When Winds Blow Cold

by Anna Tan

  When Winds Blow Cold

  A fairy tale

  By Anna Tan

  Smashwords Edition

  Published by Teaspoon Publishing

  http://www.teaspoonpublishing.com.my

  Copyright 2015 Anna Tan

  Cover illustration by Chew Yuin-Y

  http://instagram.com/elvenstar

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Contents

  Title Page

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  About the Author

  Other books

  I

  He was a son of the sun, and the sun had made him old before his time. He stood half a head taller than his father, his body baked brown in the sun as he swam like a dolphin in the diamond sea. His black hair had bleached over the years, growing in a thick tangle that flopped over one eye. Laughter filled the fishing boat his father operated and the house his mother jealously guarded, mingling laugh lines with crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes.

  “Who would marry a twenty-year-old who looks like he’s forty?” his mother grumbled as she waddled her way slowly around the table, heading to the kitchen sink.

  “Don’t worry, ma, I’ll find someone,” Danis replied with a smile.

  “Oh, you try and see.”

  He thought her reply uncharacteristically pessimistic as he snuck a brown arm around her waist in a strong hug. “I’ll see the matchmaker tomorrow.”

  She smiled back at him, but he was too distracted to notice the worry behind it.

  Danis scrubbed himself clean early the next morning, taking special care to wash behind his ears and around his neckline and to scrub beneath his nails; things his mother had said every girl would be sure to notice instantly. He pulled on a smart new shirt, blue like the sea he loved, and freshly pressed slacks. He combed his hair, carefully tweaking out the snags, slipped on his shoes, and went into town.

  ~

  Mother Yara looked up from her knitting as a dark stranger walked up to her doorstep. “What would you be looking for, my good sir?”

  “Mother, I’m looking for a wife,” Danis replied.

  “At your age?” she tapped her lips thoughtfully. “Would a widow do?”

  “At my age? But I’m only twenty,” he said, kneeling so that his face was level with hers.

  She peered at him, taking his chin in her grasp. “Twenty? Only three single girls in this town around that age and none of them would have you,” she said.

  “Why?”

  Mother Yara pursed her lips and refused to elaborate. Instead, she instructed the man with skin like polished wood to sit on her porch whilst she went to call the girls.

  He was sitting on the edge of the top stair, staring up into the sky, when the beauties of the town came to heed Mother's call, curious to see this new suitor she had found.

  “But he is so old, Mother!” they exclaimed. “Surely, he isn’t seeking for us.”

  “He is but twenty, or so he says,” she replied, leaning on her walking stick.

  “Surely he tricks you,” one said, tossing her long black locks. “Look at those wrinkles!”

  “Or he is mistaken,” said the one with the pretty almond eyes. “His skin is dry and old.”

  The third merely smiled and walked away, the others following her lead.

  Mother Yara took pity on Danis, his disappointment written clearly across his face. “If you do not mind someone older than you and a widow, Peony is a fine young woman, alone with a small child,” she said, not unkindly.

  “If she would have me,” he said, a crack in his voice.

  But Peony, standing at the gate of her house, a toddler of two clinging to her skirts, shook her head. “I don’t need a man about the house,” she said, her voice hard and grating, “much less one who looks like he would need my help to stay alive.”

  Nodding, Danis brushed aside Mother Yara's apologies and set his face to the north.

  “If I can find no wife here, I will travel from town to town until I find one,” he said resolutely. Not stopping to return home, he set off with nothing but the clothes on his back and a pack of freshly baked bread that Mother Yara pushed into his hands.

  II

  The verdant forest hummed with life. Danis stopped and watched in awe as birds of bright colours flitted from branch to branch. He leaned against a large rock, listening to the stream that bubbled nearby. He wanted to plunge into the water, to hide his pain and disappointment in the hands that had held him all this time. He wanted to float on its waves until it led him back home.

  “Why do you sigh so loudly, little human?” a voice of endless wells said softly into his ear.

  Danis looked around sharply. “Who—who is that?”

  The rock beside him moved. “Does it matter who I am before you answer my question?”

  Danis scrambled away as a scaled head raised itself and a bright gold eye looked down at him.

  “I suppose it does not, O Great Dragon,” Danis said, stammering. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realise I was leaning on you.”

  “No. Most of you do not until I reveal myself,” the dragon said. “But you have yet to answer my question.”

  “I sighed because I could not find a wife. None of them would have me.”

  “And this wife is important to you, little one?”

  “I suppose. Every man my age has one.”

  “And what is this ‘wife’ that everyone has but you do not?”

  “A wife… well, a wife would be my partner and my love. We would raise children together and—”

  “Ah, you look for a mate!” The dragon looked ponderously upon him and Danis wondered if he was quite safe. “Why is there none for you in the town?”

  “They say I am too old—or look too old, if there is a difference.”

  “You? Old? You are but a fraction of my age and I too have yet to find a mate.”

