Rosie nodded, a lump suddenly in her throat, and then croaked politely, “Yes, ma’am.”
“I hope we can be friends, too. Something about your face—whatever it is—I think my daughter’s heart chose its friend well. I would like to be your friend, too,” said the queen.
The queen held out her hands, and Rosie knelt as she took them, and bowed her head over them; but the queen freed one of her hands, and stroked Rosie’s head, and touched the merrel feathers. At that moment the door of the queen’s chamber opened, and a little round person walked in; Rosie looked up.
A little, round, elderly, white-haired person; a fairy. Sigil. Rosie knew her at once. Knew her as she had not known her own mother and father because they were the king and queen and she had thought about them too much in the three months between Ikor’s arrival at the Gig and her first meeting with them in over twenty years; knew her because in the unexpected shock of this meeting she had no guard against knowing. She remembered that face bending over her—her hair had been grey then, not white—bending over her when she had been too small to do anything but lie in a cradle or in someone’s arms, and smile, so that they would smile back. Sigil.
Rosie drew her breath in on a sob. It had all been half imaginary to her till then—the three months as a lady-in-waiting seemed the most imaginary at all—and she now wanted it to be imaginary, now that her own mother no longer remembered. It had all been—just possibly—some great mistake from the beginning. But she looked into Sigil’s face and knew it was not. She, Rosie, had been born a princess; and she had chosen to forsake her heritage forever. To her horror, the tears poured down her face, and she could not stand, nor move away from the queen, the queen who did not know whose hand she held.
Sigil was there at once, kneeling beside her, smoothing her wet cheeks with her small dry hands, and whispering to her in a voice Rosie remembered singing old lullabies. “There, there, my dear, it is always hard to lose a friend; and you are losing yours ever so dramatically, are you not?”
Rosie gulped and nodded, staring into Sigil’s eyes, knowing that Sigil knew what Rosie was remembering, and why Rosie wept. As Rosie’s tears slowly stopped, Sigil cupped the tip of Rosie’s chin in her hands, hands that had once cupped her entire face when she had been only three months old, and said, “Live long and happily, my dear. Live long and happily. You have earned it, and I think—I believe—you may have it.” She shook Rosie’s chin, gently and fondly and familiarly, and whispered, “All will be well. All will be well.” Rosie, through her tears, looked up at her, suddenly remembering the spider that had stowed away in Ikor’s sleeve during the long journey in search of the twenty-year-old princess, and had, perhaps, been the same spider that had hung in the corner of the window in the princess’ bedroom at Woodwold.
All will be well. Some day the queen would remember the young fairy who had sat on her bed and held her hand, and told her about her four-year-old daughter. Some day the queen would remember that she had looked over Peony’s shoulder at their first meeting in Woodwold’s park, had looked into Rosie’s eyes. Magic can’t do everything. All will be well.
Sigil kissed Rosie’s forehead and stood up, and Rosie bent her head once more to the queen, and stood up also, and took her leave.
Rosie had not seen Sigil again, except briefly, at the wedding, at a distance, a distance one or both of them were careful to maintain; and now they were gone, her family, her past, what might have been her future. . . . She shook herself, and took a deep breath, and thought, Peony will make a better queen. She even gets along with Osmer. And she’ll have Rowland to help her.
Her mind reverted with relief to the sound of Narl’s lighthearted whistling. Of course he was happiest when he had more work to be done than any six ordinary smiths could do, and at the moment, not only was the rebuilding of the Gig still going on; his was the only fully operational forge within it.
The centre of Foggy Bottom seemed to have been the eye of the magic-storm, and the centre of Foggy Bottom was the village square. Everyone assumed that this had to do with the wainwright’s yard, which opened onto the square; but the wheelwright’s yard was there, too, and Narl’s forge. Whatever the reason, for half a league round it, as cleanly as if someone had measured it, no damage had been done to any field or tree or fence or building; and perhaps this was the reason why so many of the wandering animals had found themselves there, and why so many of them seemed to want to return there even after they had been fetched home. The condition of the other smithies was causing some frustration on the part of the other, less fortunate, smiths; usually a smith only has to hang a few pointy bits of iron round the area he wants to make into a smith’s yard and he can get on with his making more or less untroubled; but in the Gig for nearly a year after Pernicia’s death the iron bits round every smithy but Narl’s kept falling down, or being rearranged overnight by persons or presences unknown, and perfectly sound bellows developed holes the moment they blew on smiths’ fires, and the fires themselves flared and collapsed maddeningly, and iron broke instead of consenting to being worked, and the level of magic-midges was so dire that the smiths themselves were batting away at them.
