s Great Hall for the princess’ one-and-twentieth birthday party.
He could not think of it now. He would think of it later. Now there was Rosie, gone into battle alone, a battle she must have known she would lose. Did she think he would not follow her, to the ends of the earth if necessary?
But then, what could he do against Pernicia?
He stood up again, hoping for inspiration, and did not see Zel trotting up behind him. Zel went round Narl’s ankles, and stood by Katriona, looking into her face. Narl took one step, two, t
hree, toward the small, terrible whirlwind that contained Pernicia and Rosie; and as he walked away, Zel put his two front feet on Katriona’s breast and said, Katriona, you must wake up and help us.
Narl knew nothing of that; his eye had been caught by a faint pale stir high over his head. He looked up, and the merrel was standing on its rafter, half spreading its wings; it looked down at him, and he felt it was trying to catch his eye.
The merrel. The merrel was awake.
Merrels have the best far-vision of any creature; a merrel can see a harvest mouse running up a stem and into its grass globe while the merrel hangs a half a league above the earth. Narl, who had no beast-speech, could nonetheless hear it telling him, in the nearly human language it had learned over its long years of imprisonment above Lord Prendergast’s Great Hall: I can see her. I can see your friend, your companion, your dear one, bound in a death embrace with the fairy who has sought her life for twenty-one years. I can see her.
The merrel sat high above the floor of the Hall, bound short by links of cold iron, which no magic can loose. Narl took a deep breath, and swept together all the magic that was in him, and held it, and looked at it, and then he brought the experience of all his years at the forge, working cold iron in fire and earth and air and water; and he seized the magic as if it were the raw material he was accustomed to, and bent it and shaped it, drawing it long and thin, setting a point and an edge to it; and the magic struggled like an angry colt, for he was not accustomed to shaping magic, and it is at best a much less obedient servant than is iron. No magic is willing to be handled as if it were some common, dull thing, inert but for the hands of its worker, and still less may it be easily forced to the will of, of all people, a smith; and, furthermore, into this magic he had to hammer some of his own being, some sympathetic tie to the qualities of iron, and this was worse yet, for it was like weaving fire and water together. The magic nearly escaped him many times, for it would have none of what he would have of it, and in the back of his mind he knew that what he strove for could not be done, by the laws of the world.
But he felt the thing in his hands become the weapon he needed, created perhaps more out of his own dire extremity than of anything else, and briefly he quailed, because he was not sure what it was he had made. But it was all he had, and he had no time to try anything else. And so he grasped it, aimed it, and flung it at the chain round the merrel’s ankle. He bit back a cry as it left his hands, for his magic-spear burned like the fire of his forge; and he was caught in a back-draught.
Katriona woke to the sound of the roof on Woodwold’s Great Hall being ripped apart, and the scream of a hunting merrel. She looked up and saw the merrel that had lived in the rafters of Lord Prendergast’s Hall for as many years as Rosie had been alive, beating its great wings, and flying up, up, out through the ragged, smoking hole in the roof, two or three broken links of the chain round its ankle glittering in the sunlight, the whiteness of its beating wings as dazzling as the sun itself. It flew up into the sky till it was lost in it.
Katriona looked round, trying to remember what was happening, wondering why everyone seemed to be lying or crawling about on the floor, wondering why she felt so sick and lost, feeling as if she had just been dragged a very long way through some thick, cold, horrid, slobbery material, that had blocked up her eyes so she could not see the way, and her nose and mouth so she could not breathe, and clung to her limbs so she could not move; she would be there still if it were not for whatever had so determinedly dragged her . . . absentmindedly patting the young fox which was standing beside her, looking at her thoughtfully. It had called her by name and asked for her help, she suddenly recalled—and as suddenly recalled a day almost twenty-one years before when another fox had asked if she would come to the rescue of a fox who called her by name. She had not heard a fox speak since Rosie was a baby.
She staggered to her feet. It occurred to her as quickly as it had occurred to Narl, though she could not yet put sense to it, that only the ordinary people were waking as she was waking, the fairies were all asleep—asleep—why were they asleep?—and then she began to remember, as if it were all something she had dreamed, the night of the princess’ birthday party. Pernicia. Pernicia would be sure to lay her baleful sleep the heaviest on other fairies—Katriona could still taste the foul gumminess of it on her tongue—on the magicians, on the royal family themselves, those who had hoped, had striven, to defy her.
But worse yet, Pernicia had torn Rosie away from her, Katriona; she had felt her hold loosen and break before the sleep, the awful sleep, struck her down. She remembered Peony struggling through the crowd toward the two tall women facing each other incongruously over a spinning wheel—she did not remember any more after that, only her knowledge that she had lost Rosie. How long had she been asleep? Where was Rosie?
