by Philip Smith
There was a stunned silence as Matildra’s cheeks went bright pink and she pursed her lips into a hard line. Paige smirked.
“I appreciate your concern that I might suffer your fate of being an old maid at twenty years old, but you needn’t worry! I’ll have you know Derak of Oak’s Bough just this morning asked me to dance. What about you, Matildra? Have any eligible bachelors asked you to dance a day in advance?”
The girls gasped. Horror and indignation etched themselves onto Matildra’s rosy face.
“That’s what I figured,” Paige snipped, with only a trace of regret. But she was too annoyed to offer an apology. Instead she adjusted her belt quiver, turned her back on the group, and marched across the bridge towards her own home, satisfied that she’d put all the whisperings and gossip to rest, at least for a while. She felt the three Cops jingle in her pocket and decided she’d have to make it back to the market tomorrow. She smirked, pleased with herself for the exit line, and stepped up onto the deck of her home.
The chiefs home stood at the northwest corner of the village, only a couple platforms away from the Burgesses’ house where all the matters of state were addressed. Paige adored the house which was built around one of the few Elder Trees left within the confines of the village boundaries. It was a two-story circular home made from the finest red cedar hauled from the southern marshlands of the Wild, near Orellion Lake. The window shutters were painted a crisp green with carved runes of dragons, griffons, and winged horses dancing about the frames. Both stories had a large deck—the bottom one being available to foot traffic, which was shaded by the chief’s personal deck above. Many chiefs before had used the upper deck as a place for excessive merrymaking, but Papa was a simpler, more resourceful man and had some dirt hauled up to turn a large section of the deck into a garden for Elenass. Various vines spilled out from their boxed confines, winding around the support pillars to provide passersby with a light snack in the early summer months.
Paige strode up to the double doors she’d been walking through nearly all her young life and dropped her pack in the vestibule. The doors were both a half of a beautiful arched frame with ornate knot carvings, filled with the mythical creatures that had once inhabited the Wild many years ago: satyrs, fauns, centaurs, unicorns, and sphinxes, among others. Hand-chiseled vines wove in and out of the design as if it had grown there, and stains transformed the door into a beautiful patina brown that reminded one of freshly upturned humus after the first plowing of the season.
She twisted the giant iron ring, and the door swung open noiselessly on well-oiled wrought iron hinges as Paige grabbed her pack and stepped inside. The smell of freshly-brewed herbal tea filled her nostrils as she breathed in the smell of home: the aroma of her mother’s herbs mixed with the smell of a warm hearth, fresh bread, and newly laid parchment. She sighed contentedly as the late morning sun streamed in through the shimmering glass windows. She set her pack under the coat rack on the wall and gently swung the door shut.
Paige slipped off her moccasins and let her bare toes wiggle into the bearskin rug. In front of her was the giant, barky center of the home, the Elder Tree, its bark cascading up towards the second floor and above in a vast array of wild shapes and twists. To her right, a grand, log staircase ducked up into the second floor with the sleeping quarters. Below it, beyond the carved timber door, lay her father’s study. To Paige’s left heading around the tree to the back of the house was the sitting room, which was decked out in rustic log couches with cushions sewn from sheepskin, draped in hand woven tapestry. The parlor nestled itself around a small tea table crafted from solid, grey granite beneath which were stacked old leather-bound books and rolls of parchment. Beyond the sitting room, curling around to the back of the home, the kitchen and dining room basked in glorious sunlight as the wall surrounding that section of the house was more window than it was wood.
“Alwasu? Is that you?”
“Yes, Mother,” Paige responded, looking up to see Elenass descending the stairs, the train of her slim-fitting, sky-blue dress slipping down two steps behind her. Her fair hand barely touched the banister as she glided into the parlor. Her waist-length hair, so blonde that it was nearly white, was pulled back into a single braid, similar to Paige’s own hair. This style brought attention to her pronounced, tapered ears that were slightly longer in the point than Paige’s own. Elenass’s face was symmetrical in every way, with a complexion most women in the village would slay a dragon to have.
Paige grinned and walked over to her mother, embracing her and kissing her on the cheek.
“You’re home much later than I’d expected. Did everything go alright?” Elenass asked, her steel blue eyes searching her daughter’s, which was very nearly like looking in a mirror. Paige nodded. Her mother swiped away a pesky loose strand of dirty blonde hair from her daughter’s face, tucking it behind a tapered ear.
“Papa just had to finish up some business and then get off to the Burgesses,” Paige explained. “We saw Gerik in the village, and Papa invited him to supper tonight.”
“The rabbit slayer?”
Paige nodded.
Elenass laughed softly under her breath. “Such a strange man. I will never understand how your father can make so much fun at another’s expense and somehow still be best friends at the end of the day.”
“I think it’s a ‘man thing,’ Mother,” Paige said, smiling. “I hear they can be punching each other over drinks one moment, then buying them for each other the next.”
“How vile,” Elenass muttered. “We’ll need to be sure and set another place at the table. Olivian!”
