What Came From The Woods (def working title)

The Passers-Through (Recording available here.)


Once, there was a girl, and her heart was always in bloom. Her mother and her father, who were farmers, and her sisters and brothers, of whom there were many, were all kind and gentle people, but a man’s heart is not built to stay open through every day and every night. Even the kindest and gentlest of people must shutter their own soul to the outside world, or else every piece of themselves would tumble out into the fields and leave them with nothing. But this daughter of farmers knew no reticence, and kept no piece of herself in reserve, Her heart was always flying out to meet the world like birds shocked from a tree, cawing and tumbling into the air, greeting family and strangers and air and rain and cool morning mists and unploughed fields with the same unhesitating love.



For sixteen summers she lived this way, happily enough, and her family’s farm was prosperous, and her doting parents kept her close. But as the sixteenth summer faded into autumn, a stranger passed through her town. He stayed only one evening and afterwards no one could recall if he had said where he had come from (the woods, perhaps) or whether he was young or old, or what his profession or purpose in the world might be. But he had lit the fire in the tavern hearth with barely a wink of his left eye, and afterwards the usual loiterers and lingerers had gathered around him and each one found themselves asking for his advice.



And so the blossoming girl’s father returned home to the farm and called for her, and when she came running he began to weep, and told her that he had learned of a way to cure her perpetually open heart, but that she would need to travel very far, and that her task would tax her greatly.



“Your mother and I have always kept you from any real dangers,” the farmer said, draping his own traveling cloak around her shoulders, “but where you are going, we cannot follow, or the magic will not work. You must find a key, a special key, carved from the bones of the fastest bird, set with the most precious stone in the world. Whosoever has this key is granted total control over their own heart and mind, and once you have that your mother and I will never have to worry about your well-being.”



The blossoming girl didn’t want to leave her family or her home, the things she loved the best in the world, but she loved her father and, seeing his tears and hearing about his fear, she could not deny him. And so she set out into the world, traveling first to the south and then to the east, following a map made by a man she had never met.



i.



Barely even a day into her travels, she came to a stream, and a small wheat mill sat upon the stream. In her own village there was also a wheat mill, which sat upon a river, but this wheat mill was no larger than a doll house and, as she came to it, she realized it was staffed entirely by frogs, who were all weeping, as her father had wept the night before. While she watched, the largest frog took the very smallest frog in its mouth and, weeping still, deposited it in the wheel of the mill, grinding it to blood and viscera. And all of the frogs croaked,



Life gives life and it takes away,

Burdens us with night and day,

Leaves us only with despair,

But gives us plenty for-to share.



Woe to the wheel of life.



“What a dreadful song!” said the girl, storming into their midst, unable to keep quiet. “How can you do this to one another and then sing about it?”



The largest frog gazed at her solemnly. “There would be no song without the act, and no act without the song. Who among us would dream something so terrible, if we were not already doing it? And who among us would do something so terrible, and say nothing of our wickedness?”



And upon saying this, the frog dropped another one of its children into the wheel.



“If you know it’s wicked, why do it?” the girl demanded.



And the frogs began to explain, through their tears and occasional repetitions of their bleak verse. Generations of frogs had used this mill to grind their flies into flour, and the stream, while too small to be of use to the world of men, who merely waded through it on their way to bigger things, had always been strong enough to push the wheel to grind the flies to make the flour to feed the frogs and their families. Until one day the stream had dried up. The water had simply disappeared, and the frogs of the forest began to slowly starve to death.



Until a stranger had passed through, and had stopped to give them some advice. And this stranger had taught the frogs their song, and taught them a small piece of magic which would bring the water back to their stream. And so, as long as they sacrificed their children and kept singing, the water would keep flowing, and the frogs would live. Not every frog, but enough of them.



In the time it took the frogs to explain this, the edges of the girl’s traveling cloak had become waterlogged and sodden with their tears, and her feet were beginning to sink into mud that stank of salt and wretchedness. Seeing them weep, so much like her own father, the girl could not leave them. So she began to climb the hill, looking for the source of the stream. The higher she climbed, the less water there was in the streambed, until finally it was nothing but a dry groove of clay and rocks in the forest.



The spring that had once fed the frog’s stream had indeed ceased to flow. At the point where it had once bubbled forth to the surface of the world, there were now only a few smooth stones and a handful of withering ferns. The girl crouched at the mouth of the spring and began to cry, overcome by hopelessness and fear for the frogs. And as she cried, her tears rolled downhill, through the dry streambed. The frogs could hear her weeping at the top of the hill, and they came to join her, and with all of their weeping they filled the stream until it was rushing and gurgling as strongly as it ever had in any living frog’s memory.



With enough frogs weeping together, there was more than enough water to keep the fly mill functioning, no sacrifice necessary. Tears are a fine substitute for blood. And so the blossoming girl left the frogs of the fly mill, still weeping but no longer wicked, and she went on her way.

iii.

The girl and the beast-rat moved farther east, the sun setting at their backs. The woods were changing. Her hometown was the very westernmost edge of the world of men, and the mountains and wood farther west than that were uncloven and unexplored. The trees there could bend and change shape to suit their preference, growing into strange formations. You might clear the brush in the wrong place and come back a few days later to find that a large tree had fallen in your way, and that mushrooms and damp ferns were already springing up to replace what had been taken. Sometimes, branches became like gates. The damp earth whispered and sighed when your back was turned. Dark birds followed you everywhere, sometimes too loud and sometimes too silent, always with a glimmer of dark purpose in their dark eyes.

