Spindle's End Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Part One

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  Part Two

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  Part Three

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  Part Four

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  Part Five

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  Praise of the novels of Robin McKinley

  SPINDLE’S END

  A New York Times Bestseller

  “Full of humor and romance as well as magic and adventure . . . with an ending that has a decided twist . . . Spellbinding.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “Dense with sensual detail. The author sets her simple but elegant plot along the boundary line between fairy tale and fantasy. . . . A believable, fully imagined fantasy world . . . The fun lies in following McKinley’s meandering garden path all the way till the end . . . A rich and rewarding read.”

  —Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books

  “A captivating tale, rich in lush imagery and replete with startling, engrossing characters . . . McKinley’s greatest gift lies in her liquid language, so full of heart and evocative images that the reader is spellbound.” —Voice of Youth Advocates

  ROSE DAUGHTER

  A Booklist Editor’s Choice

  “[A] heady mix of fairy tale, magic and romance that has the power to exhilarate.” —Publishers Weekly

  “This luxuriant retelling of the story of the Beauty and the Beast . . . is full of silvery images.” —Kirkus Reviews

  “Readers will be enchanted, in the best sense of the word.”

  —Booklist

  “Every sentence and every occurrence seems infused by magic.” —Fantasy & Science Fiction

  THE HERO AND THE CROWN

  A Newbery Medal Book

  An ALA Best Book for Young Adults

  An ALA Notable Book

  “Refreshing . . . haunting . . . an utterly engrossing fantasy.”

  —The New York Times

  “A work of considerable imaginative power.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “McKinley knows her geography of fantasy, the nuances of language, the atmosphere of magic.” —The Washington Post

  “McKinley has created an epic heroine in Aerin . . . a powerful fantasy.” —Fantasy Review

  “Beautifully rendered . . . McKinley’s battle scenes are galvanizing and her romantic ones stirring.” —Booklist

  “As richly detailed and elegant as a medieval tapestry . . . vibrant, witty, compelling, the story is the stuff of which true dreams are made.” —Horn Book

  “Robin McKinley’s Damar books are among the finest sword and sorcery being written today.” —Locus

  THE BLUE SWORD

  “A new language, a new landscape, and a new people—all unforgettable.” —Horn Book

  “Any book that, at one point or another, reminded me of The Sheikh, Gunga Din, Islandia, and The Lord of the Rings can’t be anything but a true original.” —Asimov’s Science Fiction

  THE OUTLAWS OF SHERWOOD

  “[McKinley] richly restores the textures that time has worn to bare narrative threads.” —The New York Times

  “In the tradition of T. H. White’s reincarnation of King Arthur, a novel that brings Robin Hood . . . delightfully to life.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  THE DOOR IN THE HEDGE

  “Robin McKinley paints a magical landscape that will delight and enchant hearts young and old.”—Joan D. Vinge

  “The Door in the Hedge opens onto a world of magic that is both muscular and enchanting. Robin McKinley obviously loves the music of the old tales, but she adds melodies all her own, and that is what makes these stories so very very special and so very very unforgettable.”—Jane Yolen

  “This collection should interest readers of all ages who never tire of wizards and fairyland.” —The Washington Post

  “McKinley, in these stories, is afraid neither of great beauty nor of great evil. She has the gift of taking these stories and retelling them with love.” —Science Fiction Review

  “Adds subtlety, complexity, and suspense to what is only tersely stated in Grimm. Like a musical theme and variation the telling is full of digressions and decorations—arpeggios of ideas and language—that add new depth to an old tale.”

  —Horn Book

  DEERSKIN

  “A fierce and beautiful story of rage and compassion, betrayal and loyalty, damage and love . . . A fairy tale for adults, one you’ll never forget.” —Alice Hoffman

  “I did so much enjoy Robin McKinley’s Deerskin . . . I respect her writing and reread her constantly, finding new perceptions each time.”—Anne McCaffrey

  “An enormously powerful novel . . . dreamlike, urgent, inexplicable. . . . Robin McKinley has created a world where nightmare and hope exist side by side.”

  —Patricia A. McKillip

  “A wonderful story, wonderfully told.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Award-winning author McKinley turns her storytelling acumen and stylistic grace toward an adult audience . . . a classic journey-tale and a parable for modern times.”

