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
✦ ✦ ✦
The late market was the trip that paid for Coll’s winter, and the weather had held fair, and he meant to leave at first light. The cart was greased, the surplus sacked and counted. His potatoes were still in the ground — but the sky looked settled, and he would lift them when he got back, the way half the village meant to. The market first, while the good winter prices lasted.
At first light the horse would not put weight on its off hind.
Coll ran his hand down the leg and felt the heat in it. Lame. A week at least before it could pull a loaded cart to the far market and back — and by then the market would be over. He stood in the cold with his hand on the animal and felt the whole winter tip over for the want of one sound leg.
He said as much to Pell at the field edge, because Pell was there mending a hurdle and a man has to tell someone. “The one trip that matters, and the beast goes lame the very morning. My winter, thrown over for a stone in a hoof.”
Pell did not look up from the hurdle. “Can’t say yet,” he said.
“There’s nothing to say. I’ve missed it.”
“You’ve missed the market.” Pell was an old barley man, and he said things the way he planted them — slowly, without expecting them up before their time. “That’s all you know so far.”
Coll went home sore at him. It is an easy thing to say, when it is not your winter.
✦ ✦ ✦
With the horse lame and the market gone, there was nothing to do but lift the potatoes. Coll spent three days bent over the fork, bringing the crop up out of the cold ground and down into the dark of the cellar, where it would keep till spring. Dull work, and he did it sore.
The frost came the night he finished.
It came the way the hard ones come — a still, clear evening that looked like nothing, and by morning a cold gone right down into the earth. A frost like that takes a potato left in the ground and, by spring, turns it to black rot. Coll’s were in the cellar. He stood in his doorway in the white morning and understood, slowly, that had the horse stayed sound he would have been two days down the road — his whole crop still in the field, waiting on a frost that had not waited for him.
The men who had gone to the market came home three days later. They had sold well. They came home to fields the frost had been through — a winter’s potatoes gone soft in the ground, and no one home at the dark hour to have lifted them.
The horse was sound again within the week. When Coll led it down the lane, the neighbors called him a lucky man — the lame leg that kept him home the one morning it would have cost him everything to be gone.
“Lucky,” Coll said, and could not quite say it as if he meant it. He had cursed that leg for three days. It sat strange in him, to be told the cursing had been thanks all along.
He asked Pell, because Pell had been right and it galled him. “So it was a good thing, then. The horse going lame.”
Pell banked his fire for the evening and considered it the way he considered weather. “It kept your crop out of the frost,” he said. “That’s what it did.” He set the last turf to the coals. “Whether it was good or bad — the season’s not out.”
✦ ✦ ✦
And it was not. But Coll stopped reaching for the word that winter — good, bad, lucky, ruined — the way he had reached for it in the lane with the whole village listening; a man can wear himself thin trying to name each turn as it comes. Pell only put another turf on the fire, which was the truest thing either of them knew to say.
✦ ✦ ✦
You never know a loss from a saving until the season is out.
— 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 Far Note (A Tale from Crosshollow)
- The Doorway (A Tale from Crosshollow)
- If You Seek Guarantees in Magic, You Will Find Neither
- When Will My Magic Spell Work? I Don’t See Anything!