But here, four days to the east, the trees were growing straighter and thinner. The dirt stayed silent unless you really dug your toes in and listened. Jackdaws flew in spirals above her head as she walked, but their conversation was unthoughtful. The girl could tell how close the increasingly frequent villages and outposts were by listening to them, their usual profanities and insipid comments turning to plain bird sounds the closer men were.

Traveling was becoming lonely, and the beast-rat was terrible company. It mainly sulked in her pocket or else nipped at her fingers, sour about its demotion from fearsome beast to lowly pet. The girl was already days behind schedule, and couldn’t afford to be sidetracked by plight again. If she kept away from villages, she could almost pretend not to be worried about what the traveler ahead of her had done in each of them.

So the crows kept her company. “Wretch!” they screamed. “Boil-faced hairy-toed tooth-tittied hag!”

“Blaggards!” the blossoming girl shouted back, swinging her fists at the sky and skipping a little, caught up in the spirit of things. “Black-beaked oath-breaking egg-sucking worms!” The jackdaws screeched with delight, and brought her presents: glistening feathers from fairer birds and bits of women’s jewelry. The blossoming girl tucked the feathers into the places where her traveling cloak’s seams were loose, and gave the jewelry to the beast-rat to gnaw on in place of her hands.

On the morning of her sixth day of travel, she ate the last of her double-baked traveling bread, glad to see it go, and dug up the roots of a woodsman’s sorrel for lunch. The jackdaws led her to a thick patch of wineberries as they crested the ridge of another hill just past noon. As evening fell, she gnawed sassafras and called the jackdaws milk-stealing self-flagellators to convince them to crack open hickory nuts for her. The beast-rat turned its whiskered nose up at all of this, however. It hadn’t eaten since it had finished off the salted pork on the fifth day.

“Couldn’t one of you lovely pig-poking puss-drinkers fetch us something for my murder-minded travelling companion?” the blossoming girl sighed. “How close to men can you get before you lose your sense?”

“Men!” shrieked the birds. “Callow-hearted latrine-licking swine!” And they took off into the darkness, laughing, leaving the girl alone.

But when she awoke at sunrise it was to the jackdaws slinging happy, eager curses at the eastern horizon, all settled around and on top of her traveling cloak, so that from the air she had perhaps looked like one large, misshapen bird. They had brought her another gift in the night: a yellow-eyed, silver-skinned fish. She fed this to the beast-rat, who gobbled it up, eyes and all.

“You really ought to say something,” the girl told it. “I’ve saved your life and it’s only polite.”

“Witch,” the beast-rat wailed. “Foul blood-breathed hag!”

Hurt, the girl threw the beast-rat to the ground. The jackdaws scattered, all echoing the beast-rat: “Witch!” they cried. “Crone! Hag!” For a moment their shrieking covered up the second noise the beast-rat made, which was wretching.

It vomited the fish back onto the girl’s feet and stared at her balefully.

“Witch,” the fish moaned pitifully, in the same voice the beast-rat had used the moment before. The beast-rat said nothing.

“Take me to where you found this fish,” said the girl, slipping the thing into her waterskin and scooping the silent beast-rat back into her pocket. The jackdaws clamored around her, screaming. “Cave-bellied two-tongued viper!” they cried. “Sin-stewing liver-chomping washerwoman!”

“Take me to the hell-begotten rot-hole you got this mold-ridden fish from, you maggot-eyed brainless birds!” the girl corrected herself. And the jackdaws took off down the mountain, pausing on trembling tree branches to wait for her as she scrambled after them, screaming “witch!” at her. And the fish in her waterskin moaned, “Witch!” And the beast-rat said nothing, but stared grimly up at her from her pocket, accusing, as if it knew that she had promised herself not to get distracted again, and as if it knew that she was taking them both into danger.

At the foot of the mountain the jackdaws cursing became less inventive, and an hour further into the woods it ceased to be words at all, and an hour further than that, as the sun was climbing to its highest point, they fell silent, except for an occasional caw and croak to hurry her along. At last they came to a marsh, with cattails poking up through muddy water and swaying like church-goers. The girl took off her boots and slung them around her shoulders in order to wade into the muck, and found that the water was as warm as blood.

And she thought about how strange it was, that her bird friends and her beast-rat’s unfortunate snack were so silent now, when there didn’t seem to be a single human soul around. There were no smoking chimneys, or sounds of children playing, or men and women at work, or even signs of frequent visitors to the cattail marsh. The mud was untrampled, the reeds unbroken, the water still and calm except for her own two feet moving cautiously through it.

Man drains a little bit of magic from everything. They use it unknowingly, plucking bits and pieces from the air for small tasks that they don’t even realize are magical: making a song linger in the mind long after its been heard, or knowing who’s at the door without looking, or healing from a broken heart. One man alone doesn’t take up more than his fair share, but there are so very many men and women, and they love to gather in one spot and stay put. No other creature in the world as large and magic-thirsty as man spends nearly so much time in groups so very large. A town is like an anthill of ants that have grown too big and unwieldy and desperate.

But there was no anthill here. The jackdaws should still have things to say, and the fish in her waterskin should have called to its friends, and the water should be as cold and icy as the air above it, and the girl shouldn’t have had half so much dread bubbling over in her gut.

There is only one way a place with few people loses all of its extra magic: you have to start taking it on purpose.

“A witch,” the girl whispered to the jackdaws. “A hag. Have you been warning me, all this time?”

She did not speak aloud a sudden terrible thought, unfamiliar to her in all her years of safety and serenity, that perhaps the jackdaws had not been warning her but luring her. She did not turn back.

