Wingfeather Tales by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2021-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

The girl’s capacity for wonder had ever moved him, even when she was a toddler and could not yet speak but would pause and stare at any mirabilia of light and shadow or coo at a softness of moss or smile at any song of sweeft or fazzle dove. She was the sort who was forever seeing little magics in the mosses of the forest and begging him for stories of the lost Shining Isle of Anniera (he often made these up for he knew so little of the legends) or of the great lone fendril that soared high in its glory round the world’s skies with wings stretched wide as the roof of a house, drawing the turning seasons behind it, or of a thousand beasts and legends still rumored to dwell in the places beyond the maps.

“Oh, Papa, can we go there one day?” she would ask. “To the Shining Isle?”

And he would kiss her forehead and tuck the blankets tight round her and reply, “But say the word, my princess, and I shall make it so,” and the girl would giggle and the man would bow comically and then catch her eye with a wink before he left her room.

His eye now fixed on something white catching moonlight in the trampled herb bed. It was roughly the size of a hen egg and he thought that he knew what it was and he leaned painfully forward and extended his fingers to retrieve it and it was soft against his fingertips. Lifting it closer to his face, he then drew in a spasmed breath, for it was a thing the girl had carried and dropped earlier in the night.

It was a little tricorn, sewn of a silvery-white silk.

Of all the tales her father spun, the girl’s favorites had always been of this, of the mythical tricorn who roamed the wilds and from whose cobalt horns and hooves shed peace and light like golden lantern light upon a silvery wood.

“Is it true, Papa?”

“Of course.”

“But I mean, is it really true?”

“As true as you can imagine it, princess.”

He had steadfastly encouraged her belief in such fancies for he had loved the innocence of her wonder, knowing that he could not shelter it forever in a time of brutalities and war, knowing that innocence would one day collapse beneath a burden of knowledge and experience as it always must amongst life’s sorrows, but for that knowledge vowing all the more to protect it so long as such was in his power.

“I will at least give her a childhood,” he had told his wife one night, and she had kissed his cheek then and rested her head upon his chest, and it pained him now to remember how it had felt then to be so trusted and to feel himself strong.

The man had wanted his child to believe in the big stories, the wide wonders, the legends and myths that would teach her to see beyond the fear and suspicion and decay

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