The Spellcoats (21 page)

We journeyed through forest beyond the lake. Robin was bounced over tree roots and thrown out of the cart once. It seemed to me that much more of it would kill her.

“Go and tell the King the One wants us to stop until Robin's well,” said Duck.

It was an excellent idea. “Suppose I tell him the One wants us to be left behind in an empty cottage, on our own?” I said.

“He won't do that,” said Duck. “He wants the One.” He was right.

Our King readily agreed to camp until Robin was well. “Still looking very peaky, isn't she?” he said. He pointed through the budding green. “Suppose she rests up in that old mill over there. We'll camp outside, and the village over the River can send us food. We'll give her a week or so. There don't seem to be any Heathen in these parts.”

I had no idea we were near the River. It was all forest to me. Imagine my surprise when I found it was the mill across the River from Shelling—the one that is haunted by a woman, that they say the River forbade them to use. I told the King it would do perfectly. I hoped I would see Zwitt's face when he knew.

Jay went over to Shelling in the punt Uncle Kestrel keeps on the millpond and gave them the King's orders. Shortly Zwitt and some other people came over in boats, bringing a few things and protesting about the rest. I think food was short. The floods had been in all the gardens. But Zwitt would protest if he was sitting on a heap of vegetables a mile high and someone asked him for a carrot.

Zwitt saw Hern with the King and knew him at once. He asked to speak to the King alone. I looked out from the mill and saw them walking together among the forget-me-nots by the millrace. Zwitt, by his face, was uttering dire warnings. Our King was laughing and patting Zwitt on the back. I see why our King was so pleased. Now he knows that we told the truth and the One is indeed the One. I think he came to Shelling on purpose. It is what I would have done in his place, I suppose, but my heart is heavy. He will never let us go now. Hern says Zwitt made the King promise him twice as much as usual, as a fee for leaving us alone. But promises are easy.

“Your friends across the water tell me you put bad spells on them,” Jay said to me. “Are you a witch?”

“I wish I was. I'd—I'd turn their feet back to front!” I said.

“Temper, temper, now!” said Jay.

I am still very bitter. From upstairs in the mill, where I sleep, I can see the ruins of our house. Zwitt did that. It was to soothe my bitterness and my worry about Robin that I began to long to weave. Then came my dream. Then Uncle Kestrel.

We made Robin a bed in the dry room on the ground floor. It has a door, for loading flour, which opens onto the River, and I have this open in the daytime so that Robin can see the River. All the time I have been weaving it was at its most beautiful. The water is a deep, shining green, like an eye in the light. It flows lazily, slowly. The sun slants down in beams and turns the water green-gold. Midges circle in. Every so often a fish leaps, or a willow bud falls heavily and swims to the doorstep. But Robin does not enjoy it. And I find it so hard to be patient with her.

That first day I was near shaking her. As we were settled, I wanted Gull with us, where I could see him. If we exchanged him for the Young One, no one but us would know the difference. Robin unwrapped Gull and let me have him. But she would not have the Young One in exchange.

“I won't have him near me,” she whined. “Take him away.”

I have had to hide the Young One in my bed upstairs. If I even speak of him, Robin begins to cry. And yet she clings to the One so that even I hardly get a glimpse of him. The King came in that evening—as he comes every evening—to inquire after his “golden gentleman.” Robin would not let our King look at the One at all.

“I wish the King would leave us alone,” she said.

Then Sweetheart put a mouse on her bed, and you would have thought it was a poisonous snake. Then Jay came in. Jay made a lot of noise and merriment. He says laughter cures. But the reason he came, I saw of a sudden, is that he is courting Robin. I was shocked. It does not seem right when Robin is ill. Jay is quite old and has loved many women. He boasts of it. That shocked me, too. But I like Jay all the same. My head was in a muddle about it.

“Do you like Jay enough to marry him?” I asked Robin when Jay had gone.

Robin shuddered. “No! I can't bear the way the stump of his arm wags about!”

It is true. Jay's stump of arm seems to have a life of its own. I do not like to look at it either. “Don't you like him at all?” I said. “He likes you.”

“Don't talk about it! I don't want him! I shan't ever marry!” Robin said frantically. I could have kicked myself. It was gone midnight before she was calm enough to go to sleep.

When she did, I opened the door to the River and sat thinking. It seemed to be all my fault, this, because I had twice wronged the One. As I sat, I thought I saw a light in the River. I knelt in the doorway and stared, terrified, down into the green-gold depths of the water. There was a huge shadow there, like a man with a long nose and a bent head. If it had not been that I had only just got Robin to sleep, I would have screamed. I was sure it was Kankredin.

“That one-armed jokeman says my Robin is poorly,” Uncle Kestrel said. He was rowing toward the door with a tiny light in his boat. Where my shadow came from, I do not know.

It did me good to see him. “It's no good going for mussels,” I said. “The King's camp is by the millpond.”

“I know that, my love,” he said. “I came to see how you all did.”

I knelt on the doorstep, crying a little, and told him about our travels, our King and the One. But I did not tell him about Gull. He thinks Gull died on the way.

“Kings and Undying are like that,” said Uncle Kestrel. “They take no account of the trouble they cause. You make sure to keep Robin here until she's well. That's what matters. Is there any little thing I can get you from your house?”

“You're the only person in Shelling I love!” I said. “Did they break my loom as well as the roof?”

“Now don't get so fierce,” he said. “They did not. They only took their feelings out on the walls and roof.” Then he said something that has made me angry ever since. “I'm not excusing them,” he said, “but you gave them provocation, you know, even Robin. You all knew you were different, and you acted as if you were better. It made for hard feelings.” I was too angry to speak. “You want your loom brought?” he said, and I had to forgive him.

“And my bobbins and my shuttles and my needles and my spinning wheel,” I said. “And don't forget my yarn.”

