Goldmayne: A Fairy Tale

by Kate Stradling

  Goldmayne: A Fairy Tale

  By Kate Stradling

  Goldmayne: A Fairy Tale

  Copyright © 2013 Kate Stradling

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written consent of the author.

  Published by Kate Stradling

  katestradling.blogspot.com

  For my two sisters, who kept to the mold,

  and for middle me, who broke it.

  Table of Contents

  Preface

  Prologue

  Part I: The Witch and Her Horse

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part II: The Building of a Legend

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Part III: The Acts of Fools and Fairies

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Preface

  The origins of this book can be found in a small anthology called The Magic Tree and Other Tales* by Marius Barbeau, retold by Michael Hornyansky. The collection is out of print and has been for decades, but it’s absolutely brilliant. Among its pages exists a pair of stories, “Scurvyhead” and “Sir Goldenhair,” that captured my imagination as a child. They tell the adventures of Petite Jean, the quintessential fairy-tale hero, who ventures out into the world to make his fortune.

  In my youth, I hoped that someone would pick up his story and give it the same attention afforded to more common fairy tales. As I grew older, I realized my naivety. It was an obscure tale from an equally obscure collection, in a world where fame and familiarity are king and queen. I resigned myself to its obscurity, even learned to appreciate it. While other tales were adapted and altered, my “Scurvyhead” and “Sir Goldenhair” remained pristine, unadulterated.

  But, well, a story exists to be told, not to wither away in obscurity. As I turned my own attentions toward writing, this story simmered in the back of my mind, biding its time. It formed in bits and pieces, details jotted in notebooks and then set aside for years until, gradually, the characters took shape and demanded a venue for their voices. I offer many thanks to my mother, Edith, a true Patron of the Arts, for enabling me in this endeavor; to Kristen, Ryan, Russell, and others who read the first draft and provided feedback; and to my intelligent and meticulous cousin Melia, who proofread and critiqued the final draft.

  In a way, I feel like I’m trampling sacred ground. Goldmayne is part “Scurvyhead” and part “Sir Goldenhair,” but it’s partly its own monster as well. Whether anyone familiar with these two stories would approve of my embellishments, I don’t know. I trust the originals to stand on their own merit, and hope that my work might do the same. To that end do I humbly offer this book and, more importantly, cast some light on the source from whence it springs.

  -K.S., April 2013

  *The original title of the anthology was The Golden Phoenix and Other French-Canadian Fairy Tales. The edition I grew up with was renamed. Just, y’know, throwing that information out in case anyone wants to track down a copy of this most noble book.

  Prologue

  Duncan did not believe in fairy tales.

  His tiny slip of a mother had whispered the fantastical stories in his ears late at night from the time he was only a small child. She must have known a thousand variations, for the tales were never quite the same from one telling to the next, but while they were diverting and certainly dream-inducing, even as a small child Duncan had not believed them.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in the existence of fairies or witches. It wasn’t for a lack of magic in the land, either, for he lived in a land that fairly teemed with magic. It was the stories themselves: the running themes of heroes by happenstance, of tragically cursed royalty, of supernatural deliverance and happily ever after. The happily ever after was the part that Duncan disbelieved the most. Even as a boy he recognized that such a thing was so far removed from his life as to be completely implausible.

  Happiness was a rare commodity, one that did not come his way very often, one which those around him never seemed to experience at all. “Happily ever after” was an impossibility, a child’s dream that Duncan could not afford to nurture.

  He was an only child, sickly at birth, born to a delicate mother who loved him with all her soul and to a barrel-chested father who thought him a nuisance. From a young age he learned to fear the man and cling to his mother as though she were his only lifeline. Whether he knew it or not, in those early years, she was.

  He could keenly recall the expression of sorrow that always graced his mother’s face: the sadness in her eyes and the tight thinning of her lips. She tried to hide it from him, smiled for him often and always held him close to whisper how much she loved him. Duncan, a quiet, observant child, pretended not to notice the shimmer of tears in her eyes or the fragility of her spirit. Instead, he allowed her to baby him, all the while knowing that his mother led a miserable life.

  How she came to marry his father he never discovered. He could not imagine two more different people. He supposed, in childlike innocence, that they must have loved each other once, but any semblance of that feeling had long since disappeared. To put it bluntly, Duncan’s father was a brute, a man who treated his wife as a servant and respected her less than the livestock kept on their little farm. He demeaned and belittled her, and he allowed her only the freedoms he saw fit to give. When she finally succumbed to Death’s wasted embrace, his grieving was not that of a man who had lost his soul mate, or even his friend; instead, Duncan’s father lamented the loss of someone to cook his dinner and clean his house. At the time, a thirteen-year-old Duncan had wondered if, perhaps, his father would have grieved more for the old gray mule they kept to pull the plow.

  Duncan plunged into misery from that day forward, his one advocate in the world gone. His mother had harbored high hopes for him, but the father he was left with held no such aspirations. In his eyes, Duncan was a slight, useless child of weak constitution, hardly fit to be called his son. He determined to work some strength into the boy, or beat it into him if work failed.

