Points of Departure: Stories

by Pat Murphy

  “Free me, and I will let him go,” hissed the voice of the lapping water.

  “But I can’t … I don’t know how ….”

  A whisper in the night: “Give to me of yourself, daughter of the moon,”

  In the moonlight, Tarsia could see the minstrel’s head fall back into the water and a swirl of silver bubbles rise.

  She stepped forward, ready to push the water nymph aside. Tarsia’s eyes were wet: tears of frustration, anger, sorrow, pain. A single tear escaped, trickled down her face and fell into the river. Just one.

  Tarsia grabbed the minstrel’s cloak and his arm and roughly dragged him toward the riverbank. At the sound of a long sigh, she looked up to see the moonlight chains on the water woman’s arms fade. The nymph raised her hands to the sky in an exultant gesture and the river sighed, “Thank you, daughter of the Lady.” The slim figure melted into the river, becoming one of the sparkling ripples in the current. The minstrel coughed and began to move.

  Tarsia lit a fire to dry him out, draping the dry cloak over his shoulders. She did not need it for warmth. She felt strong—no longer a thief, but daughter to the Lady.

  “How did you plan to get along without me to build fires?” she asked the minstrel.

  He shrugged his slim shoulders beneath the cloak. “I trust to luck to get me by. Luck and destiny.” His eyes were bright with reflected moonlight. “Sometimes they serve me well.”

  The next day’s ride took them out of the river canyon into the golden foothills. A boy tending a flock of goats by the river stared at them in amazement. “No one ever comes by that path,” he said.

  Tarsia laughed, cheered by the sight of the mountains ahead. “We came that way.”

  “What about the undine?” the boy asked.

  “What about the undine,” she said, still laughing as they rode past. “We sent her on her way.”

  They walked the horse along the river’s edge just past the goat herd. Ahead, they could see the buildings of a small town. The sun shone on Tarsia’s face and she saw the mountains, craggy peaks where the snow never melted.

  “Take me with you to the Lady’s court,” she asked the minstrel suddenly. “I know why you’re going there, and I want to come.”

  He looked startled. “You know? But …”

  She laughed. “Do you think I’m half-witted? No minstrel could afford a horse like this one or a fine leather saddle. I knew you were a thief when we first met.” She shook her head at the incredulous look on his face. “I know you are going to the Lady’s court to steal.”

  “I see,” he said slowly. “But if I’m a thief, why do you want to come with me?” He studied her face intently.

  For a moment, she considered telling the truth. But she was city bred, not trusting. “I want to see which of the stories about the Lady are true,” she said. “Besides, I can help you.” She could imagine herself at her mother’s side, rewarding the minstrel with gold and jewels for bringing her there, and she smiled.

  “It’s a dangerous place,” he said.

  “If you don’t take me, I will go alone,” she said. “If you take me, I’ll pay my way. I’ll pay for tonight’s lodging.”

  He nodded at last. “If you wish, I’ll take you. But it’s your choice.”

  The breeze whispered in the tall grass of the riverbank.

  “The wind is encouraging us,” Tarsia said.

  “The wind is laughing at us,” said the minstrel.

  In the inn that night, Tarsia and the minstrel were the center of a group of villagers. The boy with the goats had told what path they had followed. “You came past the undine,” the innkeeper said in amazement. “How did you do it?”

  Tarsia told them, leaving out only the water nymph’s sigh of farewell. “So the river is free of the Lady’s bond,” said a sour-faced farmer. “She will not be happy.” And the corners of his mouth turned up in a grim smile.

  “Softly, friend,” advised the innkeeper. “You would not want to be overheard ….”

  “We live in the shadow of her rule,” grumbled the farmer. “But maybe that will come to an end. My boy said he saw the footprints of a giant heading toward her court. These folks say the undine is free. Maybe the Lady …”

  “Only one of the Lady’s own blood can free the winds,” interrupted the innkeeper. “And she has no children.”

