“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.
While she was watching, Rowland came up to her and spoke her name. She had to prevent herself from starting away from him, and she knew, when she met his eyes, that she hadn’t quite succeeded. She smiled at him, a little tentatively; her mouth didn’t want to turn upward. She knew he was both aware of and hurt by her avoidance of him—she had said barely three words together to him in the last three months—but then he didn’t know the truth of their situation.
“Rosie,” he said, and then, in a rush, as if he had meant to say something else entirely, “can we not be friends? I must value a—a relationship between us, because you are Peo—the princess’ friend; but beyond that I—I like you. Once I—I thought you liked me. I have not forgotten that it was you who taught me the names of the Foggy Bottom dogs, especially the medium-sized brown ones that all look alike, and to recognise birds from the songs they sing. I miss our days together at the smith’s.”
Rosie’s eyes filled with tears before she could stop them. “Oh!” said Rowland, horrified, groping for his handkerchief, “I beg your pardon!” Rosie remembered just in time not to blot her eyes on her sleeve, and fumbled for her own handkerchief, rolling the little gargoyle in her pocket as she did so. She blew her nose on her own but accepted and used Rowland’s to mop her face, as a kind of answer to his question, because she couldn’t think what to say to him. Presumably he would know soon enough, and then perhaps he would understand why she had avoided him.
But she had not answered his question, and he hesitated to put it again. He took his slightly damp handkerchief back, and folded it slowly, as if each corner squaring with the other corners was crucially important, while he tried to think of something else to say to her. “Narl sends his best wishes,” he offered at last.
Rosie grunted, a Narl-like grunt. She could think of few things less likely than Narl sending anyone his best wishes; and as far as she knew, Rowland was now spending most of his time at Woodwold. He had asked and been granted a place in the rota of the princess’ guard. But his remark did confirm her guess that Narl would not come to the ball. She had known he wouldn’t, but her heart nonetheless sank further.
Rowland still showed no sign of leaving her, and the crush of people was willing to let them alone for a little while; it seemed fitting that the man the princess loved and the woman who was the princess’ best friend should have a word or two to say quietly to each other. Rosie hugged to her the thought of the princess’ first royal command. With a dowry such as the princess might bestow on her best friend, would the prince of Erlion allow his heir to marry a wainwright’s niece? But even if she had known the answer was yes, this could not comfort her much. Ikor was quite capable of lying about the dissolution of the bond made by the Erlion heir’s vow—or at least of refusing to do it, even if it were possible, if his magic or his understanding of his sovereign’s subjects told him that it would be better for the country, and the country’s head of state, if it remained intact. “What will you do,” she said at last, “if you cannot marry Peony?”
“I don’t know,” he said, the words spaced out one from another. “I know I must think of this. The people—the princess’ people—look at us and smile and want it to be a happy ending. The story is a very satisfactory one, is it not? My childhood vow, and then falling in love with a girl I meet at a country smith’s, when I, too, am in disguise, and she turns out to be the princess.
“But it is not a story, with the happy ending already written and waiting for us to turn the pages. The people I know—it seems to me they believe that the refusal to announce our betrothal is some kind of whim, to make the suspense more exciting. I know it is not. Ikor—Ikor told me very little, only that there is no betrothal, and—he could not hide from me that there is something else to tell; and I look in Peony’s face, and I know there is something she is not telling me—something that hurts her—something that hurts us. I know there is something she is not telling me as clearly as I know she loves me. I—I spend my duty hours wondering what it is, while I walk up and down, or check that the emeralds or the rubies or the amethysts are still hanging where they were a quarter hour ago. What I find myself wondering about most often is the curse—the curse that we are supposed to believe has failed. I would like to believe that it has failed, quietly, with no sign of her who cast it, despite the fact that the entire country has lived under the shadow of that curse for twenty years.
