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Irene has become something of a story. The princess who had beaten the goblins, who always travels with a miner boy whom the king himself consults for strategy in the new war against the underground. She is the princess who does not eat pigeons, neither stewed nor boiled nor in a pie, nor any other fashion, but who is learning how to spin despite not sewing well, who always smells of roses.
Who will not let them kill the goblins. She had helped to kill Froglip, and she will kill a goblin or a human trying to kill her, but only that -- no more. No extinction, no hunting. This is her own magic, right against wrong, even when no one else will help her. They aren’t animals, after all. She’d seen their village underground. Irene has still never seen stone so finely crafted. With different rulers, maybe... she still has hope of a truce, eventually.
Curdie had told her how the goblins -- how Froglip had said they had, anyway -- had once lived above ground with them. Irene cannot think it fair to have driven them underground, but with the way they treat each other and the way they treat their pets, who can, Curdie says, be sweet... nor can she think of letting them live with them, with Curdie and his parents, with Lootie, with her king-papa, with any of her people.
That's why she's here. She has to tell them all what happened, pass the message. A royal herald would be believed, but for Irene to come herself, that they may all see their princess safe and whole, unmarried still, her proud, gentle father’s beloved daughter, and telling them the story...
"My nanny," Irene says to the crowd, "Always told me that you never knew when strange things might happen. I," she ducks her head, ashamed, hair falling over her cheek. "I never believed her. Until the goblins came up to steal my kitten, and then... "
She has already told this story many times, in many villages. There is always a guard around her as she sleeps, and Curdie stays awake beside her, a club ready at his hand. Musicians are always on hand, in shifts. Her king-papa had learned what Curdie and the other miners had to teach very swiftly, and so had his guards.
Their shoes are all much sturdier now, with hammered metal between leather soles. The better to trod upon goblin feet with.
The men and women of the villages they visit learn very quickly, too, especially when they learn from Irene telling them about Froglip fighting Curdie, and the feel of his soft and clammy, greyish-white foot beneath her clenched fist.
Their eyes always seem to spark more brightly when she moves among them in her dusty travelling dress, circlet on her brow and a single rose tucked in her hair. She uses her softest, most castle-polished speech and all the airs Lootie ever called regal, meeting their smiles with her own, seeing them recognize her as their princess who had been threatened, been aided, fought, and won, instead of only their dutiful king’s young and sheltered sole child.
Irene is a symbol. She is the victory the goblins didn't have, more important than the ruined castle still being repaired many miles behind them and the people who will never sleep easily again. Though Curdie had been wrong -- the people in the castle are not the only ones who do not know about the goblins. She would feel far worse about destroying their safe illusions were it not for the need.
Her king-papa hadn't been happy about Irene traveling around the kingdom so soon after the attack on the castle, especially when he learned that she didn’t plan to return until every hamlet had been warned about the warren of tunnels the miners had discovered after the waters had receded, stretching on for miles underneath the kingdom, but she'd pointed out that she hadn't been safe inside those four walls at all, no matter how many guards he had set. Not that there was a floor to go with those same four sturdy stone walls anymore. And besides, with Curdie with her...
"And Irene with me," Curdie had said, smile flickering over his mouth. "I'll keep her safe, and she can keep me safe. And get me out of any trouble I got into."
"And my grandmother's lamp up in the sky will light our road! Besides, Father, I can always find my way safely."
On her finger, her grandmother's ring glitters with a heart of rose-red fire, just as it had then. She did not mention to him that the thread would show her the way, but it would not guarantee a path. That she must make for herself, but she will always have the option.
He had, in the end, let her go. Irene in her turn had let him believe that if he had finally forbidden her from visiting her people to warn them personally, she would have stayed where she was put and not begged her grandmother’s aid one more time.
She has not tried the hidden door, nor climbed the stairs, nor raced from room to room amongst dust and cobwebs since she realized her grandmother’s intentions. Irene doesn’t want to find them empty again. She prefers to think of her grandmother spinning, silver hair glimmering in the firelight, as she must have done for years and years and years, smiling down from her tower at Irene and Curdie and her king-papa.
Irene believes in hope. She believes in second chances. She believes that those alone are no longer good enough. Irene believes in goblins, and in magic rings, and in the power of a song, and in strange creatures in the woods, and in fires made of roses. In the usefulness of one really well-timed fist, sometimes the more the better but not always, and the necessity of standing up and singing. In grandmothers no one else has ever seen, and in her own kind of magic.
Sometimes when she spins, if she looks at it just right, her thread glitters.
Irene thinks that, when she has spun a fine enough thread, she will give a skein to Curdie.