Rosie stopped herself from shaking her head. She found an overturned chair with a missing back but four sound legs, righted it, and knelt on it, looking into Peony’s face. Her face was thinner and paler than it had been—last night? Was it still only last night?—and her breathing, as Rosie bent low over her, sounded strained, as if a weight pressed on her breast.
Rowland moved back a little, as if to give Rosie room, or as if he couldn’t bear to look any longer, to watch Peony’s life ebbing away from a wound neither of them could see.
Rosie, tired and bruised and miserable and shaken and sick as she was, felt her own life beating strongly in her, and reached out and took Peony’s hands. She stared at her friend’s face for a moment, at the face so like and unlike her own, and then she let go with one hand long enough to reach in Peony’s pocket, and find there the spindle end she had made for her, and drew it out, and put it between Peony’s hands, and clasped her own round them. One of the merrel’s feathers came loose from Rosie’s matted hair, and drifted down to lie on Peony’s breast.
Something—something—some nonmagic moved between them. Princess, not-princess, two young women who had traded places, who had pretended to be one young woman, who had become two other young women. Rosie with her strength and her careless energy, her generosity to everything that lived; Peony with her gentler kindness, her subtler understanding, and an elasticity that had never been a part of Rosie’s nature.
Narl came up beside her. There were stained scraps of cloth wrapped round the palms of his hands, but when he put his gently round hers, Rosie felt him adding his strength of hope and love to her own, and she cared about nothing but that he should help her bring her friend back to life.
Katriona was moving through the Hall, waking those who still slept, against whom Pernicia’s savage, ensnaring spell had struck hardest, the fairies, the magicians, the royal family. She had a long way to go to reach these, and even with Zel providing a safety line the way was ugly and dangerous. The king and the queen and the three princes she awakened first, drawing them back tenderly and carefully from the sticky, heavy emptiness where their spirits had been suspended; and several of the queen’s ladies, who had pulled their queen and her family bodily away from the wreck of the Great Hall, burst into tears. Osmer woke up first; he looked round, half hearing the nearest lady’s attempt to reassure him that the wicked fairy was gone and he was safe, and an admiring amazement came into his face. “I’ve been asleep? I wish I’d seen that!” Katriona discovered that she could still smile, and moved on.
She found Barder, who was easily awakened, and Aunt, who was not, and Ikor, who was harder yet, and even after his eyes were open, Katriona could see the ends of nightmares in them, gleaming like toads’ backs. She turned then to the other Gig fairies, and when she had recalled them, Aunt and Ikor had recovered enough to help her awaken the other royal fairies and magicians; it took all three of them to awaken Sigil, whom they might not have found at all but that they were sure she had, after all, attended the ball. She had lain under a fallen-down tapestry, and she was so small and drab, even in her ball clothes, that she looked like a crumpled fold of vague foresty background to the bright woven scene of ladies gathering flowers. She opened her eyes with her head on Ikor’s arm, facing a window, and the first thing she saw was briar roses: “Dear Woodwold,” she said.
Lastly, and as gently as they could, they woke Lord and Lady Prendergast and their sons and daughters, who woke to find the Great Hall, the oldest part of their ancient and beloved house, destroyed, and for a little while the thought of a wicked fairy defeated and their country and future monarch saved seemed too small a victory to them.
Katriona wearily moved back toward the table where Peony lay, where Rowland stood and Narl and Rosie crouched over their joined hands. The stallion, Gorse, stood behind Narl, and several dogs were scattered round the table’s end. One of them—her name, Sunflower, swam into Katriona’s mind—had her feet up on the edge of the table, where she could just raise her chin high enough to stare into Rosie’s face. Gorse was as bedraggled as a wild moor-horse, and had strange marks on his flanks, as if he had squeezed through a space too narrow for him; the dogs’ chests were all matted with foam. Katriona guessed that this was part of the story of how they had pulled down Pernicia’s castle; and wondered what else she had missed while she was asleep. But those stories could wait.