“It is not only Peony’s face that tells me there is something I do not know. It is Ikor’s face, Ikor who came here first and arranged us all into this new order, this new story. Do you know that Ikor would not meet my eyes when he told me there was no betrothal? Ikor is not a man who does not meet the eyes of those he speaks to. And there is something in your Aunt’s face, and your cousin Katriona’s, and in yours, too, Rosie. There is a great and terrible weight upon all of you. This is what I fear—this is what I think: that the curse has not failed. Perhaps that is what the ball is for: to make most of the people believe, so that . . . so that what?”
He paused. They were both looking at Peony, who was now talking to Terberus. They were both fair and graceful, with quick, attractive smiles, and Terberus was only middling tall. They could be brother and sister, thought Rosie. She remembered something else that Katriona had told her on the last day in Foggy Bottom: how a glamour worked least well over the people who had the most connections with the truth. Love was a very strong connection.
“Rosie,” said Rowland. “I’m not asking you to tell me what it is, because Peony would have told me if it would not do some harm for me to hear it. But—do you know what I do not know?”
Rosie looked at him. “Yes,” she said. “I do know. And so I know why she cannot tell you.”
She saw that, however much he thought he had accepted the existence of that hidden thing, the confirmation of it was a blow to him; and she was sorry for this, sorry for having dealt him such a blow on top of the last three months of denying their friendship. The few of them who knew—even if Rowland didn’t quite know what he knew—should be able to stick together.
Perhaps it was the strain of knowing that whatever would happen would happen tonight, perhaps it was the magic-fog muddling her thinking, perhaps it was the hopelessness of her own love making her foolish, but she added impetuously: “But I think I can tell you that it means—it means Peony will not die tonight, whatever P-Pernicia does.” As she realised what she had said, she saw a little flicker of understanding run across Rowland’s face—an understanding too near the truth. He had no guess that Peony was not the princess, but he glimpsed a reason why two young women, one of them dreadfully cursed, might be bound so closely together as to confuse the curse into choosing the wrong one. . . .
Rosie admired him for his immediate look of horror and dismay at the same time she was appalled at the slip she had made. “No, no,” she said hastily. “It’s not what you—” But at that moment Lady Pren decided that the two of them had talked only to each other long enough, and, important guests that they were, they had to spread themselves more liberally among the others.
Rosie found the young lord Lady Pren bestowed her upon rather hard going (as doubtless he found her). Perhaps as a result of her conversation with Rowland, she felt the fog pressing round her again, and the passage of time began to confuse and disorient her, as if she were standing precariously on the limb of a tree and time was the wind now lashing its branches. She came to herself standing alone—she didn’t remember the young lord leaving—but there was a fleethound head suddenly under her hand, and so she stroked it, while it—Hroc—looked up at her and sent loving thoughts.
She looked down and saw that there was quite a little party of hounds following her—and getting under people’s feet. Lord Pren allowed his favourite dogs indoors (as well as the ladies’ lapdogs, which rarely, Throstle excepted, went outside), but under most conditions they stayed out of the humans’ way for fear of being banished to the kennels after all.
If you want to hang around someone, you should go hang around Peony. She’s the princess here.
No,
said Hroc.
She isn’t.
Rosie sighed—and caught a quick look from Peony, as ever not far away, feeling the sigh, and wondering if there were anything wrong she should pay attention to. Rosie shook her head, and returned her attention to Hroc.
Animals knew what they had to know about magic, that it was liable to turn them into brambles or thunderclouds at any moment and, if they were lucky, back again; but it was always there, like thickets and weather, and, like thickets and weather, to be borne as stoically as possible. Domestic animals (and the brighter or more inquisitive wild ones) knew that humans meddled in it, but then houses and barns and preserved foods over the winter were another sort of meddling, and on the whole domestic animals (and a few wild ones) approved of houses and barns and preserved foods. Coming up with ideas like houses and barns and preserved foods and then building or storing them (and, unlike squirrels, finding them again) was the sort of thing humans did, but there were limits. A fire in the fireplace was lovely, but it didn’t change the fact that there was a snowstorm outside. The idea of what Rosie and the other conspirators were doing was, in animal terms, like trying to convince a snowstorm to fall on one house instead of the one next door.