No one, however, had been quite so ill-spirited as to accuse Narl of being responsible for any of this, nor of himself being a fairy (there hadn’t been a smith who was also a fairy in so many years it never occurred to anyone to think of such a thing unless he or she had restless children to keep amused with fairy tales), especially after it was discovered that if he forged the pointy bits of iron to mark out other smithies, they stayed where they were put. No one but Aunt, Katriona and Barder ever heard the full story about the journey to the castle in the wasteland beyond the edge of the Gig.
But even too much work didn’t make Narl lighthearted. Narl didn’t know how to be lighthearted.
“But, Narl,” said Rosie. “Aren’t you going to . . . I mean . . . really miss her? Peony, I mean,” she added in amazement, as he looked across at her blankly. She was sitting on a bale of hay and plaiting (badly) a few of the longest stems together.
Narl stopped whistling, and straightened up from the shoe he was measuring against Fast’s foot, and looked at her thoughtfully. “Not as much as I’d’ve missed you,” he said.
Rosie felt herself turn flame red, and then the blood all drained away from her head and she felt dizzy. She looked at her plaiting and let it drop on the ground (where Flinx, who, since the advent of Zel, was spending more time at the forge, examined it briefly for news of the mice he was sure lived in the hay bale). “I thought you were in love with her,” she said in a very small voice.
“In love with—?” said Narl.
There was a pause. “Well,” he said, as if commenting on the weather or the number of horses waiting to be shod and house- and shop-fittings to be cut and ploughshares to be mended, “it happens I’m in love with you. Have been since that day Rowland and Peony met. No, before that. That’s just the day I knew it. Not having been in love before—and old enough to have long since decided it wasn’t going to happen—I didn’t recognise the signs.”
Rosie couldn’t say anything. She stared at the ground. After a moment she heard Narl moving toward her, and the toes of his boots appeared in her line of vision, and then one drew back, and Narl knelt and tipped her face up with one scarred hand till he could look into it. “I wasn’t going to say anything about it,” he said quietly, “because you seemed so determined to have nothing to do with me except as your old friend the farrier.”
Rosie stared at him as if he had turned green or grown wings. “Narl, I’ve been in love with you forever.”
“That’s all right then,” he said, smiling a little, and Rosie remembered the animals saying, Ironface! Smiling! And Flinx, the Block, cracking. That had been a terrible day, the grey grim waking after the princess’ ball, Peony missing and Pernicia waiting, and a terrible moment: Narl had just called her Princess, like slamming a door shut between them.
Narl’s smile g
rew fixed, as if he wasn’t sure how to say what he wanted to say next, and when he spoke at last he sounded so wistful and forlorn Rosie heard an echo in her mind, a great white bird chained to high rafters saying, Will you come and talk to me again some time? “Then will you marry me?”
“Oh yes. Yes. Yes. Oh. But you’ll have to come live with us, you know.”
Narl, who lived behind his forge in two small rooms full of old tools and things he hadn’t figured out how to mend yet, flinched.
“Oh—please,” said Rosie, and grabbed his dangling hand, suddenly feeling that whatever happened next she would burst with it.
“What will they say?”
Rosie shook her head, still hanging on to his hand. “I don’t care.” She thought about it a moment, and then, surprised, and realising it was the truth, said, “They’ll like it.”
“They will, will they?”
But she realised he was laughing at her, and she flung her arms round his neck and kissed him, and his arms closed round her, and drew her down next to him. They were out of sight of the town common and Fast’s groom was safely at the pub and this bit of the courtyard ground had been recently swept; and it was a quiet afternoon, and no one came bursting through the courtyard gate with the latest ironmongery crisis. The kiss went on quite some time, till Fast, standing tied to a ring and wearing only three shoes, turned his head round to see what was going on. It sounded rather enjoyable.
Well, finally, said Flinx. Did you ever know two humans so thick?
But Fast was a romantic. He could hardly wait to go home and spread the news at Woodwold, but he had to have four shoes first. He switched his tail, and nodded his head up and down hard enough to jerk at the ring, and began to paw the ground. And the hay-bale mice, taking advantage of Flinx’s preoccupation, shot out of the back of the bale, dodged their way out of the yard, dashed across the common, and arrived, panting, to tell their relatives at the pub about the princess and the fairy smith.
Robin McKinley, Spindle's End
(Series: # )
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