The wolf’s at the door…

The wolf’s at the door, though. Autumn’s coming now and that’s winter already in its arms.

One evening she waits in the dusk for the new smith at Shaklocks to do curfew and cross the yard to that old house where Ann Shaklock told her the stories of St Eloi and Vulcan, and Jack Shaklock taught her the song.

When the new smith sees her there in the shadows his face drains of colour and he bolts like a rabbit, runs all the way down the street.

Good.

The next day she walks to the town where she’d sung the song at the fair. The smithy is one of the first buildings she gets to. She waits off the road for this smith’s curfew.

When he comes out of the smithy and sees her waiting he makes a sign to her that he’s seen her. He turns and unlocks the smithy door again, goes in and shuts it behind him. When he comes back out he’s carrying things in his arms.

He crosses the road to her. He gives her back her hammer, her pincers and her firestones.

Do you want a job? he says.

I don’t, she says. Thank you.

I’ll take you on, he says.

It’s kind, she says. No thank you.

Come and work here whenever you need to, he says. While I’m here you’re welcome.

I won’t, she says. Thank you.

She steps back off the road into the trees.

She’s as free as the bird now.

She can go anywhere so long as she can also survive it.

She has a new song too, to sing, about the town in flames. It’s just a song but it’s about what fire can do and what’s worth what when fire takes something and burns it to nothing but ashes and she can sing it like that’s what she herself is, fire, she can send heat through it blazing bright then dark.

What happens next?

Does she go and find the players?

Does she follow the route to where the local fairs are still left in the year to find them playing their story in the market squares or the fairfields to people in exchange for money, food, a sleep in the warm?

Do they give her a part in that story they told her about?

The poor mad girl who’s ruined by revenge and loss.

The young man on fire with what he can’t change and with whether to live or to die.

When she fights the villains with the sword on the platform does that crowd at the fair go crazy with delight at what a good swordsman she is?

Probably, since she’s always handled her tools of the trade like extra hands added on to her already skilled hands and now she knows the uses and skills of a long very strong beak to a thin-boned bird.

Does the bird still follow her at the safe distance through the summer months when she’s in the more peopled world? or does it happily slip away at last into the world of other birds?

Does she leave the peopled world in the colder months to go and stand on a strand where the birds like her bird are congregated, to see if there’s one that’ll lift its head, turn its head, step out of the company and come towards her, fearless?

I’m not going to tell you what happened in the end to the girl, except that she went the way of all girls.

Same with the bird, other than that in the end it went the way of all birds.

If any of this ever happened, if either of them ever existed.

One way or another, here they both are.