Katriona was exhausted. Never attack a spell head-on, Aunt had said years ago. You need to sniff out where the weak places are. All spells have them; it’s just a matter of finding them . . . and, of course, being able to use them. Katriona could not have found nor used the weak spot of Pernicia’s spell. Not alone. She looked down at a small pointed red-furred face looking up at her. I am still here, Zel said. I am still here.
They were all still here, and they were all still alive.
She stood at the end of the table, looking down at the top of Peony’s head, at Rosie’s face, fierce with concentration; and Narl looked up at her and said, half shouted, “Kat! Wake up! Don’t you want to keep her?”
Katriona did not at first know what he meant, but she responded to the desperation in his voice, and saw that Peony, now alone in all the Hall, remained asleep; and obediently she put her hands out, and laid them as gently as she could on the burned backs of Narl’s hands. But with that contact she realized the intricate interlacing of energies at play beneath her palms—discovered, too, the secret Narl had been hiding in his forge for many years—and suddenly understood what Narl had meant. Her fingers bit down against Narl’s skin, and she put every mote of magic she had left in her into the work, for Pernicia was gone, and she could use her last strength as she chose.
Aunt looked up from where she was rubbing the temples of a young fairy with a headache, catching a whiff or a whisper of what was happening among the remains of the high table; Ikor, in one of the anterooms strapping the sprained ankle of one of the grandest of the royal magicians, leaped to his feet and ran back into the Hall, shouting, “No, no! You cannot! No—”
Rosie leaned forward, round the globe of hands, and kissed Peony on the lips.
Everyone’s hands collapsed inward as the spindle end shattered; Rosie felt an eerie, sucking sensation against her palms for a moment as she involuntarily fell forward onto Peony’s breast, and a queer, fluttery, disorienting sensation in her own breast and throat, as if something were being pulled out of her and drawn into her friend. Narl and Katriona both took a sudden, hasty step backward. Rosie sat up, spitting Peony’s hair out of her mouth as Peony said, “Oof. Rosie, you weigh a ton.”
It was at this moment that the cook came howling up from the kitchens saying that Lady Prendergast’s terrier and two mice were lying asleep in the centre of the kitchen table with a single long black hair twisted round them in a circle, that nothing could pass that boundary hair, and would some fairy please come and get these animals off her table?
CHAPTER 23
Woodwold was not the only house that had suffered in the final confrontation between Pernicia and the princess and the princess’ allies; all over the Gig there was wreckage as if by tiny, violent, very local storms, or duels among goblins or a fire-wyrm or two. There was a great deal of work to be done to set all to rights. But no one’s village had been flattened, and friends and family gave housing and help to those who had been unlucky; and the crops and the animals were largely unhurt, although the latter in some cases had strayed so far some humans suspected they had been ill-sent or driven, especially when, after their initial journeys, hitherto stolid beasts showed a tiresome new urge to wander. And, of course, as soon as the news of Pernicia’s final defeat went out (and everyone shook themselves and stared at each other and said, “How could we ever have imagined that Pernicia had just gone away? That was a very powerful spell!” And everyone was a little annoyed, especially because no one could remember the end of the ball and the appearance of Pernicia, which must have been one of the best stories if anyone could tel
l it, but then, it was king’s business and magic, and all’s well that ends well), everyone in the Gig was a hero. This pleasant knowledge helped the work go a little quicker, as did the amount of volunteer labour that poured in from all over the rest of the country, to hear the tales of heroism firsthand in return for some digging and dragging and sawing and hammering and heaving and putting together. The volunteer labour and free goods came even more thickly when the announcement of the wedding went out.
