By Nina Martineck
By the time she reached the age of fourteen, the rest of the faefolk knew that she would not get any stronger.
Such a shame, they’d whisper as she drifted through the square. She’ll never find a trade, they’d mutter as she meandered through the market. It must have been her mother, they declared, infrequently caring if she could hear them or not. Was her mother a windfolk? Probably not.
When the wind brought her fragments of conversation, she never had trouble piecing them together. She, of course, never blamed them—gossip was its own kind of magic.
Not that she knew much about that.
She didn’t have many options. The schools wouldn’t admit her. Apprenticeships had prerequisites she couldn’t meet. Though windfolk could be invaluable on a sailboat on a still day at sea, she wasn’t enough of one to apply for such a position.
Each morning, she watched ships depart the harbor from the window of her cottage. One day, I’ll be on that ship, she promised herself whenever the wind brought her notes of seafoam, or a brief susurrus from the waves. Everything was different out there. Just water and wind.
She sighed, as gentle as air. How could someone, she wondered, feel so attached to things that feel no attachment to anything else?
One evening, right before closing, as the sun crept behind the trees and the day’s warmth dissipated into a splenetic breeze that followed her, she blew into his store. Instinctively, he pulled his cloak tighter around him.
She said that she needed something from him.
He raised an eyebrow. Of course, he knew her already. She preceded herself.
She asked for something to enhance her magic.
He pretended to rifle through his bottles, but he already knew nothing was there. He’d looked for her awhile back, when the whispers first began. He could help her, he’d thought. Cure her. Then maybe she wouldn’t be a whisper anymore. Maybe he wouldn’t, either. He could be the best apothecary in town if he fixed her. Maybe the best in the world.
He found nothing.
She came back the next morning before the sun had fully risen. She brought morning dew and mumbling leaves with her.
She needed something.
He repeated his verdict: He had nothing that could do what she’d asked. He wasn’t quite sure something like that existed.
She begged him to make it, then. Make her something that could annex her sails or snap her trees or clear her paths. Make her something that could give her more than feeble murmurs, more than mere suggestion, more than a gentle tingle down the tops of her arms. Bring her cries and bring her voice and bring her torment down her spine.
Gingerly, he took the contents of one bottle and mixed it with the contents of another.
He spent the next sixteen days hunched over his desk, lost in books and bottles.
She intrigued him.
Three times a day, she took her remedy he’d given her. It will fix me, she told herself as the acrid sludge slid down the back of her throat. A few more days, a few more doses, and she would be atop a mast, enveloped in starchy white cloth. Then she could satisfy them.
When she ran out, she would go back to his store, and he would make her more. He was the one who’d concocted it, of course. It was his design. One day I’ll patent it, he told himself every time he mixed her another batch. Once people could hear her music and feel her dancing, everyone would flock to his shop.
Patiently, he climbed mountains with her so she could train with the bits of oxygen that clung to the cliffs. He followed her to empty fields where he left her with the grass so she could learn to control its rustle. He let her take him into caves so she could feel her echo.
The wind learned to play with her.
He would not love her, he told himself. If something were to go awry, she would undoubtedly taint his reputation.
When her feet no longer touched the ground and she could uproot a tree and didn’t have to ask politely for the wind to listen, he cut her off.
He was adamant: She didn’t need any more. She could fill any sail—what more could she want?
It wasn’t enough. She wasn’t enough.
She was enough before she started her remedy, he insisted. He might have believed himself.
But she screamed at him, and the wind listened to her. It circled her and rattled his bottles and knocked herbs from his shelves. It slapped him in the face and pushed him backward and extinguished the fire in his hearth. It swept her off the floor and suspended her and let her float there until she demanded otherwise. It wanted more. More.
So he made it more.
When she downed the bottle’s contents, indifferent to its causticity, he was only a few steps behind her. He wanted to see, after all. He wasn’t quite sure what would happen next, and he wanted to see.
When she inhaled, her lungs stole every atom of the sky. When she exhaled, the wind paid no attention to her will—it became ambivalent to her desires. It lifted her up. Tore her up. Up, up. As she shrieked and bawled and hollered and moaned, it claimed her. Extracted her cells one by one and welcomed them to its murmuration.
She’ll get her wish now, he thought over her contorted rapture. She could fill any sail she wanted.
“Goodbye,” he said.
She didn’t listen.
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Wow, what a good tale!
Powerful. It reminds me of the fisherman and his wife tale, but with a more realistic (and sorrowful) ending.
Wow, this was so beautiful – I absolutely loved it.
What an ending *sobs* Beautiful.
Wow. Great tale.