The Girl from the Rune Yard

by Eric Guindon

  The next day, Kyria decided she would break into the Rune Yard.

  If I’m to be sent away, I’ll make sure I see the inside of the Rune Yard at least once in my life, she told herself. Secretly, she also hoped to find the wondrous thing from her dreams. She didn’t admit this, even to herself; it was just too silly to think her dream Rune Yard had any hint of reality to it. Still, she hoped.

  That day, she walked the perimeter of the Yard more than usual. She went slower as well, taking the time to look for a way through the barrier. It was never meant to keep people out, only to deter and warn. Anyone determined enough could make it inside the Yard. The assumption was that no one would want to break in. Who would, other than Kyria? The place was known to be dangerous. Her father did not get paid so much for the metal he brought out of the yard as for the job of finding likely pieces and safely retrieving them. Kyria’s family had passed down the tricks for safely handling the runic metal through the generations. Any inexperienced folk would likely find their own deaths in the Yard, but Kyria felt she knew enough to guarantee her own safety during her intended trip.

  She looked for signs of burrowing near the wall. Animals, she had noticed, would dig tunnels under the wall. Most of these were small creatures, like rats, badgers, or groundhogs, but Kyria knew her father had sometimes had to deal with feral dogs in the Yard.

  Any hole a dog dug to get through was a good start for a hole she could use, Kyria reasoned.

  So, she walked the perimeter, watching the bottom of the wall with special attention.

  She marked the more promising places in her mind as she spotted them, ranking them for suitability as a passage for herself. In the end, she narrowed the list down to three good-sized burrows. These were all too small for her, but she intended to take along a shovel to enlarge an existing passage. She hoped her first attempt would bring success, but she could not be sure how easy it would be to enlarge each of the holes. Also, she feared there might be hunks of metal covering some of the exits. Any of these possibilities could render a promising hole into an unusable entry point.

  Satisfied that she had catalogued all the potential places she could use to burrow into the Yard, Kyria turned her mind to other matters. She knew she needed a set of the protective clothing that her father and his assistants used while they worked in the Yard. These suits of thick, plain linen covered all the exposed skin on the wearer, making sure they could not touch any of the runic metal with their bare flesh.

  Kyria had asked her father endless questions about the clothing, but had not gotten much in the way of satisfactory answers.

  “This is just what you have to wear to be safe in the Yard, child,” he would tell her. “No one knows why it has to be linen, but this is how our family has kept safe for generations, so this is how we do it.”

  Kyria felt she needed one of those suits if she was going to be safe in the Rune Yard. Her plan to acquire one was simple. She waited for the end of the day, when the workers turned in their protective suits, dumping the dirty wads of clothing into a basket for the laundry. When the last suit was discarded, she picked up the basket.

  “I’ll take this down to the laundry.”

  Doing laundry was a chore Kyria’s mother was happy to let her have. Selecting the least dirty of the suits, Kyria placed it aside discreetly when no one was looking. She washed the rest, scrubbing them clean, rinsing them, and hanging them out to dry. The girl would have preferred a freshly laundered suit for her trip into the Yard that night, but she also wanted a dry suit and she doubted the heavy linen would be dry in time for her expedition. So she made do with a dirty suit. She put it into a bag to hide it from sight and placed the bag among the many others in the storage room, there to wait next to the barley and flour for her to retrieve it later in the night.

  Happy with her preparations, Kyria spent the rest of the evening daydreaming about the coming night’s adventure.

  At supper, the girl’s parents tried to engage her in conversation about her future.

  “I hope you have given more thought to what we discussed the other night, sweetling, I hope you have,” her mother said as she passed the bread to Kyria.

  The girl took a slice of the loaf and shrugged.

  “Surely, you know a girl can’t run the Yard, Kyria,” her mother continued. “You know a girl can’t.”

  “Why not, Mother?” Kyria asked, letting herself be brought into the conversation.

  “Tell her why, Frawn, won’t you?” Her mother looked to Kyria’s father for support. The man looked surprised to have been brought into this argument and assumed a pensive look for longer than Kyria’s mother was willing to allow.

  “Well, tell her!” she insisted.

  “It is dangerous in the Yard,” he said at last.

  “Is it more dangerous for a girl than for a man?” Kyria asked.

  “Well, you aren’t as strong as the men who work the Yard,” her father pointed out.

  “Does that make me less safe? Really?” Kyria pressed.

  Her father thought about this for a moment. As he went to answer, Kyria’s mother gave him what the girl took to be a warning look.

  “It means you are less useful, but no, it doesn’t make you less safe,” he finally admitted. Kyria’s mother glared at him. He shrugged.

  “Surely, you’d like the city?” Her mother tried another tack.

  “It’s crowded there,” Kyria observed. “I don’t like crowded.”

  “But, the city is full of opportunities too, kitten. You have to see that, you have to.”

  Kyria made a face and ignored her mother as best she could.

  She doesn’t care what I want. If she likes the city so much, she should move there herself and let me have the Yard, the girl thought.

  When it was finally time for bed, Kyria drank glass after glass of water, wanting to make sure she would wake in the night to go to the loo.

