Dust and Water: A Song For The Stained Novella (A MAGICAL SAGA)

by Webb, Cassandra

  “Pa,” I call out.

  “You!” comes a shout and my pa, a fit but wiry old man, bursts from the first bedroom.

  He’s only wearing his pants; he was sleeping.

  He swings his scrunched up shirt, and I just manage to duck.

  “You been gone three weeks, boy,” he says, swinging it again. “And not a single picking on you. What are we supposed to feed you with if you’re off dancing and singing in the sunshine instead of working?”

  His eyes are narrowed in the kind of intensity that means he’s not going to listen. I duck another swing and dart for the stairs.

  “You’d better run boy, but there’s not nothing for you down there.”

  What does he mean by that? Down here has been my whole life. It’s a cellar full of wine and ale barrels, stores for the kitchen and all manner of other stuff – like broken tables, so it’s kind of the whole life for the tavern too.

  In the far corner, where the damp is the least and I get fair warning of my Pa entering in a temper, is my pile of sacks bed. Was. It’s gone.

  My jaw drops, everything I have ever valued was slipped between the layers of those sacks.

  Well, almost everything. I dash across the room. Some of my drawings are still here. Most of them have been torn from the wall and litter the floor. In the spots where the stones were chipped or the mortar had come free, there are little shelves and there used to be bobs – things I’d found and secretly kept. A pin, a nice belt buckle, an arrowhead. All gone.

  “Dregs!” I shout.

  “Watch your ruddy language,” Pa shouts out.

  I turn and glare at my fiery haired cousin. She looks like she’s been rolling around with a cartwheel and she thinks she owns the place. Well, her da, me uncle, does own the place so she kinda does. That doesn’t quench the sensation of midday-cobblestones burning inside my chest.

  “Or you’ll be gone too,” Pa finishes.

  I ignore her; all that’s on my mind is my last treasure and then getting out of here.

  “Where’ve you been, anyway?”

  I run my fingers over the stones around my trashed bed.

  “Nowhere. Why’d Pa do it?” I ask, waving at the ruins around me.

  My fingers feel the slight shift of a loose stone, and I pause because Mercy hates Pa too and she’s usually the first to talk dung about him, but she’s quiet.

  That’s when I see the plump white thing in her hands. White like only something new ever is.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  She hugs it close to her chest. “Well, you weren’t here and me, I was, and I thought you were gone for good. Them things were just junk. Plus, when Pa, saw he gave me a few coppers for the job. Like, clearing it out and all.” I advance towards her. “I never knew you was planning to come back and now you’re back, and I am sorry.”

  I snatch the white thing out of her arms. For all she’s bigger than I am, she has spent her life serving drinks and not hauling loads of lost things.

  “A pillow!” I shout. “You traded all my stuff for a pillow!”

  I whack her over the head with it and in the shower of feathers, I hear her hit the ground. Everything feels like a dream, and the feathers don’t help. My fingers find the loose stone again and I pull the object from behind it.

  Leaving her, and all those memories behind I take the steps three at a time and barge through the door into the tavern.

  Chairs whack, smash and topple in my wake; I even grab one and throw it across the room.

  “Wow,” some lad says.

  Freezing in my tracks, I eye him. He looks about my age, maybe older, but, of course, he is taller.

  “Bad day?” he asks.

  I grunt at him.

  “Do you know where the proprietor is?” He asks, saying proprietor as if he’s not sure the word even exists.

  “Who sent you,” I ask.

  “Hi, I’m Larkin. A friend, he’s helping me get a job. I kinda, well, see –”

  I wave at him impatiently and keep walking towards the front door, toppling every second chair just for good measure.

  “You don’t want no job here.”

  “Can’t be any worse than my last job, or my da.”

  Turning I look him in the eye. “Don’t aim for no worse, go look for something better.”

  I push the tavern doors open at the same moment some guy tries to walk in. He’s not a local drunkard – and I’d know – and his gaze lands straight on the lad behind me.

  “Get him out of here,” I say. “No one worth employing with here.”

  The man nods, and he has those dark knowing kind of eyes that instantly make me think of magic. Goosebumps rise on my arms. I get moving. It’s almost lunchtime. I can be somewhere with good food by afternoon tea. Fancy that, me thinking about afternoon tea – and I just might get to eat some, too.

  “Hunter,” Mercy shouts.

  I turn.

  She’s standing on the dirt between the cobbled road and the tavern stairs. Her mess of red tangled hair is decorated with feathers.

  “Don’t go.”

  I shake my head. A new feeling is unsettling my stomach. “Run, Mercy. While you still can,” I shout back at her.

  The other guy and the lad are nowhere to be seen. Good.

  Pa pushes the door open, his dust coloured eyes full of anger and the stiffness in his shoulders is made up of aggression.

  “Mercy, get back to work or you can find somewhere else to sleep tonight. And get those feathers out of your hair.” The door slams shut behind him.

  She looks at me, long and sorrowful.

  “Take this,” I say, slipping the flask of foul Baren liquor from my shirt. It’s still full – or as full as it was when I found it.

  But I don’t need it anymore.

  “Why?” she says.

  “Buy a new pillow or something.”

  She hugs it to her chest, then she does as Pa says.

  She’s gone.

  A part of me wants to go and get her. Tell her to come with me. But I know she won’t. She has a bed, a bedroom, and a wage – even if they do still treat her like a servant.

  She’s safe, in a dismal kind of way, and she has to make up her own mind.

  Age Marks.

  At the edge of the city there’s a wall, then a huge wide road that surrounds the city and is mostly for the maintenance crew. There’s a little stream and a bridge, then the road wanders into the trees and that’s it.

  It looks so simple. Just a few more steps and I will no longer be a city rat, but a… what’d he call them? Farmhand. I’ll be a hand.

  My hands have calluses on the knuckles from scrubbing floors and my shoulders have grooves warn into then from hauling loads. That, and a few scars from my pa or uncle is all I have left of the city.

  And, this letter.

  I unfold the piece of paper that I pulled from behind the loose stone. It’s thin with age and a brownish-yellow colour. The edges have begun to wear away and if it was seen on the street, it would be considered trash.

  But, the neat scrawl is my mother’s handwriting, and both of them signed the bottom. This is the last I have of my parents.

  To my son.

  To be given to him on his twelfth birthday.

  Ride like the wind to find your dreams and make them a reality. Pick yourself up, carry your chin high, but carry your heart higher still. And treasure your mind, our greatest gift to you.

  Mother and Father

  If I wasn’t snooping around Pa’s room, I wouldn’t have found this, not so long ago. I still don’t have a clue what it means, or why they’d be leaving me a letter – as if they knew the authorities were coming for them and that the noose lay ahead. They were street dealers, setting up quick tables for betting on cards or dice, scamming people for money and high-tailing it before they got caught. At least that’s what my uncle says.

  I shrug to myself. It doesn’t matter, whatever they did, whatever they were planning. I have three
lines to live by and I plan to try as hard as an anvil.

  “Ride like the wind to find your dreams and make them a reality. Pick yourself up, carry your chin high, but carry your heart higher still. And treasure your mind, our greatest gift to you,” I say, then I repeat it.

  As I walk, it becomes a little song.

  My ripped, torn and stained song.