Paige heard the door to her room open and close with the tell-tale squeak that had been there as long as she could remember. The sound of soft footsteps padded towards them as her older sister entered. She was a tall, beautiful young woman only two years Paige’s senior. Olivian was built like her mother, tall and slender with dirty-blonde, straight hair that fell almost to her waist.
“Yes, Mother?” Olivian asked, reaching behind her head and tying her hair back into a loose ponytail. Her eyes were a dead ringer for their papa’s: solid sapphire blue, compared to Paige’s almost grey blue. She wore a dark blue gown with long, loose sleeves and silver trim, a black leather corset holding it snugly around her waist.
“Set another place at the table tonight.”
“Can’t Ala do it?”Olivian protested.
Paige glared at her older sister, although she was, by this time, used to her trying to shove off chores on her. Olivian had become the graceful, poised, refined young woman the village expected a chieftain's daughter to be, but since Papa refused to hire any household servants, she had tried to settle for bossing her little sister around whenever she could.
“Did I ask her to do it?”
“No.”
“Then please do as I ask. Gerik is coming over for supper.”
“Yes, Mother,” Olivian muttered, rolling her eyes slightly. Paige giggled. Gerik wasn’t Olivian’s favorite person. Her nature gave her little patience for “those brutish, vile ruffians” Papa kept company with.
“And be a dear and watch the tea, will you?” Mother added. “I’ll just be a moment more upstairs.”
“I can watch it, Mother,” Paige volunteered. Her mother looked at her skeptically.
“Darling, you should probably wash yourself first… Wait, are those bloodstains on your sleeves?”
Paige stopped halfway up the stairs.
“Papa’s are worse, just for the record.”
“What?”
Paige chuckled. With all her grace and poise, her mother was overly meticulous about her housekeeping. Papa said it was an elf thing, and that’s why they got along so well—because her father described himself as a “rustically handsome, adventuring scalawag who has a slight tidiness problem.”
Paige lunged up to the second floor steps, which led to several bedrooms and a washroom. She passed her parents’ door and their washroom coming to the entran
ce to the room she and Olivian had shared since they were babies. It was carved with roses so lifelike one would almost be tempted to smell them.
The room was spacious, with a lunette window that stretched from the ceiling to the cedar baseboard. The interior of the room had been whitewashed over the cob stucco that danced in fancy patterns all the way to the ceiling. A chandelier made from contorted antlers hung above the girls’ goose-feather beds, which sat along either side of the room. A hastily made quilt tossed over the rope-tensioned frame denoted Paige’s bed from Olivian’s perfectly flat, meticulously smoothed comforter.
Paige ran over to her side of the room to the mahogany vanity sitting at the foot of her bed against the wall. She slid open a collection of drawers under the dresser and removed a clean linen shirt and some baggy fisherman’s pants. Mother wouldn’t be overly fond of the choice, but Paige wasn’t particularly worried about that. It had been a long morning, and right now she felt like snuggling up on a couch downstairs in comfortable clothes wrapped in her father’s bearskin throw while sipping on some hot tea. She might even take a book out of Papa’s library.
She eagerly changed and then went to the small washroom down the hall she and Olivian shared. No time to boil water for a hot bath—that would have to come later. So she splashed her face and scrubbed her hands in the wooden washbasin, dried her hands with a wool hand towel and rushed back downstairs, her baggy linen trousers whooshing as she descended the stairs a daring two steps at a time.
Olivian was in the kitchen setting the small stone table in the parlor for tea. A wooden tray held some small scones made from raspberries in mother’s terrace garden, with some small maize-meal cakes sweetened with honey and topped with chopped walnuts. Olivian brought over the teapot and set it down on a small cushion to keep the porcelain from scratching.
“Would you like honey, Paige?” Olivian asked.
“Sure.”
Olivian set a cup down and poured a small spoon of honey into the bottom of a clay mug. Then she poured tea over it. She handed Paige the cup, placing a tiny teaspoon with a unicorn’s head on the end of the handle.
“Did Mother say you could use these?” Paige asked, glaring at Olivian as her sister put an identical spoon in her own teacup.
“No, but what’s the point of having an enhanced set of teaspoons if you can’t use them once in a while?”
“Liv, we’re supposed to save them for company,” Paige insisted. Olivian shrugged.
“Gerik is coming later, and he won’t drink tea, so think of this as getting to use it because our company today won’t.” Olivian snapped her fingers and her spoon leapt to life, the unicorn head letting out a soft whinny and shaking its sparkling mane. It began to try and gallop around the teacup, stirring the honey into the tea as it trotted about in the steaming herbal brew. Paige rolled her eyes but snapped her finger too, allowing her own spoon to trot about and stir in the sweetener.
Her unicorn whinnied at her, and Paige nodded a “thank you” to the horse, offering it a crumb of a maize-cake in gratitude. The horse nibbled the crumb up happily and turned it’s head away as if it were bashful at being recognized for its service.
