Firebirds Rising

by Sharyn November

  I have always lived with and around books. There was a battered, blue buckram-bound copy of Heidi on the bookshelf in the upstairs hall of the house I grew up in. Old book, with nice color plates, dating back to my mother’s childhood.

  When I was about eight I discovered that Heidi had a library-card pocket inside the cover. Overdue library books were a capital crime in my family, and this one had been checked out in 1933, when my mother would have been eight herself. I asked her about it, and to my surprise, she looked very embarrassed and said, in a determined but apologetic voice, “I am going to return it.”

  She’d checked it out of the Bristow, Oklahoma, library and her family had moved out of the state two weeks later. It had gotten packed by mistake. She’d been carting it around, from house to house, to college, into her marriage, feeling guilty about it for thirty years.

  Sometime in the mid-1970s, she and a friend were planning a road trip, and Mom looked at the map and realized that if they made a 150-mile detour (each way), they could stop in Bristow. So that summer, my mother marched up the steps of the Bristow Public Library, plunked Heidi down on the circulation desk, and said, “This is overdue.” An understatement. It was more than forty years overdue.

  The librarian looked at the book, looked at my mother.

  “I’ll pay the fine, whatever it is.” Mom pulled out her checkbook.

  “That won’t be necessary,” the librarian said. Then she got her DISCARD stamp, whacked Heidi, and handed the book back.

  It’s sitting on my desk as I type this.

  When I started thinking about a story for Firebirds Rising, my guiding librarians picked up Heidi and wandered into my brain again. They puttered around in there for months before the story began to gel. I wrote most of the first draft in a little cottage in the desert outside Tucson, with downloaded photos of old libraries on my laptop. When I got home, the manuscript and I visited a dozen old Carnegie libraries in northern Ohio, where I sat and wrote and looked at old wooden wainscoting and Craftsman-tiled fireplaces and pebbled-glass office doors. I spent a week sitting on the floor of the Stacks in a Case Western University library, making notes about the smells and the textures so that I could give them to Dinsy.

  Sharon Shinn

  WINTERMOON WISH

  All the way from Wodenderry to Merendon, I sat alone in the coach and scowled. I couldn’t believe that no one, not even my cousin Renner, was willing to leave the royal city and miss the queen’s ball.

  But I had never spent a Wintermoon away from my grandparents’ inn in Merendon, and I was not about to start now. Now that the whole world was bleak and my life nothing but a blighted promise.

  My aunt tells me I am a fanciful girl with a flair for the dramatic. My mother says more plainly that I overreact to everything. In this instance, at any rate, I was sure I had a broken heart and nothing would mend it except a trip to Merendon, and even that didn’t seem likely to do the trick. But who would want to stay in Wodenderry, when Trevor was in love with Corrinne and taking her to the Wintermoon ball?

  The weather was bitterly cold and even my father’s well-built carriage could not keep out the drafts. Our frequent stops for hot tea at little inns along the way were still not enough to warm me all the way through. By the time we arrived in Merendon, just around sunset, my feet were icicles in their fashionable fur-lined boots and I couldn’t feel my fingers in my gloves. We pulled up in front of the Leaf & Berry Inn and my heart sank: there were no welcome lights pouring from the front door or the upper-story windows. The inn looked as dark and cold as the interior of the coach.

  But when the driver carried my luggage around back to the kitchen door, my spirits rose again. I could see my grandmother through the window, working at the stove, her white hair piled on top of her head, her hands busy, her face serene. I could smell the baking bread and roasting chicken. The very shape and scent of the scene before me matched the picture of home I always carried in my heart.

  I was almost in tears as I burst through the door, and my grandmother dropped her spoon with a clatter. “Lirril! You startled me. Oh, look at you, you’re half-frozen. Come sit by the stove. Bob! Build up a fire in the parlor! Lirril’s here and she’s a little ice-child.”

  I felt better than I had for days.

