short story: the magic of names
Jan. 17th, 2011 10:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
holliSo I'm having a problem with rewriting, guys, which is basically: I suck at rewriting. I edit as I go, which means that once a story's done I have a really hard time seeing what still needs fixing. Having said that, I *think* this story needs a better balance bewtween the real-world and fairy-tale parts, and possibly needs to be broken up into sections. Concrit would be much appreciated.
When Rina was nine, she saved a fairy kingdom from an evil wizard. These days, people think she's a little crazy. You might assume that these two facts are related, but if you did, you would be wrong.
For one thing, she never told anyone about her trip to Radagast. The Birch-leaf Lady warned her not to, right before she sent Rina home; she said that speaking of it might draw attention from the wrong sorts of creatures. She was right, Rina thinks, but maybe not the way she meant to be.
Rina went to Radagast because of the necklace her grandmother left her. It was-- still is, in fact-- an ugly necklace, with its faceted red stone, nearly egg-sized, set in tarnished silver. Rina's mother hadn't wanted her to have it, had complained it was too big for Rina's little neck. "She's going to give herself a hunchback, wearing that thing," she'd said to Rina's father after Baba's funeral, half-joking. "Just you watch." But Rina'd worn it every day, under her clothes, to school, to bed, even swimming, the heavy pendant thunking reassuringly against her breastbone.
Rina still wears it. Just in case. In the waiting room at the doctor's, she clicks her nails against the stone, tapping out the rhythm of the marching song the Bear and his page-boy had taught her on their long, long walk through the forest.
When Rina was nine, she went walking down the lane behind her parents' house, counting birch trees. They stood in a double row, down each side of the rutted-dirt road that used to lead somewhere, in the days before they built the subdivision. Today the lane ends at a drainage ditch, and you can hear the highway on the other side. But Rina didn't know that then.
As she walked, the leaves on the birch trees started to tremble. Flakes of birch-bark whirled in the air, branches rattled, but Rina couldn't feel the wind. It scared her, enough that she started to run, to make her necklace thump back and forth under the collar of her t-shirt, but she stopped when she saw the lady standing in the middle of the lane.
She was a lady, certainly, not a woman; she was dressed like a fairy queen from one of Baba's books. She wore silver bells on her headdress, and her wrists, and her ankles. There was no telling her age, not for Rina, for whom all adults fell into a range between "old" and "really old." Her dress-- no, gown-- was green and white.
"What's your name, child?" the lady asked, and Rina stood up straight and answered: Maria Irina Bielkova, ma'am. The lady nodded, and said, "Don't tell anyone else that, dear. Now follow me." And Rina did, down the lane of birches, into a deeper forest.
Most of the kingdom of Radagast is forest. In junior high, Rina drew maps in her notebooks, instead of notes. She could happily spend a whole math class charting the course of the Red River, or naming the mountains that enclosed the land like a cup around an egg. When people asked why she didn't pay attention to the class, instead, she had a hard time caring. She didn't show anyone the notebooks, or write her true name on them.
But now Rina is nineteen, and waiting on a much-abused couch for the receptionist to call her name. She is not thinking of Radagast, any more than she usually does; she isn't thinking of anything. Or she's trying not to, anyway.
Rina is doing a lot better, these days. A year ago, she wasn't. Her parents talk around it: when you were ill, they say, not when you were crazy. Or when you cut off all your hair. Or when you wouldn't get out of bed. But she's had a year, of doctor's visits and meds and therapy, and she's starting to feel like a person again. She gets tired of waiting, though.
In Radagast, Rina waited in the lady's house, which was not so much built as grown, while the lady bent over a pool on water in the floor. She'd worried that her parents would miss her, but Rina had been a child who loved fairy tales, and she knew one when she saw it. She didn't think you could turn down being in a fairy tale, and wasn't sure she wanted to anyway. It didn't stop her imagination, though: she sat on the silk-cushioned chair in a house made of birch trees, and pictured her parents going frantic with worry, calling the police, putting her face on milk cartons. She imagined going home, still nine, to find her parents old and gray. That could happen in a fairy tale, Rina knew, but she still didn't leave, because the lady had told her what she was needed for. Rina's necklace, it seemed, was a map.
