Edmund and the fox

PROLOGUE

 

All the best stories start out with “once upon a time” and this story is no different. Once upon a time, in a small village that was halfway between the tall craggy mountains and the warm and sparkling sea, there lived a woman. The woman was small and spritely, with reddish-blond hair slowly streaking with grey, and nearly colorless grey eyes with a golden ring around the pupil.  She was a brown witch, and lived some distance outside of the village, with her three children and a languid grey cat named Stealth.

The three children were fatherless, and no one ever spoke of what had become of their father, or fathers.  It was simply known that the brown witch carried the three children alone, and bore them alone, and raised them alone.  Had any other woman in the village done such a thing it would have been the talk of absolute scandal, but the village needed the brown witch and her potions and knowledge, and the village enjoyed the three children, two boys, three years apart, called Oliver and Edmund, and a daughter, who was frail and sickly to the point that even her mother’s magic couldn’t heal her, called Violet.

 

 

Chapter One

 

Edmund and the Fox

 

The first story of note comes from Edmund, who had his first proper adventure at the age of eight.  Prior to the age of eight, such incidents cannot be regarded as “adventures” but rather “mischief” and are described in hushed tones by others as “Recall that time when Eddie was five, and he got lost?” 

But by the age of eight, it takes much longer for grown people to realize that a boy may or may not be lost, and they are much more willing to give that boy the opportunity to have an adventure, and that is what happened to Edmund on this day.

Now, one must understand that Edmund was not a child of nobility.  He didn’t have a tutor and a nanny to mind him and learn him his letters.  Rather, Edmund’s mother was the brown witch of the village, which was something like a healer, but even witches need to earn money and even witches’ children need to eat, so at the age of eight, Edmund started to work in the village as a messenger, which was a common enough job for children of his status, and he was one of many eight to ten year old children who wore a red sash across his chest and ran through the village, taking messages and parcels to other villagers and bringing home his pouch filled with coins for his mother.

On one very lovely day, Edmund left his mother’s cottage, which was far outside of the village’s walls, and walked for a way with his brother, Oliver. Oliver had been a messenger too, but now he was eleven, he was too old.  Oliver had a fine bow and set of arrows, and was a skilled hunter, even as he was so young, so he spent his days hunting small game to skin and sell at the market  and gathering herbs for his mother.  It was Oliver’s duty to walk Edmund to the village each morning, lest he become lost in the woods.  This aggravated Edmund, because he felt quite certain that no one had walked Oliver to the village when he was a message boy, and that he, Edmund, was only being subjected to this humiliation because he had the misfortune to be the younger brother.

“You can leave off, Oliver.  I know how to reach the village by now.  There’s only one way to get there from our home anyway,” Edmund said, kicking a rock.

“No there isn’t. There’s a score of ways to get to the village, you just only know the way that follows the path,” said Oliver loftily, “I know many ways,  But I usually set my snares within ten paces of it so I can check them while I walk you.” 

“Well, it’s a way I know.  And I don’t need a nursemaid like you following me and making all the other messengers think I’m a baby.  Even little Evelyn Marsh, the Cooper’s daughter, who turned eight just a fortnight ago doesn’t get walked to the square by her brother,” Edmund retorted, kicking his rock again and having it skitter into the underbrush.

“That’s because the Marshes live in the village.  We live outside it.  Anyway, mother says I’m to walk you to the village, so I do.” Oliver said in that bland, unconcerned way of all elder brothers the world over that is so infuriating to their siblings.

Edmund was annoyed.  Every day, Oliver walked him all the way to the center of the square, and if Eddie tried to run ahead, he would catch him and hold him by his shoulder until they reached the square and Oliver would hand Edmund over to the herald and said, “Mind him, he’s slippery” and the herald would clap Oliver on the shoulder like he was a man even though he wasn’t and the other messengers would laugh at Edmund, so he didn’t try to slip away anymore.

On this day, however, Edmund found himself in tremendous luck, because as the walked, Oliver checked each of his small snares for game, and on this day, one of the snares had caught a tortoise. A tortoise was not something that would be easy to sell, and Oliver had no desire to kill it for its shell. 

“Hello, Grandfather,” Oliver said, kneeling to inspect the snare, “Let’s set you free,”

But the tortoise had struggled quite a bit and the snare was very tangled and damaged and Oliver had to sit down cross-legged in the dirt and pull out his knife to start the operation.