  “It is different with us. We do not live as long as your kind do.”

  “Hm, I suppose so.”

  A silence fell between them as the dragon continued to stare at the young man.

  Danis nervously backed away a step at a time. “I apologise for disturbing your rest,” he said. “I will go now.”

  “Wait.”

  Danis looked up into the dragon's burning eye.

  “Go north, little human. Go north until the winds blow cold and you walk on water. Go north, and there you will find her.” The dragon blinked once, twice, and then it spread its mighty wings and flew away with a mighty rush of wind, leaving Danis’ question floating unheard behind it: Is that a prophecy?

  The forest was quiet now. Danis pulled his cloak around him, hugged his pack of bread, and continued on the road.

  At every village and town he entered, Danis approached the matchmaker with a hopeful heart and a sunny smile, hoping that he had gone far enough north to find his wife. Yet at every stop, the young maidens looked upon him with scorn and derided him for his sun-kissed skin and his calloused hands whilst the older women accused him of being a rascal and a layabout, trying to find a woman to support his idleness.

  After the tenth town, he stopped asking. Instead, he watched the faces of the women watching him and wondered why he was being treated so fearfully and harshly. He bought food where he could, counting his coi
n now, uncertain how long it would last. The weather grew colder as he walked further and his smart blue shirt, once pressed and new was now dull, torn and dusty. His cloak no longer warmed him and he shivered as he walked. Yet his heart refused to let him return home.

  Then one day, the winds blew and Danis shivered to his very bones, as first a fine layer of white powder coated him and then turned to water.

  “The winds blow cold,” he muttered to himself through his tangled beard. “What the dragon spoke of is coming true.”

  A sliver of hope kindled in his heart and he held his head a little higher as he continued along the northern road.

  ~

  He was cold and thin and starved by the time he reached the imposing gates of a city far in the north. The city guards scowled at him as he passed through.

  “No begging at the houses,” one said sternly, holding on to Danis’ arm until he nodded in reply.

  Danis shivered in the cold and wished for a new pair of shoes, for the slush on the ground soaked through the holes in his old shoes and he hadn't the money left to buy a new pair. He thought wistfully of the sun, his friend, and the sea, his playmate, and wondered if he would ever see them again. He stopped beneath a nearby lamppost, grateful for the little scattered warmth, as he scanned the nearby buildings for an inn.

  “What are you looking for?” a soft voice asked him.

  He looked down at the tiny porcelain figure beside him. “Are you lost, child? Should you not be accompanied on a cold night like this?”

  “Cold? In this fair weather?” Her pink lips curled in disdain, a dash of colour against her almost white skin. “And I am not a child. I am eighteen and need not be chaperoned by anyone.”

  “Eighteen!” he exclaimed. “You don’t look it. I thought you were twelve.” He pulled his cloak tighter around him, shivering as the snow started to fall again.

  “And how old are you?” she asked, her tone more curious than angry. “Are you very cold?”

  “I’m twenty, and I’m freezing,” he said. “Do you know where I can stay the night?”

  She reached out and took his hand. “Come, I’ll show you.”

  They walked in silence, Danis struggling to catch his breath in the freezing air, the girl lost in her own thoughts. The arched gates appeared like a ghost in the dark and Danis stopped as she walked through them. She turned questioningly as she felt his hand slip out of hers.

  “You’ll have frost bite soon if you don’t hurry,” she said. “Your clothes are not made for our weather.”

  “But this is not an inn,” he said with some bewilderment. “It is a castle and the guards said not to beg—”

  “You are not begging if I lead you in, are you?” she interrupted him. “It is my house and I do not wish for you to die on my doorstep.”

  He followed her in past tall marble arches and thick stone walls to where the wind did not blow. He smiled his relief as his body warmed just a little. His fingers and toes began to thaw, warmth slowly creeping through his limbs and when she offered him a bowl of soup, it seemed to him hot and inviting, though there was no steam and it did not burn his throat or his tongue as he gulped it down.

  “Who are you?” she finally asked when he put the bowl down.

  “Danis of the Sun and Sea,” he replied. “And you?”

  “Hana, Blossom of the Snow.”

  “Thank you, Hana, for saving my life.”

  “What’s a little wind?” she replied, but she blushed prettily.

  She settled him into a comfortable chair lined with thick fur and Danis sunk into it gratefully. There was no fire in the building for Hana was a daughter of the winter and did not need fire to warm her.

  “What are you doing here in my city?” she asked.

  He started to reply but stopped, the weight of his disappointments and pain churning in his belly. “How is it your city?” he asked instead.

  “My father rules here,” she replied. “But I see that you are tired. Perhaps we shall talk more tomorrow.”

  Hana held out her hand to him, and he took it, letting her lead him through passages that sparkled in the lamp light and the clear floor that shimmered like water. A longing for the waves of his home overtook him and he blurted in his confusion, “What ground is this that we walk on? It shimmers like the sea and yet is hard and strong enough to stand on.”