  “They say she had a daughter once,” said the minstrel quietly. “I studied the ancient stories as a student of the lute. They say that the child was captured in a battle with a neighboring city. The child was killed when the Lady would not release the winds to ransom the girl.”

  “And the Lady mourned for her daughter?” Tarsia added tentatively.

  The crowd of villagers laughed and the minstrel raised his eyebrows. “I doubt it. But the stories don’t really say.”

  A loose shutter banged in the rising wind outside the inn. The group of villagers that had gathered around Tarsia while she had been telling of the water nymph dispersed to other tables.

  “Some say that the winds that the Lady allows to blow carry tales back to her,” the minstrel told Tarsia softly. “No one knows for certain.” The shutter banged again and the conversations around them stopped for a moment, then resumed in hushed tones.

  “The land here was green once,” said the minstrel. “The people have become bitter as the land has become dry.”

  The minstrel began to pick the notes of a slow, sweet tune, and Tarsia went to the bar to bargain with the innkeeper for their night’s lodging. She took one of the minstrel’s coins from her pocket and it flashed silver in the firelight. The innkeeper weighed it in his hand and turned it over to examine both sides.

  “A coin of the south,” he said, then peered more closely at the profile etched on one side.

  The notes of the song that the minstrel was playing drifted across the room, over the sounds of conversation.

  He was picking out the sad ballad about the Lady that he had played the day before. The innkeeper glanced at him sharply, then looked back at the coin. He seemed to be listening to the sound of the wind prowling around the windows.

  “You are heading into the mountains from here?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Tarsia said cautiously. She knew that he was no friend of the Lady.

  He handed her back the coin. “Good luck,” he said.

  “Eat supper as you like, and you may sleep in the loft above the stable.”

  She frowned at him without comprehension. “What do you mean? Why?”

  He seemed to study the minstrel’s face in the dim light.

  “Consider it as payment for ridding the river of the undine.” He smiled at her for the first time, and took her hand to fold her fingers around the coin. “Good luck.”

  She pocketed the coin and returned unhappily to the minstrel’s side. She did not like bargains she did not understand. Like the giant, the innkeeper seemed to think that she knew more than she did.

  “Did you make a deal?” the minstrel asked.

  She sat down on the bench beside him, frowning.

  “We’re sleeping in the stable loft. No payment—he didn’t even argue.”

  “I see.” The minstrel nodded across the room to the innkeeper and the older man waved back, a gesture that was almost a salute.

  “There are things on which one does not bargain, little one,” said the minstrel. “You’ll have to learn that.”

  That night they bedded down in sweet-smelling hay.

  Outside, the wind bayed like a pack of hounds on the hunt, and Tarsia lay awake. She listened to the minstrel’s steady breathing and thought about the mountains and the court of the Lady. But she did not want to sleep and dream.

  When she wined restlessly in the hay, the minstrel blinked at her. “Lie down and go to sleep.”

  “I can’t,” she grumbled back, into the darkness that smelled of horses.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “I’m cold,” she said, and it was true—even wit
h his extra cloak around her, she was shivering.

  He raised himself on one elbow wearily, and lifted his cloak to invite her to lie beside him. She snuggled against his chest and he touched her cheek lightly. “What’s worrying you?” he asked. “Do you want to turn back?”

  “It used to be so simple,” she said, half to herself. “I used to be just a thief in the city, climbing on the city wall and laughing at people who were foolish enough to let me ick their pockets. So simple …”

  “What are you now?” Though his voice was soft, the question had edges.

  The winds bayed and she shivered. “No one. No one at all.”

  The minstrel rocked her gently in his arms and she listened to his steady breathing as he slept beside her.

  She slept, but not easily.

  The Lady’s hand was warm on Tarsia’s. Far below, the small thief could see the Village: toy huts set on a golden hillside. The mountains rose ahead of them: cold, gray, and forbidding.

  “We don’t need them,” the Lady said in her soft voice. “It doesn’t matter that they hate me.”

  The wind was in Tarsia’s face and the stars wheeled about her and she was high above them all. No one could touch her here. No one could put her in shackles or chase her into the sewers. She had come home.

