The Box and the Sword

This is that swell prolog to the young adult novel I'm working on.

I debated posting this: it's long for the web, and it's rough. Also, there are those among the Serious Writers who will turn up their noses. But, to take those in turn, you don't have to read it, most of what I put here is rough, and to the Serious Writers out there, a full confession: I like Harry Potter. I adore Middleearth, Earthsea, and Narnia. I think "The Piano Man" is a swell song. I can't tell the difference between merlot and chardonnay. I think The English Patient is unreadable where it's not silly, and that most all of the Dickens-meets-Rushdie school of modern literature is unreadable and silly at once. If I grew up to be Ursula LeGuin instead of Mary Oliver, I'd be happy.

And this is a journal of my writing life, and I did spend the weekend noodling with the folks of Three Crows. So here goes.

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The Box and the Sword

On a cold day in April, they put
the unbinder in a box.

The box was plain, with no widening for the shoulders as most coffins had. The wood was unknotted pine. The joints were done, not with pegs and bored holes, but with square, iron nails. The foursquare corners, the fine wood, and the costly nails were meant to keep the box straight, to keep the unbinder's magic from finding a twisting path to follow.

The unbinder knew. She'd caught the carpenter's boy, loosed the nine-knotted red thread that bound his silence. This they didn't learn till later, when they found the child at the wood edge, the knots of his hands undone, a prentice carpenter who would never turn an auger again.

So it was that when the town of Three Crows gathered to draw lots to see who would drag the unbinder from her home, they found her waiting. She stood on a stone by the creek, looking down at the box on its trestle. The light was the color of watered milk. The box was the color of new cheese. It gleamed.

The unbinder looked very fine, standing there, with her red curls full of bells and velvet ribbons. She wore a bolt of blood-red velvet, with a hole cut for her head, that covered her front and back but left her long pale sides bare. No stitched clothes could she wear, so far loosed was her power. "Sweet friends," she said, in a voice as soft as frost. "What do you have planned for this fine box?"

The knot of people shifted as if she'd turned her power on the neighbors' bond that held them together. The priest dropped the gold straws he held in his fist. They scattered across the sodden spring-melt common.

The carpenter stepped forward. Alder was her name, a tall woman, fox-haired, foursquare as the box. "Sister," she answered. "We would put you in it." And behind her, three foresters nocked arrows.

"But sister," said the unbinder, smiling, "I may be unwilling." She flicked a ringed hand at the women with the bows. At once, the bowstrings whipped free of bow horns, lashing. The bent wood sprang straight, and one of the foresters cried out at the bow snapped against her hand. The people grew still as cattle huddling before the storm.

Hart the smith stepped forward. He was holding a sword. He had been given it for mending by a soldier, but the soldier had not returned. It was the only sword in the town. "Willing or unwilling," said Hart, "you will go." And he walked towards her. Alder came up with him.

The unbinder looked at Hart, green eyes narrowed. She had not foreseen the sword. Slowly the wire that wound the grip curled free like a morning glory looking for something to climb. But the sword stayed straight. Hart shifted his grip, for the unspooling wire had cut his hand. But he came still forward. "If you touch me," said the unbinder, "I will undo the all the knots of your body."

"Three feet of iron will touch you before I do," said Hart, though he had paled. His boots squelched in the icy mud.

"My blood carry my curse, then."

Hart wavered, and the unbinder laughed. "Come then, little deer, little buck. Let me twist the velvet from your antlers."

At that, Hart gave a cry, as if calling himself to courage, and charged the unbinder, holding the sword like a lance. Quick as a fox the unbinder leapt from the stone, her bare feet slipping on the mud as she spun. Her hand struck out and caught Hart's elbow. Hart screamed, and whirled, slashing with his sword.

And then there was stillness. Hart lay in the mud, bleeding from eyes and ears, and the unbinder stood above him, clutching her cut arm. The sword had spun a off, and lay at the creek edge in a clump of forget-me-nots, half its length plunged in the mud.

Some in anger and some in despair, the people of Three Crows stirred. The unbinder gave a cry like a hawk's cry and lashed her hand in an arc across their path. The hand was bloody and the blood flew toward them. Everyone scrambled back. The unbinder laughed again, high and wild. Her magic was twisting. The little knots of the velvet came undone and the cloth grew bald. The red fuzz wandered in the air like a snow of blood. Her hair rose like smoke.

Alder knelt between Hart and the creek. She slipped a hand to his pulse, and raised it, bloody. She turned her dark blue eyes up to the unbinder. She put a hand on the sword.

The unbinder stood above her, in sword's reach, in arm's reach. "Sister, you were never one to bluff."

"Never," said Alder.

"Tell me," said the unbinder, and it was if they sat alone, with tea before a little fire. "Was it you, built the box?"

"Yes," said Alder.

"If my blood carries this curse, you are cursed already. You unknot the ties of kinship."

"Sister," said Alder, "give me your hand."

The unbinder held out her hand, bright with blood. Alder took it. The sword was hefted in her other hand. Her plain, strong face knotted in pain. "Willow," she said. "I would not have seen you buried alive. I swear to you." And she thrust the sword forward.

The unbinder fell.

It was some time before any had the courage to pull Alder from under the cooling body in its tattered velvet. There was no hurry to do it, for all thought she was dead. But she was pulled out alive, her face blank, her leather apron bloody. Tears leaked from her eyes.

They wound Hart's body in blue cloth, because he was a hero. They had the cloth ready, for one death was no more than they had foreseen.

In the herb-hung midwife's house, Alder lay in a fever like a tough root in fire. The dyer set the indigo boiling.

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The rest of this story is about a girl who's Willow's daughter and Alder's niece and foster -- shortly to be an outright orphan, and soon to need to come to grips with what she's inherited.

If there's any interest in this, I may post more of it. Maybe a chapter every two weeks? Though I don't guarantee I won't make adjustments to the world and the people as I learn more about them.