"Like this," the lady said, holding the pendant up to the light. "You see?" And Rina did. In the depths of the stone there was an image.
In Rina's necklace, if you looked closely enough, held it to the light just so, there was a map. It showed the mountains, the rivers and towns, and the endless dark woods that covered most of the land. Deep in the forest, far from anything, there was a spark of light.
But the map disappeared when Rina took the necklace off. The Lady examined it critically, then sighed and handed it back. "Your grandmother-- did she talk about her family, very much? Her ancestors, grandparents, great-grandparents," she asked.
Rina shook her head no; she only knew her Baba had not been born in the same town as Rina herself, and her mother. She thought they had been Russian, maybe, at some point.
"Well, she must have come from the line of the last king, who abdicated when he decided to wed an outsider woman," the Lady explained. "So that would make your mother the queen, if we had queens anymore." She added, sounding a little morose, "We had a Parliament, since the king left, but that's all gone too."
Which was how Rina found out about the wizard. He was very old, being a wizard, and had made Rina's necklace hundreds of years ago, as a gift-of-good-faith for the king. It contained his only weakness, whatever that was. Once he had served the crown faithfully, and then the Parliament when there was no longer a crown. But, the lady said, time had twisted him, and made him bitter, and one day he had stood before the assembled Parliament and turned them all to apple-tree saplings with a wave of his hand. "We planted them, of course; they started bearing fruit last year," the Lady said. "But the wizard is a terrible tyrant, and something must be done."
Something, apparently, meant Rina.
The Lady waved a hand, and food faded into existence with a rustling of birch-leaves. Rina hesitated-- she remembered warnings against fairy food, from stories-- but she was hungry, and it smelled awfully good. Anyway, macaroni and cheese couldn't count as fairy food, surely, and it was Rina's favorite.
The Lady watched her eat with a critical eye. "Elbows," she said gently, and Rina took her elbows off the table with a guilty hunch of her shoulders.
Rina has had impeccable manners since she came back from Radagast. Even in the hospital, last year, she had thanked the nurses politely for the little paper cup of pills they handed her each morning. She sees no reason to be rude, even if she's crazy. People are better to you when you're polite. The Bear always asked nicely for things, even though he could have got whatever he wanted by threats, or just on the strength of his reputation. But he believed that the powerful owe respect to the powerless.
Rina is not powerful, but she's still polite.
Rina turned nineteen, not long ago. She is two years out of school, and she spends a lot of time in doctor's offices. None of the doctors she has seen have noticed, yet, that she worries at her necklace when she is feeling at her worst. The Goth receptionist in one of the offices told her she thought it was a really pretty pendant, though.
Rina's parents don't exactly know what to do with her, but that has been true for a long time. She is tempted to say, since she came back from Radagast, but she suspects that this is not exactly true. Perhaps that's when she started to notice it.
The problem is-- well. There are a lot of problems, but the easily identifiable problem is that Rina does not know what to do next. There is no clear path ahead, to the next part of her life, and the next, and so she feels paralyzed, frozen like the wizard in his block of amber. Rina wonders, from time to time, what the Parliament of Radagast did with the horrible thing, once they were turned back from being apple-trees.
She feels lost in the woods, she told her doctors, in the hospital. Every path is tangled with brambles and vines, impassable. She thinks she could fight her way through them, if there were something worth getting to on the other side, but there is no guarantee of that. So she keeps still.
In Radagast, Rina's path was clear, marked out on the map in her necklace. She was given a guardian, to walk the path with her: the Bear of the Red Mountain, greatest warrior in ten generations. The Bear was an enormous man, broad and tall, with a bristly brown beard and a booming voice. He had a page-boy, who scurried after him, and rarely talked, though Rina would have been happy to have a conversation with someone her own age. The page-boy was sandy-haired and extensively freckled, with bright green eyes and a pointed nose. He staggered when the Bear clapped him on the back, and stumbled under the weight of even one piece of the Bear's armor. Rina sort of wondered why the Bear bothered to have a page-boy at all.
