She closed the ceremony by placing her hands on the Upshan Berental.
Hello, stranger, Kyron said.
I’ve missed you, Reesa thought, smiling.
Me too.
Then she turned to the assembly, and Brother Nolhein presented her as a full member of the congregation. She took her seat next to Arkit, and caressed the tiny hand of her friend’s new infant. “You did great,” Arkit whispered. Reesa tried to smile at the encouragement.
Can we talk? Kyron asked as Reesa’s mind drifted away from the services.
Certainly.
I’ve been exploring, studying the door that brought me here. I think I can open it.
You can get out?
No. When you’re in here, you’re in for forever. But I think I could open it wide enough to bring you in.
What? I couldn’t!
You always told me how much you wanted to see the screaming turnip people. At this, Reesa laughed aloud, drawing some indignant looks. She couldn’t deny it; she really did want to see the screaming turnip people.
There’s so much to see in here. More than that, there are people in here, others like me. I’m learning to talk to them. Every one of them used to live in one of the places I’ve told you about.
Really?
I think they found their way here, found a way through the door. We’re working together, trying to figure out how it all works. Will you join us?
Kyron, please. I just want my old life back.
We both know that’s not true.
She glanced at Arkit and her baby, then stole a glance at her parents before turning back to the Upshan Berental. She closed her eyes, squeezing tears from them. Kyron?
Yes?
Tell me a story.
***
The services concluded and the congregation began filing out. Reesa sat staring forward in her seat, unmoving but for shallow breaths and the occasional eyeblink. Father Uther watched her from the temple’s entrance, first with sadness and then with annoyance. When Reesa’s mother grabbed her shoulders and began to wail as she shook her daughter, he rushed back inside.
Reesa’s mother was sobbing uncontrollably, clutching the girl’s head to her chest as she cried, “No, please, please come back.” Arkit’s arms were around them both, trying to offer comfort. Her father stood beside them, one hand on his wife’s shoulder, his face stoic as plaster.
Father Uther’s heart sank. Like all the priests, he knew the legend of the empty boy. “Did she say anything to you before—?” Uther tried to summon a word for it, but came up blank.
Arkit nodded. “She said she was sorry, and she asked me to look after her parents.”
“Is that all?”
Arkit gave a choked laugh. “I don’t know what she… She said, ‘The secrets of the universe are mine.’”
About The Author
Bryce Anderson, author, programmer, and part-time underworld lich king, resides in Salt Lake City, a real, not-made-up place that exists. A cat named Zoidberg lives in his apartment and frequently gets all up in his grill. Bryce would be a political revolutionary if he had any real ambition at all, but since he doesn’t, curmudgeonly will have to suffice. His writing advice is simple, and also applies to jump-starting a beleaguered national economy: persistent, bold experimentation.
For more information, visit http://bannedsorcery.com.
Bronwen's Dowry
Belinda Mellor
Editor’s Note: Nobility looms large in fantasy stories. Heroes and their honor, kings and their duty, good vs. evil, etc. But nobility is not limited to such grand stages. Sometimes it plays out in a single heart.
The journeymen shearers called at the farms in early summer to clip the flocks of their winter wool and barter a few wares on the side. At Olber Stoson’s farm the shearer had arrived with only a few tunes to trade, and those from poor pipes. He was a sparely built man; young yet weathered, with few words and fewer smiles. He was good at his craft and not a single sheep shorn was bloodied. Olber Stoson was impressed.
The price for the shearing was a small percentage of the fleeces. Pawl earned his supper with a few simple tunes. Olber Stoson was not impressed by those. Olber was a widower, recently bereaved, soon to be wed again. He had found a new wife on the far side of the Hill, a woman somewhat younger than he, once wed but now widowed like himself, and possessing a fine piece of land. That was her only quality it was said, but it was quality enough for Olber, for his flock grazed land that was not his and the roof over his head belonged to another, and they were required back.
