The Story Peddler

by Lindsay A. Franklin

  So when Gryfelle eased beside me with a tied-up rag in one hand and an open look about her face, I was fairly shocked.

  “May I sit?”

  I nodded to the ground beside me. The story I’d been building hovered in front of me—an old legend about a beast called a starwolf that looked human through the day then flipped to a dread beast in starlight. I hadn’t told it in years because it wasn’t crowned. The wolfish beast made of gray-brown fabric story strands twirled slowly. When Gryfelle lowered herself beside me, the story wolf opened its mouth in a silent roar, and a beam of red light shot out.

  I waved my hand to make the blazing thing disappear and felt my face go hot. “Sorry. Not exactly the prettiest story, is it?”

  She didn’t look at me but smiled a little. “No one would fault you for having that tale on your mind—the beast revealed by starlight. I suppose that’s what you witnessed last night.” She held up the bundle in her hands. “Karlith tells me these cold river stones might soothe your sore jaw.”

  “Oh. That.” I’d barely thought of it, but it was achy.

  “I don’t remember using cold river stones or packed snow to ease pain and swelling, but Karlith says we’ve had need to do so dozens of times.”

  “Oh.” Part of Gryfelle’s healing arts that had disappeared into the night air.

  I hadn’t a notion what to say next. And being lost for words isn’t exactly what I’m known for.

  “May I?” Gryfelle held up the bundle of stones.

  I frowned. “May you what?”

  She smiled. “Your face.”

  “Oh, yes. All right.”

  She gently pressed the cool bundle to my sore jawbone.

  I studied her—the high cheekbones and the delicate lips, the smooth skin and the thick lashes shielding those green eyes. “Can you get it back, Gryfelle?”

  “Pardon me?” The lashes curled back and the green eyes lifted to me, a giant question mark swimming in them.

  “If Karlith taught you the arts again. If Mor retold your life story over and over, would it make a new memory for you?”

  Her eyes lowered back to her work. “It doesn’t quite work that way. I know for this moment that cool things help reduce pain and swelling. But the knowledge will not lodge fast in my mind. Furthermore . . .” She trailed off a moment, and great tears began to roll down her cheeks.

  But then she gathered her voice. “Furthermore, the desire to learn the healing arts has fled with the knowledge. It was a part of who I was, now lost. It’s worse than if the knowledge had never been there in the first place.”

  “Like a rockslide.” The picture popped into my head—along with a hollow dread in my heart. “When a big squall sweeps through Pembrone, sometimes the water lashes at the cliffs above the Menfor Sea. Rocks that’ve been sound enough to scramble across for years might suddenly break free and tumble down, taking hundreds of others with them. After that, the cliff face there is so smooth that no Pembroni would dare to test it for some years to come.

  “It’s a bit like that, isn’t it? Things that were once stuck fast in your mind come tumbling down, and the face of it is so smooth nothing else will stick there.”

  Gryfelle paused a moment, testing the temperature of the not-so-cool stones. “Yes. It is a bit like that.” She sighed and sat back. “Tanwen, I’m very sorry.”

  I stared at her. “You’re sorry? For what?”

  “I never meant to strike you last night.”

  I recoiled. “Of course you didn’t! Nobody means to lose herself.” I winced. Hadn’t come out like I’d wanted. “I mean, it isn’t your fault, Gryfelle.”

  She nodded and stared down.

  I sat on the fallen log beside her and spoke hesitatingly. “Dylun said the curse was from suppressing your songspinning gift. Suppressing—that’s the squashing down?”

  “Yes. That’s correct.”

  “And that’s why Mor made me promise to stop squashing it down?”

  “Yes.” Gryfelle paused. Then she looked me in the eyes. “I’m dying, Tanwen.”

  A thought suddenly struck me in the chest, though I couldn’t account for the way it knocked the breath from my body. “That’s why you won’t be with Mor.”

  A little smile broke through the cloud on her face. “Mor feels a great responsibility for me. But I think it’d be quite a shame to allow him to waste his heart on someone like me—a candle burned down to a stub. The flame will only hold out so much longer, I fear.”

