But that was much later. While Aunt threw her spindle point into the fire, and prodded it into the heart of the flames, Katriona took off the amulet she was still wearing hidden under her clothing, and held it between her two hands. The disturbed fire flared up and the hot red light fell across the amulet, and it flared, too, and Katriona almost dropped it, as if it were a chain of embers and would burn her. She remembered the sense of it pulsing between her fingers on the princess’ name-day; it had lain quietly since then, till this moment. The fire-coloured light flickered in the same rhythm as the vibration against her fingers, and the amulet sparkled along its whole length, even where the shadow of her fingers fell across it. “I think,” she said slowly, “I think I will not wear you any more.”
She raised her head and saw Aunt looking at her, the poker still in her hand. “I’ll give you something to wrap it in,” said Aunt, and Katriona knew she meant something that would disguise it from magic-seeing eyes. There was a little iron cup that stood on its own three tiny legs, like a miniature cauldron, in a niche high in the stone chimney. It had held other small magics safe from prying eyes, but it was empty now. Katriona pulled a stool in front of the hearth and stood on it so she could reach the niche and the cup. The cloth Aunt handed her was white, and when Katriona laid the amulet on it, she half expected the whiteness to blacken and char; but it did not. She folded the cloth round it carefully, and curled her thin package twice around the inside of the cup, till it lay flat.
“Should I lid it with iron, too?” said Katriona.
Aunt thought. “No,” she said after a moment. “I don’t think there’ll be enough leak to notice, not in this house. Let the poor thing breathe. Something like that—likely it’ll be happier if it can keep its eye on us, too.”
“On Rosie,” said Katriona.
The local chief priest came calling to inquire self-importantly about Rosie’s name-day and dedication. Aunt was ready for him, and polite to him, neither of which was true of Katriona, till Aunt sent her on an imaginary errand to rid herself of the distracting series of muffled objections, which were Katriona’s only contribution to the conversation, stiff as it was already. Part of the vehemence of her feeling was based on the fact that the Gig’s chief priest was a pompous ass (the Gig was too obscure to have its own bishop), although the sleekest and most worldly-wise priest, of which the chief priest of the Gig was neither, was never perfectly at ease with the meekest and least active professional fairy—of which Aunt was neither.
It was not an easy vocation, being a priest in that country, where magic was vibrantly everywhere, maddening and unquenchable, and the gods were assumed to be a kind of super-fairy except that you never saw them nor were offered any concrete proof of what the priests claimed they had done for you. Possibly because of the rampaging dailiness of the magic of that country, its natives could rarely be persuaded to spend any serious time or thought on questions of how the world began or what it was for, or why people were people instead of stick insects or pondweed, or any of the other standard varieties of religious inquiry. For the ethics restraining you from bashing your neighbour and stealing his land or his money or his daughter there were centuries of instilled belief that these were bad things to do, and a strong government that, for as many centuries, had agreed. And for ecstatic visions there was the illegal eating of fish.
Aunt’s theory about priests was that religion had emigrated from some other, less magical country, and its missionaries, while of good stout disbeliever-thumping stock, had never really adapted to the peculiar conditions of this country, and therefore, while they had managed to rig a sort of clumsy administrative scaffolding, it had never, so to speak, had its walls and roof put on, and developed a vernacular architecture. The priests had gained some ground, over the generations, with certain cabals of magicians; but priests and fairies remained like oil and water.
Katriona returned from her errand to find Aunt alone, amusing Rosie by swinging on its thin coloured string the tiny god-charm the priest had blessed her with. Rosie sat on the floor and made snatches at it (falling over at intervals). “Fairy godparents might have been quite a good notion toward a truce between us,” Aunt said thoughtfully. “It’s a pity the possible precedent was such a disaster.”
“He just wants the money!” Katriona said, outraged that Aunt had agreed to a second (abbreviated) name-day for Rosie—as if her first one had not been more than enough for anyone.