Olber had but one problem, one possible snag in his plans: as a young man with a young wife he had hoped for a son who would work alongside him, support he and his wife in their old age. His wife had provided him with a child, but it was a girl, and she never bore another. They had struggled on but the harvests were bad and the winters were worse; the lambs died and the family had nothing like enough to eat, even after The Finder had visited the Hill one spring. When a local gentlewoman offered to take the child and raise her as her own, Olber and his wife had readily agreed.
That had been fourteen years ago. Then his wife had died. Alone, with nothing but sixty sheep to his name, Olber could not have hoped to find a new wife, so, to his present regret, he had gone to the fine house and demanded the return of his girl. There had been shouting and some swearing on his part, but eventually he had his way and took her off to keep house for him and help on the farm.
Then the farmer over the Hill had died, out riding one day in a storm, and his plain and argumentative wife had been left a farm she could not manage, and Olber had moved fast and should have moved in, but for his daughter.
Bronwen was a pretty girl, even though she had lost a lot of weight since coming home and her hands were now chapped and her cheeks pinched. She would not be welcome at the farm over the Hill. The big house had made it quite clear that she was now her father’s responsibility so he could not take her back there, and how could he marry her off? He could ill afford to part with any of his sheep and, even if he could, what sort of dowry would a few sheep be? Yet until she was gone he could not go.
“Have you a wife, Pawl?” Olber asked, after Bronwen had served up a mean supper of cabbage and wheat stew.
The journeyman laughed, slightly, mockingly. “Do I look wed?”
“You would like a wife though? Or are you content to be your own man?” the farmer persisted.
Pawl looked at his hands, thin, supple with lanolin from the fleeces. “Aye—and what man would not? But I can ill support myself, let alone another, and if there were little ones…” The statement hung in the air, and Olber knew the scene all too well.
Bronwen was brewing a nettle tea in the lean-to area where the cooking and the washing took place.
“My daughter needs a husband, and I have found no one to take her. She is a good lass…”
“But she has no dowry,” Pawl finished.
“And you have nothing to offer, so no other father would even let you look at his girl,” Olber countered.
And so the deal was done. When Pawl the journeyman shearer left that side of the Hill he took with him not only three fine fleeces and his sorry pipes but also a pretty wife, with a small satchel of threads and needles under her arm.
Bronwen did not look back, nor could she bring herself to look at the stranger walking beside her who was her husband. She was not afraid of him for he was not a man who caused those around him to fear, rather she was shy and bewildered, and somewhat surprised at the turn her life had taken. He was no less surprised than she; he had not intended to look for a wife and in his experience of life up until this point nothing was found unless it was looked for, and even then there was no certainty. It was not that he had no wish to marry someday, rather that he had a more immediate priority, an event in the late autumn, which for him marked the finishing of the old year and the start of the new. That event was the Piper’s Quest.
Nightfall found them on the far si
de of the Hill, knocking at the solid door of a solid farmhouse. The woman who opened the door was as sturdily built as her home, and she looked appraisingly at Bronwen’s thin face and Pawl’s bony hands and might have taken them for vagrants but that she caught sight of the shearing blades in Pawl’s belt.
“About time too,” she grumbled, and directed them to the barn where they could sleep. “I suppose you haven’t eaten?” she added, as an afterthought, and fetched them some bread and some broth, with which they celebrated their wedding feast.
Pawl woke early, as was his wont, yet Bronwen was up and gone before him. When he had worked and washed and evening was closing in, he returned to the loft and Bronwen smiled her welcome.
“We’re to eat in the house,” she told him.
He frowned. “How come the invitation?”
“I, too, have worked today,” she said. “I have cooked and I have mended. The woman is to marry again soon, she told me. There is a lot to do; I helped, she said to eat in.”
Bronwen’s dress was plain but it hung well on her, it even suited her.
