Hroc had been there that first evening in Foggy Bottom, when Ikor had told them what they were going to do, when the necessity of some scheme against Pernicia was as plain to Hroc and the others as a flung rock in the ribs—even if the manner of it seemed like one of those strange human designs that get you ultimately into more trouble than they get you out of. But Hroc had shrugged a dog-shrug, as most of the other animals had shrugged their kinds of shrugs. Human business was human business, with which they would not interfere; and there were other matters to attend to. Rosie was still wondering about those other matters, about whether the sense of preoccupation she felt in her animal friends was something more ominous than that they had little to say to a woman who was spending all her time indoors, playing at being a lady-in-waiting, and doing no useful work. The thought that it was only this, that they had nothing to say to her any more, was so bitter that it was hard for her not to want the preoccupation to go ahead and be something ominous.
But the last thing the conspirators needed right now was Rosie’s friends making it obvious that Rosie seemed ill and distracted on the princess’ birthday.
Well, so
pretend
she is the princess,
said Rosie, and Hroc gave her a weary look.
Pretend
was one of those human words. The only equivalents, and they were not helpful ones, were the deception of the hiding predator, and the playing-to-learn-skills that all animal children did to a greater or lesser extent. Hroc knew perfectly well what “pretend” meant when Rosie said it to him; he just believed it to be piffle, as if she had told him grass was pink and water was not for drinking.
She looked into his patient, intelligent eyes and thought, with a sudden bubble of panic: This isn’t just a loophole, a gap for a nimble enemy archer to shoot through; this is an entire wall that isn’t there: that the animals
know.
That they’re waiting for something to happen—something besides the euphoric celebration of the princess’ one-and-twentieth birthday. And that the something would happen to Rosie.
Why hadn’t Aunt and Katriona
seen
? Never mind Ikor, who had a tendency to see only what he was looking for. And she felt the deep subterranean grumble of Woodwold agreeing with her, and knew, then, that some of why Woodwold had lain so wakeful these last three months was because of the perilously incompatible difference in the stories it heard through the footfalls of those who went loose upon the earth.
However deadly a mistake they had made, it was too late to change it now.
Hroc, sensing her distress, dug his nose into her leg a little harder.
At least tell the others to go away,
she said.
I do not want attention called to me this way.
The other dogs stretched or shook themselves and began to wander away as if they had never been clustered round Rosie in the first place.
And you say you do not believe in
pretend, said Rosie, and Hroc smiled a dog-smile, with his eyes and ears.
The fog was returning in earnest. Rosie saw the king place the crown of inheritance on Peony’s head, and the king’s bishop bless her; heard the first official cheers led by her brothers; and she saw that the queen kept her eyes too carefully on Peony, and did not once look at Rosie, though she was always near at hand, and whom everyone else, in the knowledge that she was the princess’ best friend, made a point of smiling at and speaking a word to. It was noted that the princess’ best friend was pale and preoccupied (and that one of Lord Pren’s fleethounds was shadowing her as if waiting to be a sort of self-motile sofa, should she need to sit down suddenly: the courtiers by now all knew about her talking to animals), but then who could blame her? My lord Rowland was almost as distracted, but he had his noble upbringing to fall back on, and he could (as the saying went) make conversation with an enchanted chamber pot. My lady Rosie was only a village girl after all. How lucky they were that the princess, although she, too, had been raised as a village girl, was so poised and gay on this splendid and historic occasion, and effortlessly seemed to take up her proper position.