“I am going to be late for the herald,” Edmund said, “Let me just get on with it, we aren’t far, and then you can save your precious turtle,”

Oliver was trying very hard to disentangle the tortoise without getting his fingers snapped, so he told Eddie, “Go ahead then, but don’t tell Mam, she’ll box my ears.  Go straight to the square and I’ll be back for you at sundown,”

So Eddie took to his heels and walked down the path.   But of course, he did not go straight to the square.

First, he stopped to climb a tree, and inspect a bird’s nest. Then , he strayed from the path some distance to look at a doe and her twin fawns drinking at the bubbling stream. 

After the deer went away, Eddie found a blackberry bush, and stopped to strip the berries from the bush into his messenger’s bag to share with his friends, Christopher and Marcus and Livvy.  Halfway through the berry picking operation, it began to rain. Eddie pulled the hood of his shirt up, and stuffed his sash into his bag so it wouldn’t get soaked, forgetting that the bag was now full of blackberries, and that would doubtless be far worse for the red sash, and started back toward the path.

 

Eddie wasn’t as familiar with the forest as his brother was, and he realized that he had lost track of time as well as of his way, and now it was pouring rain and getting very dark in the woods.  He looked at the ground for his own footprints to follow, and eventually, he reached the stream where he had watched the mother deer and her speckled fawns. The rain was falling so hard that the water had risen considerably, with debris flowing rapidly down stream, and the edges of the water breaking over and flooding the banks. 

At this moment, there was a terrible crash of thunder, and a brilliant ribbon of lightening, and Eddie heard a sound.  It sounded exactly like a small child crying wordlessly.  Eddie looked all around for the child, and realized that the sound was coming not from a lost child (two lost children in the woods would be very unlikely indeed)  but from a fox, who was digging frantically at her flooding den by the banks of the river.  There were two wet and shivering fox kits huddling in the dirt, but the mother kept digging at her den, which was beginning to collapse.  Eddie approached the fox family, and the mother fox looked at him with intelligent amber eyes and frantically pawed at the ground.

“What is down there, sister fox?” Eddie asked her.

 Eddie set his bag aside and began to dig in the soft mud with his hands, and after several minutes, he felt wet fur beneath his fingers. It was another fox kit!

Eddie pulled the kit out of the mud and used his shirt to wipe the mud and water from its face.  It was very still and limp in his hands. The mother fox nuzzled at it in his hands for a moment, and then gave him a sorrowful look because the kit was dead, and took her remaining brood to higher ground.

Eddie studied the fox kit in his hands.  He was very small, and not red like his mother or siblings, but silver and white, under a coating of mud.  He was about the size of a half-grown kitten, and Eddie placed his fingers on his little chest, and felt a flutter of a heartbeat. Maybe the little baby thing was still alive.  Eddie tucked the fox kit up into his shirt, against his own heart, and held him in place his hands, and started back toward his  cottage, where his mother would certainly be able to help the kit.  She was magic, after all.

The rain had washed away all of Eddie’s footprints. The wind had lashed all the branches and foliage into unfamiliar shapes.  The lightening lit the forest in flash-frames. He had lost the river, and lost himself entirely in the woods.

Eddie did not cry.  He was eight years old, and a messenger, and he had just rescued a baby fox from a flooding den, and he was not going to cry because of the rain.  He was going to be smart. A few paces away, there was a large oak tree with a hollow trunk. Eddie crossed to the tree and peered inside.  It was dark, and he couldn’t see anything. He found a rock in the dirt and tossed it into the tree trunk, and waited to see if anything would come skittering out, and nothing did, so he tucked himself and his kit into the hollow tree and waited for the rain to let up. He drew the kit out of his shirt and rubbed his little body between his hands.  He breathed warm breath on his face. He brushed drying mud out of the pretty silvery fur.  And slowly, the kit began to come around.  He became less limp, and he curled into Eddie’s small hands, and give soft little snuffling sounds beneath his chin.

Eventually, the rain did stop, and Eddie stepped out into the forest again, and stared about, trying to orient himself. It didn’t take long, because he soon found one of his brother’s snares, when it snapped up around his foot.  Sprawling, and barely lifting the kit out of danger of being crushed, Eddie yelped, and then inspected the web of catgut around his ankle.  It was indeed on of his brother’s snares; he could tell because there was a small leather tag attached to the snare that held his brother’s mark, the letter O with a fletched arrow through it.  