  All parts of her plan in place and ready, she went to bed and found sleep easily, despite her excitement; her day’s walking and the laundry work had worn her out.

  Unsurprisingly, Kyria dreamt of the Rune Yard that night. It was the same dream as so often before, but this time the wondrous thing spoke to her.

  “The outhouse,” it told her. “Wake up and go there now!”

  She woke up, needing to pee so bad that she skipped and danced down to the outhouse. With that need relieved, Kyria was more careful to be quiet as she made her way back to her room to change out of her nightshirt and into proper clothing for the night’s activity: breeches and a shirt.

  This accomplished, the girl crept back downstairs to the storage room for her suit. Her nose wrinkled as her smelled it; the thing reeked of sweat worse than before. She put it on and hoped she would get used to the smell. The suit was too big for her, but that was expected: all the workers were grown men. She used safety pins to help make it fit better.

  As she left the house, heading toward the first hole she intended to try, Kyria stopped by the tool shed and picked up the smallest spade she could find. Seeing it on the way out, she also took a gardening hand-spade with her.

  The first hole turned out to be too close to rocky earth to be easily enlarged. Kyria gave up on it after a half-hour of wasted effort. The second hole was better, the digging fairly easy, but when she reached the other side she could not enlarge the exit: it was in the middle of a pile of metal, all set too closely together to allow her any way out.

  By the time she started work on the third hole, Kyria had wasted an hour and a half. She fervently hoped this last effort would work out; she was out of options.

  As she worked to enlarge the burrow, she realized that she hadn’t brought one important piece of gear: a lantern. Outside the Yard, the moon was providing plenty of light, but Kyria realized the inside of it might be quite dim, with its walls casting long shadows over everything in the moonlight.

  I’ll deal with the darkness, she decided. It’s too far to go back to the tool shed. Espec
ially if this hole doesn’t work out.

  Thankfully, it did. After another half-hour of work with her shovels, Kyria at last found herself peering into the mysterious interior of the Rune Yard.

  It was quite dark in the Yard, and more frightening than she had expected. Immense beams and sheets of runic metal thrust into the sky, high over the girl’s head, making a grim-looking jagged outline over the edge of the wall in every direction she looked.

  Kyria had to keep telling herself she was perfectly safe to keep from bolting back down the hole and out of the Yard. She shivered and resolved that she would not leave until she had at least checked the place where, in her dreams, the wondrous thing lay.

  But where was that?

  Kyria laughed at herself.

  I’m trying to find a place I’ve only ever seen in a dream. It doesn’t exist, you stupid girl!

  Then the moon rose higher and shed its light on a piece of runic metal Kyria recognized. The layout of the runes, the shapes of them, was familiar to her. She knew them from her dreams!

  Her eyes widened and her heart beat faster, thundering in her ears. She forced herself to breathe slowly, calming herself. Closing her eyes, she tried to picture where she needed to go in relation to the landmark she had found. She dearly wished she had brought a lantern.

  No sense wishing for things you haven’t got, she scolded herself and took a slow hesitant step in the direction she had decided should lead to the crawlspace where the wondrous thing from her dreams waited.

  Her confidence grew with every step she took in the direction she had chosen. The few moonlit parts of the Yard she could make out seemed familiar. She knew she had gone in the right direction when she started seeing golden runes on some of the metal. Although she did not know if such runes were uncommon, or rare, she did remember there being a high proportion of them near the crawlspace.

  Against all expectations, when she made her way around the next heap of jagged metal, she saw before her the small passage through junk that she had dreamt about so many times throughout her childhood.

  How can this be? She wondered.

  She approached the passage with trepidation, wondering if she was really still in bed, dreaming this whole escapade.

  She got on her hands and knees to crawl into the small space between tall sheets of runic metal. All the work of the night had made Kyria sweat considerably and, by then, her linen suit was soaked.

  She tried not to think of her discomfort and forged onward.

  She advanced down the passage, climbing over pieces of metal, watching out for sharp edges. She started feeling ahead with her linen-covered hands in the now almost complete darkness.

  It was slow going, but she was quite deep in the labyrinthine twists and turns of the passage when a voice burst into her head.

  “Don’t put your hand— !” it warned, but not quickly enough. Kyria’s sweat-soaked hand touched a rune she could not have seen in the darkness. The instant she made contact, the rune flared to life, glowing a bright red colour and momentarily blinding her.

  “Wh—?” She screamed out as she felt her strength flow from her and into the rune. It was so strong and sudden Kyria almost lost consciousness. She struggled to focus; she had to break contact with the rune!

  She could hear distant sounds of metal groaning and scraping against metal; she could even feel tremors through the structure around her.

  Move! She willed at her hand, but she was too weak and scared, her body too sluggish and unresponsive. Her mind was gradually receding into a haze. When she lost consciousness, her collapse pulled her hand away from the rune. Her last memory was the sound of her father’s voice, calling to her in alarm. He sounded incredibly far away.

  Kyria was surprised to wake up in bed.