  My grandfather bustled in, gathered me in a big hug, paid a handsome tip to the driver, and made sure the man had a place to spend the night. I sat at the kitchen table, sipping tea and inhaling the smells of the house. Dinner and wine and pie in here; wax and polish and soap drifting in from the other rooms. Overlaying it all, a sharper, sweeter odor, the very scent of Wintermoon.

  “You’ve started the wreath already, haven’t you?” I said, my voice just a touch accusatory. “You knew I was coming, and you couldn’t wait until I got here?”

  My grandmother looked amused. “We’ve gathered some spruce and some rowan, and I’ve put some greens over the banister, but we haven’t finished braiding the wreath,” she said. “Don’t worry, you’ll have plenty to do.”

  “A mighty cold Wintermoon it’s going to be,” my grandfather observed, stepping out the door to fetch another pile of wood. “Glad you made it here before the snow. Supposed to start falling tomorrow afternoon.”

  In a few moments, the three of us were gathered cozily around the kitchen table, eating my grandmother’s excellent meal and catching up on events. Well, mostly I told them everything that had been happening to me lately. Their lives tended not to hold much excitement or variation. Oh, we had three guests come through last week, and a family of five stopped here the week before. Things were slow over the summer, but that gave us time to sew new curtains and finish the floors in the back bedroom on the second floor. I had far more to relate.

  I hadn’t planned to bring up Trevor’s name, but my grandmother had an uncannily good memory, which sometimes came in handy and sometimes did not. “What about that boy?” she asked as she served the pie. “The one you were so keen on this summer? Trevor? Was that his name?”

  “Oh, I’m not interested in him anymore,” I said, my voice quite airy. “He’s—well, he’s—anyway, Corrinne has been flirting with him most shamelessly. So of course he’s practically infatuated with her. He even wrote her a poem a couple of weeks ago. A poem! Did you ever hear of such a silly thing?”

  I had been shockingly jealous when Corrinne showed it to us—to me, and the other girls from my school who had formed a circle of friends. It wasn’t a very good poem, it didn’t even rhyme, but you could tell by its extravagant praise how much Trevor adored her. I had been in love with Trevor all my life—or, at least, since he had danced with me two years ago when I was fourteen and allowed to go to my first Summermoon ball at the palace. But he had never so much as written my name on a calling card to be left at my parents’ house.

  My grandparents looked amused. “Never was much of one for poems myself,” my grandfather said. “Still, that seems like a powerful sign of attraction. Man who’d write a poem for a girl would do anything for her, I suppose.”

  “I wonder if your father ever wrote a poem for your mother,” my grandmother said to me.

  “He would have if she’d asked him to,” my grandfather spoke up. “That man would have done anything she wanted. He courted her for months. He’s still courting her, all these years later.”

  Revolted, I put up my hands. “Please. Stop.”

  “I’m going to ask him about that poem,” my grandfather said, teasing me.

  My grandmother stood. “I’m going to clear the dishes. You two get started on the wreath.”

  The best part of Wintermoon: braiding the wreath. I happily settled on the floor beside my grandfather and helped him plait the long, whippy branches together, tying them at intervals with red and gold cords. My fingers were soon sticky with sap and I had sharp little needles all over my dress. My grandmother joined us about thirty minutes later, carrying a basket of odds and ends.

  “Oh, here’s a few pearls from that necklace
that broke…let’s tie those on. Those will be for—well, what do you think? A wedding? Yes, pearls for a wedding. And some of that blue silk from the back bedroom. How about serenity? Now don’t forget the dried fruit—that’s for prosperity, Lirril, never make a wreath without it.”

  My grandfather had his own contributions—dried cedar chips and a bird’s wing and a scrap of fabric from a ship’s ripped sail—though sometimes his connections between object and the magic they could confer seemed tenuous at best. I had only one extra bit to bind into the wreath, a long ribbon embroidered with alternating hearts and birds.

  “That’s for love,” I said, knotting it around the woven branches.

  “That’s something everyone needs every year,” my grandmother said.

  When we were done, my grandfather hung the great wreath over the fireplace and it made a dense shape of promise over the mantel. Tomorrow night we would build a bonfire in the back, between the chatterleaf and kirrenberry trees that gave the inn its name, and we would throw the wreath into the blaze. All our hopes for the new year written in flame. Guaranteed to come true.

