I cried out in surprise and was stunned by the squawk that came out as my voice. I turned my head from side to side, and though every color was saturated so deeply, I could not see the change in my body. I raised my hands in frustration, but froze as I opened my…wings? Merlin had turned me into a bird, too?
I looked back at him and he tittered to me. I had no idea what he was saying, yet somehow I understood that he was laughing, not at me, but in glee. Well, I had asked about the world he saw through his eyes and he’d answered by letting me see it myself.
Merlin wasted no time in pointing his beak forward, then taking off down the river, following its twists and turns until it fell away completely, the water rushing over a ledge tucked into the forest. Merlin dove right after it.
I raced after him, but not without some surprise at how my body flew instinctively. I never knew there was a waterfall nearby. Only as animals could we truly plumb the secrets of the forest. The waterfall wasn’t too tall, rushing along as it was off a hillside, but it was high enough to shoot forth a heavy spray of mist each time the waters leaped to rejoin the river below.
Merlin pointed his beak upward and shot through the trees, following a straight course to Heaven. I rushed to catch up, and soon we were beating our wings over the treetops, rising higher and higher above the smallness of our village lives. I followed Merlin closely, uncertain about my orientation in the sky. It was odd to think that though I had seen birds and butterflies, bees and flies flitting about every day of my life, I had no idea how the world looked to them.
Simply put, it was the most exhilarating, most thrilling experience of my entire life.
For a while, we floated on the breeze, content to drink in the world below us, a world both tiny and beautiful. Beyond the treetops, I could just make out the river below, could just see the mill sitting beside it as the wheel pedaled through the water. Looking farther, I could see the edges of the village on one side, could just make out the bundles of movement signaling people going about their day. All throughout, the forest was neatly dotted with farmlands, the straight lines of freshly turned soil visible within the frame of trees bordering each family’s plot. Livestock dotted sprawling fields, sheep like little white puffs of clouds against a grainy green sky. I couldn’t keep my head from shaking at seeing it all below. They had no idea of the extensive beauty of the world around them, had no idea how much bigger the world was from the sky.
Through the thrill of it all, the one constant thought in my mind was that this was the world of a mage, so tiny, so perfect, so expansive, so palpable, like the tickle of air from a butterfly’s wings. Neither Merlin nor I knew it then, but that flight was the beginning of something larger than anything we could have anticipated. It wasn’t anything dramatic, nothing world-altering, but rather a certain inexplicable sense that comes from getting a taste of something so vast. How could life at the edge of a little village ever be enough after that?
Soon, a flock of geese converged upon us, flying straight toward Merlin and me as if they owned the skies. They cut between us, their long beaks fearsome as we were forced to duck and dive between them. Still, I held my own as they passed, chirruping in a friendly manner as they flew by. Somewhere alongside me, Merlin chirped with laughter.
We finally took a break on a lush tree branch that was close to the window of a farmhouse. I was too euphoric to do anything but turn to Merlin with very wide eyes. I didn’t know what kind of facial expressions a bird could make, but I hoped mine showed just how incredible I thought this was.
To me, it seemed like Merlin was grinning in response but he abruptly cut it short with a piercing squawk.
I was too startled by his suddenly fierce cry to move at first, so I sat dumbly until I felt a ferocious swipe at my side. I lost my footing and tumbled from the branch, straining vainly to fly even as I flipped over and fell with my back to the ground. From such a position, I could just make out the bold orange tabby that had mistaken me for a snack. It was already quickly bounding down the tree trunk, thinking to catch me as I hit the ground, and most likely crush my back.
All I could think was that at least I had seen the world as Heaven does, so it would be more familiar when I got up there.
But that was not to be. A sudden jolt broke my fall and my morbid thoughts as well. A brilliant purple head punched me sideways to force me to turn over, Merlin’s desperate attempt to save my life. I tried to twist with his motion and soon enough I’d righted myself and flew with all the power my little body could muster. Merlin stayed behind me the whole time, almost pushing me forward as we made a low beeline for a safe, empty spit of field.
No sooner had we reached it, then I felt the warm tingle once more. Next, I was tumbling to the ground as a human, my fall cushioned by the uncut grass. I came to rest, and in seconds, Merlin was beside me, panting heavily from the chase, from the mad dash to safety, from the exertion of keeping us as birds until just the right minute.
“All right? All right?” he kept saying, clutching my face, my hands to make sure I really was in one piece.
“Ow!” I yelped, as he grabbed my arm too tight.
We both looked down to find a bloody swipe from where the cat had nicked me in the tree.
“All right,” Merlin said again, taking hold of my arm and covering the scratch with his hand.
A low heat burned beneath his touch, and when he removed it there was nothing there, the skin healed as if there had been no wound at all.
“Good thing it wasn’t broken,” Merlin said, flopping back in the grass.
“Why’s that?” I asked, trying to sound composed in the face of such casual magic, as if magic was something I saw every day.
“Don’t think I have enough energy to summon the magic needed to fix it if it were,” he replied tiredly. “We’d have to find a Healer, though I doubt there are any close by.”