Aunt sighed. The priest was not a pleasant companion, and talking to him had given her a headache. “Yes, of course he does, but he’ll use it to buy food and firewood for those who need it. Don’t worry; I’ve already explained that my sister had Rosie dedicated before she died; she won’t have the words spoken over her again.” (You wanted to be careful about the super-fairies, just in case their magic was anything like the usual stuff, where doing the same spell twice could create serious havoc.) “But I couldn’t afford to insist against it—what if he tried to trace my supposed sister’s supposed priest to make sure the ceremony was done? Priests have more contacts than robins.” Katriona subsided, but with an ill grace.
Foggy Bottom’s priestling earned his title—and a certain grudging respect, even from Katriona—by nursing the sick and the indigent, but he was afraid of Aunt, as if religion and magic might ricochet off each other to the harm of innocent bystanders. While he was ready to do his duty by all his parishioners, even to the extent of rubbing the dedication herbs and oils into the potentially combustible foreheads of babies related to Aunt by blood, he was certainly not going to go out of his way to pursue her about it. After his chief’s visit, he was only too visibly relieved to be let off the actual rite, and accepted the promised fee for adding Rosie to Foggy Bottom’s church registry with a hand that shook only a little.
Rosie, who had to be present for this transaction, smiled at him benevolently, and would have pulled his priest’s plait, except that he flicked it out of her way in time, and proffered the string of his hood as substitute. She pulled with glee and made happy little chirps at each tug. “She sounds like one of your robins,” said the priest, thinking that she was a difficult baby not to like, whomever she might be related to.
“Not when she wants something and thinks it’s not coming fast enough,” said Aunt drily.
Rosie grew up square and strong and stubborn and inquisitive, with a limitlessness of both energy and persistence that meant she was a great trial to Aunt and Katriona while she was still young enough to require constant watching. “Mind you,” said Aunt, “little children are like this”—Aunt was the eldest of eleven and spoke from long experience—“but I’ve never seen one that was Rosie’s equal for sheer pigheaded-ness. With all due respect to pigs.”
Katriona sighed. She wanted children of her own (even if it turned out that Aunt was right and she was wrong, and she was a real fairy herself), but the experience of raising Rosie was making her feel that perhaps she wanted fewer than she had previously imagined. Even when Aunt had one or two small boarders to stay, as she often did, till their baby-magic ran its course and they were safe to return to their families, Rosie was deflected from her purposes not a whit by prognosticating furniture, clothing that giggled and ran away when you tried to put it on, nor a ravening panther just outside the door apparently waiting to swallow the first person it saw. (It was something like a panther; manifestations of baby-magic are only as good as the imagination of the child, and this one’s understanding of natural history was not so great as his desire for mayhem.)
This was convenient in one way, as a more nervous and dependent child would have been made miserable by baby-magic jokes and ruses; but Katriona sometimes thought it might have been worth it. Katriona had been officially sworn and contracted as Aunt’s apprentice shortly after Rosie had come to live with them, which in theory meant that Katriona could be sent instead of Aunt to attend to any fairy task Aunt thought her capable of; but in fact Katriona found learning basic fairy craft something of a struggle,
despite her zealous dedication. At first the only clear manifestation of her aptitude for any magic at all was her ability to throw (so to speak) cold water on the various conflagrations of baby-magic, and there was no plan or subtlety to that; it was just a reflex, like grabbing the milk jug before Rosie knocked it over or a boarder turned it into a wasps’ nest. The early years of her apprenticeship felt like a kind of frantic juggling act, and the only real difference between handling magic and handling Rosie, she thought despairingly, was that there was no malice in Rosie.
