Chapter 7 #2
The air hummed with power. In the swamp, I’d often vomited from the stench of faerie magic—a thick, rotten thing that slithered like a slug over my tongue. Here, Adrik’s power spilled sweetly through the chamber.
“You must be a great admirer of Bearded Ivar,” he said, glancing with amusement at the book I’d tossed to the foot of the bed.
“I certainly used to be. After spending the night with him, I’m rather disenchanted.” I was shocked to learn that I possessed a sliver of humor after all.
“Now that I know your type,” said Adrik with a quiet laugh, “let me pick out some books for you.”
I drank the tea he’d conjured while he busied himself with the shelves. It was a light and floral brew with a hint of heat. Adrik said over his shoulder, “A green tea with peach blossoms, ginger and honey. It’s my favorite.”
I decided, as I tried the sweets, that I had no love for candied oranges—they tasted like the sickly-sweet potion Lorell made me drink—and that wildberries dipped in chocolate were the best thing I’d ever eaten.
Adrik tapped a book gently on its spine. It floated from its place on the shelf and came to rest on the nightstand, followed by another. I snatched the third from the air, intrigued by its familiar leather binding. It was the same tattered book of folktales my mother had often read to me.
“I thought they were all burned.”
A man had come to us three winters after my mother’s death, dressed in strange white robes, and he’d pried the book from my hands, even as I pleaded with him. That night, the fires down in the village had burned so brightly, I’d smelled the sickly smoke through our sealed windows.
Adrik smiled softly at the book. “You will find that this town has a penchant for sheltering the rare and the precious.”
I stifled a shudder. The faeries suffered a ruthless obsession with collecting strange and powerful things. No wonder Adrik felt fondly for a town that attracted them.
“Do many who live in Wildemire still revere the spirits?”
I tried to sound nonchalant, but in truth, I burned to know the answer. I burned to know if there existed a place that might have seen wisdom in my mother’s madness. A place where the old folktales, haunting my memories like restless ghosts, still lived.
“There are few who do not. The spirits go wherever they are welcomed and honored. We’d be fools to slight them. To risk losing their protection.”
“The rest of the world would claim you are fools to believe in them.”
If Adrik thought ill of me for voicing such doubts, he did not reveal it. His smile remained mild as he said, “And what would you claim, Evana?”
I hesitated, convinced for a moment that he’d lured me into a trap, forcing me to unmask my madness just to scorn me as the villagers had. “I am not inclined to pass judgement on matters that exceed my understanding.”
“Then you are wiser than most.”
“Or more cowardly.”
He gave me a curious look, head slightly tilted. “It depends on what you make of your ignorance. A coward finds comfort in it and preserves it by shielding their eyes and ears. A wise person might find in ignorance an incentive to learn something new.”
“And what do you call a person who is afraid to find a lie hiding in every so-called truth?”
“A rightful skeptic, perhaps.” His smile had sharpened. He nodded to the book I still cradled as tightly as I had on the night of the burning. “I know better than to convince a skeptic, but I will say this: You will find more truth in these lost folktales than in the words preached by villagemen.”
I said, with a meaningful glance at the small town beyond the window, and with no small measure of amusement, “Are you not a villageman, too?”
He laughed quietly. “I suppose. Would you be more inclined to believe me if I were a lord or a prince?”
The sound I made was too sharp to be a laugh. “Less.”
“Wise,” he said with a wink.
To save firewood—the piles were, according to Adrik, shrinking rapidly—he carried me to the parlor. I endured this quietly and with a shameful flush. He settled me into a fireside armchair, amid haphazardly placed stacks of books.
Sunlight fell through a painted glass-door, spilling rainbows over the well-used dining table and its mismatched chairs. The room was flooded with color, as if someone had fetched ten buckets of paint and poured them at random over fabrics and furnishings.
Adrik must have noticed my bemusement, for he said, “Before Lorell lost his sight, he could best see bright colors and sharp contrasts. He allowed us to paint his things after moons of persuasion and mishaps.”
How foolish of me not to have realized this much sooner about Lorell—the midnight visits seemed suddenly not so strange.
“Do you live here too?”
“I live in a little cottage near the river, down there where it curves into the forest. I love the old man dearly, but the idea of living with him?” Adrik gave a dramatic shudder.
I bit back a smile, reminded of Lorell’s nocturnal trips.
“I am down in the workshop most mornings,” he continued, indicating a crooked door beneath a narrow, twisting staircase.
“In the evenings, I come over to cook, and throughout the day whenever Lorell calls for me.”
“You seem to be in high demand,” I said, recalling the nightingale-catching and late-night-riding.
“Ah, I am indeed highly desired, Evana.” He flung himself with grace into the armchair, popped a chocolate into his mouth and watched me with amusement while I stared at the fire, unable to bear his teasing smile. “Would you like to hear another tale?”
I nodded tensely. In truth, I wanted nothing more than to slip back beneath the covers and be released from his too-bright smile, his twinkling gaze.
But with the favor I needed from him an ever-present weight on my heart, I dared not refuse him.
Perhaps he’d slip up and reveal something of use to me.
That afternoon, Adrik told me the tale of the forge.
As he talked, the words turned into song and dream and rolling riverwaves that swept me off to another time, another life.
Down at the end of the winding street, tucked between the old mill and the bridge, stands Emond’s forge; a crooked cottage of darkstone walls and blue shutters.
