Spindle's End

by Robin McKinley

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.)

And she saw awareness, or understanding, strike him as he looked, sharp as a knife, and where the invisible blade wounded him there bled hope and fear and longing – and something like resigned despair.

What is it? Can I help? I would do anything for you – when she realized, first, that he would not want her to have seen what she had seen, and second, that what she had barely stopped herself from saying was the truth.

And Rosie had just learnt she was in love with him.

Maybe this is just what love – that first burst of mutual love – was like.

The story is a very satisfactory one, is it not? My childhood vow, and then falling in love with a girl I meet at a country smith’s, when I too am in disguise, and she turns out to be the princess.

perhaps it was the hopelessness of her own love making her foolish,

Rosie leant forward, round the globe of hands, and kissed Peony on the lips.

‘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 recognize the signs.’

‘Narl, I’ve been in love with you forever.’

Did you ever know two humans so thick?

And the hay-bale mice, taking advantage of Flinx’s preoccupation, shot out of the back of the bale, dodged their way out of the yard, dashed across the common, and arrived, panting, to tell their relatives at the pub about the princess and the fairy smith.