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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>Maren's bakery was the second warmth of every Crosshollow morning — the forge came first, and then the bread smell, which arrived at the lane before the light was properly up and stayed until the last loaf was sold. By mid-morning the early rush had settled and the bakery had gone quiet in the way it went quiet between the busy parts of the day: two or three people at the tables, the sound of Maren moving in the back, the small percussion of the village going on outside.
Liss had come in without particular purpose. She had been doing that lately — going places without deciding to go there, arriving somewhere warm and sitting until the warmth had done whatever it was going to do and then moving on. She had a roll and a cup of something and she was sitting at the table by the window that looked out onto the lane, which was what she did when she wanted to look at something without having to think about it.
Maren had said her name when she came in and asked what she wanted and said nothing else. Maren knew Eda. Maren knew whose daughter she was and approximately what was being carried. She had been in the seed shop in November. She had sat in the chair by the fire and watched Eda tell Liss what she needed to hear and watched Liss leave before she was ready to have heard it. Maren understood the situation. She had the good sense to treat Liss like a person who had come in for a roll and leave it at that.
Liss looked out at the lane. She was not waiting for anything. She was trying very hard not to wait for anything, which is a different thing and harder. He had been perfectly civil. She had gone and said more of it and he had been perfectly civil and she had come away with nothing to show for it except the knowledge that civil was worse than the alternatives, somehow — worse than anger, worse than nothing. She had gone home and her mother had looked at her face and gone back to sorting seeds and that had been that.
That had been weeks ago now. She was leaving it alone. The seed was in the ground. She knew this. It was harder to know than to understand.
The door opened and a girl came in.
She was perhaps nine years old, perhaps ten. Small for her age or simply young-seeming in the way that children who are usually energetic seem young when they have gone quiet. She came up to the counter and put both hands on the edge of it — the gesture of a child who has been here before and knows the right height — and gave Maren an order that was clearly her mother's order, recited with the particular care of someone trying to get it right.
Maren took the order and wrote it on her pad and looked at the girl for a moment.
"You all right, then?" she said.
Not what's wrong, which would have required the girl to name it. Just the simpler question, leaving room.
The girl considered this. "Our dog died," she said. "Three days ago."
"Ah," Maren said. The way she said it held nothing extra — no rush to fill it, no improvement on it. Just the sound of someone who had heard something and received it properly.
"He was old," the girl said. "Everyone keeps telling me he was old. I know he was old. He was fourteen." She looked at her hands on the counter. "I just want him back."
Liss had not looked up from the window. But she had gone still.
"What was his name?" Maren asked.
"Rook."
"Good name for a dog."
"He was black." A pause. "He slept at the foot of my bed every night. He was heavy. He made the blanket go all to one side." She said this last part with a precision that had nothing to do with complaint — the precision of someone describing something they would give a great deal to have back.
Maren came around the counter and gave the girl a small roll, warm, from the rack near the oven. "Sit down a moment," she said, "while I put your order together."
The girl sat at the table nearest the counter. Liss was at the table by the window. Neither of them looked at the other.
Maren went back behind the counter and began wrapping things and said, without particularly addressing anyone: "What did you love most about having him?"
The girl thought about this seriously, in the way children think about things when they have been asked a real question.
"He was always there," she said finally. "Wherever I went in the house, he was just — there. He'd come and put his head on my feet when I was reading. I didn't even have to do anything. He just came."
Maren nodded, her back to the room, wrapping bread.
Liss looked at the lane. She was thinking about a word. There. He was just there.
The door opened.
A woman came in — the girl's mother, recognizable immediately as such, the look of a woman who has sent her child ahead on purpose and is now arriving at the result of having done that. She had her arms slightly in front of her. Something small and warm and squirming in them, pressed against her coat.
The girl looked up. Her face went through several things at once.
The puppy was perhaps eight weeks old, black, with the slightly oversized paws and the slightly oversized ears of a creature that had not yet grown into itself. The mother set it down on the floor and it took four uncertain steps toward the girl and then sat down heavily, the way puppies sit, and looked up at her with the absolute openness of something that has not yet learned to protect itself from anything.
It was not Rook. The girl knew this. She was nine years old but she was not foolish and she knew immediately that this was not Rook, that nothing would be Rook, that the specific weight of Rook on the blanket and the specific way Rook had of finding her feet when she was reading was gone and would stay gone.
And then the puppy put one paw on her knee and made a small uncertain sound.
The girl's face changed. Liss was watching. She saw it happen — not replacement, nothing so simple as that. Something else. Recognition. The feeling she had been describing — the being-found, the being-come-to, the thing that just showed up and put its weight against you without being asked — here it was. In a different form. Arriving through a different door than the one that had closed.
Pip began to cry. Not sad crying — the other kind, the kind that happens when something good comes after something hard and your face doesn't know what to do with the combination.
The mother looked at Maren over the child's head. Maren looked back. Nothing needed to be said between them.
Liss looked down at her cup.
She was thinking. Not about the puppy, not about the girl, not in any direction that would have been obvious from the outside. She was thinking about a word she had used to herself for months, privately, in the way you carry a word when you don't want to say it out loud. Him. She had been wanting him — the specific weight of that specific person, the precise shape of what they had, the particular way it had felt to be known by someone who knew her. She had gone to him and said more of it. She had been watching that door.
She thought about what Maren had asked. What did you love most about having him?
She had not been asked this question. She had been asking a different one, for months. Why hasn't he come back? Why won't he? What do I have to do to make him understand?
She sat with the new question for a moment. It was uncomfortable in a different way than the old question. The old question had someone else in it — someone who needed to change, someone who needed to come back, someone whose decision it was. The new question had only her in it.
What is it I actually want back?
She didn't answer it. It wasn't the kind of question that answered itself in a bakery on a Tuesday. But she turned it over once and set it down somewhere in herself that wasn't the place where the old question had been living, and the old question, she noticed, had gone slightly quieter.
She finished her tea. She put her coat on. She left a coin on the table.
On her way out she passed the counter where Maren was handing the wrapped order to the mother, who was managing it one-handed because the girl had the puppy in her arms now and was not going to put it down for anything. Maren looked up as Liss went by. Just looked — the look of someone who has been watching more than she has said and has decided to keep most of it to herself.
"Liss," she said. Just the name. The way you say a name when you mean something by it that doesn't need to be words.
Liss nodded. She went out into the morning.
Behind her, through the closing door, she could hear the puppy make its small uncertain sound again, and the girl laugh at it, and Maren say something warm to the mother that was too quiet to carry.
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In Crosshollow, it is said that you rarely get back exactly what you lost. What comes instead, if you are patient and don't look too hard at the wrong door, is the thing underneath the thing — which was what you needed all along.
— From the Archives of the Keepers of Magical Tales —
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