  —Library Journal

  “Superlative.” —Booklist

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  SPINDLE’S END

  An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2000 by Robin McKinley

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission. For information address: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is www.penguinputnam.com

  eISBN : 978-1-440-62494-0

  ACE®

  Ace Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ACE and the “A” design

  are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To the Lodge, my Woodwold, and to the other Dickinsons who love it too

  Part One

  CHAPTER 1

  The magic in that country was so thick and tenacious that it settled over the land like chalk-dust and over floors and shelves like slightly sticky plaster-dust. (Housecleaners in that country earned unusually good wages.) If you lived in that country, you had to de-scale your kettle of its encrusta tion of magic at least once a week, because if you didn’t, you might find yourself pouring hissing snakes or pond slime into your teapot instead of water. (It didn’t have to be anything scary or unpleasant, like snakes or slime, especially in a cheerful household—magic tended to reflect the atmosphere of the place in which it found itself—but if you want a cup of tea, a cup of lavender-and-gold pansies or ivory thimbles is unsatisfactory. And while the pansies—put dry in a vase—would probably last a day, looking
like ordinary pansies, before they went greyish-dun and collapsed into magic dust, something like an ivory thimble would begin to smudge and crumble as soon as you picked it up.)

  The best way to do it was to have a fairy as a member of your household, because she (it was usually a she) could lay a finger on the kettle just as it came to a boil (absentminded fairies could often be recognised by a pad of scar-tissue on the finger they favoured for kettle-cleaning) and murmur a few counter-magical words. There would be a tiny inaudible thock, like a seed-pod bursting, and the water would stay water for another week or (maybe) ten days.

  De-magicking a kettle was much too little and fussy and frequent a job for any professional fairy to be willing to be hired to do it, so if you weren’t related to one you had to dig up a root of the dja vine, and dry it, and grate it, producing a white powder rather like plaster dust or magic, and add a pinch of that to your kettle once a week. More often than that would give everyone in the household cramp. You could tell the households that didn’t have a fairy by the dja vines growing over them. Possibly because they were always having their roots disturbed, djas developed a reputation for being tricky to grow, and prone to sudden collapse; fortunately they rerooted easily from cuttings. “She’d give me her last dja root” was a common saying about a good friend.

  People either loved that country and couldn’t imagine living anywhere else, or hated it, left it as soon as they could, and never came back. If you loved it, you loved coming over the last hill before your village one day in early autumn and hearing the corn-field singing madrigals, and that day became a story you told your grandchildren, the way in other countries other grandparents told the story of the day they won the betting pool at the pub, or their applecake won first place at the local fete. If you lived there, you learned what you had to do, like putting a pinch of dried dja vine in your kettle once a week, like asking your loaf of bread to remain a loaf of bread before you struck it with a knife. (The people of this country had developed a reputation among outsiders for being unusually pious, because of the number of things they appeared to mutter a blessing over before they did them; but in most cases this was merely the asking of things it was safer to ask to remain nonmagical first, while work or play or food preparation or whatever was being got on with. Nobody had ever heard of a loaf of bread turning into a flock of starlings for anyone they knew, but the nursery tale was well known, and in that country it didn’t pay to take chances. The muttered words were usually only some phrase such as “Bread, stay bread” or, in upper-class households, “Bread, please oblige me,” which was a less wise form, since an especially impish gust of magic could choose to translate “oblige” just as it chose.)

  Births were very closely attended, because the request that things stay what they were had to be got in quickly, birth being a very great magic, and, in that country, likely to be teased into mischief. It was so common an occurrence as to occasion no remark when a new-sown field began coming up quite obviously as something other than what was planted, and by a week later to have reverted to what the farmer had put in. But while, like the pansies and the thimbles, this kind of magic was only a temporary aberration, it could be very embarrassing and onerous while it lasted. Farmers in that country worried more about falling asleep during the birthing times of their stock than they worried about the weather; the destruction a litter of baby taralians caused remained, even after it had reverted to piglets. No one knew how the wild birds and beasts negotiated this, but human parents-to-be would go to extreme lengths to ensure a fairy was on hand to say the birth-words over their new little one.

