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 she 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?”
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.”