She was feeling very important, as the bearer of the map that led to the wizard's one weakness, when she was introduced to the Bear and the page-boy. So she drew herself up and introduced herself by her full name to them, and didn't understand their reaction at all.
"Why is it so important, anyway?" Rina asked, after the page-boy turned a peculiar wheezy shade of grey. "I mean, you've all got code names like you're spies or something. I don't get it."
"Names have power," the Birch-leaf Lady explained gently, drawing Rina aside so the page-boy could finish having his conniption fit in peace. "You can't cast a spell on someone unless you know their true name. An oath sworn with your true name is binding, in a way an ordinary promise isn't. We guard our names closely, here. Perhaps it's different where you come from."
Rina remembered that her Baba insisted on calling all her children and grandchildren by nicknames. Rina's mother offered her a vague explanation for it, once-- some old folk superstition, she said. If you didn't call the children by their real names, the Evil Eye couldn't get them. Something like that. Rina wondered, briefly, if this meant there was really an Evil Eye, and spent a moment in shivery horror at the idea of a big, evil floating eyeball. Maybe it blinked curses at you.
Year later, Rina remembers the importance of names when her doctors hand her down a diagnosis. Depression, they say, and she thinks: when you know the name of a thing, you can defeat it. It is the first time she feels hopeful since she went into the hospital.
It's not as easy as it was in Radagast. Even when you know what you're fighting, it's hard to win with imperfect weapons. And the journey is long; but then, Rina is used to long journeys.
They went on foot most of the way, in Radagast. Horses tired quickly under the Bear's weight, and he didn't like to stop to change them. Anyway, where they were going was treacherous country for horses. The deep woods were best navigated on foot, though it was slower going.
They saw wonderful things on the way, though. Rina remembers a waterfall, tumbling down its mossy cliff into a deep green pool, the cliff face pocked with hollows full of birds. Sunbirds flashed in the light through the trees, and flared their bright tails, reflecting into the water. Rina wishes she'd kept the feathers they found there, but they were lost when she had to leave her pack behind in the mirror-maze under the Glass Mountain.
In high school, Rina painted the things she saw in Radagast, and felt like she was cheating when people praised her. She knows she's not a bad painter-- her technical skills are good, she understand how to use color-- but everyone complimented her imagination, and Rina never paints anything she hasn't seen with her own eyes. It's only that she's seen more than most people. So compliments are hard for her to take; they made her feel like such a fraud that she stopped painting, for a while.
When she was at her worst, she cut up most of her canvases. There was one she couldn't bring herself to damage, though. She painted the page boy, mud on his boots, a hand pushing the sweaty hair out of his eyes as he carried the Bear's sword to him. That one, she never touched.
The page-boy was a year older than her, and the best friend she had in Radagast. It was him who taught her woodcraft, how to read the trees and set snares, how to skin a rabbit, how to shoot a bow. The Bear offered comments, occasionally, and gentle criticism, but he left the page-boy to it most of the time. He huddled beside her when they were caught in a freak snowstorm, summoned up by the wizard, and never let go of her hand while they were lost in the mirror-maze.
While they waited for the Bear to come back, one afternoon, Rina asked the page-boy how people got along in Radagast, if no one knew anyone else's name. "Well, we have titles," he said, "like the Bear does, and the Birch-Leaf Lady. And when I'm grown I'll have one too," he added, as if remnding himself that he would not always be just the page-boy.
"So does anyone know your name, then?" Rina asked.
"Just your parents. And your children, if you ever have children. And if you get married, whoever you marry. But my parents died, and the Bear said I shouldn't tell him even though he's my guardian. So only I know mine."
"Oh." Rina didn't quite know what to say, to a boy with no one in the world who knew his true name. "Well, you know mine."
"Only because you didn't know better," he said, and shook his head at her, the way he did a lot.
They were waiting a long time, in the shelter beneath a tangle of raspberry canes. As the sun was setting, the page-boy leaned over to Rina, and whispered something in her ear.
It was his true name. It was quite long. Rina could still write the whole thing out from memory, today, even though she never, ever would.