At last she came to a small house, or perhaps a boat that did not need to move very fast. It wasn’t half so much floating as it was nestled in the water, a fat lump of weathered wood blackened all around the edges where a sort of veranda was flush with the marsh, the rushes of its thatched roof turning green in the damp. She hid in the cattails and watched as a very old man came out of the house, unremarkable except for how very gray he was, from the tip of his long, tangled beard to the deep wrinkles of his forehead. He walked thrice around his little house, his gray, bare feet very sure for such an old man. The girl was just beginning to feel sorry for him, this lonely old hermit in his decaying home, when he stopped pacing finally and stamped his bare left foot just once. A curl of gray smoke rose immediately from the sad little houseboat’s chimney, and all at once the girl knew who she was looking at. The jackdaws all fluttered their wings and ruffled their feathers in response to her sharp intake of breath, but otherwise stayed silent.

She plucked the beast-rat from her pocket and spoke to it once more. “Well, monster,” she said, “I can hardly take you to certain death when I’ve only just saved your life, so you will need to run now. Go where you will, and grant me only one favor, in light of my rescuing you: do no harm, unless in defense of yourself, or to put food down your greedy gullet.” And she let the beast-rat go, sending it swimming frantically towards dry land. And she turned to the jackdaws, and she told them, “I have no weapons and no gut for witch-hunting, and so although the curse I bear will spur me now into waiting disaster I have no hope of success. Fly, now, and find some other fool to fix your witch problem for you. Maybe I’ll get lucky and they’ll arrive before this old trickster has finished with my sorry self.”

The girl waded to the trickster’s house-boat and rapped three times on the narrow veranda, as she would on a neighbor’s door. “Hallo!” she said, as cheerfully as she ever had, letting her curse of full-heartedness do its work. “Hallo in there, might I come aboard? Only I’ve been travelling a long way, and my feet are so wet the left one’s turned into a fish!” and she put her left foot inside the mouth of the fish the jackdaws had brought to her.

The old man leaned out of his door, and this close the ordinary grayness she had seen from the reeds became all the stranger, for his gnarled gray beard wasn’t hair but roots, twisted together like an uprooted parsnip, and his head was crested with leafless twigs and shoots instead of hair, frail and trembling as if in the deepest of winters, and the wrinkled skin of his brow resembled the bark of an old oak tree.

“You’re lucky it didn’t swim away from you, then. A fish has no loyalty, and a proper foot ought to be nothing but loyal.”

“My feet can usually can be counted on, and count on them I do, concerning sums larger than ten, as my schooling is somewhat incomplete, but now I find myself host to a school of fish and I’m sorely inconvenienced by it,” she told him, sitting herself on the ledge and proffering her foot for his inspection. “Surely you’ve lived here a long while, judging by the state of your beard and your boat, sir, have you got any advice?”

The old trickster was giving her a look, and if she had come to him with no hint of his recent works she’d have taken it for kindly, but instead she knew it to be measuring.

“Come inside,” he said, “Sit by my fire, and I’ll ready a spell to fix your fish-foot.”

The outside of the trickster’s house-boat looked dreadful due to disuse, but the inside looked worse from overuse. Pots and pans and bunches of dried plants hung from the ceiling in no kind of order, and the contents of its lone room looked tossed as if by a thief looking for valuables. The very strangest thing about the house, however, was the hearth, which was nothing but a hole in the very middle of the trickster’s houseboat, perfectly round and the size of a large cooking pot, open only to the black waters of the marsh. Glinting above the calm, black mirror of this water was the trickster’s fire, which hung by itself in the air, a small sun burning for the benefit of the household.

The girl sat in a too-small, too-rickety rocking chair by the fire. “Pardon my rudeness,” she said, to further the appearance of being dim-witted, “but you’ve got quite a large hole in your boat. Won’t we sink?”

“A soup pot full of bones isn’t sunk,” said the trickster, “it’s doing the work it was intended for.”

“You must be very wise,” said the girl, “to keep an incomplete boat afloat.”

The old man was rummaging in cupboards too low for him, fine bone handles too delicate in his hands, bumping his head against the pots strung across the ceiling, as if arranged by a much shorter housekeeper.

“How did you come to live here,” asked the girl, “In a house too small for you, and where you can’t find your own things?”

“Oh,” the old man said, turning to look at her now. “I’ve acquired it recently, from a close friend.”

“Must be a very close friend,” the girl said.

And the old trickster snapped the fingers of his left hand and the girl found herself tipped from the chair by the fire into the too-warm waters of the marsh. The fire burned much too close, and the girl couldn’t crawl back out without being burned. She cringed away from the flames, and the fire burned hotter, and the water grew warmer, and the old man bent down and said, “Very close indeed.”

And here I thought I was only pretending to be a fool, thought the girl, wretchedly. Danger is an idiot’s sport, played only by those who don’t know the rules. She submerged herself completely in the trickster’s soup pot, trying frantically to swim away underneath his floorboards, but the reeds of the marsh bent and swayed together, trapping her there, skeletal fingers of a corpse’s hand. Her fish had left her foot and darted through the reeds, and shortly it returned, a mess of others with it: dozens of yellow-eyed fish swimming through the reeds, back and forth, seemingly in as much of a panic as she was, the water frothing with their movement.

The girl broke the surface of the water again, to see that the old trickster was now scribbling around the rim of his soup pot with a fragment of charcoal, his root-beard blackening with soot.

“Please don’t kill me,” said the girl. “I’ve done nothing to deserve this.”

“Every living creature dies, you foolish child,” scoffed the old devil. “What difference does it make, if we deserve it or not?”

