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
✦ ✦ ✦
It happened in the doorway of the bakery, on a cold bright morning.
Tomas was going in for his loaf, and Osric the cooper was coming out, and they met in the door the way people do, one stepping aside for the other. Tomas said good morning. He said it the way you do to a man you have known twenty years, and he lifted his hand.
Osric went past him without a word.
No word, no nod, not so much as a look. He came out into the light with his eyes on nothing, close enough that his coat brushed Tomas's arm, and went off up the lane with his head down.
Tomas bought his loaf. He did not much hear what Maren said to him. He walked home with the morning gone sour.
✦ ✦ ✦
It sat with him, and it grew.
Twenty years. He had bought the man's buckets and paid fair for them and paid on time. There had never been a hard word between them. And here he was walked past in a doorway like a stranger, in front of Maren, who had surely seen the whole of it.
By the time he was home he had worked out the reason. Osric had heard something. Somebody had said a thing about the price Tomas had asked for the far pasture in the spring, and Osric had believed it, and this was Osric letting him know where they now stood. A man did not cut you dead for nothing. He had been told something.
✦ ✦ ✦
After that he watched for it, and he found it.
Two days on he saw Osric across the market and lifted his hand, and Osric did not lift his back. Osric had not seen him. He was looking at a cart, thinking about something else. But Tomas did not know that. He saw a raised hand and a hand that stayed down, and he counted it against him.
So he stopped saying good morning. He took the long way round the cooperage. When Osric's name came up he had little to say, and what he said made it sound as though he knew more than he was telling. He carried the thing everywhere he went, and it did not get lighter.
✦ ✦ ✦
It was Maren who set it down, and she did not know she was doing it.
He was in for his loaf again, near a week on, and she asked him, the way you ask a thing in a bakery, whether he had heard how Osric's little girl was faring.
"Faring?" Tomas said.
"The fever." She was wrapping his bread. "Near a fortnight of it now. It went to her chest and would not come up, and there were nights they thought they would lose her. Osric came in here one morning last week grey as ash. Hadn't slept. He bought his bread and walked off without it, and I sent Dael up the lane after him." She shook her head. "He's been like a man walking in his sleep. You could say good morning to him and he'd not hear you." She tied the string. "She's mending now. Turned the corner Tuesday. But it was a near thing, and he's not slept a whole night in two weeks."
Tomas stood there with his loaf in his hands.
✦ ✦ ✦
He was quiet the whole way home.
There had been no snub. Osric had not been thinking of him at all. He had walked out of that bakery with a sick child in his head and no room in it for anything else, and he had passed Tomas the way you pass a gatepost, and thought nothing of it, because there was nothing to think.
And Tomas had taken that morning and made a week out of it. He had been so sure. He had gone the long way round the man's shop. He had found a new way of saying his name.
The anger went out of him and left him feeling foolish. It is one thing to be wronged by a man. It is another to find there was no man, and you did the whole of it yourself.
✦ ✦ ✦
The next morning he took a round of Maren's bread and a small crock of his own honey and went by the cooperage.
He said nothing about the doorway. There was no reason to. Osric had never known there was anything the matter.
He knocked, and Osric came, thinner than before and grey around the eyes, but past the worst of it. Tomas gave him the bread and the honey and said he had heard the little one had been poorly, and was glad she had turned. Osric was glad to see him. He always had been.
Tomas walked home lighter than he had been all week.
✦ ✦ ✦
Most of what we carry was never handed to us. We pick it up in a doorway and carry it home ourselves.
— 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.
[PODBEAN IFRAME]
You Might Also Like
- The Exchange (A Tale from Crosshollow)
- The Cooper's Winter (A Tale from Crosshollow)
- The Bakery (A Tale from Crosshollow)
- The Tales of Crosshollow