  “But—” A lump in my throat cut off my words. I swallowed it down. “But if you love him, Gryfelle . . . I mean, you do love him, don’t you?”

  Her smile wilted to a pained grimace. “I’m sure I did. Once.”

  I’d never imagined what it would feel like if hope and despair waged a war inside my mind. But I supposed it was something like the battle raging inside me in that moment.

  I cleared my throat. “Do you remember what your life was like in Urian?” The name of the city I once dreamed about tasted like ash in my mouth.

  “I remember some things I’d rather forget. Imagine what it was like for the weavers at court when Gareth stormed to power. Suddenly, something that had been considered a gift from the goddesses was looked down upon like a curse. My parents—”

  She closed her eyes for several heartbeats before she could continue.

  “My parents did their best. I was only five years old when King Caradoc died, and they supposed I could be trained to ignore my songspinning ability.” She glanced up at me and raised an eyebrow. “That didn’t go so well.”

  “Did you run away, then?”

  A sad sort of smile turned up one corner of her mouth. “No. When it became clear the experiment hadn’t worked—that the suppression of my songspinning hadn’t made me ‘normal’ but had instead pushed me past a threshold into something truly cursed—my parents turned me over to Gareth and the king’s guard.”

  My mind got stuck on that one. Her own flesh-and-blood kin turned her in? Maybe I didn’t have much nice to say about life in a small farming town. And maybe I talked a lot about how poky and ordinary Pembrone was. But such a thing as turning in your own blood kin when you were the one who’d made them what they’d become. . . . Well, I could only think Gryfelle’s mam and dad wouldn’t be able to show their faces in Blodwyn’s tavern after what they had done. Not if they’d been Pembroni.

  I wanted to reach out and take Gryfelle’s hand. But it was pale as milk, and she was shaking. I didn’t know if she’d want me to.

  “Gryfelle?”

  She looked up again. “Yes?”

  “How did you escape after you were arrested?”

  “I didn’t. I mean, not at first. I was exiled to the Isles of Gael.”

  “The Isles of Gael!”

  Of course, then I remembered that Karlith had said it the night before. But I’d been so addled by the commotion I hadn’t comprehended what she’d said in the moment.

  I’d heard about people being banished to the islands of the prisoners. But for serious crimes. Like thieving from a temple or something. Something that wasn’t bad enough to earn a date on the chopping block but was so bad the king didn’t think you were worth feeding for ten years in his dungeon.

  But exiled for being a songspinner? And a young lass too!

  “Yes, the Isles of Gael.” Gryfelle sighed. “I hadn’t been on the island two minutes before I realized I’d have to get off somehow. The other prisoners—” She shook her head as if to clear it. “Well, that’s another memory I’d not mind losing. They’d all but turned into beasts. Savages. All the society and humanity chased from them by starvation, violence, and cruelty.”

  Suddenly, something clicked in my mind. My heart wrenched. “Is that where you met Mor? Because he was sailing around and pirating and all?”

  She smiled ruefully. “I suppose that’s the short version of what happened.” But she didn’t give me a chance to ask what the long version was. “Are you cold, Tanwen?”

&n
bsp; “Eh?”

  “You’re shivering.”

  I guessed I was a bit chilly. The sun was all but blotted out by the trees, and the Corsyth felt damp and misty this afternoon. “I suppose I am.”

  “Shall I warm you?”

  “Warm me? But how—”

  My question died when she opened her mouth again. Because this time song poured out. Strands like hazy fire flowed from her lips. I couldn’t figure the words—Old Tirian again. But it felt like she sang of the kind of summer afternoon when all the work stops for a minute and everybody lies in the shade and sips something cold.

  Whether she truly sang about that or not, I don’t know; but as I thought about those summer afternoons on the farm, strands for those ideas ribboned from my fingers. Pale blue satin for the sky and sparkling yellow mist for the sunlight. Then a ribbon of amber-colored light that looked as though it bubbled. It could only be Brac’s mug of ale. Then another strand so clear I could scarcely see it but for a shimmer here and there. That was my mug of cold well water, never so appreciated as on those hot, sunny days.