I looked down at Merlin in the grass. He sleepily smiled into the sun, exhausted from an afternoon of flying, exhilarated by our brush with danger. Without knowing why, without permission, my hand rose and lightly stroked his hair. It was so full, so soft, so comforting.
His grin grew and I kept at it.
“You can run out of magic?”
Merlin lolled his head toward me. “Not entirely, no, but turning and keeping two humans as birds is very tiresome, especially when only one has any magic,” he replied. He shifted a little so my frame would block the sun from his eyes. “I’m much stronger than I was, but not nearly as much as I could be.”
“So no mail deliveries yet?” I asked.
Merlin nodded. “I can only fly so far at this point,” he explained. “But I did fly most of the way when I came home.”
“Do you have much more to go?” I asked. “In your training, that is.”
“A mage never stops training,” he said firmly.
“Does that increase your magic?”
Merlin closed his eyes and took a deep breath that pressed him into the ground, as if his body was trying to become part of the very earth before its time. His sudden silence made me certain he wasn’t going to answer my question, not to my satisfaction at least. But then he did speak, and in his voice I heard a sound, a prayer, a world I’d never heard there before.
“There’s magic everywhere,” he said slowly, his hands passing over the grass beside him so the little green fingers tickled his palms. “We don’t fully understand all the different parts of it, but we can learn how to tap into it, how to harness it.” His fists clenched, as if he were tugging the reigns of the magical lines only he could feel. “It doesn’t mind either; it likes to be molded and shaped, it likes to be set upon the world in the forms we give it. Otherwise, it’s just a humming tangle of restless, untapped energy. I’m lucky to live in a kingdom with a king who appreciates that.”
“And every time you use it, you get stronger.”
“Usually,” Merlin confirmed. “Though, we can only ever be so strong. That’s why there are so few of us, w
hy each one of us needs a mage to guide us because the strengths of our powers differ. And, after years of training, if we are there when our mage master dies, then his magic comes to us.” Merlin grinned. “You can imagine the screening for apprenticeships is rather intense.”
“What if no one’s there when he dies?” I whispered, so entranced with what he was describing, so fearful of breaking the spell of his world.
Merlin pressed his hands back against the ground. “Then the magic returns to the earth where it belongs.”
I sat beside Merlin as he spoke, but there could have been an ocean between us. How could there be such a power in the world that couldn’t be seen or felt by so many of us? What was it like to feel it, to look at a village street and see more than grayed cobblestones softened by generations of footsteps, to stand in a barn and not just see a cow being milked and a horse eating hay? What was it like to see all those invisible threads of magic pulsating through everything in this world?
As if reading my thoughts, Merlin reached out and picked up my hand, grasping it lazily in his before letting it drop again. “Power invites liability, too,” he said, his half-smile directed more at his inward thoughts than me.
“What?”
“Never mind.” He tried to stifle a yawn. “Guess that last bit took more out of me than I realized. When I first cast these types of spells, it would knock me out for a full afternoon.”
He laughed at the dismayed look that must have crept across my face before I could catch and stop it. “Don’t worry,” he reassured me, “we’ll make it back.”
I softened. “You can rest a while first, if it’ll help.”
“Yes, thank you,” he replied, then without asking, adjusted himself so his head lay in my lap.
Seconds later, his chest was rising and falling in the gentle rhythm of sleep. I smiled down at him, feeling like I could use a rest myself. Carefully, I leaned back until I was also pressing against the warm grass, yearning to sense just a pulse of the magic interwoven with the earth. I didn’t fall asleep, but stared up at the sky, thinking about how different the view was from below it, marveling at how wonderful the view was within it.
I decided it must be what a king felt when he looked down on his subjects from the heights of his great castle towers. From there too, the world must seem so tiny, yet so vast, so small, yet so conquerable. I wondered if Merlin would grow strong enough to turn us into birds long enough to fly to the palace and see the world through the king’s eyes. What a story that would be.
Of course, I didn’t know then that I would get that very chance, as myself, in my human form, no less.
But that day, I closed my eyes and relished the sun’s warmth, only thinking that already I had a tale more fantastical and honest than any Father had ever spun.
And Merlin had made it happen for me.
I only asked for a glimpse of life though his violet eyes, and in response he’d given me the sky.
Even a king couldn’t do that.
One Lie to Outdo Them All
I can still hardly fathom the merciless irony of the moment that irrevocably changed my life occurring in the home of the man who gave me my first name, and thereby first opened the world to me. I cannot understand why such a well-meaning friend was burdened with a memory he could so relentlessly come to regret.
It was a quiet weekend afternoon, peaceful and unhurried as those days usually are. Father and I had been invited to Merlin’s family’s farm for a late lunch, so I had spent all morning carefully arranging a basket of freshly cut flowers for his mother. With a gaggle of children and a busy farm to tend, Merlin’s mother often complained that she had little time for niceties. I always tried to bring along a bouquet of some size whenever I went to visit.
To accommodate the scores of hired harvest workers, and the family itself, Merlin and his brothers had built a line of wooden tables and benches in a level clearing right outside their home. As long as there was light, meals were served there to keep the mess outside the house Merlin’s mother and sisters spent all day setting right.