Prince Rowland Jocelyn Hereward and Princess Casta Albinia Allegra Dove Minerva Fidelia Aletta Blythe Domnia Delicia Aurelia Grace Isabel Griselda Gwyneth Pearl Ruby Lily Iris Briar-Rose’s marriage was celebrated only six weeks after the death of Pernicia and the merrel beneath the ruins of Woodwold’s Great Hall. The princess insisted that she wished to be wed in the Gig, from Woodwold, and the Prendergasts—whatever damage had been done to their family’s ancient home—were incapable of saying no to her about anything whatsoever, aside from the fact that it was a tremendous honour. (And, of course, as a result of the prospect of the princess’ wedding, every royal fairy and magician put their minds to the work of restoring the Prendergasts’ Great Hall, which was the only possible location in the entire Gig for such an occasion as a royal wedding, so that it nearly put itself back together and was, furthermore, now glistening with powerful new spells and good wishes, fully sound and solid and complete by the day. The new Great Hall, indeed, was so lofty and beautiful that the king’s bishop was almost reconciled to having to hold the most important wedding of this generation in the barbarian, backwater Gig instead of at his own noble cathedral in the royal city.)
Rosie and Narl were the bride and groom’s First Friends (although the queues of attendants behind both of them were several dozen strong, and there was a certain amount of sniffing and eyebrow raising that a horse-leech and a smith, however dear the friendship, should come at the heads of the columns). Both of them felt extremely silly in the royal getups they were expected to wear, but both felt so complacent about their part in what had occurred, with this wedding as its culminating feat, that they almost forgot to mind. (Since Rosie had begun to let her hair grow so that she could braid the merrel’s feathers into it, at least the ladies assigned to her hairdressing for the wedding, unlike those who had tried to dress it for the princess’ ball, had had a little to work with. Rosie’s godmothers’ gifts appeared to have stayed with her even when being the princess had left her, and her hair grew at a cracking pace, as if it had been impatiently waiting its opportunity for the last seventeen years. But the curls, while initially just as bumptious as ever, began to hang out of their own weight as they spilled past her shoulders. The royal hairdressers had taken full advantage, thinking, rightly, that there was fairy work in it somewhere, but grateful that this tall young woman would not spoil the show.)
Rosie privately thought that Narl was taking Peony’s marriage remarkably well, but when, a week later, they had seen the wedding party set off for the royal city, and Rosie was beginning to realise just how much she was going to miss Peony (who, with twenty-one new names to choose from, had chosen to remain Peony), she couldn’t stop herself from saying something about it to Narl. At least they might be able to share their sense of loss.
But Narl was off-hand. “We’ll all miss her. Lovely young woman, and clever with it. She’ll make a splendid queen; she has all the right instincts, and the grace to make what needs doing get done.”
Rosie said, only speaking the truth, “I can hardly imagine Foggy Bottom without her.”
“You’ll miss her worse than I, of course,” said Narl. Whistling in a curiously lighthearted way, he returned to his hammer and his fire. Rosie blinked. He had been whistling like this for the last seven weeks. Narl never used to whistle. Of course everyone was tremendously relieved at having the curse off the country for good, and the future queen officially heir-selected by the future king, and married to the man who both she and her country liked best as her consort, but . . . Rosie still did not clearly remember everything that happened during the destruction of the old Hall. She remembered that she and Pernicia had been grappling with each other (she seemed to remember attacking Pernicia with her bare hands, but rejected this as crazy); more particularly she remembered the white streak out of the sky, and the merrel’s last words, Good-bye, friend. She knew that it was the merrel who had saved her.
And she knew that Narl and Katriona—and possibly her own spindle end—had done something besides just wake Peony up.
Her final meeting with Peony had been extremely painful. Even if they did manage to keep a courier busy round the year with their letters to each other (and any sort of writing was not Rosie’s favourite activity; it came approximately second to embroidery), even if Rosie did go up to the royal city at least once a year herself, their friendship was going to be nothing like it had been for the last six years. Peony herself would become—was already becoming—someone else than she had been; she had to. Rosie supposed that even she herself would change. What had happened to them wasn’t like losing your best friend so much as it was like losing your shadow or your soul; you barely knew it was there sometimes, but you knew it was crucial to you. There had been tears of joy and despair on both sides; that Rosie would stay where she was, in a world and a life that suited her, and that Peony had found a life that suited her—that suited her as if she had been born to it—and people who loved her. Most particularly one person who loved her: Rowland.