"How are you feeling?" asks the doctor, and Rina stops thinking about the page-boy.
"Better," she says, though they both know how relative that is, that better isn't necessarily anything like good. But Rina does feel nearly good, better than she has in months: the path before her is as clear as it's ever been. A few curling tendrils obscure it, perhaps, but she feels up to the task of pushing them aside.
"I'm painting again," she says, and she smiles.
At the end of their long, long walk through the woods, Rina came to the end of the map, and she and the Bear and the page-boy came to a tiny, twisted cottage nestled into an overgrown clearing at the heart of the wood. It rested on gnarled chicken feet, which were rooted firmly in the soil, and did not appear to have moved for many years. The little light that filtered in through the trees was dim and green.
The Bear did not hesitate, but strode to the cottage door in three great steps, and knocked his booming knock, which made the old wood rattle. There was a long pause, then, in the silent woods. Rina and the page-boy looked at each other, each wondering if their journeying had been for nothing.
But there was a noise within the cottage, a slow, creaky step. The door opened, just a crack. An old, old woman peered out at them. And then, after a moment, she let them in.
Rina has a hard time forgetting that place. The cottage had been dust-shrouded, nearly lifeless, even the fire in the the hearth near death, and the woman had seemed to Rina's eyes old beyond all impossibility. But then, this was not an unreasonable thing to think, for the Bear's patient questioning revealed that she was the wizard's mother.
These are the things that stick in Rina's brain: the shape of a rocking-horse, under its curtains of cobweb, that sat in the corner. The way the old woman's hands never stopped moving, how they fluttered to her face, then fell to the table to wring one another, the ancient joints knobbly between twiglike bones. And the sound, the sound Rina does not think she will ever, ever shake: the tiny click-click of the old woman's tears, which turned to small clear stones as they dripped off her chin and the end of her nose.
Rina has a pair of earrings set with those stones, which the page-boy presented her before she left Radagast. She does not wear them where anyone else could see.
It was not hard, once they had the wizard's true name, to defeat him. He had grown so sure of his power that he did not know how to cope with his own weakness, and the Birch-Leaf Lady imprisoned him in a block of amber without a great deal of trouble. Once it was done, the wizard scowling at them out of the yellow-tinted depths, they sent Rina home. She was back in time for dinner, the same day she left. All she brought with her were the earrings, the dress she wore to the victory banquet, her necklace, and a name.
When she gets home from the doctor's, Rina goes for a walk. She goes to the lane that runs behind her parents' house, and listens to the rattle of the pill-bottle in her pocket, and the rushing of the cars that the trees hide from view.
The birch leaves begin to whisper, and the noise of the cars fades. Rina stands very still, for a long moment, listening to the familiar sound.
A young man is standing at the end of the lane, which stretches now into a deeper forest. He had sandy hair and green eyes and a shy, secret smile, and Rina knows him well. She runs down the lane towards him, and he sweeps her up into a hug.
"Come with me," he says, and Rina hesitates. She remembers the bottle in her pocket, and the thing she is fighting. In Radagast, they don't know the name depression.
But neither can they defeat it. "Stay with me," Rina counters, taking the page-boy's hands and pulling him back down the lane. "For a little while, at least. Come see what things are like here."
The page-boy wasn't expecting this, Rina can tell. "I painted a picture of you," she tells him, and his hands tighten on hers, an old familiar pressure. "Let me show it to you."
And he does.
When Rina was nine, she saved a fairy kingdom from an evil wizard. These days, people think she's a little crazy. You might assume that these two facts are related, but if you did, you would be wrong.
For one thing, she never told anyone about her trip to Radagast. The Birch-leaf Lady warned her not to, right before she sent Rina home; she said that speaking of it might draw attention from the wrong sorts of creatures. She was right, Rina thinks, but maybe not the way she meant to be.
Rina went to Radagast because of the necklace her grandmother left her. It was-- still is, in fact-- an ugly necklace, with its faceted red stone, nearly egg-sized, set in tarnished silver. Rina's mother hadn't wanted her to have it, had complained it was too big for Rina's little neck. "She's going to give herself a hunchback, wearing that thing," she'd said to Rina's father after Baba's funeral, half-joking. "Just you watch." But Rina'd worn it every day, under her clothes, to school, to bed, even swimming, the heavy pendant thunking reassuringly against her breastbone.