Merlin had three married siblings who lived with their families in little houses of their own along the property. Everyone was there for lunch, so it was a pleasantly boisterous affair. As it turned out, we weren’t the only outsiders asked to join. For whatever reason, the nobleman whom Merlin’s father had his contract with had shown up to inspect his holdings, and in his generous way, Merlin’s father had invited him to eat with the rest of us. The duke, knowing his station but not being too above it, gratefully accepted the proffered hospitality. No doubt his acceptance of the invitation had much to do with the faery-eyed child who was showing much promise as a mage-in-training.
That simple, innocent agreeance was the single spark set against hay that would burn my life to the ground. And, of course, Father was there to strike the flint and feed fuel to the flame.
Our initial arrival went smoothly. It wasn’t until I was walking just behind Father, having given Merlin’s mother the flowers and receiving a platter of sliced bread to bring to the table, that anything went wrong. Because it was at that precise, fatal moment that Merlin’s father chose to introduce my father to his noble benefactor.
“Our resident miller,” was all the introduction he gave, but Father never needed more than a few words to bust open a door of bedazzling opportunity.
“It be me pleasure, milord,” Father blustered, doffing his hat and dipping his head at the nobleman, who politely nodded in return.
“I couldn’t help but be noticing them fine standard there,” Father rambled on, gesturing to the livery of the duke’s attendants. “I once be riding under colors meself, though that be a long time ago, under the honorable Lord Blackwell, Heaven rest his soul.”
Father provided a respectful pause into which the nobleman distractedly said, “Amen.”
His tone didn’t really suggest he was listening, but that didn’t stop Father. Very little ever did. For surely the duke knew that there was no Lord Blackwell, though why he didn’t say as much, why he didn’t walk away, is something beyond my ken. The only reasonable explanation I have thought of, discomfiting as it may be, is that the nobleman was somewhat bemused by Father and his presumptuousness.
“Aye,” Father blabbered, “back in me younger days, before me wife, Heaven bless her soul, be making an honest man of me. Me dragon slaying days be over same minute I be resting me eyes upon her golden hair. Then I be buying up me mill, right before me daughter’s birth. Pretty thing, she be. That be her, right there.”
Not wanting to be rude, or upset anything for Merlin’s father, I paused long enough to offer the nobleman a quick curtsy and a smile, doing my best to keep the bread from sliding off the plate. What I really wished was to tell the nobleman to move on, to leave my father to lace his sailor boots alone before anyone else was dragged under with him. It would have been a highly inappropriate thing to say. Still, I should have.
“Be looking very much like her mother, she does,” Father continued, momentarily lost in his world of admiration and remembrance.
A disinterested “Hm?” from the nobleman was all he got in response.
“Aye, and very talented, too, that one. There not be many a thing she can’t do, if she just be putting her finger to it. Greenest thumb in this village that be hers, though it won’t be helping her none living at the mill. She be growing some lovely flowers, like so, just like her mother.”
Most of the food had arrived at the table, but Father was still holding the nobleman back with his ramblings. The nobleman was too well mannered to push past him, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t glance around feverishly for someone, something to help persuade Father to leave the man be.
“Nay, nary a thing she cannot do. Bakes them little cakes be melting in your mouth, like them first snowflakes falling into a still autumn river.”
“Hm.”
“Surprising me still every day, she is. She be having one of them hands that be turning everythi
ng to gold. I be wagering she could even be spinning straw to gold, if she be given the chance!”
“She—gold?”
A question. Curiosity. Notice. The type of response Father was always angling for. He puffed out his chest and repeated the sentence that marked my doom. “I say me very daughter could be spinning straw into gold.”
The nobleman quirked an eyebrow at Father. “Really?” he asked, his tone ominously different.
The rest of the afternoon passed without further notable incidents, and none of us would be wise to the repercussions of Father’s lie until its poisonous tendrils spread to our cottage a few days later, announcing itself with a firm knock at our door.
Father and I went to answer at the same time, so I was right behind him when he opened it to reveal a small cadre of soldiers clad in the deep yellow and blue of the king.
“Are you the miller, master of this house?” the soldier who knocked demanded to know.
“Yes,” Father replied.
“And behind you,” the soldier gestured toward me, “is the daughter who can spin straw into gold.”
“Straw into gold?” Father questioned innocently, scrunching his face, looking for all the world like an old man with only half his wits about him. “Surely, that her hair be shining like gold.”
The soldier gave Father a very measured look. “That’s not how we heard it.”
Father cleared his throat uneasily. We knew better than to glance worriedly at each other, to give any indication that would prove all Father’s blathering to the nobleman had been a downright lie. What was more surprising, what made the whole situation so surreal, was that the nobleman had actually repeated Father’s lie, either enough times or to the right people to cause this little scene to unfold. Perhaps sitting next to Merlin at lunch hadn’t helped either. Not in a kingdom where the king was so devotedly interested in magic of all kinds.
Lies of Golden Straw Page 5