“Are you alright, little brother?” Eddie asked the fox kit, which whimpered at him.  Eddie loosed the snare from around his foot, and tried to reset it, but he wasn’t skilled enough, so he just took it down and wound the snare around his forearm like a bracelet to return to his brother. 

Eddie walked and walked.  He ate some of the blackberries in his bag, and drank from the stream, and offered some berries and water to the kit. He took a nap on a sunny rock that had dried off.

And when he woke up, it was nightfall.

Suddenly, Eddie was very worried indeed.  The sky was orange and purple and stars were starting to come out.  The quarter moon was rising  over the tree tops. The fox kit was snuggled beneath Eddie’s chin, warm and trusting, but Eddie was getting very worried. It was dark.  He never made it to the village.  His brother would have come for him and the herald would have told him that Eddie hadn’t shown up at all.  Then Oliver would go tell his mother that Eddie hadn’t gone to the village, and his mother would be furious.  And what if they never found him? What if he had to wander the forest for the rest of his life, which would probably be quite short now?

Eddie looked around him.  The trees looked like they were all pointing accusing fingers at him in the darkness. Naughty boy, naughty boy, you should have stayed on the path! You should have stayed by your brother’s side! Naughty boy!  They seemed to scold.

“Hush up, you trees.  I had to leave the path to save the fox,” he said, “And anyway I can’t be that far away.  Oliver’s snare was just over by those trees and he said his snares were always ten paces from the path!”

Eddie ran up to the place where he had fallen in the snare, and found the great scruffed up underbrush from where he sprawled, and he started to walk from it.  On pace eight, he realized he probably needed to take a few more steps because his legs were shorter than Oliver’s, so he took thirteen steps.

No path. 

He ran back and set off in the opposite direction.  Again, no path.

He ran back and slowly circled the place where the snare had been. He took a stick and carved a big X in the dirt by the two ways that didn’t lead to the path, and by the way that led to the rock he had slept on, because he knew that didn’t lead to the path either.  That left only one way to go. 

“What do you think, little brother?” he asked the fox, peering down his shirt to look at it.  It blinked its amber eyes at him, “Alright, one more way to go!”

And Eddie took off the last way, ten steps, then thirteen, then fifteen and then he was on the path. 

As Eddie walked along the path, with water squelching in his boots and dripping from his hair, he encountered a man from the village, who was the blacksmith. 

“You there! There you are! The whole village has raised the hew and cry for you! Your mother is frantic for you!” said the blacksmith, grabbing Eddie by the back of his shirt like a puppy by the scruff , “Your mother will tie a bell around your neck, just you watch!”

It did not take long for the blacksmith, who was a giant of a man with long legs like tree trunks, to reach the edge of the clearing where Eddie lived with his family.  There was a stone wall around the property, and an arched wooden gate etched with runes.  The blacksmith let Eddie go and he ran under the arched gateway and felt the tingle of power and protection he always felt when he returned to his home. 

His sister lay in her carriage with her doll in her lap, and saw him first. 

“Mama! Mama he’s back!” she cried, lifting her arms toward him. Eddie leaned forward so Violet could wrap her arms around his neck from her place. 

Oliver emerged from one end of the house, and his mother from they other, and they converged upon him, a cacophony of scolding voices.

His mother crackled with maternal indignation, her eyes flashing like steel but her arms warm as they circled him.

“What were you thinking? How dare you go walking into the woods alone! So many misfortunes could have befallen you!” said his mother. 

Eddie pulled the fox kit out from under his shirt at last.  Violet clapped her hands and squealed with delight.  Eddie laid the kit in her lap for her to hold, and relayed the tale to his mother.  As he ended his story, his mother’s eyes and mouth had softened. 

“You’ll grow up to be a fine man, Eddie.  You  are courageous and kind, and your actions today have earned you a familiar who follow you for all of your days.” She said.

“A familiar?  Like you have? Am I going to have magic too?” said Eddie,

“You all have magic.  You just haven’t learned it yet. And yes, exactly like I have,” she replied, “What will you name him?” 

Eddie studied the fox kit in his sister’s lap and thought for a moment.  “Perhaps I’ll call him Moonlight,”

“A fine and auspicious name.  Now, please, my son, do not wander into the woods alone again.  You’re not yet a man nor a mage.”

“Yes, Mama.  I won’t wander again,” said Eddie.

            But of course, even though he tried his hardest, Eddie didn’t keep his promise, and he had many more adventures before he was a man.