Rosie heard the long speech the king’s bishop made, and could hear by the way his voice soared and fell, and hastened forward and drew back to mark each word, that it was a speech full of erudition and noble sentiments, but she understood nothing of it. She made herself watch, and so noticed the Gig’s Chief Priest looking both sulky and gratified as a member of the king’s bishop’s train, and the Foggy Bottom priestling looking thrilled and daunted (and almost unrecognisable in a shiny new hood) several tiers back in the same train. When, after the bishop, Lord Prendergast stood up and gave a much shorter speech, she only saw that he was smiling as he spoke. She must have lost a few moments, because a plate loaded with food was suddenly lying before her, and she discovered that she was sitting at a grand table with Katriona on one side and Barder beyond her, and Callin on Rosie’s other side, and the princess’ other ladies beyond. There was a reaccumulating drift of hounds and a spaniel or two over her feet and under and behind her chair, and Throstle, who had made a study of this kind of behaviour so he could perform it so charmingly that even people who didn’t like dogs failed to protest, trotted along the table among the goblets and platters and epergnes, and jumped into Rosie’s lap. Throstle adored Rosie, who had rescued him in the last three months from a life of uninterrupted lapdoggery by bringing him on her stable rounds every morning, telling Lady Pren it was therapeutic, which was true enough. (The new system had almost broken down after Throstle tackled a rat bigger than he was; he had it by the neck in the prescribed terrier manner, but it was going to beat him to death before it died. Fortunately Milo, Hroc’s brother and best friend, had been there to finish it off.)
Peony sat between the king and the queen, with the princes on either side of them; and the youngest prince, who was the farthest away from her, on his elder brother’s right hand, kept slipping out of his chair to stand by hers, holding on to the back of it and half climbing it, as boys, even princes, will do, as he spoke to her.
Rosie put her hand in her pocket, and touched the round butt of the spindle end, seeking the face of the little gargoyle, her finger finding its nose by the silkiness of the tiny well-polished slope; and the fog, while no lighter, for a time seemed a little easier to bear, although she had no appetite for supper. She looked round the table for other familiar faces, and caught Rowland watching her worriedly, and she did not have the strength to smile at him. She looked—not at, but round the queen, hoping for some glimpse of Sigil, who must, surely, have arrived in or with or somehow simultaneous to the royal train, even if she did not wish to attend the ball, and once or twice she thought she saw a small drab person bending near the queen as no servant but only a beloved friend could do; but Rosie could never see her clearly.
After dinner the dancing began, but Rosie did not dance. She would not have dared, because dancing was one of the name-day fairy gifts; but she had been able to say, truthfully, and with most of the Gig as witnesses, that she had never danced. Ikor claimed to have tried to teach her, and that even magic was in this case unavailing. (If there had been any jokes about clodhoppers behind her back, Rosie had never heard them. She was, although she was unaware of it, an imposing figure, not only on account of her height and the princess’ fondness for her.) Fortunately Peony danced as well as if she were enchanted, and Rosie guessed which fairy had been the giver of that particular bounty by a look of such maudlin fatuity on her face that it caught even Rosie’s cloudy eye. All the godmothers were, of course, present; and if one or two of them had some impression that their gifts had not gone quite as they had expected, they were too public-spirited to mope.
Katriona sat with her on a padded bench against the wall, and Rosie sent most of the dogs away again when they tried to follow her. Katriona held her hand as if feeling her pulse for fever, which perhaps she was; and Rosie leaned back against Woodwold’s wall and half thought she felt it twitch. Through the fog she thought, I am still waiting to go home. I am not waiting for my birthday to be over so I can go—so that I can go to the royal city and become a princess, and—and let Peony be herself again; I am waiting for a few months of sham to be over so I can go home, and live in the wheelwright’s house, and work as a horse-leech. She made an effort to keep her head up, not only so that she might be seen as sitting with dignity, instead of lolling feebly, but because looking down at her own fine skirts made her dizzy, as if the twinkly grey were a series of whirlpools any one of which she might fall into and drown.
The fog seemed to giggle. The hairy rat-snake things were back, and she thought maybe the giggling came from them. They didn’t seem to have any eyes—or, for that matter, mouths—just furry, unpleasantly sinuous bodies, and rather a lot of small pattering feet. Yes, she could definitely hear someone laughing—she opened her heavy eyes, not having realised they were closed, and looked at the dancers. She had trouble focusing her eyes on all the bright moving figures, but a couple near her turned and she saw Peony in Rowland’s arms; and then the laughter in her ears grew louder. Who was laughing? She shook her head, which only made it throb.