Pawl knew he did not look so well in his clothes. “I have only two shirts, the other is more worn than this—”
“It is mended now.”
And so it was. Mended and decorated with an intertwining pattern in green and red, gold and blue.
“The Dancing Serpents,” Pawl muttered approvingly, recognising the design. At least that problem was solved for the Piper’s Quest. Maybe old Stoson had done him a favour greater than he had guessed.
Feeling less discomfited than he would have thought possible, Pawl, with Bronwen, ate supper in the cool of the farmhouse. When they had finished, the woman asked if the journeyman could do more than shear sheep—could he perhaps mend fences?
And so they stayed. Not too many days, not too many tasks—there were others waiting on Pawl’s arrival and a journey to be made, a place to be when the year ended.
They ate in, daily, and sometimes the woman of the house smiled and hummed along with Pawl’s piping and sometimes she scowled and her eyes burnt with a hunger, a desire, and she would not talk. On those evenings they left early for their straw-filled loft, where they slept as secure as wintered stock.
“What does she want?” Pawl asked his wife one morning.
“Morning and evening—the promise of long-life and security.”
“Meaning what?” he insisted, but she smiled and made no other reply so he shrugged and went out to secure the roof of the hen coop as he had promised, while Bronwen opened her satchel and took out her needles and threads and some fine linen that had once been a nightgown when she had lived a gentler life.
“We must be on our way soon,” Pawl said that night at supper. He was, in a way, sorry to leave. He had put on some weight in just the few days since they came here, and Bronwen looked better than when he had first seen her.
“Just one more task, then I’ll not keep you.” The woman was relaxed, happy even. Her hunger gone, satisfied. “A simple task—it shall not take you long.”
She spoke truly. By noon the following day he had finished the blackwood frame and Bronwen had collected their few belongings together and was ready to go. They ate a noon meal alone and, when they were done, the woman appeared, radiant with pleasure and with pride.
“It looks just so,” she declared, fetching down a faded dried posy from a nail in the wall and hanging in its place the blackwood frame, within which the Arc of Dawn and the River of Dusk sparkled and flowed in an almost perceivable pattern of silk threads against a milk-pale cloth. Pawl gaped and Bronwen hid a smile behind her napkin.
The woman misunderstood his expression and a guilty glimmer lit her eyes. “I know, I know,” she soothed. “Yet you have no home, and you will get better use from the price I paid.”
“Yes,” Bronwen said quickly. “We will.”
“Of course,” Pawl agreed, wondering what it was he was agreeing to, recalling the only other time he had seen the great symbols of home and life—a tapestry in a crowded hall, a wedding gift to the Master of Myron, where the Piper’s Quest would be resolved, this year as always.
She gave them a horse, instead of fleeces, for the shearing and the work he had done. It was not a particularly good horse, nor a young one, but it was the first Pawl had owned and he was pleased with the bargain. They still had two of the fleeces Bronwen’s father had paid; the third was spun already. Pawl felt richer than he had for many years. They even had food for a day or two. Nevertheless he was not relaxed.
“Where did you get that embroidery?” he asked urgently, as soon as they were away.
She laughed lightly; the horse pricked its ears.
“I sewed it—I made it myself. Once I lived in gentle company. I learnt many things.”
“Obviously,” he muttered. “That was what she was so anxious about.” It was a statement, not a question. She answered nevertheless; she felt she owed him that.
“She is to marry soon. She saw my design, I was working on it and she saw it. I told her it was for us, but she wanted it. Eventually I agreed.” She made a little, dismissive, apologetic gesture.
“What did she offer in exchange?” Why did he feel so angry? What, he reasoned, could they have done with the embroidery if she had kept it? Hung it about the horse’s neck?
“I can make another,” she said contritely, though she knew it was not so, not really. The Arc of Dawn was the symbol of life and of a marriage; the River of Dusk was the symbol of security and the home. These things came into the pictures once, perfectly; after that they were copies only. “Materials, threads, clothes from her past to cut and remake,” she answered his question. “She has much, we have little. Now she has something she could not have otherwise had, and we have more than before. She also let me keep the spindles I borrowed. Now I can spin the fleeces. I shall make you a tunic.”