  As such, Duncan spent the next few years as slave labor, kept ignorant of the world. His only concern lay in finishing the chores his father placed upon his shoulders. Often he knew the sting of failure, emotionally in the words of censure his father never spared and physically in the rod used to bring those words home. Despite long hours of plowing and weeding, harvesting and threshing, Duncan maintained his slight frame rather than bulking up as his father wished. While his body became hard and muscled, it remained deceptively lean, and much to his father’s chagrin, by his seventeenth year he showed not the least sign of a beard.

  “Mewling baby-face,” the man was wont to sneer. Despite this, Duncan was content to remain beardless. His father’s beard was in dire shape, in his opinion. It was snarled and tangled and looked as though it had never seen a bar of soap in the whole of its existence.


  Besides, his lack of facial hair was more than compensated for by an unruly mane atop his head, long and dark and falling in waves. Most of the time, he kept it tied back, though a fringe always hung in his face to shield his eyes from view. Traditions in this part of the world allowed for men to wear their hair long, but that did not stop Duncan’s father from commenting on his womanly son. He often wondered aloud whether his wife had hoodwinked him and borne a daughter instead.

  The village girls were not so misguided, however. The older Duncan grew, the more heads turned his direction, and the more admiring whispers followed behind him. This, of course, was where all the trouble originated. Duncan had never attended school and had no friends his own age. He was socially inept, but his father was not. While the son drove the crops to and from the market oblivious of the admiration surrounding him, the father heard all about it at the local tavern, and his petty heart writhed in jealousy.

  The final straw came one dusk when a fellow patron inquired whether Duncan would soon bring a new bride home to the farm to raise his own family. The miller’s daughter seemed to have taken a keen interest in him, as had the smith’s. In fact, from what this particular patron had heard, nearly half the marriageable girls of the village had set their cap on the quiet, handsome boy, so he could have his pick among them.

  Duncan’s father, jealous of a son who could inspire such admiration, had managed a gruff, negative response, paid his tab, and then left just drunk enough to let his festering wrath guide him home. The scene that followed was not pretty and shall not be recounted here. Suffice to say that it ended in Duncan being dragged outside and tossed bodily into the vegetable cellar, with the doors slammed and locked behind him. His father returned to the farmhouse and the warmth of the fire within.

  The ensuing night was bitterly cold. The boy shivered among a pile of turnips, wondering what he had done to incur such wrath. He hugged bruised arms to himself and tried to piece together the half-lucid ranting his father had bellowed at him, but he could make no sense of it. In the end, all he really knew was that he was miserable, and that he had been miserable for a very long time.

  Thus it was that when the pale gray of dawn curled up from the horizon and the door to the vegetable cellar rattled open, Duncan picked himself up the wooden stairs and trudged out into the crisp morning air with a firm resolution.

  “The goat needs to be milked,” his father sneered, “and after that, there’s plenty enough work to do in the north field. Get to it, lazybones.”

  Duncan obediently turned in the direction of the ruminating she-goat, and his father went back into the house to finish his breakfast. As such, he entirely failed to see his son pass the goat’s pen, circumvent the vegetable garden, and disappear beyond the hedgerow into the road. He would not discover the boy’s absence until well into the morning, and by then it would be too late.

  Duncan did not believe in fairy tales, but neither did he believe a person was destined for misery. At seventeen, he turned his back on everything he knew and decided instead to find his own path in the world. Where that path would lead, what fantastic creatures and people he would meet, he never imagined.

  No, Duncan did not believe in fairy tales, but that is how this fairy tale begins.

  Part I: The Witch and Her Horse

  Chapter 1

  Sleeping beneath a hedgerow by the side of the road is not a comfortable activity. The shrubbery does very little to keep away the chill of the night, and there are sticks and rocks poking and prodding at very odd angles. Every small movement produces some new discomfort, and if one happens to be wise enough to bank some dead leaves for cushioning, every small movement also produces a rustling noise that is just foreign enough to disturb one’s sleep.

  Necessity alone brought Duncan into this very situation. After having abandoned his father’s farm with nothing more than the clothing on his back, he had no means of providing shelter for himself out on the road. What little knowledge he had of the world was more misleading than helpful, too. He might have sought a place to sleep at one of the farmhouses he had passed during the day, but he had no hope that such hospitality would be granted. His father had always turned away travelers with a contemptuous sneer, and Duncan simply assumed that all farmers were that stingy. He was wary of trespassing on others’ property for the same reason, namely because of how vigorously his father had declaimed vagrants and vagabonds. Hence, he had settled for the hedgerow next to the highway.

  It had been his third night on the road. As if the sticks and rocks jabbing at him from odd directions had not been enough to disrupt his slumber, his empty stomach added to his discomfort. He had foraged a couple handfuls of berries and a few mushrooms from a stretch of woods earlier in the day, but those had long since been consumed. He passed a fitful night, and it was only near dawn and from complete exhaustion alone that he slipped into a dreamless sleep.

