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MAUDE and Arthur met when they were quite young by the standards of our world, but not so very young by the standards of theirs. Arthur was a traveling man by then who had journeyed around the farthest reaches of the seven kingdoms, selling his wood art, making fine furniture and beautifying the worlds of peasants with his craftsmanship. That’s how Maude liked to tell it, that is. And then, one day, he showed up on her father’s doorstep.
Her father was the village leader in White Wind. The king of White Wind was a kindly man who did not get involved with the village grievances, and so it was Maude’s father who presided as judge over arguments as silly as “That child dropped an apple core on my lawn” to those more serious in nature: “My sheep wandered into his pasture and died.” The people of White Wind were not so peaceable as those in other kingdoms, so her father had quite a responsibility keeping good relations between neighbors. Maude used to sit in on some of the meetings, held in the town inn, over ale and bratwurst. Mostly the men talked, though the widows were known to put in a few words as well. Maude, for her part, hated the petty conflicts. She did not find it so difficult to get along with a fellow neighbor, if one was not constantly nit-picking about the ways others live their lives. But the people of White Wind did not seem to understand this simple freedom. She wanted nothing more than to escape this wretched kingdom.
She was no fool. She saw her opportunity to escape when Arthur, a young, foreign, vibrant man, knocked on her door.
He was slightly older than she was, twenty to her nineteen. She was past the wedding age for most women of her time. Plenty of the village men had asked, for Maude was considered a lovely woman, with sandy hair and shining caramel eyes, and, also, sufficient and smart. But her father needed her at home. Or so she told herself. She did not exactly know why her father had not wed again after her mother died. Maude did the best she could for him. She cleaned, but it was not a precise cleaning. She cooked, but not so very well as the widow Rayna, who occasionally brought a meal to their door. Maude had seen Rayna’s longing as she watched Maude’s father go about his business in the town. Why did her father not wed the widow, who was good and kind and young enough to bear him more children?
Maude often wished that her father would marry again so that she could live her life as she very well pleased, traveling the lands instead of trapped in the village of White Wind, where all that happened was a neighbor stealing an apple from another neighbor’s apple tree.
And then came the visitor who set it all in motion.
Arthur was handsome, with ruddy brown hair that always looked as if he had just risen from his bed, as if he did not own a comb at all—not tangled, but windswept. It was understandable, of course, for he slept on the ground. Being a man of little means, he had grown accustomed to sleeping beneath the stars, for inns cost money he did not have.
And so it was that one day Maude opened the door to the most piercing blue eyes she had ever seen in all the land, nearly glowing eyes, and there he was. He looked twice, and then he smiled, his whole face carrying the sun in it.
“Your father around, my young lady?” he said, though she knew even then, even with only a glance at his boyish face, that he could not have been much older than she. He leaned against the doorway, crossing his arms across his chest.
“Who might be asking?” she said. She had spirit, that was what the villagers said of Maude. It was what her mother had always said. Spirit that could run wild on a whim or be tamed with a story. The baker’s apprentice, Benny, was the first man to appreciate that spirit, but he did not suit her, though her father, at the time, urged her to accept Benny’s proposal of marriage. Benny was much too arrogant for her taste. She preferred a man who knew his worth and yet did not tell everyone about it. She preferred a man who recognized the value of women in his life, and Benny was not one of those men. He wanted a wife who was beautiful simply so he could show her off and keep her locked in a house, cooking, cleaning, caring for the children she would bear him. So she had refused to marry him. That had been a spirited argument, shaking the walls of her home, when she told her father of her decision. But he could not ask her to marry for anything other than love, could he? After all, he had loved her mother.
There was something else Maude had not told a single person, not that she had friends to tell. She had not even written it in her record book, where she penned thoughts from her days, the only real ritual that meant anything at all to her. Every night, she sat by the fireside with a quill pen and the stack of parchment bound by sturdy thread and wrote a page, perhaps two, and then stuffed the book beneath her straw mattress.
The something else was this: Maude wanted to marry a man with magic.
She knew the danger, of course. A man with magic was always a danger, for kings would kill to keep their thrones. She did not want to marry a magic man for the kingdom it might one day bring, as one might expect. She wanted to marry a man of magic because no one had ever taught her how to use her own. No one but her father even knew why she kept her mother’s staff, propped in a corner of her room.
“Forget it,” he had said after her mother had died. “It is good for nothing.”
But she knew it was good for something. It had to be good for something. It was a gift, was it not? She touched the staff every night before bed, part of a story she told herself, about how the power was in the staff, not the magician’s hands, and in order not to lose it, she must make contact with the wood every chance she had.
Her mother’s staff was ancient. It had been passed on for generations, gnarled and rounded at the top, as if a ball lived on the end of it. A message had been etched into the ball, but she could not read the script. It looked as if it had been touched with loving hands too many times. Perhaps someday, when she unlocked the use of her magic, she would know what those words meant.
The man at her door bowed. “I am called Arthur.”
“And from where did you come, Arthur?” She had, of course, heard of this Arthur. He had arrived days ago, and already the people had fallen in love with his woodwork.
“Everywhere,” Arthur said. “And nowhere.”
“Riddles,” Maude said. “I have never liked riddles.”
“Well then,” Arthur said. “Perhaps you will not like me.”
Maude knew this was not true. Already she liked this man, the way he smiled as if it was the most natural thing to do. The way he leaned against a door and crossed his arms across his chest. The way he spoke and the gleam in his eye.
Arthur moved a hand behind his back. When it appeared again, he had a yellow rose. “For friendship,” he said, and he winked.
And she knew. This man had magic.
She took him in to see her father, who was not only the town leader but was also the town woodworker. She listened to their conversation, standing on her toes behind the door, learned that Arthur had traveled all over the lands but was looking for somewhere to settle down, somewhere to do his woodworking in peace, with another skilled hand, said to be the best in the land (though it was, in fact, Arthur who was the best woodworker in all the land). Maude knew her father was the sort of man who took to compliments, and so she knew that Arthur would be allowed to stay. A thrill wedged into her heart.
Her father, of course, was pleased and said as much. He could use the help, he said. She heard a slap, which she knew to be her father’s hand on Arthur’s back, for she had seen him do it to the baker’s apprentice on occasion.
She smiled. She would not be so keen on leaving for a while yet. First, she must learn the ways of magic. First, she must learn how to use her gift.
When she saw Arthur out of the house, it was dark. And it was only because she was watching him that she noticed him reach beside the door and draw out the walking stick.
No, not a walking stick at all. A magical staff.
He turned at the edge of the yard. She could hardly distinguish him from the darkness. But she did see him reach up, tip his hat and, she imagined, wink.