Pawl, strolling beside the horse, smiled slightly, despite himself. Then he raised his arm in salute to a figure in the distance, a shepherd driving a flock of sheep towards the place they had just left, and Bronwen laughed and waved too.
“That was your father!” Pawl exclaimed.
“It was,” Bronwen agreed. “I wonder where he is going.”
***
Summer passed and, as the days shortened, the distance to Myron shortened too. They left in their wake a trail of shorn sheep, mended fences, cleared ditches and gentle music. Bronwen spun and sewed and was content. Pawl was growing restless. He cut himself wood for new pipes and spent long hours whittling and paring, and made music that hung mistlike on the early autumn air, blending harmoniously with the melody of the woodland birds and the breezes and the streams. Music that would be lost amid the high rafters of the great hall of Myron, would be muted by the tapestries that hung about its walls, would be dismissed as mere pleasant tunings from a wandering shearer and would fail, as ever, the Piper’s Quest.
Bronwen listened to his playing with joy and to his misgivings with sorrow. He was committed to the Quest; each year it drew him back to Myron and each year it sent him out again to search for better tunes, to hone his skills, to long for a finer set of pipes that were far beyond his reach.
***
On the morning when the outline of Myron crenelated the horizon, Pawl sat by their campfire and traced the intertwined shapes of the Dancing Serpents that adorned his wrists.
“They chase each other endlessly. No escape. So the pattern continues and the seasons follow in their rightful order. I am the winter snake.” He sighed, fingering the blue serpent, “Chasing the Piper’s Quest like winter follows autumn’s tail.”
Bronwen nodded, understanding. “Chase on,” she told him. “I shall follow you meanwhile, as spring follows winter. The cold is forgotten then.”
He smiled wistfully. “What are you making?”
The cloth in her hands was cut small, jade green and shot through with threads of cherry red.
“A gown,” she replied. “From an old skirt give
n me by that farm woman. Green for happiness, red for good health.”
“It is a child’s gown,” he stated tonelessly.
“Indeed. A mother’s twofold wish for her child.” She held up the tiny garment for his inspection. “Of course, it is not finished yet.”
Pawl looked aghast. “We have no money, little food. I am going there”—he pointed vehemently towards their destination—“on a fool’s errand.”
She packed her handwork away. “I said it was a child’s gown, not that we are having a child. Most of the skirt was badly worn; the good cloth was too small to do much else with.”
“I am sorry,” he muttered, after a heartbeat’s silence.
“For what?” she asked mildly.
He rose to his feet and kicked the fire to ashes, saddled the horse and lifted her onto its broad back. “Sorry I can offer you no more than a fool’s dreams.”
***
The Piper’s Quest lasted a moonphase, marking the end of autumn, when the harvests were gathered in and the animals brought off the high pastures to the valleys and farm barns, and the earth lay dormant, waiting. Then the pipers of Eral gathered at Myron and made music that would seep through the frost-hardened ground and touch the seeds of new life, bring ships safely home, and warm cold hearts and cold hearths.
Eventually they would be judged, and from their number one would be chosen and named The Finder. For The Finder, life would never again be the same.
***
Even Bronwen, used as she had been to genteel living before her return to her father’s house, was overwhelmed by the splendour that was Myron. Yet, before long, the architectural grandeur and the ostentatious wealth of the city paled beside the beauty of the gathered pipers’ music. It soared to the rafters, carrying its listeners’ hearts. It soothed their cares and worries as it settled into alcoves and recesses. It elevated the lowly and reduced the mighty, so that all seemed in harmony. And Bronwen wept for the loveliness around her and for her husband, whose misgivings and premature sense of loss she at last understood.
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