  He was, therefore, quite annoyed to be awoken by a knobbly cane prodding into his back from above. The insistent motion startled him enough that he jerked and rolled over to discover its owner.

  A huge black horse snorted in his face.

  Duncan flinched and wiped off the fine spray with the back of his hand, repulsed.

  “Alive, are you?” said a crabbed old voice that sounded quite similar to the rustling bed of dry leaves beneath him. At first, he thought the horse had spoken, but he peered past its giant head to discover that, indeed, a rider sat astride the beast.

  This was the owner of the knobbly cane, he realized. His eyes slid up the length of gnarled wood to the equally gnarled hand that held it, and then beyond to the tiny, wizened face that peered back at him. Thin, colorless hair wisped down over watery black eyes, and the wrinkled lips were pursed in an assessing frown. Duncan wasn’t sure whether he was looking at a man or a woman, but it was no real surprise that he had not seen the rider at first glance. The person was completely dwarfed by the enormous black horse on whose back he or she sat.

  “What’re you doing, sleeping down there in the ditch?” asked the cackly voice, and Duncan thought that it must belong to a woman—a very raspy old woman. “I took you for dead.” And then, for emphasis, she jabbed her knobbly cane into his shoulder.

  Duncan winced and clutched the spot. Old the crone might be, but she had enough strength behind that jab to raise a bruise. “I was only sleeping,” he said apologetically. “I’m sorry if I startled you.”

  “Ooh, you’re very polite there, aren’t you? Stand up. Let me have a look at you.”

  He didn’t owe any deference to her, but he had been raised to be obedient to commands. That ingrained training made him pick himself up stiffly from the ground and climb out of the shallow ditch. The huge black horse still towered over him—its withers were at eye-level to Duncan, and he had no idea how the tiny rider had managed to mount such a great hulking beast. The cane, from this perspective, seemed far smaller. He wasn’t even sure how it had been able to reach him down at the ground.

  He had no opportunity to puzzle over this. The old woman leaned forward in the saddle so sharply that Duncan thought she was going to fall on him. Instinctively he recoiled.

  Somehow, the crone maintained her perch. “A handsome enough face despite the dirt and bruises,” she muttered. “I wouldn’t mind adding it to my collection. Here now, boy, why are you sleeping in the ditch? You’re disheveled enough on the surface, but you don’t look like someone who’s used to living on the road.”

  “I’ve run away from home,” Duncan admitted.

  She nodded wisely. “Trouble with your father was it? It’s always trouble with the father that drives a boy to run away. You look like a nice enough creature, so I can’t think you have a rebellious nature. Well? Answer the old woman, would you?”

  “Yes, trouble with my father,” said Duncan, quick to obey. “He gets drunk and beats me for no reason that I know of. If I’m going to be miserable, I might as well be miserable on my own.”

  “And what do you
plan to do now?” she demanded.

  He hesitated to answer. He had given the matter some thought in the three days since he had set out from his father’s farm, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to tell a random stranger his plans, especially when that random stranger was such a menacing old bat.

  His will to withhold the information failed him beneath her piercing stare. “I thought I’d try to get hired as a farmhand somewhere,” he said. He wanted to get far enough away from his father before he hired himself out for any work and had decided that a week’s worth of walking ought to be about enough. His father probably wasn’t even looking for him, but Duncan didn’t want to chance discovery in the future.

  “Farm boy, are you?” said the old woman rhetorically. “What do you know about gardening?”

  “It’s about all I know,” Duncan replied, a little ashamed at the admission. “Gardening vegetables, that is. I know that some people garden flowers, but you can’t eat those, so my father never had any use for them.”

  She grunted. “My garden grows flowers, and it needs tending. How would you like to come work for me?”

  Duncan eyed her dubiously.

  “It’s an honest job for an honest pay, and you won’t have to sleep in the ditch by the road. I’ll pay you two silvers a day—that works out to twenty a month, my boy.”

  “You mean sixty,” said Duncan instinctively. “Or fifty-eight if you follow the lunar month. Twenty a month would only work out to two silvers every three days, or two-thirds a day. Unless you do mean a lunar month,” he added thoughtfully. “Then it would be slightly more—about five every seven days.”

  She studied him with her beady black eyes, her stare so keen that Duncan thought he must have offended her. He squirmed uncomfortably.

  “You have a head for numbers,” she grumbled at last.

  Immediately he uttered the response that his father had drilled into him ever since he was a small boy: “Numbers are a farmer’s life.” Everything in farming hinged on numbers—the number of days from sprouting to harvest, the number of seeds planted versus the crop collected, the number of acres plowed, the scarcity or abundance of produce leading to the number of coppers for which one might sell it by the pound or bushel. Duncan’s father might have sneered at education and letters, but he held a strong reverence for numbers, and he had drilled that reverence into his son. While Duncan could not read a word, couldn’t even recite the entire alphabet, he knew his numbers better than most anyone.