Meg wanted to weep. She should have known Talis wouldn’t consider apologizing to this young lord. No doubt her whole family was now on its way to the gallows.
“I’ll have your ears for that,” the boy said, seething. How dare this lout of a peasant speak to him like that? His accents were of the coarsest nature, the talk of a boy meant for nothing but pulling a plow. He would be dead of overwork by the time he was twenty-five.
“Oh, will you?” Talis said easily and slid off the horse to stand before the boy. For all his great height, Meg knew that Talis wasn’t quite nine years old yet, while she suspected this boy was eleven or twelve.
Immediately, Meg stepped between the two boys, or as she was beginning to think of them, between the two young gentlemen. “There’s no harm done, sir. You have your horse back. The children were only bringing it back to you. No harm done at all.”
Neither of the boys seemed to notice she was there. With each passing moment, Edward was getting angrier. It was the arrogant stance of this dark-haired, dark-eyed boy, and it was the way that girl on the horse looked down at him. She was just a child, but with that hair swirling about her and with those eyes that looked so old, she bothered him. He didn’t like that she was looking at the peasant boy as though he were capable of anything, while he, Edward, was worth nothing. And how could that be possible? He was the one wearing the velvet and the jewels, not this coarse lad.
Edward struck the first blow—a blow that Talis easily parried, stepping aside to miss the boy’s fist coming at his face. But Edward’s next blow caught Talis on the shoulder, then, by accident, he stepped on Talis’s bee-stung foot and pain shot up his body. Talis leaped on the older boy and they fell to the ground, fists and feet flying.
Meg thought she might faint again. They were going to be hanged for sure.
“What’s this!”
Never in her life had Meg been so glad to see anyone as she was to see Will.
“I thought you were picking berries,” Will said, more annoyed than anything else. “Can I not trust any of you?”
Will was not concerned with matters of class and whether one of the boys in the tangle of arms and legs at his feet was a gentleman and the other not. All he saw were two boys fighting and so he broke them up. Grabbing the collar of each one, he pulled them apart, holding them at arm’s length while they fought to tear each other to bits.
“Behave yourselves!” he said, giving them each a curt shake.
“Unhand me, you…you…farmer!” Edward shouted at him, trying to recover his dignity.
“Aye, I am that,” Will said, unperturbed. “Now, what’s this about?” he asked as he set the boys to the ground.
“They stole my horse,” Edward said, pulling down his doublet, dusting himself off.
“This horse?” Will asked. “They stole this horse that’s standing here? You mean they took it away from you?”
“No, I…There was a mishap. It was not my fault but I landed on the ground.”
“So they stole it after it tossed you off and ran away? And where did they take the horse after they stole it? To London? Shall we send the sheriff to pursue them?”
Meg knew she had never loved Will so much as she loved him at that moment. He was so very sensible. He treated boys as boys, no matter what their status.
When the young gentleman looked confused by this, Will slipped his arm around the boy’s shoulders as easily as he did with Talis. “Now, where do you live?”
When Meg saw quick tears come to the boy’s eyes, she knew that he was lost.
“Meg!” Will said sharply. “Is there more of that beef pie left? And what of a berry tart? Callie, get down off that animal and bring it home. All of us are hungry.”
What was nearly a disaster, and would have been had it been left to Meg, she guiltily thought, turned into a lovely day. After the initial hostility between the boys passed, they found they were interested in each other. Both of them were very proud and hated to ask each other questions, but at Will’s urging, they soon warmed up, with Talis showing Edward his wooden sword. Edward laughed when Talis punched the air with it and was soon giving lessons on how a real knight correctly held a sword.
Will instructed Meg to try to keep the boys interested in each other while he made some inquiries and tried to find out the direction of the boy’s home. As far as he could tell the boy was at least twenty miles from his home. Finding this place was not going to be easy, since the villagers considered any man who had traveled more than six miles from his birthplace a world traveler. Meg had no doubt at all that Will would find where the boy lived. After this morning she knew that Will could do anything.
After Will left, Meg watched Talis’s concentration, seeing that Talis studied the boy, studied his clothing, his walk, even a couple of times mimicking his way of talking.
What was sad was Callie’s face, the way she watched the two boys, feeling left out and alone. It was Talis who invited her into their world as they sat under a shade tree and drank Meg’s sweet cider. “Tell us a story, Callie,” Talis said.
Smiling, feeling confident, Callie started one of her best stories, a story she had been working on for days about a dragon, a horse, and a witch with green hair. But she was hardly into the story before Edward yawned and said, “I’ve read much better than that. Isn’t your father going to come back? I wanted to…to say farewell before I left.” He wasn’t about to admit that he wanted to ask a farmer how to get home. Not that he thought a peasant would know where a house as rich as his father’s was, but perhaps he might know something.
Because he was thinking of his own problems, Edward did not see the look of shock on the faces of Callie and Talis. He wouldn’t have known what caused it had he seen it.