Rina still wears it. Just in case. In the waiting room at the doctor's, she clicks her nails against the stone, tapping out the rhythm of the marching song the Bear and his page-boy had taught her on their long, long walk through the forest.
When Rina was nine, she went walking down the lane behind her parents' house, counting birch trees. They stood in a double row, down each side of the rutted-dirt road that used to lead somewhere, in the days before they built the subdivision. Today the lane ends at a drainage ditch, and you can hear the highway on the other side. But Rina didn't know that then.
As she walked, the leaves on the birch trees started to tremble. Flakes of birch-bark whirled in the air, branches rattled, but Rina couldn't feel the wind. It scared her, enough that she started to run, to make her necklace thump back and forth under the collar of her t-shirt, but she stopped when she saw the lady standing in the middle of the lane.
She was a lady, certainly, not a woman; she was dressed like a fairy queen from one of Baba's books. She wore silver bells on her headdress, and her wrists, and her ankles. There was no telling her age, not for Rina, for whom all adults fell into a range between "old" and "really old." Her dress-- no, gown-- was green and white.
"What's your name, child?" the lady asked, and Rina stood up straight and answered: Maria Irina Bielkova, ma'am. The lady nodded, and said, "Don't tell anyone else that, dear. Now follow me." And Rina did, down the lane of birches, into a deeper forest.
Most of the kingdom of Radagast is forest. In junior high, Rina drew maps in her notebooks, instead of notes. She could happily spend a whole math class charting the course of the Red River, or naming the mountains that enclosed the land like a cup around an egg. When people asked why she didn't pay attention to the class, instead, she had a hard time caring. She didn't show anyone the notebooks, or write her true name on them.
But now Rina is nineteen, and waiting on a much-abused couch for the receptionist to call her name. She is not thinking of Radagast, any more than she usually does; she isn't thinking of anything. Or she's trying not to, anyway.
Rina is doing a lot better, these days. A year ago, she wasn't. Her parents talk around it: when you were ill, they say, not when you were crazy. Or when you cut off all your hair. Or when you wouldn't get out of bed. But she's had a year, of doctor's visits and meds and therapy, and she's starting to feel like a person again. She gets tired of waiting, though.
In Radagast, Rina waited in the lady's house, which was not so much built as grown, while the lady bent over a pool on water in the floor. She'd worried that her parents would miss her, but Rina had been a child who loved fairy tales, and she knew one when she saw it. She didn't think you could turn down being in a fairy tale, and wasn't sure she wanted to anyway. It didn't stop her imagination, though: she sat on the silk-cushioned chair in a house made of birch trees, and pictured her parents going frantic with worry, calling the police, putting her face on milk cartons. She imagined going home, still nine, to find her parents old and gray. That could happen in a fairy tale, Rina knew, but she still didn't leave, because the lady had told her what she was needed for. Rina's necklace, it seemed, was a map.
"Like this," the lady said, holding the pendant up to the light. "You see?" And Rina did. In the depths of the stone there was an image.
In Rina's necklace, if you looked closely enough, held it to the light just so, there was a map. It showed the mountains, the rivers and towns, and the endless dark woods that covered most of the land. Deep in the forest, far from anything, there was a spark of light.
But the map disappeared when Rina took the necklace off. The Lady examined it critically, then sighed and handed it back. "Your grandmother-- did she talk about her family, very much? Her ancestors, grandparents, great-grandparents," she asked.
Rina shook her head no; she only knew her Baba had not been born in the same town as Rina herself, and her mother. She thought they had been Russian, maybe, at some point.
"Well, she must have come from the line of the last king, who abdicated when he decided to wed an outsider woman," the Lady explained. "So that would make your mother the queen, if we had queens anymore." She added, sounding a little morose, "We had a Parliament, since the king left, but that's all gone too."