“What is it?” said Katriona; but Rosie’s lips refused to open, her jaws were clamped together. Slowly she stood up, and Katriona with her, still holding her hand. Now the fog seemed to be becoming visible in the Great Hall; there was a greyish sort of shadow cast by nothing in particular, hovering near the far end of the Hall, across the long room from where she now stood, near to where the merrel sat hidden among the rafters. The laughter seemed to come from that direction. Rosie was curious; she would go nearer, and look. It was good to feel as if she wanted to do something—anything—in the middle of this horrible sick foggy inertia.
She tried to pull her hand out of Katriona’s—she didn’t need Katriona—but Katriona wouldn’t let go. Very well, she would have to come, too. Rosie was now moving inexorably toward the strange greyish-black shadow that had no reason to hover where it did, still hearing—following—the laughter. It was odd that no one else seemed to hear it. She noticed several people looking at her as she made her single-minded way through the dancers, dragging poor stubborn Katriona behind her. But why was no one looking toward the end of the Hall, no one saying, Who is that laughing? Perhaps because the laughter was for her, Rosie. Perhaps—since she had heard it first when she was thinking about going home—perhaps it was going to tell her how to go home, how she could give up this dreadful princess business, and go home, and be Rosie again.
She had to walk slowly because she still felt light-headed and not quite steady, and because Katriona was gripping her hand so tightly, and because Hroc was pressed against her other side, almost as if he wished to prevent her from walking the way she was going. She thought some of the other dogs were coming with them; at least one of them, probably Sunflower, kept getting between her legs, getting its paws caught in the fancy lace of her underskirt. They must look like one of those children’s games, where you have to go somewhere while you all touch each other. But they wouldn’t stop her. As soon as she knew what the laugher knew, everything would be all right.
As she neared the shadow, she saw that the dancing had stopped; they were all facing the bodiless shadow. Oh, so they
did
see it. The music had also stopped, or at least she could no longer hear it through the laughter. It was so loud now Rosie’s ears were ringing with it; nonetheless she heard some commotion behind her, someone speaking:
No, no, let me go, you don’t understand.
It sounded like Peony’s voice.
The shadow was no longer bodiless. At first it was only as if a purple stain ran down it, as if some shaft of light had touched it from an unusual angle and produced this effect; but then the purple and the black and the grey began to wind themselves together and become a human shape. The human shape became a woman, tall and beautiful and terrible, as tall as Rosie, and her black-and-purple-and-cerise cloak fell round her in dangerous, shining folds.
“Well, my dear,” said the tall woman to Rosie, who was still moving like a sleepwalker toward her. “We meet at last. We did not meet before, did we? I may have seen a hand or a curl—your hair is remarkably curly, is it not?—above the sides of your crib on your name-day, but I do not feel that was a proper meeting, crudely barred as I was from coming close enough to look you in the face. Well! So this is what the princess looks like—a tall rawboned gawk. I always did think your mother was common. The boys take after their father. It is just as well that one of them will be king—if there is any kingdom left for them.” And she laughed.
It was taking Rosie an astonishing length of time merely to cross a few spans of floor. She thought it had something to do with Katriona, and she tried to turn her head and frown at her, but she could not; she could only go on staring at the tall woman in front of her. Very well; she did want to stare at her; she was fascinating. She was not polite—calling Rosie a gawk—but it was the truth. It was obvious this woman would have all the answers. Rosie wanted to talk to her. She wanted to ask her how she could go home again.
In the corners of her eyes she could see various soldiers and magicians and fairies moving in a strange, constrained way. They were trying to make the tall woman go away, thought Rosie wisely, she is spoiling the party, and they don’t want her answers. Well, I do.
If she could have spoken aloud, she would have told Katriona to let go of her; the hand Kat was holding was numb, it was very unpleasant, it felt as if it no longer belonged to her. Even the dogs were trying to push her away from the tall woman. But Rosie wanted to talk to the tall woman and, it seemed, the tall woman wanted to talk to Rosie.