Rosie hated her curly golden hair. When she was old enough to hold minimal conversations, the itsy-bitsy-cutesycoo sort of grown-ups would pull the soft ringlets gently and tell her what a pretty little girl she was. She would stare at this sort of grown-up and say, “I am not pretty. I am intelligent. And brave.” The grown-ups usually thought this was darling, which only made her angry, perhaps partly because she was speaking the truth, although it was tricky to differentiate between “brave” and “foolhardy” at three or four years old. (Fortunately her faith in grown-ups other than Aunt and Katriona was founded on people like Barder. Barder had a ritual of picking her up, saying “Oof,” followed by, “So, you’re a strapping lass. Are you going to grow up to be a blacksmith like Narl or a wheelwright like me?” and tossing her in the air. She adored Barder from the beginning, and was magnanimous about the fact that as the years passed he threw her less and less high.) But aside from her hair, she was not pretty—all those fairy godmothers giving her lips like cherries and teeth like pearls and skin like silk and they forgot to make her pretty, thought Katriona—and she was intelligent.
She was intelligent enough, for example, to grasp that Aunt’s prized scissors (the only pair in the village) were a much more precise cutting tool than a knife—neither of which, in theory, she was allowed access to. She nonetheless came indoors for tea one day with her hair lopped off to about half a hand’s breadth all over her head. It stood out like the corolla of a ragged sunflower. Aunt and Katriona were initially so stunned that Rosie had time to put the scissors carefully back where they belonged, with an easy familiarity that proved she’d done it often before.
But the uproar this caused was nothing compared with the uproar when Katriona noticed she had also cut her eyelashes. Various negotiations (including, finally, such desperate measures as “supposing you ever want to eat again”) eventually produced the grudging promise that, in return for Katriona keeping her hair cut short, she would leave her eyelashes alone.
Short hair rather suited Rosie. The bones of her square little face stood out with a clarity that seemed to reflect (or warn of) her personality. And without the distracting curls, Katriona found herself noticing more often the expressions flashing over that small candid face. . . . When she was watching Rosie with only half her attention she was often startled into full heed by a turn of Rosie’s head, a look in her eye, a tip of her chin, underscored, perhaps, by a gesture of her hand, a drop of one shoulder, a playful leap: and Katriona was reminded briefly but intensely of a fox, a badger, a wildcat, a doe. Not any fox or badger or wildcat or doe. Rosie had a humorous, wily, shrewd look Katriona remembered from a particularly kind and clever nanny goat they had met on their journey, and an earnest, ardent look that came from a sheepdog. Even Rosie’s curious ability to mimic Aunt’s robins—to the extent that the robins themselves went off into gales of good-natured robin-laughter about the nearness of her near misses—began to seem a little ominous. What, thought Katriona, did our princess drink in with the milk?
She refused to think about what she had said over the cradle during the wreck of the name-day: . . . you can have my gift, it isn’t very useful, I can talk to animals . . . She had only been speaking to say something, to drive away the sound of the words Pernicia had spoken; what she said hadn’t meant anything, any more than any words she or anyone else might have said could have driven off Pernicia’s curse.
She mentioned the question of the milk quietly to Aunt one evening, and Aunt looked at Rosie for a while, her fingers, and foot on the treadle, continuing unfalteringly their business of spinning. Rosie was trying to feed her unwanted supper porridge to the left-hand fire-dog, which was her favourite. Katriona couldn’t herself see the difference, but, knowing Narl, who had made the pair, there was one. Both bore hound faces, with flying-back ears lying along their necks as from a rush of wind, and open-mouthed, eager expressions. Rosie was murmuring to her friend; the only clear phrase, often repeated, was “It’s good for you.” Katriona, watching, saw the dog-aspect of Rosie more clearly than usual in the moving fire-shadows. There was that sheepdog, but there had been other sheepdogs; there had also been that gaunt, intense, solemn hound not unlike what must have been in Narl’s mind when he made the fire-dogs; and a large, slow, thoughtful, heavy-coated dog rather like a small bear.
“I can’t see it,” said Aunt, later, when Rosie was in bed, “which is not to say it isn’t there. I don’t know, my dear. She’s happy, she’s healthy, she’s growing . . . she is certainly growing . . . and we love her.” Katriona could hear the tiny waver in Aunt’s voice as she said “we love her,” because they did—and she was the princess.
