The Wonderful Stag, or the Courtship of Red Elsie by Kathleen Jennings

Author:Kathleen Jennings
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

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Those who wish to wed in the village now must walk a long way, down from the mountains and into the valley with its towns and river-trade and schools. They must go swiftly, and they will not travel at night, for there is still a creature in the forest with hooves and a pelt the colour of old blood, and rings on its antlers. It is an angry, dangerous, graceless beast, and it has killed travellers and petitioners both before now, and trampled them, and taken their gold.

But if lovers wish to marry the old way, and not bow to the inquiries and iniquities of magistrates in cold, pillared courthouses, they may still go hunting in the forest. If they can trap it, and hold a knife to its throat, they might wrest a ring from those terrible antlers — more bone than horn, and with tin and silver and fools-gold growing mingled through the prongs.

Those rings will not necessarily grant such lovers happiness, as it is said the old ones did. And if you wish to be freed from your marriage, it is safer, all in all, to ask the permission of Red Elsie, and accept her terms.

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