Rose Daughter by Robin McKinley Page A

he
could ever remember making. He would have laughed, now, had he the strength, at
what seemed to him suddenly the wild wastefulness of his younger self. For the
truth was that he had no wish now to spurn what appeared to be offered to him.
He was grateful to have his life, to be granted the hope that he might, after
all, see his daughters again.
    But he wished someone would come and reassure him they did
know he was here. And he wished that whoever it was that came might be more or
less human. Or at least not too large. There had been a sorcerer he had had mercantile
dealings with who had a hydra to answer his door. He’d had to call on the
sorcerer himself because his clerks were all too frightened to go. But he had
been younger then too.
    They came to a room. It was a small room for the size of the
palace, but a very large room to a man who lived in Rose Cottage. The soft
crimson carpet of the corridor con—
    tinued here, and the candelabra on the walls were ornate
gold, with great golden pendant drops made to look like dripping candle wax,
and the wallpaper was a weave of red and gold, patterned to look like ripples
of fabric bound with golden cords. There was a fire in a fireplace large enough
to roast the pony, and a table drawn up beside it, with a place laid for only
one person but with enough food for twenty.
    The merchant gave a great sigh and unsaddled the pony. She
staggered forward and stood, swaying and steaming, in front of the fire; then
she turned her head and ate three apples out of a silver-gilt bowl on the
table. “I wish there was hay for you,” said the merchant, picking up a loaf of
bread and breaking it into pieces with his hands and offering it to her; she
ate it greedily. But as he held it out to her, something caught at the corner
of his eye; he looked over her shoulder and saw ... a golden heap of hay in a
little alcove on the other side of the fireplace, opposite the table. He would
have sworn that neither hay nor alcove had been there a minute before. But when
the pony had linished the bread, he turned her gently round, and she went lo
the hay at once, as he sat down at the table.
    He did not fall to as quickly as she; he was too worried
about his host. But he was tired and hungry almost past bearing, and he tried
to comfort himself with the thought that there was plenty of food here for two,
should the master of this place appear after all—or perhaps his hydra. He
looked again at the amount of food provided, and the single place setting, and
worried about the appetite of the creature usually catered for. Finally, and
half embarrassed, the merchant moved the single place setting round the edge of
the table, so that he was not sitting at the head but only on the master’s
right hand.
    He ate eagerly but hesitantly, looking often towards the
mouth of the lit corridor where he had entered, taking great pains to spill
nothing on the snowy tablecloth, laying the serving spoons exactly back where
he found them, choosing nothing that would by its absence spoil the elegant
appearance of the whole. By the time he was no longer hungry, his eyelids
seemed to be made of lead; with a tremendous effort of will he stood up from
the table, thinking he would lie down in front of the fire to sleep. His knee
knocked against something, and he discovered a little bed with many blankets
drawn up close behind him where he had sat at the table. He shivered because he
knew there had been no bed there earlier and he had heard nothing. But there it
was, and he was tired. He stayed awake jusl enough longer to pull the biggest
blanket off the bed and throw it over the now-dozing pony.
    He woke to the sound of munching. There was more hay in the
alcove, and his pony was going at it busily. There was also a bucket of water
and another of the remains of a feed of mixed corn. The blanket was still over
her, barely; it hung down to her toes on one side and was halfway up her ribs
on the other, and it was caked with rnud and