She turned too quickly, still dizzy from sleep and waking, and almost fell. We have been to the castle, Rosie and I and the others, said the fox at her feet. We pulled the castle down.
Pulled the castle down—? Unbidden Katriona’s memory produced a picture of the barren plain and the standing stones and the unfriendly eyes and the castle, where she and Aunt and Barder had once briefly stood. Pulled it down? Hope surged through her and made her hands and feet tingle with warmth, and she felt healthy and strong—and amazed, for she remembered the tales of the people who had woken out of Pernicia’s sleep at the broken fortresses. And perhaps it was because she was thinking of castles and fortresses, and that her feet were planted so firmly on Woodwold’s bare floor that briefly the bone-marrow knowledge stirred in her, too, and she heard a voice that was no voice speaking at a pitch no human ear could imagine, and it said I am here. For Rosie. Princess. At that moment Katriona raised her eyes and saw the briar roses twining round the windows and hanging over the open doors and knew who it was who spoke to her. Thank you, she said, not knowing if it could hear her or not; not knowing if it could understand gratitude. Thank you.
But where was Rosie? She looked again at the hole in the roof, and when she dropped her gaze this time she saw a seething roil of magic near the feet of a haggard man.
Narl—she had not recognised him. His face was grey with pain, and he was missing some of his hair, as if it had been burnt off. He held his hands in front of him, curled loosely to his breast; she glanced at them and saw that the palms were swollen and cracked and bleeding, and the sleeves of his fine coat had been tattered to the elbows, and his forearms were marked as if with tongues of fire. “Narl—” she said, horrified.
He shook his head, and her eyes turned to follow his. She could see through the roil of magic only slightly more clearly than Narl, but she knew that what she saw was the final confrontation between Pernicia and Rosie, and that Rosie was, inevitably, losing.
The merrel stooped so swiftly that neither of them saw it, neither of them nor Pernicia either; lightning is slower. The merrel’s talons seized Pernicia and wrenched her out of Rosie’s slackening grasp as Woodwold opened a gulf in the earth just beneath them. Katriona thought she heard Pernicia scream; but if she spoke any magic, it did not save her, nor did the merrel’s hold falter. Katriona ran forward and grabbed Rosie’s shoulders, pulling her back just in time, muttering a few hasty words to loose Rosie from the snare of magic that still clutched her, and a few more words begging that Woodwold might leave some floor under the both of them while she did it; as it was they were pitched backwards, and Narl put out his wounded arms and caught them both, and Katriona and Narl staggered out of reach, hauling Rosie with them. Katriona noticed that two long snowy pinions had caught in Rosie’s hair.
Pernicia and the merrel plunged deep into the earth, and the gulf round them spasmed, spewing raw, dry, mouldy earth and fragments of ancient root and stone; and then it snapped shut with a sound like hundreds of anvils banging together, and the noise fell upon everyone as hard as a giant’s blows, and their breath was knocked out of them. But the floor where those two had disappeared rose like a mountain, and
avalanches tumbled down its sides, and there was a roaring, echoing noise like many angry taralians in a narrow valley, and there was so much fine grit in the air that as the people in the hall opened their mouths to drag their breath in again after losing it to the recoil of the closing of the pit, their mouths and throats were instantly full of it, and they coughed helplessly, and their lungs ached. Frightened, baffled people pressed themselves back, nearer the heart of the house, away from the front of the Hall and the mountain that had risen up there, dragging their still-sleeping comrades to what safety they could.
One of the walls of the Hall cracked and buckled and fell down, and the sounds the splintering wood made were like human screams. The walls on either side of it tottered and bent toward it, like grief-stricken friends toward a fallen companion, like Katriona and Narl over Rosie; the wreckage shot across the broken floor, dangerous chunks of lathe and plaster thrown skidding up miniature peaks and launching themselves into the air on the far sides, though the central mountain was beginning to subside again in showers of chips and clods of earth. Tapestries belled out as if blown by the breath of giants; several were torn from the wall, and one skimmed round the stricken room like a bird before it fell upon what had been the high table; half of the table still stood, while the other half was a ragged heap of broken posts and planks and food and serving ware.
Rosie was only half aware of the destruction round her. Katriona had peeled the worst of Pernicia’s binding magic away from her face and hands, but as shattered furniture and bodies slid this way and that across the writhing floor, Rosie was separated from both her and Narl and, dizzy and nearly helpless, fetched up against something solid. She groped at it, and discovered one of the legs of the high table at the end that was still standing, and slowly worked her way upright. The bowed body next to her was familiar, its arms braced against the tabletop, but it took her a moment to recognise it: Rowland, bent protectively over something, and once she knew him she guessed what, or rather who, that something was. Rowland looked up then and recognised her; and in a lull in the diminishing sounds of destruction he said hopelessly, “Is there anything you can do?”