“You're trying to sink my boat!” he said. “Sometimes you sound just like your aunt.” But he brought them, every one, and my spindles, which I had forgotten to ask for. I have never seen a boat so packed with wool. The loom was perched on top. I had to wake Duck to help me drag it indoors. He could not think what I was so excited about, but I think Uncle Kestrel understood.

Since then I have been weaving, unless Robin finds the noise too disturbing. The King is amazed at my industry. Indeed, I am often very tired, though it gets easier and easier. But I am afraid Robin will die, and I weave to take my mind off it. I pretended to myself that when the coat was finished, Robin would be well, but she is not. Then as soon as it was finished, I dreamed once more that my mother was telling me to think. And I found I had it all to do again.

The morning I started this second coat, Duck lost patience with me. Lately, because he is so bored, he has been spinning for me, and he was at work outside by the millwheel, which has clumps of forget-me-nots growing all over it. “Of all the boring, stupid, gloomy people!” Duck said. He flung the spindle down and waved his arm at the sun-scattered brightness over all the green growing things.

“Look at it! Look at you! You're even worse than Hern!”

I burst into tears and said I hated the King.

“Who cares?” said Duck. “He's keeping Gull safe, and us safe from Zwitt. What more do you want?”

“It's all my fault,” I sobbed. “I betrayed the One to him. And I made you leave the One in his fire when we should have taken him to Kankredin. If we'd had the One then, everything would have been different.”

“You're just letting yourself be taken in by what the King thinks,” Duck said. He took up the spindle and poked moodily in the ground with it.

“I know I didn't obey the One,” I said.

“Yes, you did! Don't be a fool,” Duck said, stabbing with the spindle. “The One
arranged
it that way! He wasn't strong enough to meet Kankredin. If we'd waited for him, he probably wouldn't have come out of the fire at all. The One alone knows what would have happened if Hern had poured water on it!”

“Stop ruining my spindle,” I said. “Are you calling the One a coward?”

Duck looked sideways at me through his hair. He ties it back with a band, but it always falls round his face in white tendrils. “No,” he said, and he squatted there, using my spindle to draw patterns round a clump of grass. He reminded me of someone. “The One is deep,” he said, “like the River. Tanamil knows. He's the one we should have asked.”

“So you understand it all?” I said scornfully. “Tell me.”

Duck looked sideways again. “You wouldn't believe me unless you'd worked it all out yourself, anyway.”

I knew who Duck reminded me of—Ked, the ungrateful Heathen brat, when he was lying. I wanted to throw him in the mud in the empty millrace for making fun of me. I shoved him over sideways instead, for spoiling my spindle, and went raging into the mill.

I was so angry that I took my rugcoat off the loom and carried it to the River door to read for myself, by my own account, that Duck was talking nonsense. First, I held it up and looked at it. It is a very handsome coat in gloomy colors, touched here and there with bright yellow and burning red. It is also very large. In the front the gloomy colors gather up the center into a shape, and that shape is the same shadow with a long nose and a bent head that I saw when Uncle Kestrel came. I turned it round hastily, when I saw it. There is a lightness on the back that begins from the time we met Tanamil. I did not see that the same shape was there at once. But it is. It is made of grays and sallow greens, which are harder to see. Across the neck of the long-nosed shadow, near the hem, runs a band woven in that expressive twist which Tanamil showed me. It expresses my terror of Kankredin and his soulnet. Nothing else goes right across the coat, except the place where I unpicked my long lament for my father. I do not think even Robin would see this unless I told her it was there.

I was so frightened when I saw that double shadow that I dropped the coat. My skin crawled, and I wanted to wake Robin. But I said to myself, I made this weaving. I wove in it that it held the meaning of our journey. No one is frightened of a thing they made themselves. Read it, Tanaqui, and find out what you meant.

I knelt on the floor, in the doorway, and read what I had woven. It took nearly all morning, even though there were places I moved over very rapidly, remembering what I had woven. It was comforting at first. Here were we all, Robin, Hern, Duck, and I, and poor Gull, being ourselves, and there was my own beloved River in his grandest time, being as usual a part of our lives. And I noticed many things. I have thought about them all these three days I have been weaving my second coat.

I had read down to the place where we found the cat Sweetheart when I could have sworn I heard a seagull cry. I looked up at the red, sandy Gull, beside my loom, first. Then I looked out over the leaf-speckled green River. There were no seagulls near Shelling. I thought I had imagined the sound, from reading about the gulls on Sweetheart's island.

Then Sweetheart herself jumped down the ladder to the upper floor. Cats often appear when you think of them. It is one of their strange ways. Sweetheart was carrying a mouse. She jumped on Robin's bed to give it to Robin.

I knew what Robin would think of that when she woke. I got up to take the mouse away. And moving upright gave me a sight of the other bank of the River, just below the last house in Shelling. I saw Zwitt under the clump of hawthorns there—the may is over now—and another man moving to meet him, as if secretly. This other had darkened his light hair and further tried to disguise himself with a garish rugcoat—and a shoddier piece of weaving I seldom saw—but I knew him by his mauve pointed face and crooked mouth. He was Kankredin's mage, the one with
hidden death
in his gown. I could see the gown looped up under the dreadful rugcoat.

I dared not move while he talked to Zwitt. I was halfway across the dark room by then. And there was my coat, laid out in the doorway, in the full light above the River. Zwitt was nodding, talking eagerly, and pointing directly at the mill. He was telling
hidden death
where we were.

“Tanaqui!” Robin called out fretfully. “Sweetheart's put another mouse on my bed!”

“Ssh!” I said. “She does it because she likes you.”

“Take it away,” Robin said. “Take it
away
!”

“Oh, please shut up,” I whispered. “Something awful's happened!”