“It’s not a weapon,” said the queen. “It’s your own magic. And a scratch is all that was needed.”
The girl’s blood soaked into the thread that had once been wrapped about the spindle, the thread that ran from the spindle to the raw wool in the old woman’s hand.
The girl looked down at the blood staining her dress, and at the blood on the thread, and she said only, “It was just a prick of the skin, nothing more.” She seemed confused.
The noise on the stairs was getting louder. A slow, irregular shuffling, as if a hundred sleepwalkers were coming up a stone spiral staircase with their eyes closed.
The room was small, and there was nowhere to hide, and the room’s windows were two narrow slits in the stones.
The old woman, who had not slept in so many decades, said, “You took my dreams. You took my sleep. Now, that’s enough of all that.” She was a very old woman. Her fingers were gnarled, like the roots of a hawthorn bush. Her nose was long, and her eyelids drooped, but there was a look in her eyes in that moment that was the look of someone young.
She swayed, and then she staggered, and she would have fallen to the floor if the queen had not caught her first.
The queen carried the old woman to the bed, marvelling at how little she weighed, and placed her on the crimson counterpane. The old woman’s chest rose and fell.
The noise on the stairs was louder now. Then a silence, followed suddenly by a hubbub, as if a hundred people were talking at once, surprised and angry and confused.
The beautiful girl said, “But –” and now there was nothing girlish or beautiful about her. Her face fell and became less shapely. She reached down to the smallest dwarf, pulled his hand-axe from his belt. She fumbled with the axe, held it up threateningly, with hands all wrinkled and worn.
The queen drew her sword (the blade’s edge was notched and damaged from the thorns), but instead of striking, she took a step backwards.
“Listen! They are waking up,” she said. “They are all waking up. Tell me again about the youth you stole from them. Tell me again about your beauty and your power. Tell me again how clever you were, Your Darkness.”
When the people reached the tower room, they saw an old woman asleep on a bed, and they saw the queen, standing tall, and beside her, the dwarfs, who were shaking their heads, or scratching them.
They saw something else on the floor also: a tumble of bones, a hank of hair as fine and as white as fresh-spun cobwebs, a tracery of grey rags across it, and over all of it, an oily dust.
“Take care of her,” said the queen, pointing with the dark wooden spindle at the old woman on the bed. “She saved your lives.”
She left, then, with the dwarfs. None of the people in that room or on the steps dared to stop them or would ever understand what had happened.
mile or so from the castle, in a clearing in the Forest of Acaire, the queen and the dwarfs lit a fire of dry twigs, and in it they burned the thread and the fibre. The smallest dwarf chopped the spindle into fragments of black wood with his axe, and they burned them too. The wood chips gave off a noxious smoke as they burned, which made the queen cough, and the smell of old magic was heavy in the air.
Afterwards, they buried the charred wooden fragments beneath a rowan tree.
By evening they were on the outskirts of the forest, and had reached a cleared track. They could see a village across the hill, and smoke rising from the village chimneys.
“So,” said the dwarf with the brown beard. “If we head due west, we can be at the mountains by the end of the week, and we’ll have you back in your palace in Kanselaire within ten days.”
“Yes,” said the queen.
“And your wedding will be late, but it will happen soon after your return, and the people will celebrate, and there will be joy unbounded through the kingdom.”
“Yes,” said the queen. She said nothing, but sat on the moss beneath an oak tree and tasted the stillness, heartbeat by heartbeat.
There are choices, she thought, when she had sat long enough. There are always choices.
She made one.
The queen began to walk, and the dwarfs followed her.
“You do know we’re heading east, don’t you?” said one of the dwarfs.
“Oh yes,” said the queen.
“Well, that’s all right then,” said the dwarf.
They walked to the east, all four of them, away from the sunset and the lands they knew, and into the night.