“They’re just so cute!” Olivian giggled, letting her own spoon lap up a drop of honey from her finger. Paige half-smiled. She was right: they were cute. Mother possessed a precious few enchanted items she’d bought from several traders as they made their way through Kapernaum from time to time. Paige didn’t know a ton about magic, but she knew enough to know there hadn’t been a magician in the Wild for over a century, and so with each passing year enchanted trinkets and commodities became harder and harder to find. Many in town suspected Paige and Olivian’s mother of being able to use magic since she was an elf, but her mother claimed she could not; Paige had never pressed the matter.
After a moment of reflective sipping, Paige asked Olivian, “What are you wearing to the dance besides the gown?”
Olivian looked thoughtful for a moment. “I don’t know. I have several green shawls that might go well with it. And maybe some beaded slippers. You?”
“I don’t know,” Paige said, tucking her legs underneath her and spreading one of the wool throw blankets on her lap. “I may go to the market again tomorrow and actually do some hunting around.”
“You could get a red sash, that would look wonderfully striking with the white dresses!” Olivian suggested excitedly. Paige smirked, suppressing a giggle. Olivian became a schoolgirl again any time she got excited about the latest fashions. It could get annoying, but Paige was trying to take more of her sister’s advice recently.
“That could work,” Paige said, sipping her tea. It washed down her throat like a warm enveloping blanket, circling around inside her and spreading its warmth to the tips of her tingling fingers.
“You might go see if the Gyhughs traders are in tomorrow,” Olivian suggested. “They often have some good scarlets from the eastern side of the Wild available, and they are almost always in Kapernaum for the bigger festivals.”
“I might do just that,” Paige said, finishing what was left in her teacup. A telltale ‘squeak’ in the second stair told her someone was descending the stairs. She glanced up to see her mother. One look at the tea table and her flawless, angled face screwed up in the contortion only a mother can achieve when she is about to scold her child.
“Honestly, Olivian, how many times must we go through this; practical magic only when there are guests over!” she scolded. Paige tried to hide an I-told-you-so smile by taking a fake sip out of her empty cup. The unicorn spoon nuzzled her nose and blew a tiny breath out through its nostrils.
“Sorry, Mother.” Olivian sighed in annoyance at being caught. Paige had never understood Olivian’s fascination with magic. It wasn’t like she could use it outside of previously enchanted objects. Mother said there were very few humans left in the world who could, so few that even living among her own people she had never met one.
Elenass opened the silver chest that housed seven other identical spoons and held it expectantly at Olivian. The princess reluctantly pulled her unicorn from it’s bath. The creature whinnied in protest the whole way to the box. Paige gently took her own spoon out and it brayed pitifully as she slid it into the velvet sleeve it was kept in. Mother shut the box and the noises instantly stopped as the spoons returned to their natural state. She silently tucked it away on the stone mantle of the fireplace.
“Well. I have a surprise for you both,” the elf said, smoothing her skirt and taking a gracious seat on the edge of the couch near Paige and Olivian. “They’re on your beds now.”
Olivian’s face lit up while Paige grinned smugly. Though she was nearly twenty winters old, Olivian was every bit the little princess she’d always been.
“I’ll try it on right away,” Olivian chirped, trying to contain her excitement behind some form of decorum.
“Wait, how did you know—”
“Thank you, Mother!” Olivian interrupted, leaping to her feet. She almost immediately remembered her manners and turned, setting her teacup down gingerly before she nearly skipped upstairs.
“You both knew the whole time, didn’t you?” Elenass said, staring at Paige through azure eyes squinted in suspicion.
“Well, not the whole time,” Paige said, taking another sip from her empty cup. Elenass huffed, her bottom lip pouting slightly.
“Don’t lie to me, Alwasu.”
“I’m sorry, Mother, you just aren’t very good at keeping secrets.” Paige giggled, downing the last of her hot beverage. Elenass looked slightly offended, then smiled smugly.
“I suppose I mustn’t be. Well then, my little ray of sunshine, go try it on and make sure it fits, yes?”
“Thank you, Mother. You really didn’t have to,” Paige said graciously, setting her tea mug on the stone table. Elenass smiled taking a sip of her own tea.
“It was my pleasure, Alwasu,” she said. “Even if it wasn’t a surprise for very long.”
Pai
ge stood and tossed the sheepskin back onto the couch before crossing over to her mother and hugging her tightly. Elenass returned her warm embrace with her slender yet surprisingly strong arms.
“Love you,” Paige whispered, squeezing her mother appreciatively.
“I love you too, darling.” Her mother’s smile took on a mischievous glint as Paige straightened up and turned to return to her room.
“But Paige?”
“Yes, Mother?”
“Don’t think I’ve forgotten about the stained shirt, young lady.”
Paige sighed, but smiled as she headed upstairs.
“I’ll get it soaking, don’t worry.”
With that, she bounded up the stairs to try on her new dress, more eager than she’d ever admit for the dance the following night.
Chapter 2
Cinniknots and Hiding spots
Paige jogged across the village platforms, the wood bridges rattling with every bound and leap. Hardly anyone else was up and about at this hour, but the chieftain’s daughter wanted to be sure she got on the first platform heading down to the market. She could hear the sounds of sleepy traders pitching tents and the clanging of pots below as the village slowly woke from slumbers in the pre-dawn that peeped through the canopy above.