“But I can’t—” she said, as she began to understand what had happened. “But I’m not—”
“Neither am I,” said Rosie, through her own tears. “I’m really not. I wasn’t, even when I was supposed to be. I just wasn’t. Even when Ikor . . .” She stopped. Ikor had not spoken to her since the ball; had not come near her. If, as had happened once or twice during her visits to Woodwold, she entered a room that he was in, he left at once. At least she had seen him that once or twice, and so had seen Eskwa, regrown and shining, hanging from his belt.
Peony looked at Hroc’s head on her friend’s knee, and Sunflower’s head on her foot, and at Fwab singing the chaffinch spring song on the windowsill, and the cook’s cat just happening by the doorway where they were sitting in one of the little anterooms off the Great Hall (the latter alive with the hum and bang of feverishly working, magic-augmented carpentry), just happening to sit down there for a wash, her back to the embarrassing tedium of human tears. “The animals know. The animals will always know the truth of it.”
The animals knew. They still called Rosie Princess and she had heard the tale that had gone round after the wreck of the Hall and what came of it: Pernicia is dead. Rosie and Oroshral—which was how Rosie learnt for the first time that the merrel had a name—killed her. Rosie is staying here. Peony is going back to the city to be the princess instead. “Yes,” said Rosie. “But they’re not telling. Except each other. And they’ll stop that too, soon enough. They’ll close it down. Zel”—who was so puffed with importance for having become Katriona’s familiar there was almost no bearing him—“is already trying to, because he knows Kat’s worried. He hasn’t learned yet that Kat is always worried.” She added, less easily, “And, Peony, it—that I talk to animals—should never have happened. That it did happen may have been—what made the rest happen. Or made it possible to happen—that Pernicia’s curse didn’t work. That we found a way out. That I’m—you’re—we’re still here.”
Peony took Rosie’s hands in hers and squeezed them painfully. “You’re sure? You’re sure?”
“It doesn’t matter if I’m sure or not, it’s done,” said Rosie, but seeing the look on her friend’s face she added, “I was there, remember? If I hadn’t been sure, it couldn’t have happened. Whatever did happen,” she amended, remembering Narl’s and Katriona’s hands on hers, and the queer feeling that she had somehow gone invisible, or insubstantial, and that the spindle end, just before it imploded into emptiness, had been the only real thing about either herself or Peony. But sh
e had felt something pass between her and Peony when she kissed her, something that had come trudging up from the depths of her own being, something she herself had called out, and Narl and Katriona had given the capacity to come in response to that call, something she hardly recognised as hers except that she knew by the small surprised blank it had left behind when it moved that it had been there all her life till then and had planned to stay there for the rest of her life as well, something that hopped quietly over to Peony when their mouths met. “Think of Rowland. Just keep thinking about Rowland.” And Peony smiled through her tears.
Rosie had been called into the queen’s private room once, too, the day before the wedding. Rosie had been uncomfortable at going to meet the woman she knew to be her mother, remembering, too, that the queen had known, when the deception was still a deception. The queen had stared at her as if trying to remember something. “I am sorry,” the queen said to the Foggy Bottom horse-leech, “I cannot think who you remind me of. It is very rude to stare—even for queens. Especially for queens.” She smiled, and Rosie thought of the story Katriona told, of her standing in her father’s kitchen making supper when the king’s messengers had come to offer her a throne. Rosie smiled back, and then curtseyed (not too clumsily; three months of being the princess’ first lady-in-waiting had had some effect), having no idea what to say.
“You are my daughter’s best friend,” the queen said slowly. “I want to remember you clearly till I can come to know you. For you will come up to the city sometimes to see your friend, will you not?”