“I’m only young,” the girl explained.

“And that’s precisely why you’re where you are now,” said the old man. “If you were another old crone I wouldn’t have any use for you. But you’re not going to die, if that’s any comfort to you.” Now he gestured to the fish, roiling and thrashing in the ever-hotter waters of the marsh. “You’re going to join our friends here.”

Magic isn’t quiet. It announces itself. It is impossible to have a hex laid into you or a spell worked over you without knowing it’s happening, if you know how to listen for it. If you’ve ever woken with a sour taste in your mouth you couldn’t explain, or had a shiver roll over your whole body without being cold, or found yourself all at once falling into unwelcome thoughts that dragged you into their embrace so thoroughly you might as well have been falling through the floor of your own home, then you have had magic cast on you. Only these are the noises made by the most normal, unthinking magics, the idle magic of men and women who would be shocked if you accused them of sorcery.

The magic being worked on the girl now was a trumpet fanfare compared to the hum she was used to. The old man scratched his way around her, and the girl could feel its intentions, working their way into her skin: her youth bleeding into the water, the water bleeding into her. Her eyes were turning yellow, her hair was falling out around her, into the water, and the entire marsh was no mere marsh but a broth, the warm water now nearing a boil.

She thrust her arms out of the water, grabbing for the old man’s beard. He beat at her hands with a soup ladle, laughing the cruelest laugh someone can have, which is to say a laugh that sounds absolutely normal and human, even in the face of someone else’s pain.

But suddenly his laughter stopped, spotting something in the hearth that made him turn furious all at once. The girl did not wait to figure out what this was, because waiting could cost her the life she was rapidly cooking away. She grabbed him by the beard and yanked him into the water, or did her very best to. Half-success was better than none, and he righted himself soon enough but now his face was ablaze. As the old trickster began beating at his own self to put out the flames, the girl realized that the water she had been kneeling in was no longer up to her ears. The boat was sinking. This had the unfortunate effect of bringing the cooking fire that much closer to her. She splashed at it to no avail. The fish tossed themselves around her, and if there had been more magic loose in the water perhaps they could have told her what they intended, or explain to her how they had come to be here, in this murderer’s soup pot, and who they had been before.

The trickster was finally smothering the fire in his beard, his face smoldering, blackened and raw-looking, and the girl knew that she would not escape this soup pot alive. But she could prevent it from being used ever again. Magic like this boat would take time and sacrifice to construct, and the girl was now quite certain the old trickster would not be able to reproduce it, that its original craftsperson was in fact swimming in the marsh with her at that very moment.

The girl began tossing clumps of her own hair into the fire, trying to catch them alight. They were very wet, but she was wishing very hard, and some people are very strong wishers. Strands of burning hair hit the wooden floorboards of the boat, and the old trickster began stamping them out. The girl ran out of shed hair, and began tossing feathers from her cloak’s collection, and soon, despite the trickster’s best efforts, the boat was ablaze.

The soup pot marsh was only a scant few inches of water now, far too full of fish. The girl curled into the rapidly-draining mud and wished that she had not left her family, whom she loved, and her village, which had always been safe, even despite the darkness of the west woods, and the weight of her curse.

It is the greatest cruelty in the world that being a good person and wishing very hard are not enough to protect you. All the unthinking magic and unseen forces of our world cannot turn away death when death comes to your door.

But another person can answer the door for you. This is a terrible way to avoid death, however, and should be avoided at all costs.

The girl awoke in darkness.

At first she thought of her jackdaws from the hills, who had brought her here, and slept the previous night atop her like a shroud. But her traveling cloak was sodden with water and mud, and the weight on top of her was far too heavy to be birds.

She pushed aside the weight and found it was bodies. Bodies of men and women. Dozens of them.

She crawled from them, and it was crawling out of a funeral pyre. The bodies at the top of the pile were as blackened and burned as the trickster’s beard had been. The swamp was now empty, mud and bare cattails only, and a pile of bodies, and the burning remainders of what had once been a terrible boat.

And, several feet away, cursing as fiercely as the jackdaws ever had, was the old trickster. But he was no longer old. The magic worked on each person who had come into contact with this boat was sundered, now, burned away into the gloaming twilight settling upon the barren marsh.

And the girl noticed that nearly all the bodies of the marsh were young. Never quite children, but often barely more than children. Except one: an old crone. A hag, with sagging breasts and sharp teeth, and blank, unseeing eyes that the girl recognized despite their death glaze. The fish the jackdaws had brought her.

A witch.

“You tried to use her,” the girl said to the trickster, who turned upon her with more murderous intent than he had ever had when he was actually murdering her. His unbewitched face had no beard, and his oak-bark skin had smoothed and lost its lines, and his bare twig hair was even more delicate still, and bore small leaves now, although they too were blackened by fire.

“She was cooking all these people up, here in her swamp, and you came and found her, didn’t you?” the girl said, hefting a burning beam of splintered wood from the wreckage. “And instead of trying to put a stop to her, you only wanted her power for yourself. But you cooked her, and all you got for your trouble was her old age.”

The trickster backed away from her makeshift weapon, his left hand waving. The mud from the swamp tried to suck the girl’s bare feet in, but she pulled away as if from the grasp of a child.

“She was a terrible old woman, and a terrible waste of all that power. I had a more worthy recipient, and now you’ve ruined it all, and you’re as dreadful as she was, fledgling witch,” the trickster snarled at her.

He looked as if he might run, now, but his slow retreat had backed him up into an oncoming crowd, and they both saw now where the water of the marsh had gone.