  She was quiet when they left town the next morning.

  The same boy who had met them on the river path was grazing his goats on the hillside. “There are robbers in the mountains,” he called to them. “They’ll get you if you go up there.” The boy was cheerful at the prospect. “There’s a dragon, too. The Lady bound him there. If the robbers don’t get you, the dragon will find you and …”

  The minstrel urged the horse through the center of the boy’s herd and the goats scattered, bleating as they ran.

  The horse picked its way carefully up the dry slopes.

  Toward dusk, the grass gave way to rough rock and the animal began stumbling in the dying light. At Tarsia’s suggestion, they dismounted and led the horse. To shake the saddle-weariness from her legs, Tarsia ran ahead, dodging around rocks and scrambling up boulders, feeling almost as if she were at home on the walls of the city. She climbed a rock face and peered over the edge at the minstrel, considering surprising him from above. She saw a movement—a flash of brown—the trail ahead of him, movements in the brush on either side.

  “Hold it there.” The man who stepped from behind a boulder had an arrow pointed at the minstrel. Other men closed in from behind.

  “I have nothing of value,” said the minstrel casually.

  “Nothing at all.”

  “You’ve got a horse,” said the leader of the robbers. The man had a soft, lilting accent like the minstrel’s. “And I think we need it more than you do.” The man lifted the minstrel’s money pouch from his belt. Grinning, he hefted the pouch in his hand and gazed at the minstrel’s face.

  “Damn, but your face looks familiar. Do I know you …”

  His voice trailed off.

  “I’m going to the court of the Lady. I need the horse to get there,” the minstrel said.

  “A man of the South going to visit the Lady,” the leader wondered. “Strange. Since our foolish king has refused to pay tribute to the Lady, few from the South venture into her mountains.” As he spoke, he fumbled with the minstrel’s pouch, pouring a stream of coins into his hand.

  “Nothing of value,” he said then. “Just pretty gold and silver.” The robber held a coin up to the light of the dying sun—just as the innkeeper had held it up—and he whistled long and low. He glanced at the minstrel’s face and Tarsia could see his teeth flash in a grin. “Did I say our king was foolish? Not so foolish as his son.” The leader tossed the coin to another man in the circle. “Look. We’ve got a prince here.”

  The coin was tossed from hand to hand—each man inspecting the minstrel and the coin, the coin and the minstrel. Tarsia, peering over the edge, tried to remember the profile on the coin, briefly glimpsed in a dim light. She tugged a coin from her pocket and compared the cold metal etching with the minstrel’s face. They matched.

  “We follow our destiny and our luck,” the minstrel—or the prince?—was saying. “I am on a mission at my father’s request.”

  The leader’s grin broadened and he tossed a coin into the air so that it flashed gold as it tumbled back to his hand. “Bringing tribute,” the leader said.

  “No.” The winds were silent and the voice of the prince—once, the minstrel—was calm. “I have come to free the winds.”

  Tarsia leaned against the rock and listened to the rhythm of her heart—beating faster and faster. She heard the leader laugh. “What do you expect the Lady to say to that?”

  “I may have to destroy the Lady. But the winds must be free. For the sake of the land you have left behind, you must let me go.”

  “You appeal to the honor of a thief?” the leader said. “You are foolish indeed. And foolish to think that you alone can destroy our Lady.”

  The prince looked up then, just as if he had known all along where Tarsia was hidden, then looked back to the leader. But his words were echoing in Tarsia’s mind: “destroy the Lady …” And in her mind, the winds howled. The prince was not alone: the giant had been seen climbing toward her court and the undine was free. Tarsia leaned against the rock for support and listened to the men argue about what to do with the minstrel—no, the prince. She had to remind herself he was a prince. They could hold him for ransom, deliver him to the Lady for a reward, kill him on the spot, feed him to the dragon. She followed, a little above them and a little behind them as they walked to the dragon’s cave, still arguing. She heard the horse nicker softly as they stood at the cave entrance. The man who held the animal’s reins was right below her hiding place, paying more attention to the argument than to the horse.