Which was how Rina found out about the wizard. He was very old, being a wizard, and had made Rina's necklace hundreds of years ago, as a gift-of-good-faith for the king. It contained his only weakness, whatever that was. Once he had served the crown faithfully, and then the Parliament when there was no longer a crown. But, the lady said, time had twisted him, and made him bitter, and one day he had stood before the assembled Parliament and turned them all to apple-tree saplings with a wave of his hand. "We planted them, of course; they started bearing fruit last year," the Lady said. "But the wizard is a terrible tyrant, and something must be done."
Something, apparently, meant Rina.
The Lady waved a hand, and food faded into existence with a rustling of birch-leaves. Rina hesitated-- she remembered warnings against fairy food, from stories-- but she was hungry, and it smelled awfully good. Anyway, macaroni and cheese couldn't count as fairy food, surely, and it was Rina's favorite.
The Lady watched her eat with a critical eye. "Elbows," she said gently, and Rina took her elbows off the table with a guilty hunch of her shoulders.
Rina has had impeccable manners since she came back from Radagast. Even in the hospital, last year, she had thanked the nurses politely for the little paper cup of pills they handed her each morning. She sees no reason to be rude, even if she's crazy. People are better to you when you're polite. The Bear always asked nicely for things, even though he could have got whatever he wanted by threats, or just on the strength of his reputation. But he believed that the powerful owe respect to the powerless.
Rina is not powerful, but she's still polite.
Rina turned nineteen, not long ago. She is two years out of school, and she spends a lot of time in doctor's offices. None of the doctors she has seen have noticed, yet, that she worries at her necklace when she is feeling at her worst. The Goth receptionist in one of the offices told her she thought it was a really pretty pendant, though.
Rina's parents don't exactly know what to do with her, but that has been true for a long time. She is tempted to say, since she came back from Radagast, but she suspects that this is not exactly true. Perhaps that's when she started to notice it.
The problem is-- well. There are a lot of problems, but the easily identifiable problem is that Rina does not know what to do next. There is no clear path ahead, to the next part of her life, and the next, and so she feels paralyzed, frozen like the wizard in his block of amber. Rina wonders, from time to time, what the Parliament of Radagast did with the horrible thing, once they were turned back from being apple-trees.
She feels lost in the woods, she told her doctors, in the hospital. Every path is tangled with brambles and vines, impassable. She thinks she could fight her way through them, if there were something worth getting to on the other side, but there is no guarantee of that. So she keeps still.
In Radagast, Rina's path was clear, marked out on the map in her necklace. She was given a guardian, to walk the path with her: the Bear of the Red Mountain, greatest warrior in ten generations. The Bear was an enormous man, broad and tall, with a bristly brown beard and a booming voice. He had a page-boy, who scurried after him, and rarely talked, though Rina would have been happy to have a conversation with someone her own age. The page-boy was sandy-haired and extensively freckled, with bright green eyes and a pointed nose. He staggered when the Bear clapped him on the back, and stumbled under the weight of even one piece of the Bear's armor. Rina sort of wondered why the Bear bothered to have a page-boy at all.
She was feeling very important, as the bearer of the map that led to the wizard's one weakness, when she was introduced to the Bear and the page-boy. So she drew herself up and introduced herself by her full name to them, and didn't understand their reaction at all.
"Why is it so important, anyway?" Rina asked, after the page-boy turned a peculiar wheezy shade of grey. "I mean, you've all got code names like you're spies or something. I don't get it."
"Names have power," the Birch-leaf Lady explained gently, drawing Rina aside so the page-boy could finish having his conniption fit in peace. "You can't cast a spell on someone unless you know their true name. An oath sworn with your true name is binding, in a way an ordinary promise isn't. We guard our names closely, here. Perhaps it's different where you come from."
Rina remembered that her Baba insisted on calling all her children and grandchildren by nicknames. Rina's mother offered her a vague explanation for it, once-- some old folk superstition, she said. If you didn't call the children by their real names, the Evil Eye couldn't get them. Something like that. Rina wondered, briefly, if this meant there was really an Evil Eye, and spent a moment in shivery horror at the idea of a big, evil floating eyeball. Maybe it blinked curses at you.