Read a story, Callie thought. Only the village priest could read. He said it wasn’t good for any but men of God to read. Reading took great thought, so the priest would read the Bible and tell the villagers what it all meant. Ordinary people, people not chosen by God, could not read.
“What do you read?” Callie whispered, her knees drawn into her chest. “The Bible?”
Edward looked at her out of the corner of his eye. He was at the stage where he wasn’t sure whether girls were good or bad. And he was especially unsure about this girl. She wasn’t pretty and never would be no matter how old she got; her face was too pale, too colorless, the features too plain. Her hair, however, was glorious, now pulled back into a fat braid hanging down her back. What was odd about her was the way she followed this boy about, this black-haired Talis who dressed and spoke like a peasant but carried himself as though he were a king’s son.
The girl followed him about as though she were his shadow and he never seemed to be aware of her—except when she so much as took her eyes off of him, then he would whip around and frown at her. Talis seemed to know exactly when her attention was on something other than him, even if his back was to her.
It was very strange to Edward, since in his house, boys and girls were kept separate from one another. They wanted to be. Who wanted a stupid girl hanging about all the time? And why was this girl so silent? The girls Edward knew chattered all the time. The only time this Callie had opened her mouth was to start some boring story about flying animals and witches. He had tired of those stories years ago. Now he liked real stories, stories of knights and kings and wars—something this peasant girl could know nothing about.
Edward opened his mouth to tell her this when Will reappeared, and moments later, he was being sent on his way. He didn’t know how to say good-bye. He couldn’t very well say thank you to peasants, could he? What would his father do in this situation?
Edward mounted his horse and looked down at the four of them. Now that he saw them all together, they were a curious-looking lot. The two adults had the sun-weathered looks of farmers, but the children were…Well, dress them richly and they would fit into the queen’s court. Especially that boy (Edward could afford to be generous, now that he had found out he was f
our whole years older than Talis). If Talis were dressed in velvet instead of leather, he would be a very handsome lad.
Suddenly, Edward didn’t care what his father would say or do. His father was going to kill him as soon as he got home anyway so what did it matter what his last act alive was?
Gallantly, he swept off his hat, placed it on his heart and gave a bow to the four of them. “Thank you one and all for a splendid afternoon.” On impulse, he opened the leather bag attached to the back of the saddle and withdrew a leather-bound book of tales of the knights of the Round Table—a book that belonged to his father. “For you, my lady,” he said to Callie as though he were a courtier at Queen Elizabeth’s court, then tossed the book down to her eager hands before dramatically reining his father’s horse to the left and speeding away down the road—in the direction Will had said his father’s house was.
After the boy was gone, three of the people left standing in the front yard felt as though something had changed in their lives. Will just thought of the chores that had gone undone while he’d been chasing about trying to find where some lost boy lived. But Meg knew that never again would she see “her” children in the same way. For all that she and Will had raised them to this age, they were not like Meg and Will. She had felt less than that rich boy, but Callie and Talis had known from the start that they were equal with him.
As for Talis he had seen a world that he somehow knew he belonged with. He had told Callie that the reason he spent so little time with the village boys was that he felt sorry for her being alone (he loved to make her feel guilty; she was nicer to him when she felt he had done something just for her). But the truth was that the village boys bored him.
But today! Ah, today, he had not been bored. This Edward was a fearful snob, of course, but he knew things that Talis would like to know. He knew about horses and swords and about how a knight obtained his spurs. He even knew gossip about the queen’s court, had even once seen the Great Leicester, a man many said should be king.
As for Callie, she clutched the book to her flat, child’s bosom and dreamed of every word the boy had said. Read, she thought. He had read stories like hers. Stories better than hers.
There was part of her that was defensive. Everyone liked her stories. Meg and Will loved them. Talis thought they were divine. So who was this boy to say that her stories weren’t as good as others’ stories?
Callie didn’t know the word competition, but it’s what she knew was missing. There were no stories to compare hers with. She’d never heard of a traveling storyteller, those men who walked about the country, going from rich castle to an even richer house to tell stories for food and a bit of gold when they could get it. Those men compared their stories with one another’s, and their audiences certainly compared their stories to ones they had heard before.
For the rest of the day the three of them were silent. Will didn’t want to admit it but their silence bothered him. He was a quiet man himself but there was nothing he liked more than the happy chatter of his family. Now the three of them sat at the supper table looking at their food in thoughtful silence.
After supper they sat in front of the empty fireplace, Meg with her mending in her lap, the children staring into space. “Come, Callie-girl,” Will said, “tell us one of your stories.”
With a frown of concentration, she turned to Talis. As always, she looked to him to make decisions. “What would you like a story about?” she asked tentatively. Her self-confidence had been bruised by that boy today.
“No magic,” Talis whispered, then, slowly, he turned to look at her. “I want a story with no magic in it.”
Callie could only blink at him as her mind raced with thousands of thoughts. How could a story have no magic? How could a boy kill a dragon without magic? Dragons were big; boys were little.