The jackdaws were there, resting in the antlers of dozens of deer, and on the backs of wolves, and next to raccoons and ground squirrels and sparrows, and every manner of woodland creature that the girl had ever encountered or heard in the distance. Each belly was swollen, and marsh water dripped from beaks and muzzles.

And at the head of this unlikely and silent crowd was the beast-rat, gazing at the girl, firelight reflected in its eyes.

“What worthy recipient?” the girl demanded.

The trickster did not respond.

“You didn’t need it, you were young all along, you-- you oathless corpse-kissing cur,” she cried, “Who could possibly deserve stolen youth?”

The trickster did not defend himself, only glowered.

“And you tricked those villagers, you turned them against each other--”

“I did nothing of the sort,” the trickster spat, “They were small-minded vermin when I came to them, I only helped them look it on the outside.”

“And you convinced those frogs to murder their own children!”

“They were short-sighted little fools, they needn’t have asked me for advice if they’d just eaten flies the way frogs are meant to!” the trickster retorted.

“And--” the girl stopped abruptly, one more terrible thought coming over her. “And you were in my village, you came to my home,” she accused. “You spoke to my father. You told him to send me away.”

The trickster was looking at her now, and the uncertainty in his own eyes only made her madder still.

“What did you do to my village?” the girl asked, coming closer.

“I don’t do anything to anyone,” the trickster said. She could see he was barely more than a boy, this close, a child pretending at adulthood, having a tantrum over some unknown slight, tearing through the country, leaving uncaring destruction and pain in his wake and never thinking twice about it. “Everyone I’ve spoken to since I’ve left home has sealed their own fate, and I only helped them do it when they asked me to.”

“You’re a monster,” the girl breathed. The crowd of animals shifted around them restlessly, waiting, watching. “I can’t let you keep doing this.”

And she willed herself, wishing as hard as she could, desperate in this moment to strike him now, fear for her home crashing through her like cold waters, trying to summon the strength to end this child-witch before he did any more damage.

But curses are not convenient. And the girl’s heart, cursed to always be overflowing with love, couldn’t be cured now any more than with her brothers or sisters, or with the frogs of the fly-mill, or the rat villagers, or the jackdaws.

“Run,” she told the trickster. “Run far from here, and hope you never see me again. If a single lick of harm has befallen my family in my absence, I will ruin us both in pursuit of your destruction.”

The trickster stared at her.

“I told you to run!” she shouted, swinging at him wildly. And he fled then, the animals parting reluctantly to let him pass, and he disappeared into the woods and the encroaching darkness of night-time, leaving the scent of a woodfire and misery in his wake.

And the blossoming girl knelt by the dead witch of the marsh, and the bodies of her victims, and she wept. And, as with the fly mill, the animals wept with her, and their tears filled the marsh again, and the bodies of the dead sank into the mud, and it was as if the whole thing had never happened.

The animals the beast-rat had brought to help her left slowly, wandering away aimlessly now, their previous solemn purpose gone. Soon only the rat and the jackdaws were left.

“Well,” the girl said to the birds, “I’ve done what you wanted, haven’t I? So leave.”

The beast-rat scoffed. “They’re looking to you, now. They’ve spent too long as that old crone’s familiars-- they’ve forgotten how to live their own lives.”

The girl looked down at her companion. Its voice was feminine, smokey, like a woman in the prime of her life. It was a strange voice for a rat.

“Strong talk for a ravenous beast I specifically told to leave me to die,” the blossoming girl said, smiling through her tears.

“And leave you without repaying my debt?” the beast-rat asked. “Magic would never do my bidding e’er again, and I’d be a rat until the end of my days.”

“Well,” the girl sniffed, letting the jackdaws alight on her shoulders, “You’ve repaid your debt now, surely, so go ahead.”

“You know as little about debt as you do about being a witch,” the rat complained. “I’ll fix both problems, and then settle my debt, and then you’ll help me regain my true form. I’ll even help you complete your quest. But we don’t have time to sit around crying in swamps. We’ve got to hurry on.”

The girl stood, but did not start walking. “I’ve got to go back to my family. That boy, the gentleman witch, he left ruin in every place he visited. Who knows what he did to my home when he passed through?”

The beast-rat was scoffing again. “And what will you do for your family, returning to them as you are now? How many problems can you solve through sheer luck? And what of the child? If you can’t even bring yourself to strike a man who tries to kill you, how can you expect to protect the people you love from danger? We can lift your curse, and mine, and then your family will never know fear or pain.”

And when the sun rose again, it rose on a young witch traveling steadily east, jackdaws flying overhead and a monster whispering secrets of magic to her from her pocket.

i honestly have NO problems with any of this story. i know that's probably not the kind of helpful critique you were looking for, but it's seriously just impressively good, through and through. i think the pacing is good. i can kinda see it now the way that you were explaining it in the beginning. already, the story and characters are VERY different from they were in the beginning and i think everything has been really gradual and satisfying. the tone is fine to me. i also don't think anything is confusing and it didn't seem lazy. i actually thought all of the "solutions" were very clever and suitably fairy-tale like.

i just love it. i say all the time that i'm "not a fantasy person" but this story has been very easy for me to get into and to like. one of the things that i've enjoyed a lot is the lore youve made surrounding magic. this world operates in a way that reminds me a lot of how i thought the world worked when i was a little kid. like, there's nothing extra that needs to be explained or understood, because the rules say "oh, all the things you used to think you could do are just actually things people CAN do here." i also love that this story is morally complex. the "good" character is fucking things up. i love that your witch is just a very sad and embittered person. it's just really good.