  Gryfelle’s song drew to a slow close. Her strands disappeared, but mine crystallized into a tiny glass haymow, just like the ones on Farmer Bradwir’s farm that Brac and I would lean against when we rested.

  Gryfelle smiled. “You miss him.”

  It wasn’t a question, and I realized Gryfelle was in the habit of doing that. Observing things and saying them aloud.

  “Aye, I miss him.” A lump of guilt bigger and colder than a river stone settled in my stomach. I bit my lip. “Think I’ll ever see him again?”

  “If Mor and Dylun and Warmil have anything to say about it, you all won’t be in hiding forever.”

  “And you?”

  She smiled weakly. “My purpose is to serve as a warning to others. Beyond that, I have no future.”

  I swallowed and watched the leaves flutter above us. “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard, Gryfelle.”

  “Is it? Well . . .” I could hear her take a long breath. “Then I have warned you well.”

  Chapter 22

  Tanwen

  It’s a strange thing to feel empty and full at the very same time. Empty on account of the fact that, in so many ways, my life had taken a turn for the worse. Curses, doom, death, and the ever-lurking loneliness billowed around me like a dark cloud.

  A few days had passed, and with it, the fear of discovery seemed to ease a little. Aeron and Warmil had dumped the guardsmen’s bodies in the river, and I guessed that was supposed to make us safer for the time being. Harder to trace us back to the Corsyth if the guard didn’t have a couple of dead bodies to use as a starting point.

  The thought made my stomach lurch.

  But as I stared around the Corsyth from my favorite perch on the fallen log—at the beauty shaped by creation and by the hands that lived here—it tickled something inside me. Something that had been so long asleep I didn’t even know it existed.

  I felt like in this place, with these people, I could discover the real me. The storyteller. The weaver.

  And here I didn’t feel afraid of who she might be. I didn’t feel so much like an orphan.

  I pinched the stem of a fallen leaf and twirled it between my fingers and smiled. Brac would scoff at such fanciful notions. If it didn’t have an everyday application on the farm, Brac wasn’t much interested in thinking on it very long.

  Suddenly, I felt like my backbone had been switched out for an iron rod.

  Brac.

  Was it wicked of me to say the Corsyth weavers felt the closest to family I’d ever had? Brac had been by my side most of my life. I’d known the Corsyth weavers for a few days, and I was ready to say they somehow filled the great emptiness in my heart? Ridiculous.

  And yet it didn’t stop the feeling. Or the truth of it.

  Mor’s mischievous ice-blue eyes popped to mind.

  Aye. There was that too.

  If I were being honest with myself, the great pit inside me wasn’t just on account of the awful possibility shown to me in Gryfelle’s curse. No, part of it was on account of the fact that Mor was the first lad to ever set those painted-wings loose in my stomach. But if ever there was a lad’s whose heart wasn’t free, it was Mor.

  You’re a wretched creature, Tanwen En-Yestin.

  I crumbled the dry leaf between my fingers and let the crushed bits flutter to the ground like snowflakes.

  “Now, that’s a shame.”

  I nearly crumbled to pieces myself at the shock of a voice. Especially since it was that voice. “Ho, Mor,” I said. “Scared me half to death. What’s a shame?”

  “It’s a shame when something beautiful looks so desolate and forgotten.”

  I stared at the spot where I’d sprinkled the dead leaf bits. “It was just a leaf.”

  Mor laughed and his eyes twinkled. “I was talking about you, farm girl.”

  Heat swallowed me like I’d fallen into a fire. Except the fire was inside my face. “I am not a farm girl.”

  He grinned. Then he plunked down on the log beside me.

  We sat in silence a minute. Then I ventured, “Sometimes it seems . . .”

  He waited.

  “Nah.” I shook my head. “It’s a fool idea.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  That’s right, Tannie. Open your heart to the lad you’ll never have.

  I ignored that pesky voice again. “Sometimes it seems I’m forever meant to be without a family. My parents are gone. It didn’t take too many years before I became such a burden to the Bradwirs that I needed to strike out on my own. Then there was Riwor. Can you believe I tried to fancy her my granny for a bit?”

  Mor gave me a look that made me wonder if his noontime meal might resurface.