  “Our floors are laid with ice,” Hana replied.

  “Ice? What is that?” He had heard of it before, he recalled, but he was too tired and too cold and too confused to try to remember the myths of his youth.

  “Do you not have ice where you come from?” Hana asked in surprise. “It is water that has frozen.”

  There was no time to ask more as she ushered him into a grandly furnished bedroom. In the middle of the room stood a four-poster bed covered with layers and layers of thick blankets and coverlets.

  “I hope this will keep you warm through the night,” Hana said with some apprehension.

  “It is more than enough, surely,” Danis said. He thanked her again as she left the room, closing the door behind her.

  He was nearly asleep, ensconced in a nest of coverings, when Hana's words drifted across his fading consciousness once more: Our floors are laid with ice.

  III

  Danis woke with a start the next morning, the dragon's prophecy seared across brain. Go north until the winds blow cold and you walk on water. Go north, and there you will find her. He had walked on water—frozen water, at least—last night.

  He got out of bed, shivering as the cold morning air struck his body afresh. Someone had opened the windows while he slept and draped new clothes, thick and sturdy, over the back of the chair at the dresser. Stumbling over to the dresser, he looked at himself in the mirror for the first time in months, startled at how haggard and decrepit he had become. Despair crept over him. Why would Hana, in her childlike beauty, want to marry an ugly old stranger? No—he would say nothing of his mission, but thank her for her kindness and leave for home.

  There was a warm bath waiting for him in the adjoining bathroom; he looked around but could not find any hint of servants or any living person who could so anticipate his needs. A bath and a shave later, he almost felt like a new man. There was a knock on the door just as he finished combing his hair. The impeccable timing unnerved him; he looked around again to see if there was anyone watching him.

  The knock came a second time and he sprang across the room to open the door.

  “Father would like to meet you after breakfast,” Hana said without preamble.

  Danis swallowed and nodded, bereft of words.

  “Well, come along then. Breakfast is this way,” she said, taking him by the hand, as if he were a little child.

  “Hana, I would like to thank you—”

  “You will have to pass the tests, you know,” she interrupted him. “even if I do find you quite fascinating.”

  “What tests?”

  “The three trials to win my hand, of course. Isn’t that why you came?” she turned to study his face as they walked. “Didn’t you?” she asked a little more faintly, her white cheeks seeming, impossibly, to turn whiter.

  “I came to find you but I didn’t know it would be you,” he said rather disjointedly. “A dragon I met on the road told me to go north.”

  “The Dragon sent you to me!” she exclaimed, smiling again. “Then you will be the one!”

  “How do you know it is the same dragon?”

  “It has to be. The Dragon,” she said it as if it were his name, “prophesied a long time ago, before I was even born, about the breaking of my curse. If he sent you to me, then the time has come and you will pass the tests.”

  “Will you tell me about the curse and the tests?” Danis asked as they sat down at a breakfast table covered with many different kinds of fruits and exotic-looking dishes.

  “Maybe,” she said, shrugging. “Aren’t you going to eat anything first?”

  Danis scanned through th
e many options, looking for the tell-tale steam of a freshly baked bun or maybe some hot soup. “Is there nothing hot at all? Why is everything cold?”

  “This is how it has always been,” Hana answered.

  A look of disappointment flashed across Danis’ face. He hid it as best as he could and slowly reached out for some fruit, but Hana had noticed his expression. She clapped her hands and the first servant Danis had seen in the building appeared.

  “Tell him what you’d like,” she said.

  Hesitantly, Danis requested for fish porridge. The servant bowed low and left. Danis and Hana sat at the table staring at each other over the lavish spread.

  “Don’t you want to eat something?” Danis asked.

  “I’ll wait,” Hana replied.

  They sat in silence until the servant reappeared with a steaming bowl of fish porridge.

  “Thank you,” Danis said. He savoured the saltiness of the broth, the heat of it cheering him. “It smells of my hometown, of the sea wind that used to blow through my hair. Ah, I miss my sea.”

  “Is that what it smells like?” Hana asked with childlike wonder. “I've always wondered. That was the first test, by the way. We have not lit a fire to cook breakfast since I was born.”

  “Have you never had this? Would you like to try some?” Danis offered her the bowl.

  “Me? Eat something hot? I would melt,” she said.

  “Why would you melt? Are you not flesh and blood like me? Taste it—it is good. See, I will blow on it to cool it for you so that you may partake of it,” he said, commencing to blow on a spoon full of porridge until Hana gathered enough courage to try the hot liquid.

  “Oh, a fire! A fire in my belly,” she exclaimed as it trickled down her throat into her stomach. “A wonder it is! I feel warm from the inside out! You are a miracle, Danis of the Sun and Sea. There is truly none like you.”