  I slept deeply and well—for the first time in days—in the small bedroom on the third floor. It was the room that had belonged to my mother and her twin when they were growing up. Even once I woke, I didn’t realize how far advanced the morning was, because so little light was coming in the double windows. When I finally rose and dressed and peeked outside, I understood why: snow was falling so heavily that the sky was leaden and gray. The clouds were piled so deeply overhead that I couldn’t imagine the sun would ever shine.

  I skipped downstairs, calling, “Look at the snow! Look at it! There must be two feet on the ground already!” I didn’t care much for snow on the crowded streets of Wodenderry, but here in Merendon, where I didn’t need to leave the inn for a single necessity, snow was a delight.

  “No one will be traveling far this day,” my grandmother observed. “So anyone who has somewhere to get on Wintermoon had better be there by now.”

  I danced around the kitchen. “No one’s here—we’ve got the inn all to ourselves,” I exclaimed. “We can eat all the pie—and drink all the cider—and stay up as late as we want. No guests! No chores!”

  My grandmother laughed. My grandfather said, “I’ll just go chop some more wood.”

  Half an hour later, the stage from Oakton arrived.

  It came feeling its way through the blizzard like a blind child down a tunnel and arrived at the front door like an omen of doom. My grandfather ran out to exchange a few words with the coachman. I watched as the door to the coach pushed open—a maneuver that took some effort against the wind—and a single figure stepped out, landing knee-deep in the drift of snow. He was tall and reedy, wearing an inadequate coat against the searing chill of the weather, and his head was uncovered. I could see his face, angular and thin, and his eyes, dark and devoid of hope. He couldn’t have been more than a year or two older than I was, but he looked weighed down by cares or disappointments. A more pitiful, dispirited, unwelcome visitor you could not imagine having arrive on your doorstep on Wintermoon.

  “Oh no,” I breathed as he fought his way up the walk toward the front door. “Oh no.”

  My grandmother had materialized beside me and was looking out the front door, serene as always. She said, “Looks like we’ve got company for Wintermoon.”

  His name was Jake. That was about all we learned about him during dinner that night, and I wasn’t even interested in that much information. The four of us sat around the bigger table in the dining room and passed around food while we made labored conversation. His name was Jake, he was headed toward Thrush Hollow. He was sorry to be caught in the storm, yes, ma’am, so glad there was a place that could take him in, he was sorry if he was any trouble. He had the money to pay. He was polite and, once he’d warmed up a little, not unattractive in an intense and moping fashion. But who wanted strangers around on Wintermoon? Wintermoon was a time for family! For being with the people you loved most in the world! There was almost never anyone at the inn for Wintermoon. Why hadn’t he started his journey a day or two earlier if he was so eager to join up with his parents or siblings or cousins or whomever he was off to visit? Why was he here, now, with my family, spoiling my Wintermoon? I could not have been unhappier if I had still been in Wodenderry.

  Well, yes, I could have. But not much.

  “So, Jake, would you like to help me build the bonfire?” my grandfather asked in his genial way as we finished the pie. I had to admit, even though we’d had to share it, there was plenty of pie for everyone. “It’s dark enough now.”

  Jake came to his feet, looking uncertain. “You build a bonfire? Do you burn a wreath, too?”

  “Well, goodness, doesn’t everybody?” my grandmother exclaimed.

  Jake gave her a crooked grin and looked, for the first time, boyish. “I haven’t. Not for years.”

  “You don’t have to help,” my grandfather said.

  “He wants to,” my grandmother replied briskly. “Go on out there, you two. Lirril and I will clear the dishes. We’ll come out when the fire’s good and hot.”

  Jake put on his threadbare coat and followed my grandfather out the kitchen door to where most of the fire had already been laid. I watched from the window as they brushed away the accumulated snow and searched for dry kindling. Jake moved slowly, like a man at an unfamiliar task, but willingly, as if learning something he would like to know. Twice I saw him smile at something my grandfather said. He had only smiled once throughout the entire meal.

