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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Liss had turned learning into a kind of running.
It had crept up on her without her noticing. There had been a time, not so long ago, when she carried her mother's herbs around the village slowly, stopping where she was wanted, sitting where there was sitting to be done. Now she moved through her days like someone always a little behind. There was so much to learn, and so many to tend, and never enough hours to do either properly. She had begun to count them the way a miser counts coin — this many before dark, this many people still to see, this much undone.
She was good at it. That was the trouble. The village had started to lean on her, and the more it leaned the faster she moved, and the faster she moved the less she seemed to have. I haven't the time, she said, a dozen times a day, and believed it every time.
She said it to her mother most of all.
Eda's seed shop sat back on the mill lane, and Liss passed it most days. And most days Eda would look up from the bins and say some version of the same thing — sit a while, there's tea, the beans can wait. And most days Liss would stand in the doorway with one foot already back on the lane and say she couldn't, not today, there was Coll's chest and the Harrow baby and old Tam's knee, and she'd come properly on the weekend.
"You said that last weekend," Eda said once, not sharply. She was sorting seed into paper twists and did not look up. "And the one before."
"I know. I will."
"Mm." A twist of seed, folded closed. "You're becoming a great help to everyone, Liss."
It sounded like praise, and Liss took it as praise, and was three steps down the lane before she wondered if it had been.
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The lights came on a Tuesday in October, with no warning at all.
She was hurrying home in the dark — of course she was hurrying, she was always hurrying — with a list still running in her head and the cold coming up off the fields, when the north end of the sky began to burn.
It was green at first. A pale green, the color of new wheat, rising off the hills in a great soft curtain that moved as if a wind she couldn't feel were passing through it. Then a red came into the top of it, and a kind of violet, and the whole northern sky was hanging in slow folds of light, shifting, drawing up and falling back, silent. She had never seen anything like it. No one living in Crosshollow had. She stopped in the middle of the lane with her list going quiet in her head, and she stood, and she looked up.
She did not know how long she stood there. That was the first strange thing — that she, who measured everything now in what it cost her, could not have said whether it was ten minutes or an hour. Time had simply stopped being something she was spending.
And then, standing under it, she had a thought so plain it almost made her laugh.
The sky was in no hurry.
That great slow fire had been rolling around the top of the world since long before there was a Crosshollow to hurry through, and it would be rolling there long after, and it was not rushing any of it. It took its time because time was the one thing it had without end. And here was Liss beneath it, who had perhaps sixty autumns if she was lucky, telling herself a dozen times a day that she hadn't a minute to spare — as though her small hurry could add an hour to anything. Who was she to be in a hurry. The sky wasn't, and the sky had been here longer than she had, and would outlast her, and it was spending the evening making itself beautiful over an empty field for no one.
And underneath that thought came the one that stayed with her.
There had been time all along. She had only decided there wasn't.
She stood a while longer, until the green began to fade, and then she did not go home. She turned around on the dark lane and walked back the way she had come, to the seed shop on the mill lane, where the lamp was still lit.
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Eda was still at the bins.
"You'll want to see the s ky," Liss said.
Her mother came to the door and looked north for a long moment. "Well," she said softly. "There's a thing
They stood in the doorway together and watched it go. And when it had gone, Liss did not reach for the latch or mention Coll or the Harrow baby or the hour. She went in, and she sat down at the little table among the smell of dry earth, and she said, "Is there still tea?"
Eda looked at her. Something crossed her face and settled.
"There is," she said. "There's all the time in the world for tea."
She put the kettle on. And Liss sat, and did not count the minutes, and stayed.
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The hurry is the thing we invent. Look up at what was here before you and will be here after, and it will hand back the hours you swore you never had.
— 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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