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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The frost came early that year, and Coll went down with it.
It started as a cough he waved off. He was sixty-three and had spent forty years standing in cold water, and he had coughed through worse than that. Then came a night he could not lie flat, and then a week he did not leave the bed, and then it was November and he was still in it.
They put him in the back room. It was the sensible place — the warmest in the house, out of the draught, away from the noise off the lane. Seb came every morning and built the fire up. Wyn kept a pot of broth going and brought it down twice a day and stood over him while he drank it. Nessa sent salve for his chest and Maren sent bread nobody needed, because it was the only thing she could think to send. Everything that ought to have been done was done, and done well.
He did not get worse. That was the trouble. He did not get better either.
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Three weeks went by and he lay in the warm dark and stopped saying much of anything, and it was the quiet that frightened people. Coll had never been a talker. But this was a different quiet. Seb sat on the stool by the bed and talked for both of them, which was not his habit either — the fields, the price of barley, a heron that had taken up at the bend and would not be moved along. Coll would nod. Sometimes a word or two came back. Mostly he looked at the wall.
The back room had a window. It was a good window, small and square and well set. It looked out onto the stone of the byre, three feet away.
✦ ✦ ✦
Liss came on a Thursday with a packet of her mother's herbs and no particular idea what to do with herself once she had handed them over. She was not there to nurse. She was there because Eda had sent her, and because that is what you do.
She sat a while. He did not talk. She watched him look at nothing — not sleeping, not resting, just lying with his eyes open on the grey stone of the byre wall — and something in her went back a long way.
She had been seven, the summer she could not get cool. The fever would not break and the cottage held the heat like a bread oven, and on the third night her mother carried the pallet out and made her a bed against the east wall of the shop where the shade came over by mid-morning. There was nothing to it. It was cooler out. That was the whole of the reason.
She had stayed out four days. She remembered the bees in the lavender, and the road — cartwheels, someone's dog, a man singing badly — and the leaves going over and over above her. She remembered the fever breaking. She remembered not wanting to come in afterwards, and being brought in anyway.
She had never once thought of it as anything.
✦ ✦ ✦
She found Wyn in the kitchen with the pot.
"Could he not be moved to the front?"
Wyn looked up. "He's warm where he is."
"I know. Only — it's brighter at the front. He'd not feel so shut away."
It sounded thin, said out loud. Liss heard how thin it sounded and felt her face go hot and did not take it back.
Wyn thought about it for a moment. Then she said, "It'd be colder. We'd have to keep the fire up."
"Yes."
"Well," Wyn said. "We can keep the fire up."
They moved him on the Saturday. It took Seb and two others and a good deal of swearing about the stair, and the front room was cold until they had the fire going properly, and someone had to go back for the salve. They set the bed under the window.
The front window looks down the lane, past the willows, to the bend of the river below the mill.
Coll turned his head on the pillow and looked out of it for a while. Then he said, "You can see the bend from here."
That was all he said.
✦ ✦ ✦
The change was not much and it was not quick.
But he began to talk first. Small things, mostly complaints. There was ice on the slack water. Two men were out at the bend on Tuesday and neither of them had the least idea where the fish were, and he said so at some length. A heron came, and went, and came back. He kept up a running account of everything the river did and everyone who came near it, delivered flat, to the ceiling, whether anyone was listening or not.
Then he was eating without being stood over. Then he was sitting up. Then he wanted the chair by the window instead of the bed, and in the first week of February he walked as far as the gate and back with a hand on Seb's arm, and stood there a minute looking down the lane before he would go in.
✦ ✦ ✦
"It was the broth," Wyn said, in the spring, when somebody asked. She said it the way you say a thing that does not need arguing. "I had it going the whole three months. My mother's way. You keep it going and it draws them back."
Nobody disagreed. There was no reason to. He had been given broth for three months and here he was at the gate.
Liss thought about the lavender, and the leaves going over above her, and the four days she had not wanted to end. She opened her mouth and then closed it — not because she knew better, but because she did not. He might have mended anyway. People do, in their own time, for their own reasons. She had a memory of being seven, and no way at all of telling.
She went home the long way, past the mill, where the river was loud with the melt. She stood and watched it a while, which she had never especially done before, and could not have said why she did it now.
✦ ✦ ✦
Not all of what feeds a man comes in a bowl. Put him where he can see the thing that is life to him, and some part of him will get up and go to meet it.
— 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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