Year later, Rina remembers the importance of names when her doctors hand her down a diagnosis. Depression, they say, and she thinks: when you know the name of a thing, you can defeat it. It is the first time she feels hopeful since she went into the hospital.
It's not as easy as it was in Radagast. Even when you know what you're fighting, it's hard to win with imperfect weapons. And the journey is long; but then, Rina is used to long journeys.
They went on foot most of the way, in Radagast. Horses tired quickly under the Bear's weight, and he didn't like to stop to change them. Anyway, where they were going was treacherous country for horses. The deep woods were best navigated on foot, though it was slower going.
They saw wonderful things on the way, though. Rina remembers a waterfall, tumbling down its mossy cliff into a deep green pool, the cliff face pocked with hollows full of birds. Sunbirds flashed in the light through the trees, and flared their bright tails, reflecting into the water. Rina wishes she'd kept the feathers they found there, but they were lost when she had to leave her pack behind in the mirror-maze under the Glass Mountain.
In high school, Rina painted the things she saw in Radagast, and felt like she was cheating when people praised her. She knows she's not a bad painter-- her technical skills are good, she understand how to use color-- but everyone complimented her imagination, and Rina never paints anything she hasn't seen with her own eyes. It's only that she's seen more than most people. So compliments are hard for her to take; they made her feel like such a fraud that she stopped painting, for a while.
When she was at her worst, she cut up most of her canvases. There was one she couldn't bring herself to damage, though. She painted the page boy, mud on his boots, a hand pushing the sweaty hair out of his eyes as he carried the Bear's sword to him. That one, she never touched.
The page-boy was a year older than her, and the best friend she had in Radagast. It was him who taught her woodcraft, how to read the trees and set snares, how to skin a rabbit, how to shoot a bow. The Bear offered comments, occasionally, and gentle criticism, but he left the page-boy to it most of the time. He huddled beside her when they were caught in a freak snowstorm, summoned up by the wizard, and never let go of her hand while they were lost in the mirror-maze.
While they waited for the Bear to come back, one afternoon, Rina asked the page-boy how people got along in Radagast, if no one knew anyone else's name. "Well, we have titles," he said, "like the Bear does, and the Birch-Leaf Lady. And when I'm grown I'll have one too," he added, as if remnding himself that he would not always be just the page-boy.
"So does anyone know your name, then?" Rina asked.
"Just your parents. And your children, if you ever have children. And if you get married, whoever you marry. But my parents died, and the Bear said I shouldn't tell him even though he's my guardian. So only I know mine."
"Oh." Rina didn't quite know what to say, to a boy with no one in the world who knew his true name. "Well, you know mine."
"Only because you didn't know better," he said, and shook his head at her, the way he did a lot.
They were waiting a long time, in the shelter beneath a tangle of raspberry canes. As the sun was setting, the page-boy leaned over to Rina, and whispered something in her ear.
It was his true name. It was quite long. Rina could still write the whole thing out from memory, today, even though she never, ever would.
"How are you feeling?" asks the doctor, and Rina stops thinking about the page-boy.
"Better," she says, though they both know how relative that is, that better isn't necessarily anything like good. But Rina does feel nearly good, better than she has in months: the path before her is as clear as it's ever been. A few curling tendrils obscure it, perhaps, but she feels up to the task of pushing them aside.
"I'm painting again," she says, and she smiles.
At the end of their long, long walk through the woods, Rina came to the end of the map, and she and the Bear and the page-boy came to a tiny, twisted cottage nestled into an overgrown clearing at the heart of the wood. It rested on gnarled chicken feet, which were rooted firmly in the soil, and did not appear to have moved for many years. The little light that filtered in through the trees was dim and green.
The Bear did not hesitate, but strode to the cottage door in three great steps, and knocked his booming knock, which made the old wood rattle. There was a long pause, then, in the silent woods. Rina and the page-boy looked at each other, each wondering if their journeying had been for nothing.
But there was a noise within the cottage, a slow, creaky step. The door opened, just a crack. An old, old woman peered out at them. And then, after a moment, she let them in.
