At Amberleaf Fair by Phyllis Ann Karr

Author:Phyllis Ann Karr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fantasy, adventure, wizard, mystery, magic
ISBN: 9781434447425
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2013-01-16T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

When Dilys left the Scholars’ Pavilion, she walked purposefully through fairgrounds into woods, sat down in the partial shelter of a huge old uprooted oak tree, and emptied herself of tears.

“I should have accepted his token,” she said half aloud. “I should have accepted it and let that little fool Sharys scrabble for someone else.”

But how well would we fit together? she wondered. Aye, as friends…we’re good friends. I think I’ve become a better friend to him than Valdart, no matter what friends they may have been as children. But Torinel mild and me temperish? As mated parents? With my hard edges? How well would we really fit each other?

She remembered the feel of those carved cherrywood figures so vividly that when she glanced down she saw her hands twitching as if they still played with the linkage. “His marriage toy,” she whispered again. “I should have accepted it when I had my chance.”

For some moments longer she sat, hearing the rain and examining possible futures as if she were crafting tales. Torinel as toycrafter, Torinel as magicker and high mage. She herself always as storyteller, but here helping turn wood as it seasoned, there dabbling in simple conjurers’ tricks to amuse their children. Always there were children, usually two, sometimes one. And when these offspring were grown—she calculated how old they would be then, she and Torinel, and found they should still have time to adventure for a few years, like his mother, if they chose. And at last to lie down somewhere beneath a great tree that would drop its seeds into the compost of their twined bodies. Or to put on harvest colors and settle again in their neighboring cottages. Always there were two cottages in her daydreams, with a third and fourth for their children as they grew old enough. Most families found it the smoothest way of living together, since time to be alone had always been among life’s essentials. It would be all the more essential for Torinel and Dilys, accustomed as they both were to fashion their craft materials in private, and determined as she was not to interfere with this choice he must remake, whether to craft toys or study magic.

Yes, she thought, stubborn-edged as I am and soft as young Sharys may look—would she live content with a crafter? Or would she try urging him back to magic? So I might be more tolerant with him, after all!

But if the young conjurer has more ambition than to tolerate a crafter, why is she about to accept an adventurer? And am I not trying to push him back toward toycrafting, whether I mean to or not? Maybe she thinks she wants Valdart because one hardly need feel much concern either way with the rank and syllables a man can earn who is absent most of the time.

But I’m no judge. And I’m trying to study real minds as I study the little people in my tales. Unjust. Unjust to them…maybe even to myself.

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