Yavor, Emond’s eldest son, has a passion for gardening and so, during the warm moons, their house vanishes behind a shroud of flowering vines.
Once, over a hundred winters ago, this forge was no forge. It was the home of a scribe, and of a famous bard with a voice so clear she coaxed lilies from the frozen earth in the darkest winter night. The pair had four children. For many summers, their home was filled with love and song.
But then came a war, and though no war has ever found these forgotten lands, the father was unlucky; he’d gone to Kresting to see his mother, and one dark eve a faerie prince came and took all those capable of wielding a blade.
The woman and her children learned of his fate weeks later from a hastily scribbled letter. They did not know where he was or if he was alive. The woman stopped singing, and the children marked each day of his absence by planting a seed in the garden.
None of the seeds ever flourished and the earth lay littered with scars. There were many such scars; first enough to mark the passing of a moon, then a season, then a year.
Three summers and two winters passed. At the height of the second winter, the woman woke from the sound of a wistful song.
A song she used to sing to her husband. A song her lips had all but forgotten.
She followed it to the willow behind the house, and for the first time since her husband had left, she sang.
There, beneath the willow’s branches, bloomed a lily.
And in the garden, the seeds came to life.
The man returned before the moon had waned again, as if called home by his wife’s song and his children’s flowers.
The war had left marks on his body, his mind, his spirit.
He spent his whole life healing, but he spent it well.
The stars have long called him and his wife Beyond, but in the darkest night of the winter, without fail, a lily still blooms beneath that willow.
I blinked as Adrik fell silent, torn from another world.
His gaze had slipped to the window. Over his eyes hung a sheen of such tender sorrow, I felt a sharp echo of it in my own chest. There it was: A slight crack in his good humor.
A flaw in his perfection. To discover that crack felt not nearly as triumphant as I’d hoped.
I would much rather exploit a vileness for a favor than a wound.
Whatever spell had befallen me was shattered by the scratch of claws on wood.
A beast came nimbly down the stairs. I caught a shriek between my teeth.
It was as large as a hound but it moved with the sleekness only cats possessed.
I could have mistaken it for a shadow—it was as black as a moonless night—had it not been for the pair of sharp, pale-green eyes.
“Adrik!” the cat cried fretfully. “What bad manners to leave an old lady starving. Starving!”
I did not catch my shriek this time. Adrik leaped from his chair to place himself between me and the cat, and he said to me, “I forgot to warn you.”
A warning would have been good, indeed, though it should not have shocked me that this town of spirits, wild witches, and good-humored fairies was also home to a talking cat. Her eyes glittered with devilry as she peered at me.
“Oh,” she purred, treading closer. “Oh, but I get to meet the girl at last.” She clawed with a hiss at Adrik’s leg.
“What’s with the stare, girl? Never seen a talking cat?
” Her chuckle rattled like the cough of a blight-sick person.
“Of course you have not. One of a kind I am—am I not, Adrik?” His huff betrayed a hint of irritation.
“I am Bahra, but no need to introduce yourself. I know all about the girl who got nibbled by the wolves. Oh, not that stare again! Out with your questions, girl! You’re making an old lady rather uncomfortable. ”
I turned somewhat helplessly to Adrik. He shrugged just as helplessly. “Go on, tell Evana what happened.”
“Dear boy,” Bahra purred, “a great many things happen every day. I am positively swamped. Just now I was with the baker, for the mice have returned—”
“What happened to grant you so generously the gift of speech,” said Adrik with deliberate calm.
“Oh, that is what you mean." From the twinkle in her eyes I was certain she was nettling Adrik with intent. “I ate a mouse.”
“You ate a mouse?”
“I ate a mouse, who happened to have eaten a piece of cheese, and that piece of cheese just happened to have rested for a fortnight in an enchanted barrel. Remember that, boy? Remember when Zora used to enchant whatever she got her hands on? Ha, foolish child! Good times. Good times.”
Adrik said, “What Bahra means is that—through an unfortunate series of events—Zora, our resident mage, handed the gift of speech to a cat.”
“Oh, but how good of dear Zora to give me a voice you strange creatures care to heed! As if I was not talking before. You never listened!” Despite his vexedness, Adrik looked quite fondly at her.
“I’m graciously inclined to forgive the lack of supper, boy” Bahra purred as she strolled to the door.
“I bet Agnesa will not be so benevolent. No one has time to repair the hole in her roof, no one at all! The poor thing, horribly cold and all alone since Milana died. A cough she’s caught from the weather and from the snow in her parlor.
I barely heard her over the shivers and the sneezing—close to death, I reckon.
Adrik, she said to me, quite weakly. You must get Adrik. ”
Bahra opened the door with a leap and a nimble paw, and she did not cease to lament Agnesa’s plight until snow and distance swallowed her fretful voice.
“I wonder sometimes,” said Adrik with a suffering sigh, as if he’d forgotten I was there, “how these people lived before I came.”
Just after moonrise a rustle stirred the fir’s lower branches. I almost smiled when I glimpsed the fox. I was wide awake, but the beast was not. It shook the snow from its coat and sank into the snow, resting its head on its paws.
It fell asleep long before I did and I knew no better way to calm my restless fingers than by flipping the notebook to a blank page and adding in fine pencil strokes the outline of a mighty fox.
It came to me as easily as braiding my own hair. My fingers knew without thinking where to place each glimmer of moonlight on its fur.
A strange town, full of strange and wondrous creatures.
I fell asleep still holding the pencil.