The eldest brother of the family was named Chanter, and he was a practical man, and a maker of practical items. He was always bent over in his workshop, snipping and clipping, sewing and speaking to himself, and he never made one item just like the last, even when left to his own devices, and no amount of money or prestige of patron could convince him to replicate any one thing he had made before. As a man he was much the same way, unwilling to repeat himself and rarely interested in revisiting conversations he considered finished, and so while speaking with him was always interesting, he could only rarely be engaged, because his regard was as swift and fleeting as a bird on a windowsill.



Once, there was a knight who fought very heroically for the king and in the process lost his own right arm, and how he lost this arm, and to whom, and how he survived the ordeal is a story all on its own. But when the wound had healed as well as it was going to, the king appointed this knight as Sheriff and head of Watch for the town surrounding his very own palace, and set him to working. And of course a one-armed knight is a sad sight to behold, so the knight sent out word that he was in search of a new arm, and whomsoever thought they could build him a new one was welcome to send him the details of their plan, and the king’s treasury would finance the finest idea. And magicians and tinkerers from all over the land sent him descriptions of automatons and prosthetics, mechanical and magical and often both. In a world such as this, where it is difficult to control men and harder still to control magic, lost limbs are a common enough problem and so there are many solutions. And no one heard anything else of the one-armed knight’s request for some period of time, and everyone assumed that he had selected someone, who was hard at work on the new limb. What might it look like? A doll’s arm, carved with glyphs, moving as if by some unseen string? Enchanted roots, woven like the muscle beneath skin? A shining metal gauntlet, forged by some mysterious sorcerer?



But instead the one-armed knight remained armless, and no matter where he went or whom he spoke to, every person found their eyes drawn to his right side, where nothing was, and they all stared at the nothing, unable to hide their confusion and disgust. And so eventually he took to wearing a leather cloak, draped over his right side, so that if you weren’t looking closely you might suppose his arm was merely hiding just out of sight. And he went about doing his job, and doing it well, walking the streets of the city, speaking with its residents, keeping his two sharp eyes and two keen ears on every suspicious glance or guarded whisper.



Finally, after a while had gone by and the story of the sad, one-armed knight who pretended to protect the city had gotten ‘round, two thieves came. “What a helpless fool,” they said to one another. “The king keeps an invalid as his Head of Watch out of pity, and sad sentiment.” And anyone who might have been listening to them at that moment might have warned them that they were fools, because a king rarely has time for pity or sentiment, and this king in particular had little to spare.



So darkness fell on the city, and the two thieves found their way into the kitchens in the king’s palace, by way of bribing a stable boy, who wheedled their passage out of a kitchen maid smitten with him, who then bullied her younger brother into taking the two via servant’s passages to the king’s inner chambers while his private staff all slept. And they perhaps might have made off with the thing the had come to steal, but waiting for them was the one-armed knight, who had sharp eyes and keen ears.



The two thieves laughed to see him there. “What you might do to us, one half of a man up against two?” they asked.



“You’re quite right,” the one-armed knight admitted, because for all of his pride (and knights never lack it), he had never dispelled rumor or quelled fear that he was poorly-matched with his occupation. “I’m not much of a fighter as I am. Perhaps, to be fair, the two of you ought tie your own right arms behind your backs, so at least when you tell others of your conquest here, they shan’t laugh at you for fighting a cripple such as myself.”



And the two thieves did so, laughing all the while, and as soon as they had done so the one-armed knight’s cloak whipped itself up, as if by some unfelt gust of wind, and it knocked the two thieves to the ground, and the one-armed knight was upon them, his cloak like a charmed snake, vicious and accurate as even an arm of flesh could not be.



And afterwards, this story spread, and everyone agreed that sometimes it is better to have people underestimate you, and weren’t the one-armed knight and his cloak’s manufacturer very clever. But still, no one wanted to look at the one-armed knight’s right side.



The second-eldest brother was named Femur, and he was sweet and beguiling, and he made harps that were sweeter still, and bewitching, and seemed always to leave their notes ringing in the air long after they’d been set down. Femur’s workshop was lined with his harps, and sometimes he would start at one end of the room and pace to the other, trailing his hand along, and the sound of two dozen harps would echo through his family’s chateau, notes falling like ripe plums from his workshop window, strains of lazy almost-music bouncing down the winding staircases into the foyer and the kitchens and the halls, and it would take so long for the notes to die away that Femur himself could already be out the front door and into the gardens before silence regained its hold.



Musicians of every level of skill came to Femur hoping for harps. The finest harpist in the kingdom played only Femur’s harps, and had commissioned a number of them, some large and some small, some plain and some ornate, a harp for every type of performance. She even had a harp whose pillar was carved to look like a pale marble replica of herself, eyes wide and unseeing, arms raised, and when she played the arms trembled with the vibration of her music, and to an audience sufficiently lulled by her hypnotic playing and a glass or two of wine, this marble harpist seemed to mimic her flesh-and-blood inspiration.



Conversely, the worst harpist in all the kingdom was the finest harpist’s twin sister. Usually, when someone is very bad at something, no one needs to know if that someone is truly the worst. One does something poorly, and therefore does not do it very much, and then they and anyone who has witnessed the act can go about weaving a polite fiction that surely someone out there must be even worse. But the poor girl’s sister was so excellent at it, and they were identical in every other way, and so she kept trying, but no matter how often she played she resolutely stayed the worst harpist in the entire kingdom. Her fingers could pluck the same strings her sister’s had plucked mere moments before, and the result would be like iron nails thrown down a well, like barn cats fighting in early morning hours, like a leaking tin roof on a cold night. Even worse to have to play for an audience who had just heard her sister; the shame was unbearable.