  Generally speaking the more mobile and water-dependent something was, the more likely magic was to get at it. This meant animals—and, of course, humans—were the most vulnerable. Rocks were pretty reliably rocks, except of course when they were something else that had been turned into rocks. But rocks themselves sort of slept through magic attacks, and even if some especially wild and erratic bit of magic decided to deck out a drystone wall as a marble fountain, you could still feel the drystone wall if you closed your eyes and touched the fountain, and the water would not make you wet. The lichen that grew on the rock, however, could be turned into daisies quite convincing enough to make you sneeze if real daisies did so; and the insects and small creatures that crept over the lichen were more susceptible yet.

  (There was an idea much beloved and written about by this country’s philosophers that magic had to do with negotiating the balance between earth and air and water; which is to say that things with legs or wings were out of balance with their earth element by walking around on feet or, worse, flying above the earth in the thin substance of air, obviously entirely unsuitable for the support of solid flesh. The momentum all this inappropriate motion set up in their liquid element unbalanced them further. Spirit, in this system, was equated with the fourth element, fire. All this was generally felt to be a load of rubbish among the people who had to work in the ordinary world for a living, unlike philosophers living in academies. But it was true that a favourite magical trick at fetes was for theatrically minded fairies to throw bits of chaff or seed-pods or conkers in the air and turn them into things before they struck the ground, and that the trick worked better if the bits of chaff or seed-pods or conkers were wet.)

  Slower creatures were less susceptible to the whims of wild magic than faster creatures, and creatures that flew were the most susceptible of all. Every sparrow had a delicious memory of having once been a hawk, and while magic didn’t take much interest in caterpillars, butterflies spent so much time being magicked that it was a rare event to see ordinary butterflies without at least an extra set of wings or a few extra frills and iridescences, or bodies like tiny human beings dressed in flower petals. (Fish, which flew through that most dangerous element, water, were believed not to exist. Fishy-looking beings in pools and streams were either hallucinations or other things under some kind of spell, and interfering with, catching, or—most especially—eating fish was strictly forbidden. All swimming was considered magical. Animals seen doing it were assumed to be favourites of a local water-sprite or dangerously insane; humans never tried.)

  There did seem to be one positive effect to living involuntarily steeped in magic; everyone lived longer. More humans made their century than didn’t; birds and animals often lived to thirty, and fifty was not unheard of. The breeders of domestic animals in that country were unusually sober and responsible individuals, since any mistakes they made might be around to haunt them for a long time.

  Although magic was ubiquitous and magic-workers crucially necessary, the attitude of the ordinary people toward magic and its manipulators was that it and they were more than a bit chancy and not to be relied on, however fond you were of your aunt or your next-door neighbour. No one had ever seen a fairy turn into an eagle and fly up above the trees, but there were nursery tales about that, too, and it was difficult not to believe that it or something even more unnerving was somehow likely. Didn’t farmers grow more stolid and earthy over a lifetime of farming? Wasn’t it likely that a lifetime of handling magic made you wilder and more capricious?

  It was a fact much noticed but rarely discussed (and never in any fairy’s hearing) that while fairies rarely married or (married or not) had children, there never seemed to be any fewer fairies around, generation after generation. So presumably magic ran in the blood of the people the way it ran in all other watery liquids, and sometimes there was enough of it to make someone a fairy, and sometimes there was not. (One of the things ordinary people did not like to contemplate was how many people there might be who were, or could have been, fairies, and were masquerading as ordinary people by the simple process of never doing any magic when anyone was around to notice.) But there was a very strong tradition that the rulers of this country must be utterly without magic, for rulers must be reliable, they must be the earth and the rock underfoot for their people. And if any children of that country’s rulers had ever been born fairies, there was n
ot only no official history of it; there were not even any stories about it.

  This did mean that when the eldest child of each generation of the ruling family came to the age to be married (and, just to be safe, his or her next-younger and perhaps next-younger-after-that siblings) there was a great search and examination of possible candidates in terms of their magiclessness first, and their honesty, integrity, intelligence, and so on, second. (The likelihood of their getting along comfortably with their potential future spouses barely rated a mention on the councillors’ list.) So far—so far as the country’s histories extended, which was a little over a thousand years at the time of this story—the system had worked; and while there were stories of the thick net of anti-magic that the court magicians set up for even the cleanest, most magic-antipathetic betrothed to go through, well, it worked, didn’t it, and that was all that mattered.