  “And just the other day, on my first rounds with Aeron, Zel, and Karlith, I had this fool idea that Karlith felt like . . . a mother.”

  Mor smiled. “She does feel like a mother. She is a mother, and she’ll love you like one if you let her.”

  “Well, not a moment after I’d thought it, in crashes the guard, shouting her name and looking to arrest the poor lady.” I sighed. “So maybe it’s just the way it’s meant to be. Maybe I’m not supposed to have a family.”

  He laughed humorlessly. “If it makes it any easier to swallow, I know how you feel.”

  It didn’t make it easier to swallow. It just made me feel bad for the both of us. “Mor?”

  “Aye?”

  “I’m sorry about Gryfelle.”

  He smiled in a tight, sad way. “Aye.”

  “I’ve only known her a short while, and the other night was . . .” I had to hold back a shudder. “Well, I can only imagine what it was like for the rest of you.” I looked down. “Especially you.”

  He didn’t speak for a moment. Just sat there, staring.

  “Tannie?” He was looking down at the ground like life’s toughest questions were written there in the dead leaves. “How do you know if you’re . . . I mean, sometimes the right thing is hard. But you should do it anyway, no matter how hard it is. Right?”

  I nodded.

  “And do you think doing the right thing when it’s difficult can somehow erase . . . ?” He trailed off and kept looking at the leaves on the ground. Though I don’t think he was seeing them at all.

  I nudged him. “Can somehow erase what?”

  “Times when you didn’t do what was right.”

  “Oh.” The question struck like a slap. “What’d you do?” Instantly, I wished I could suck the words back in. “Oh, sorry! Forget I asked that.”

  He smiled. Warm and thunderous like a summer rainstorm. He brushed a strand of hair off my face. “Don’t ever change.”

  Then he rose and strode away.

  I was left alone on the fallen log with a stomach full of painted-wings and the sharp knowledge that I was in for a world of trouble with this pirate.

  Chapter 23

  Tanwen

  “Yes, please tell me a
gain all about your high ideals. Really, I can’t get enough.” Warmil launched a withering glare across the fire at Dylun.

  We all sat there, eating our evening meal, but they were the only two talking. As usual.

  Dylun snarled back, “So your cause is the only one worthy of attention, is it?”

  “Not what I said. Don’t twist my words.”

  “Then don’t make such twistable declarations.”

  They both harrumphed and folded their arms across their chests. They may as well have been two of Farmer and Ma-Bradwir’s youngsters arguing over whose turn it was to grub the watta root slips.

  “Seems to me,” I cut in, aware but not caring that I probably didn’t have a right to speak up, “that you both want the same things.”

  Seven sets of eyes shot to me.

  But I figured I best explain myself, now that I’d started. “You’re both aiming at freedom, aye?”

  After a moment of silence, Warmil nodded. “Aye, I suppose.”

  “Never going to happen like this.”

  Dylun’s eyebrows rose. “Pardon me, but like what?”

  “With the two of you bickering like a couple of wee ones. Not meaning any disrespect, but if you both want the same things, I don’t think arguing over stuff like this is going to help anyone reach that end. You know?”

  A soft snuffle of laughter seemed to come from Mor’s direction, but I ignored it.

  “Seems to me if you’re after the same thing, no matter what your reasons are, you should be talking about how to get there rather than what makes the journey worth taking.”

  Warmil’s blue eyes narrowed, but then he nodded once and settled back into his moody silence. Dylun’s face relaxed a little, though his mouth twitched, and fried if I knew whether that meant he was angry or thought it was funny.

  Mor smile wryly. “What Warmil and Dylun mean to say is your point’s well taken, Tannie.”

  I shrugged and fought the glow that wanted to surface at his attention.

  Lots of silent chewing followed. Lots of silent chewing.

  How did these folks manage to talk to each other so little? I had more mealtime conversation back in Pembrone—when I ate by myself.

  Out of sheer need to be doing something other than count the number of times I chewed each bite of my roasted light-foot, I took to staring at Warmil. Seemed a better choice than Mor, given the way of things. Warmil was sitting right next to me, so he was the lucky one who got to be studied.