  The light coming through the window indicated it must be late morning. All around her stood the people in her life: her parents, the Yard workers; they all looked quite concerned.

  “What happened?” she asked. Her mouth was so dry she had difficulty forming the words. Her mother gave her a sip of water and she felt more awake, her head clearing. “I was in the Yard. I thought I was going to die.”

  Her mother held her hand, her lips a thin line of concern. It was her father who answered.

  “You snuck into the Yard by yourself, unprepared,” he said, his tone low, his eyes looking at her with none of their usual cheer. “That was a very stupid thing for you to do, Kyria.”

  His disapproval stung all the worse for it being so rarely directed at her.

  “I’m sorry, I . . .” She stopped. How could she explain the dreams, the voice? She wondered for a moment if she had really heard a cry of warning before her hand touched the rune.

  I did hear it, I know I did, she tried to convince herself.

  Her parents and the workers were looking at her, expecting an explanation for her foolhardy visit to the Yard.

  She decided to go with the more rational reason she had come up with to justify her actions:

  “With you scheming to send me away from my birthright, Mother, I wanted to see it at least once.”

  Her mother’s eyebrows went up.

  “But, but,” Kyria’s father put a calming hand on her mother’s shoulder. She took a deep breath. “I only want what’s best for you, sweetling. That’s all I want,” she said. The girl believed her. She didn’t think her mother was trying to get rid of her; she was just trying to give her daughter what she believed to be a better life. Kyria and her mother simply did not agree on which was the better life.

  The girl looked to her father.

  “What did I do wrong? Why did the rune activate through the linen?” she asked. “I was being so careful to stay covered.”

  He frowned at her. “Do you really think you know our work so well? That it’s as simple as a suit?”

  “It isn’t?” she asked in a small voice.

  “Water, sweat. That’s what tripped you up,” he told her. “Stop thinking you know everything, young lady. You’ll live longer that way.”

  “Maybe you should teach me, if you want me to stop being ignorant,” she responded boldly.

  With a hint of a smile her father said, “Maybe I should.”

  Chapter Three:

  Toil and Isolation

  Two weeks later Kyria’s father began to teach her the Rune Yard trade.

  “You’ll get your fill of this and be begging your mama to send you to the city by the end of the week,” he prophesied when he came to get her the first day.

  “You don’t think I can do the work?” she had asked.

  “Oh, you can likely do the work. I simply think you’ll find it boring before long. Our family’s trade is a life of toil and isolation.”

  “But you like it,” Kyria asserted.

  “Yes, but I’ve a very unambitious mind,” he said. “I’m easily entertained. You?” He ruffled her hair. “You’ve got a complicated mind. This will bore you.”

  Kyria soon found out it did, but not the way her father had thought. During the day she worked alongside him, shadowing his work and lending a hand where possible. She found the physical work refreshing; she liked working with her hands, taking care how she handled the dangerous metal. She found the exercise cleared her mind, allowing her time to ponder other matters if the mood struck her, or to leave it empty, giving herself over to the monotony of the work.

  At night, she read and fed her mind with fresh stories and new information. Even Kyria’s mother noticed how well this agreed with her.

  “You’re looking happy this morning,” she remarked at breakfast, a few days into Kyria’s training.

  “I guess I am,” Kyria had responded.

  “It’ll pass,” her mother tried her own hand at prophecy.

  She was right, but only partly.

  After a few weeks, as the work became routine, Kyria’s enthusiasm for it waned, but she still found it a rewarding way to spend her days. To her, this was preparation for her future. She knew that
someday her father would be too old to work the Yard and it would be up to her to run the family business. She relished this preparation for the future.

  As for isolation, it was an old friend to Kyria. Working in the Yard or living in the shack outside it, she had been isolated her whole life. She didn’t mind, so long as she had books.

  And so, Kyria thrived while working in the Yard. Her mind was sharper, her body lean and toned, and her attitude more friendly and amicable toward her mother. It was such a positive improvement that Kyria was spared any further arguments from her mother about sending her to live in the city.

  For Kyria, her time working under her father was marred by only one thing: he was uncooperative in showing her where she’d had the accident when she’d snuck into the Yard. She desperately wanted to find and explore the area, to look for the thing from her dreams, but he kept her from it. She did not have the freedom of the Yard; she had to shadow her father, and he made sure, it seemed, to never let her go to that part of the Yard. If a job came up requiring metal that would be best harvested from that section, he would send a team led by Noram. This frustrated the girl to no end until one day, having seen her father sending yet another team to that part of the Yard instead of going there himself, she confronted him.

  “Why? Why won’t you let me go back there?” she demanded.

  He thought for a moment before answering her. “It’s not something you need to see.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t think you realize how close you came to dying that day, my sweetling,” he said.

  “Maybe I should! Stop trying to decide what’s best for me!”

  Again, her father thought for a moment then shrugged. “All right.”

  It took a moment for Kyria to process that her father had agreed. He had walked away from her, toward the linen suit lockers. He turned back. “Are you coming?” She ran to him and hugged him tight. The spontaneous affection surprised a burst of laughter from him.