  “He seems like a nice boy,” my grandmother said, scrubbing at the dishes.

  I sniffed. “How can you tell? He hardly said a word.”

  “Looks like he’s had a hard life, though.”

  “He’s so wretched he’s pathetic.”

  My grandmother gave me one of her rare looks of disapproval. Her eyes were an odd blue, pale but pretty; my own eyes were exactly the same color. “Better to be pathetic than to be cruel,” she said.

  My eyes widened. “I wasn’t mean to him!”

  “See that you aren’t,” she said.

  I had just wiped down the table when Jake came back inside. “Bob says I should get the wreath down,” he said in an apologetic voice, as if he thought it was something that would upset us. My grandmother just nodded, but I was instantly antagonized.

  “It’s not time to burn the wreath yet,” I said. “We never burn it till midnight.”

  Jake nodded somberly. “No. That’s what he said. He thought maybe I’d have something to bind to the branches.”

  I was frowning, but my grandmother was nodding. “That’s a good idea. What would you like to add in?”

  Jake looked despondent. “I don’t know. Nothing I can think of.”

  “Nonsense. Everyone has a wish at Wintermoon,” my grandmother said. “Come help me take it down, and Lirril and I will tell you all the wishes we’ve tied on to it so far. Then you can tell us what it’s missing.”

  We put this plan into action, although—as I could have foretold—none of our blue silk and bird feathers and cedar chips inspired Jake to articulate his own desires. He did finger my embroidered ribbon and look wistful when my grandmother told him it represented love.

  “Man-and-woman love or home-and-family love?” he asked.

  “Either. Both,” my grandmother said firmly.

  “And these dried apricots—these mean a happy home?”

  “A prosperous one,” my grandmother corrected. “But, now, I like that. Let’s find something to stand for a warm house, filled with joy. Jake, what did you bring that we can tie to the wreath?”

  His expression was a little bitter. “Nothing you can use for that, I’m afraid.”

  “No, I’ll pull a splinter from the front sign and tie that on with some ribbon. No place happier than the Leaf & Berry! Though that sign is a disgrace. More than twenty years old now, so weathered you almost can’t read the lettering. There’s paint in
the barn, but Bob hasn’t had a minute to sit down and put on a fresh coat.” She paused, remembered why she had started her sentence, and continued. “But that’s not what I meant. We need something of yours to wrap around the wreath. So you’re part of the celebration. So your own wishes will catch on fire. Then, you know, they’re more likely to come true.”

  Smiling a little, Jake investigated his pockets to reveal them almost empty. It didn’t take much imagination to picture his single duffel bag to be the same. I couldn’t imagine that he would have a thing worth contributing to our wreath, but I knew my grandmother well enough to know she would not be satisfied until we had something of Jake’s to throw in the flames tonight.

  “What about the top button on your shirt?” I asked. “It’s about to fall off, anyway.” My grandmother gave me a look that I couldn’t interpret, so I added, “Or I could get a needle and thread and sew it back on for you.”

  Jake lifted a hand and yanked the button off with one quick pull. “No, I’ll be happy to donate it to the wreath,” he said. “It’s metal, though—I don’t know if it will burn.”

  “Then you can rescue it tomorrow morning and sew it on then,” my grandmother said. “Something that survives the fire is always luck.”

  Soon enough we had attached our last contributions and leaned the wreath against the wall. My grandfather came stamping in, alternately rubbing his ears and blowing on his fingers. “Mighty cold out,” he observed. “Believe I’ll come in for a spell and warm up. Lirril, do you and Jake want to go out and watch the fire for a while?”

  Jake looked surprised at the invitation, but I was already on my feet; I’d known it was coming. That was the tradition at the Leaf & Berry. My grandfather always started the fire, then he let someone else tend it till midnight, when the wreath was thrown on. Then he and my grandmother stayed up till dawn, watching the flames, shooing everyone else back inside so they could be alone before the dying fire. I had always wondered what made Wintermoon such a special holiday for the two of them. Neither my mother nor my aunt knew the answer.