The girls’ family bade Femur to make the poor child a harp that could bear the clumsiness of her fingers, and he presented them with a near-replica of her sister’s finest harp, her own likeness reaching out from it. Femur had his messenger make a show of the harp’s infallibility, by throwing a handful of dirt at the gleaming strings, which produced notes as sweet and pure as dawn sunlight. But when the worst harpist laid hands upon the instrument, all she could wring from it was the sound of a knife being sharpened too sternly, and of children crying, and of glass shattering.

By the next morning, the worst harpist in the kingdom was dead. Her sister found her, strung from the rafters in her chambers, the harp strings from her latest gift taut around her pale neck, her corpse already stiffening. And although she was very surely dead, as the worst harpist’s family filed in to weep and shout around her body, her cold arms raised, as if reaching out, and her eyes stared, unseeing, as if looking out at an invisible audience.



Her twin, the finest harpist in the kingdom, mourned silently for a month, playing no music and speaking no words. Finally, the king himself asked for her to perform for him, and she travelled to his palace to play for him at a ball his son had begged him to throw (in pursuit of a girl) (a girl he would not find) (but that is neither here nor there). And when her hands brushed the strings, the noise was as lovely as ever, but this time the finest harp in her collection was not content with the illusion of movement. This time, in front of the king and his guests, her marble double twisted on the harp’s slender pillar, pulling her arms away from audience and instead reaching for the harpstrings, which she brushed every bit as gently and deftly as her owner, but the effect was the opposite: knives sharpened too sternly, nails thrown down wells, old chairs dragged across flagstones in a cold waiting hall. And once the harpist’s replica began playing, she refused to stop, even after the harpist herself had fled the room, wringing her hands and tears rolling down her cheeks. No one, in fact, could silence the harp now, not even when the king’s own head of watch brought an axe down upon it. And so the king had it shut up in the highest tower, swaddled in blankets, and the room filled with hay, and all the doors locked, and still, still, if the wind shifted just so, and all the conversation in a room paused, you could hear the dreadful noise of the harp. And so the king commanded a troupe of musicians to always be in attendance around him, to block out the fouled harp, and he asked the finest harpist back, to help in this, but she had disappeared, and her family did not know where she had gone to. And so her fine collection of harps stood silent, and gathered dust, and sometimes the dust was heavy enough that the strings seemed to cough a little, some unplayed song heavy upon them.



The second-youngest brother was named Patrus, and he was a broad fellow, his shoulders like the mantel of a fireplace, his gut a cooking pot protruding out. Like his matching sister, who was less than a year apart from him in age, Patrus was a weaver, but his works went where feet tread, rather than where eyes were lead. Some might find it hard to bear, having the product of deep thought and hard work trod upon by every filthy-footed traveller fortunate enough to come across a work of Patrus’s, but if this bothered Patrus, he never said.



Still, there was a touch of cleverness to his work that might betray him. A large rug outfitted for the hearing chambers of a magistrate of some repute would, when the servant girls tried to sweep dust underneath it, belch it back out onto the hems of their dresses. A noble possessed of a very long hallway commissioned a very long rug to suit it, and uncareful visitors often found themselves missing the door they were looking for again and again, as if the floor under their feet had hurried them past it.



Cleverest and most well-known of all poor Patrus’s works, however, was not ever even attributed to him, although for very good reason. The story went like this:

Once in a glen in a forest in the southern-most reaches of the kingdom, a woman lived with her three sons, in a thatch-roofed cottage. Every morning the eldest son would go out to hunt small game for supper, and the middle brother would chop wood for the fire, and the youngest son would stay by the hearth and run the household, and their mother would go into the nearest village to sell eggs. No one in the village ever saw the three sons, whom the mother would not allow near others, but they learned of them slowly over the years, because she could not keep herself from bragging about them.



“My eldest son is the finest hunter in the land,” she told the farmer’s wife once. “No one alive has steadier aim, or quieter feet. He can fell any beast he sets his eyes on.”



“My middle son is so good with a blade,” she once told the money-lender, “he could fight off a whole army, should the need arise. He can chop a tree in half with just one blow.”



And of her youngest son she made no particular claims, but anyone in the village paying attention (and who, in a small village on the edge of a wood, does not pay attention to such a thing) knew that he was surely her favorite, because she was always buying gifts for him. “Oh,” she would say, looking at some bolt of silk or piece of jewelry, “my youngest son would surely love this.”



So it came to pass one day that a hunter passing through heard rumor of the woman’s eldest son, whom she claimed was the finest hunter in the land. “I shall find this man, and challenge him,” the hunter declared, lighting his pipe in the village’s sole tavern, and ignoring the warnings of the villagers, he set off into the woods near the woman’s cottage in search of her eldest son, and did not return. Not long after, the farmer’s daughters went to catch crawlerfish in the creek and instead found a body bloated and full of worms, with an arrow through the neck, and bearing in his pockets a very familiar pipe. So when the hunter’s family came looking for him, the villagers could only solemnly point them into the wood, towards the woman’s cottage, and her three sons. But one amongst them must have felt badly and warned the woman, who loved her sons so much, because when the hunter’s family arrived at the cottage, her eldest son had fled, and there was nothing to be done for it.