When Talis saw the wide-eyed expression on Callie’s face, he began to perk up. All his life he had been trying to stump Callie on a story. It annoyed him that she was so very clever. No matter what he gave her to make a story out of, she easily did so. Now, he smiled with more assurance. “No magic, no dragons, no witches, no horses that fly. No anything that isn’t real.”
Callie had the very oddest expression on her face. It was as though her mind had flown away to some distant land. Her eyes were seeing nothing; they weren’t focusing. “I must think of this,” she whispered after a while, then made no further response. She didn’t even react when Talis began to dance about in glee. He wasn’t subtle in his delight that he had finally, at last, confounded her.
For two days Callie said not a word. She ate only when Meg put her in front of food. She did her chores only because her body seemed to remember how to do them, but her mind was somewhere else. Meg would have been very worried had it not been for the smug, overweening, self-satisfied, superior attitude of Talis. He was so pleased with himself for having stumped Callie that Meg felt a longing to shake him. She began to root for Callie just to take that young man down a peg or two—or four.
On the afternoon of the third day, Callie came out of her trance. She came out suddenly. One second her mind was not there and the next she had come back to them. She opened her eyes, blinked at all of them sitting at the table as though she’d just awakened, then she looked at Talis, gave a smile that was mostly smirk and said, “No magic.”
For the rest of the day she went about her chores with a spring in her step, ignoring all of Talis’s hints to tell him what she was planning. It wasn’t often that either of them kept a secret from the other for even seconds, but Callie kept her story secret for that whole afternoon.
By the time night rolled around, all three of them were anxious to get supper over so they could hear Callie’s story. Will pretended he didn’t like all the fuss and didn’t care one way or another, but Meg noticed that he didn’t eat his usual third helping before taking his seat before the empty fireplace. There was a soft rain coming down on the roof, and when Callie began to tell her story, there were three people listening with great anticipation.
Slowly, Callie began to tell a story about two children who loved each other very much, but he was very handsome and came from a family connected to the queen, while she was plain-faced and only one of many, many daughters of a man who wanted to get rid of all his daughters.
At this statement, Meg and Will looked at each other over the children’s heads. It had to be coincidence that Callie’s story was so close to the truth.
Her story was of politics and marriages made for money, not for love. While the children were still very young, just barely adults, the girl is told she must give up the boy for his own future happiness. If he marries another woman he could become king, and thereby become wealthy beyond all comprehension. If he marries the girl he loves, his father and hers will disown them both and they will be cast out with no money.
At first the young people agree to this because it is a very sensible thing to do and because they want to please their parents. But on his wedding day the young man runs away, goes to the girl he loves, and carries her away with him.
Since they have no money, he becomes a woodcutter, as there are no jobs for an almost-prince. They live in a tiny house deep in the woods. The winter is hard for them because they have little food, but the people of the village know their story so they help this poor young couple who gave up everything for love.
Sometimes when the young couple wake up in the morning, there are scraps of meat on their doorstep. Or maybe a handful of beans. But when the spring comes, everyone in the village is hungry and the young man knows he cannot support his bride. She is very thin because she gives all her food to him so he can have the strength to chop wood.
After thinking about it a long time, the young man decides it is better to die now than to watch his beloved starve. He plans to kill her in her sleep, then walk with her body into the river and die with her in his arms.
That night, he tells her how very much he loves her, then he gives her something to drink that will
make her sleep, as he does not want to hurt or frighten her. When she is asleep, he kisses her and arranges her hair prettily.
As he raises his axe to bring it down on her, tears are streaming down his cheeks. He knows that when she dies, his soul will die with her.
But hark! What is this? He hears a horse coming at a gallop. He puts down his axe to go to the horseman. It is a messenger coming to say that his father and elder brother have died and the young man now owns everything.
After he hears this, the young man gives thanks to God, not because his father and brother are dead, but because now his beloved can live and have enough to eat.
With great happiness in his heart, he wakes her, takes her onto the messenger’s horse, and rides to the castle with her.
Once he is lord of the manor, he repays all the villagers for their many kindnesses by giving a great feast. And he sends many bad men who worked for his father away and in their place hires good men from the village. And for the rest of his life he shares all the crops and no one in his village ever goes hungry again.
And the young man and his bride have many children and live happily ever after.
When Callie finished this story Meg and Will wiped away tears, but Callie only glanced at them. Her true interest was in what Talis thought.
For some time Talis sat still, not looking at her, but very aware that she was watching him, her breath held. After a long while, he turned to her and said softly, “I like no magic better.”
“Yes,” she said quietly. “No magic is better.”
Meg knew that when the children thought no one was looking, they were very affectionate toward one another. They held hands, Talis often putting his head on Callie’s lap, and whenever no one was near, they sat as close as possible to each other. But in the presence of others, they never so much as touched. Meg was sure this was Talis’s wish, for she felt that if Callie had her way, she might chain herself to his side, but Talis liked to pretend that he didn’t need Callie.