The tales of Crosshollow, a mythical medieval village are fables for our time — stories of ordinary people whose everyday lives reveal how the deepest forces in the world actually work. No spells are cast here. No magic is named. And yet readers find in these pages something they recognize: truths about patience, presence, grief, and love that apply to not only magic but everyday life. Told by the Keepers of Magical Tales.
A Tale from Crosshollow
As told by the Keepers of Magical Tales
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There was a man Liss did not speak to.
She spoke to everyone else. She spoke to Maren across the bakery counter every few days, and to the children who came in for the broken ends of loaves, and to the old men who sat by the window arguing about weather that had already happened. But when she crossed paths with him — on the lane, at the well, anywhere the village threw them together — Liss found something to study in the middle distance, or remembered she was needed elsewhere, or gave him the kind of greeting you give a stranger whose name you happen to know. Two words. A nod. The careful nothing of a person being very busy.
It had not always been so. There had been a season when they were easy with each other, and then a season when they were not, and then he had stopped coming round altogether — even to the bakery, where everyone came, so that his absence from it was its own kind of statement. And then, when enough time had passed that it would have cost him something to come back, he had not come back. And Liss had decided, somewhere she did not look at directly, that the next move was his. She had gone cold the way you bank a fire: deliberately, to keep something for later, telling herself it was sense.
Maren saw all of it, the way she saw everything from behind the counter. She had seen the easy season and the cold one. She had watched him stop coming, and watched Liss pretend not to notice he had, and watched the way Liss's face did a small careful thing whenever his name came up in someone else's talk — a shutting, like a hand closing over a coin. She had watched Liss carry the whole business around the village like something balanced on her head that she refused to admit was heavy. Maren said nothing. Bakers learn early that most things rise better if you leave them alone.
This had been going on through most of the autumn when Pip came into the bakery one grey afternoon with her face all wrong.
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"Shadow won't come to me," the girl said. She said it the way children say the things that frighten them — too plainly, all at once. "He's gone off by himself. He won't come up on the bed. He won't hardly look at me. I've been calling and calling him and he just — stays away."
Liss crouched down to her. "Is he eating?"
"A little."
"Then he's just poorly. Dogs do that — they go off to themselves when they don't feel right. It isn't you."
"But he won't come." Pip's voice cracked on it. "I keep trying to get him to come and he keeps — going further."
And Liss, who knew something about a creature you could not make come back to you, took the girl by the shoulders and told her the truth.
"Listen. You can't drag him back to you. The more you chase him the further he'll go — that's just how it is, with a thing that's hurting. But that doesn't mean you go cold on him either. Don't you give up on him and turn away. Keep his bowl full. Keep his place on the bed warm. Stay near, and stay easy, and leave the door open — so that when he's ready, the way back to you is warm and short." She squeezed Pip's shoulders. "Don't make him cross a cold room to get home to you. Just keep the room warm, and wait, and let him come."
Pip wiped her nose on her sleeve and nodded, and looked a little less afraid, and after a while she went home to sit near her dog without grabbing at him.
Liss stayed crouched a moment after the girl had gone, looking at the floor.
Don't make him cross a cold room to get home to you.
She stood up slowly. Maren, wrapping bread, did not look over, but her hands had gone quiet.
The thing was, Liss realized — standing there in the smell of flour and woodsmoke, hearing her own voice still hanging in the air — that she had never once let herself decide what she actually wanted. She had told herself the next move was his, because that was easier than choosing. She had let the whole thing stay vague and unsettled and his fault, a fog she could hide inside, so that she never had to stand in the open and say the plain thing.
So she made herself say it, there on the bakery floor, silently, the way you finally name a thing you have been walking around for months. I want him back. Not someday, not if he tried first, not if the conditions were right. She wanted him back, now, and the wanting was hers, and it was simple, and it had been simple the whole time. The moment she let it come into focus — one clear want instead of a fog of pride and maybe and we'll-see — it stopped being a weight she carried and became a thing that pointed somewhere. It pointed at a door. It pointed at him.
She knew what she wanted. And knowing it — really knowing it, the way you know a true thing once you stop arguing with it — was already, though she could not have said so, the beginning of getting it.
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He came into the bakery four days later.
He had not set foot in it in months. There was no reason for him to come that day rather than any other — he said something about needing bread, which was true and was not the reason, and neither of them remarked on the fact that a man who had stayed away from a place for a season had walked back into it the same week the woman who went there had finally made up her mind. It would have looked like nothing. A man bought bread. But the timing of it sat oddly in the warm room, if you were the sort to notice such things.
Liss felt the old machinery start up the moment his shadow crossed the door — the impulse to find something on the far shelf, to go stiff, to wrap up her business and take it out into the cold where it was safe. She felt all of it rise, familiar as a habit.
And then she did not do it.
She turned around, and she looked at him, and before she could think better of it she said his name — warmly, the way she used to, the way you say the name of someone you are glad to see. "It's good to see you," she said. And she meant it, and she let it show, and she did not look away, and she did not reach for her bread, and she did not leave. She simply stood in the warm room with the door open and let him see that it was open.
It was not much. It was two sentences and a look. A braver person might have said more, and a more cautious one would have said nothing, and Liss was neither just then — she was only a woman who had finally let one clear want come into focus, and found that a thing wanted clearly enough does not sit still in you. It moves. It had moved her across a room.
He smiled.
That was all that happened. He smiled — surprised, and then not surprised, and then glad, the way a face opens when a door it had stopped trying opens from the other side. They talked of nothing. He bought his bread. But something had turned in the warm room that would not turn back, and they both knew it, and neither of them said so.
When he had gone, Maren tied off the loaf she was wrapping and set it on the counter, and looked at Liss for a moment, and nodded once to herself — the small, satisfied nod of a woman who has watched a thing rise that she had begun to think never would.
She did not say what she was thinking. And what she was thinking was not that the girl had finally come to her senses, though she had. It was that it did not strike her as odd in the least — that he should wander back the very week Liss made up her mind, after a season away. Maren had kept a shop at the crossroads a long time. She had watched a great many people want a great many things, and she had noticed, without ever quite putting words to it, that the world had a way of turning toward a person the moment they truly knew their own mind — as though a thing wanted clearly enough sent something on ahead of it, and called its answer quietly home. Other people called it luck, or coincidence, or nothing at all. Maren had stopped calling it anything. She only nodded, and wrapped the bread, and let it be.
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Liss had spent the autumn waiting for him to cross a cold room. She never knew that the morning she finally warmed it — alone, on the bakery floor, wanting one clear thing at last — was the morning he started, without knowing why, to find his way back.
— From the Archives of the Keepers of Magical Tales —
Explore the Lessons of This Story
Our podcast goes deeper — discussing the real-world lessons woven into this tale and how they apply to magic and everyday life. This is not a reading of the story. It is a conversation about what it means.
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