  Tarsia sprang. Landed half-on and half-off the white horse’s broad back, gripping its mane and pounding its sides with her heels. The animal leapt forward—was it by the horse’s inclination or her direction? She was not sure—toward the prince. The horse reared as she strove to turn it, dancing in place and throwing its head back, startled past the capacity of even a well-trained horse to bear.

  Tarsia fought for control, only partly aware of the men who dodged away from the animal’s hooves in the dim light of twilight. She could not see the prince.

  A crackling of flame, a scent of sulfur, and the mountain was no longer dark. Small thief—she had never dabbled in magic, never met a dragon. If she had imagined anything, she had imagined a lizard breathing fire.

  A lightning bolt, a fireworks blast, a bonfire—but it moved like an animal. Where it stepped, it left cinders and when it lifted its head she stared into the white glory of its eyes. A sweep of its tail left a trail of sparks.

  Half-flame, half-animal—perhaps more than half-flame.

  She could see the prince, standing in its path. The child of fire opened its mouth and for a moment she could see the jagged lightning of its teeth.

  “Child of fire,” Tarsia called to it, “if I free you will you lead me to my mother?”

  The crackling warmth assented with a burst of heat and a flare of flame.

  Tarsia’s heart was large within her and she was caught by confusion—burning with shame and stung by betrayal.

  She saw the prince through a haze of smoke and anger.

  The coins she had stolen from him were in her hand and she wanted to be rid of them and rid of him. “I give of myself to you, child of fire,” she said, and hurled them into the flames. Three points of gold, suddenly molten.

  The heat of her pain vanished with them. She burned pure and cold—like starlight, like moonlight, like a reflection from the heart of an icicle.

  The dragon beat his wings and she felt a wave of heat.

  He circled the mountain, caught an updraft and soared higher. His flame licked out and lashed the granite slope beneath him before he rose out of sight.

  In the sudden silence, Tarsia fough
t the horse to a standstill. The prince stood alone by the cave. The world was tinted with the transparent twilight blue of early evening in the mountains, touched with smoke and sprinkled with snow.

  “You didn’t tell me you wanted to free the winds,” Tarsia said. Her voice still carried the power it had had when she spoke to the dragon. “You didn’t tell me you were a prince.”

  “I could only trust you as much as you could trust me, daughter of the wind.”

  “Ah, you know.” Her voice was proud.

  “I guessed. You freed the undine,” he said.

  “Had you planned to use me to destroy my mother?” she asked. “That won’t work; prophecy or no. I’m here to help my mother, not to destroy her.” She urged the horse up the canyon, following the mark left by the dragon’s fire.

  She did not look back.

  Up the mountains, following the trail of burned brush and cinders, kicking the horse when it stumbled, urging it to run over grassy slopes marked by flame. The moon rose and the horse stumbled less often. Alpine flowers nodded in the wind of her passing. On the snowbanks, ice crystals danced in swirling patterns.

  The towers of the Lady’s castle rose from the center of a bowl carved into the mountain. A wall of ice rose behind the towers—glacial blue in the moonlight. The ice had been wrought with tunnels by the wind and carved into strangely shaped pillars. Tarsia rode over the crest of the ridge and started the horse down the slope toward the gates when she saw the giant by the towers.

  She felt the strength within her, and did not turn. As Tarsia drew nearer she saw the figure in the ice wall—the slim form of the undine. She smelled the reek of sulfur and the ice flickered red as the dragon circled the towers.

  The gates had been torn from their hinges. The snow had drifted into the courtyard. The stones had been scorched by fire.

  Tarsia pulled the horse to a stop in front of the grinning giant. “So you’ve come to finish the job,” he said.

  “I have come to see my mother,” Tarsia answered, her voice cold and careful.

  “I hope you know more than you did when I talked to you last,” said the giant.

  “I have come to talk to my mother,” she repeated. “What I know or what I plan to do is none of your concern.” Her voice was cold as starlight.