Not long after that, a war began, as wars do, and the king sent forth messengers to go to even the farthest, safest villages, and seek out their finest fighters. And sure enough, the villagers, who had all long heard of how fine the woman’s middle son was with a blade, pointed the king’s messengers towards her cottage, and there they bade the young man to come with them. Those in the village who knew her best thought, surely, that she would turn away these messengers, she loved her sons so, and had kept them from danger for so long. Would she send him running off, deeper in the wood, as she surely had done when her eldest was threatened? But instead, the young man went off to war with the messengers, waving goodbye to the villagers from the back of a soldier’s horse, the first and last time any of them would ever see him (although they would hear of him, later, in stories brought in by travelers who would not even know that the young man in question had come from that very village).



This left only the woman’s beloved youngest son. And the gossip amongst the washerwomen and the tavern regulars was that surely, now, with no strong, strapping young men to put food on the table and firewood in the hearth, the woman would no longer be able to spoil her youngest so, because no one can provide for two people by only selling eggs. But the woman carried on as always. If anything her appetite for fine silk and beautiful trinkets grew, with only one son left to dote upon. At last, some of the villagers decided amongst themselves that there must be some secret wealth the woman had been hoarding all these years, in her cottage away from the village, which surely the two elder brothers had been meant to guard. But now there was only the woman and her spoiled youngest son to protect this treasure, which they surely couldn’t deserve. And so one night a fair number of the villagers-- not every one of them, but enough so that, in the grand scheme of things, one might safely condemn the village as a whole-- picked up their wood axes and their pitching forks and halberds left in family heirlooms from wars gone by, and they went up to the cottage, intending to ransack it thoroughly. And when the mob arrived, they did indeed find many fine things the woman had bought, and quite a bit of gold, but not nearly so much as they had expected, and no sign of the woman or her youngest son.



The villagers all began to accuse one another of warning her, again, and giving her time to flee with the treasure (that the treasure might be a gold-producing bird of some kind was a popular theory, as such things are known to happen from time to time). Soon fighting broke out, and several of the villagers slew one another, very bloodily.



The fighting stopped when, by chance, some king’s soldiers arrived. (If any one of the villagers thought to wonder why soldiers under the king’s seal would be so near to a cottage on the edge of a village on the edge of that king’s kingdom, none were able to voice that concern.) The king’s men put a stop to the fighting, and set about solving the mystery of where the woman had gone and how she had come into all this improbable wealth.



The woman had not been warned at all, they at last determined: she had fled by way of magic carpet.



The truth about magic carpets is that very few of them are flying magic carpets. Flying is a willful kind of magic and one can’t craft an object with the intent to fly and have any reasonable hope for it working. There are stories about magic carpets that fly, but in this time, with this woman and her three sons and all of the villagers, bloody from fighting one another, all of those stories are only stories. Instead, the magic carpet that allowed the woman and her youngest to escape, and her eldest to flee after committing murder, led in quite a different direction. One of the soldiers discovered it while pacing the kitchen floor, thinking very hard about where the woman might have gone, and happened to say aloud on his third turn across the hearth rug, “But might they be hiding in the root cellar?” And another soldier was just about to say that they had checked the whole cottage thoroughly, and there certainly wasn’t any root cellar, but as soon as the words “root cellar” had left the first soldier’s mouth he had tumbled completely out of sight.



And the rug, which did rather look like a set of steps receding into darkness to begin with, no longer was a rug but an actual set of steps receding into darkness, and the first soldier was now quite bruised at the bottom of them. And in this darkness, the soldiers found a long and winding tunnel, and none of them could keep a lantern lit long enough to get to the end of it, and so they gave up the woman and her youngest son for long lost, and took the magic carpet and all of the wealth in the house with them and returned to the king, leaving the villagers with nothing but the bodies of their dead neighbors.



Afterwards, they all decided that the magic carpet must have been sold to the woman by some travelling salesperson, because none of them had ever seen it before, and they all marveled over how much it must have cost, and wondered whether or not the seller had even known what it was. And none of them ever knew that it had been made by Patrus, far to the north, and commissioned specifically for the woman in the cottage, by the king himself.



And those were all the best stories about the four sisters and four brothers who lived together in a chateau towards the North. There was one remaining brother, called Met, and he was the youngest of all of them, only just stepping into manhood, and some who knew the family excused his lack of stories and accomplishments by pointing to his youth, but everyone knew the truth. Met’s four older sisters and three older brothers had all crafted something worth telling about over campfire or in an inn or at a springtime faire by the time they were old enough for Confirmation, and Met had passed that point years before. Met hardly had a chance to create something story-worthy; he was too busy spinning thread for his elder siblings.



From the thread in Coax’s dresses and Little Grandmother’s blankets to the strings laid in Fume’s bows and Femur’s harps, all of them owed some portion of their work to their youngest brother, who spun thread all day long, from dawn to dusk, alone in a tower. He worked six days in a row, and every seventh day he broke fast late, and then disappeared into the bowels of the chateau, and none of his elder sisters or brothers ever followed him, and none of them would say what it was that he did on that seventh day, no matter how often visitors would beg for some story concerning Met and his craft. And so, although most of the siblings were quite social and well-liked, and certainly Met seemed likeable enough when he appeared in the evenings, at dinners the siblings would hold, or at festivals, hardly a soul knew him and, because he had no stories to tell, no one ever sought him out.



Until a man appeared in the village near the chateau, a stranger with hair like a tree just in sight of springtime, and skin like a young oak, and the smell of a woodfire about him, and a left hand that twitched when the villagers began to tell him stories about four sisters and four brothers.

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(End part one of Chapter Two. Next up, Love & Villainy, which in its current form is even more contemporary-sounding than when we last left the Trickster. We'll see if that works? Also there's gonna be smooching, gross.)