Rina has a hard time forgetting that place. The cottage had been dust-shrouded, nearly lifeless, even the fire in the the hearth near death, and the woman had seemed to Rina's eyes old beyond all impossibility. But then, this was not an unreasonable thing to think, for the Bear's patient questioning revealed that she was the wizard's mother.
These are the things that stick in Rina's brain: the shape of a rocking-horse, under its curtains of cobweb, that sat in the corner. The way the old woman's hands never stopped moving, how they fluttered to her face, then fell to the table to wring one another, the ancient joints knobbly between twiglike bones. And the sound, the sound Rina does not think she will ever, ever shake: the tiny click-click of the old woman's tears, which turned to small clear stones as they dripped off her chin and the end of her nose.
Rina has a pair of earrings set with those stones, which the page-boy presented her before she left Radagast. She does not wear them where anyone else could see.
It was not hard, once they had the wizard's true name, to defeat him. He had grown so sure of his power that he did not know how to cope with his own weakness, and the Birch-Leaf Lady imprisoned him in a block of amber without a great deal of trouble. Once it was done, the wizard scowling at them out of the yellow-tinted depths, they sent Rina home. She was back in time for dinner, the same day she left. All she brought with her were the earrings, the dress she wore to the victory banquet, her necklace, and a name.
When she gets home from the doctor's, Rina goes for a walk. She goes to the lane that runs behind her parents' house, and listens to the rattle of the pill-bottle in her pocket, and the rushing of the cars that the trees hide from view.
The birch leaves begin to whisper, and the noise of the cars fades. Rina stands very still, for a long moment, listening to the familiar sound.
A young man is standing at the end of the lane, which stretches now into a deeper forest. He had sandy hair and green eyes and a shy, secret smile, and Rina knows him well. She runs down the lane towards him, and he sweeps her up into a hug.
"Come with me," he says, and Rina hesitates. She remembers the bottle in her pocket, and the thing she is fighting. In Radagast, they don't know the name depression.
But neither can they defeat it. "Stay with me," Rina counters, taking the page-boy's hands and pulling him back down the lane. "For a little while, at least. Come see what things are like here."
The page-boy wasn't expecting this, Rina can tell. "I painted a picture of you," she tells him, and his hands tighten on hers, an old familiar pressure. "Let me show it to you."
And he does.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-18 06:06 am (UTC)The back-and-forth in time was just a tiny bit confusing, but I think that helps put the reader more closely into a sympathetic headspace with Rina.
I love this. I can't think of anything that would improve it.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-18 03:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-18 02:39 pm (UTC)Is it that Rina's applying the magic-world logic (power of true names) to a real-world problem (depression)? One problem with this is that the power of true names has little effect on her adventures in the fairy kingdom, so we're told about it rather than shown it; it's set-up with no pay-off.
Is it that Rina finds there are limitations to true names' powers? Naming depression doesn't give you power over it, after all; it's what you do once you name it. This is somewhat undermined, as I said, by the fact that nobody actually *uses* true names for effect in the fantasy world during the story.
There is a difference, I think, in your story if Rina is having mental health issues due to brain chemistry or outside effect. If she is dealing with having had and accomplished a goal and now having no direction, that's one kind of depression; if her depression rises from other causes, that mandates a different sort of action.
One way or another, it just doesn't come together for me at this point. I think you may need to make it more of one piece by thematically tying together the quest accomplished and the more confusing, directionless quest of the outside world.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-18 03:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-18 03:30 pm (UTC)and one day he had stood before the assembled Parliament and turned them all to apple-tree saplings with a wave of his hand. "We planted them, of course; they started bearing fruit last year," the Lady said.
And the sound, the sound Rina does not think she will ever, ever shake: the tiny click-click of the old woman's tears, which turned to small clear stones as they dripped off her chin and the end of her nose.
The tears-turned-into-earrings does a lot to anchor the real world with the fairy tale, for me.
My only concrit is that you have both "now Rina is nineteen" and "Rina turned nineteen, not long ago," which seems a bit redundant unless the repetition is meant to stress something significant about that specific age.