Small spider weave, thought Katriona. And a poem is the most I can give her, my dear, my only darling! When will she send word?
“It will have to be enough,” said Aunt.
Mostly it was enough, except for the dreams when an assortment of terrifyingly grand or villainous-looking persons turned up on their threshold, quoting the rhyme, and demanding the princess’ return. Katriona was grateful that Rosie got into life so enthusiastically; this made her seem, to Katriona, like a real member of the village. But then what did Katriona know of princesses? Maybe they were all like real members of villages, except that they were princesses.
That was the year Rosie was four. It was a few weeks after Rosie cut her hair that something more disturbing happened.
CHAPTER 7
After the princess’ calamitous name-day four years ago, there had been a great upheaval at the palace, and the wife’s cousin’s sister-in-law of Aunt’s robin friend found that she no longer lived outside the queen’s quarters. And then, because the queen no longer had her chambers there, the robin found that the garden that was her territory and her delight was changed, in a robin’s opinion, very much to its detriment; and so she and her young family moved house.
Indeed, they left the palace grounds altogether. There was a thick new sadness that hung round the royal residence, and this being the country it was, it was a chalky sort of sadness, and the air was dusty grey with it, and birds preferred to nest elsewhere. Aunt and Katriona found themselves, for the first time in Katriona’s memory, depending on Cairngorm’s pub for news of the royal family.
There they heard, a month or two after the visit from the second herald, that the queen and princess, immediately after the terrible name-day, had been smuggled away from the court in the royal city to a stronghold called Fordingbridge in the western mountains, and that three-quarters of the royal magicians and the two finest regiments of the army had gone with them. It was a good sign, everyone said, that the king and queen felt secure enough in their provisions for their daughter’s protection to let it be known where she was held. The king had stayed in the royal city, where he could best rule his country; but he visited his family often. Sometimes the queen returned with him to the city for a little while, for her new sorrow and dignity made her husband’s people love her more than they had when she had merely been a good listener to boring speeches; and they begged to see her. She was known not to be in the best of health, but everyone but Katriona and Aunt believed that she had her little daughter under her care.
Although there was a hiatus in Aunt’s private sources of information, the animal kingdom was, in fact, keenly interested in what was happening to the royal family. There had been robins, and sparrows, and starlings, and rabbits, and mice, and beetles, and many other easily overlooked creatures, who had seen Pernicia’
s appearance at the princess’ name-day, and they didn’t have to understand human language to recognise very bad news for everybody when they saw it. The dog-fox Katriona first met had reached his own conclusions independently but most of the other animals that helped her and the princess on their long journey knew perfectly well whom they were helping and, even if they didn’t know the human tale of the old enmity between Pernicia and a queen of long ago, why. Secrets were something animals were naturally good at (something humans had had to give up when they became humans, like a decent sense of smell). The fox was ashamed of himself later (as much as foxes are ever ashamed), when he heard the full story. He had known he was talking out of turn.
The princess’ flight across the country was well concealed in the minds and memories of the animals before Katriona, wet and sneezing, arrived at Aunt’s door with a baby in a sling. Even the robins had refrained, with heroic, unrobinlike discretion, from telling Aunt why Katriona was so long on the way, although they had kept her informed of her niece’s curiously slow progress—and it had been obvious enough to Aunt from the explosive air of repressed excitement that some considerable mystery was involved.
Robins’ endless discussion of infractions of their territorial boundaries are chiefly an excuse to exchange news and gossip. The communication line broken by the robins moving out of the palace garden was rearranged and reconnected. Via an uncle’s third cousin twice removed, one of Aunt’s robins, too young to have been involved in the baby princess’ hairs-breadth escape, innocently brought the news, shortly after Rosie first learned to walk, that there was something very odd about the way the stronghold where the princess was now living felt, and that when the king and queen returned there after some time away, even the thought of seeing their daughter again seemed unable to lift their spirits, and they rode through the fortress gate as bow-shouldered as they had ridden out.