The Wonder Tales

Chapter Three

Chapter Three

Some unknowable number of days later, Helewise gathered the remnants of her sweetpeas early in the morning, her coat buttoned close against the chill. The fog was thicker than ever with the approach of autumn, but the burgeoning cold was welcome after the heats of summer, and the crisp, fresh scent to the air gladdened her heart.

The fate of her flowers pleased her rather less, for they were fading early, and fading fast. Starved of sun and light and even rain, they could not thrive, and her livelihood must suffer for it. Only the starflowers grew, bursting forth in ever greater profusion even as the rest of her garden withered.

The rambling rose bushes seemed similarly unaffected, for they continued to flourish along the waysides. Helewise walked to market with a large trug upon each arm, laden down with what she feared must be the final harvest of the season. It occurred to her to wonder whether she would find the market square still in place when she arrived, for everything about her continued to shift and alter in ways she was slowly growing used to. Perhaps she would find a pond instead, or a grassy valley, or a castle.

The roads were quiet and largely empty upon most of her way, but as she neared the market she began to pass other travellers. Some of them were familiar to her; people she knew, or at least faces that she recognised as regular market-goers.

Others were less so. Most of them came on foot, a few mounted upon ponies or fine, elegant horses. Their clothes were strange: they comprised more colours than might be considered either customary or entirely respectable, and they were cut in ways that had never been fashionable. Their hair was richly adorned and oddly styled. Everything about them was colour and vibrancy; beside these newcomers, the residents of Berrie appeared sadly drab.

Sometimes they spoke to one another, in lilting words Helewise could not understand. She could not imagine where they had journeyed from, or how so many had come to venture into Berrie all at once. When she tried to ask one of them, she received a startled stare, as though she had been a deer or a rabbit with remarkable powers of speech. No answer was given, and Helewise did not again venture to disturb any of the motley folk.

They were all going towards the market, and Helewise could only imagine that they were destined for disappointment. Berrie’s produce had always been fine, but it was not extraordinary. How could such splendid, outlandish folk be satisfied, even with the town’s best?

She was relieved to find that the market square had yet to reinterpret itself as something else, and a number of stalls were already set up. Maud Redthorn was there with Dunstan Goldwyne, selling crumpets, muffins and seed-speckled loaves; Nathaniel Roseberry sold his best wines, as always, alongside Ferdinand Crowther’s ales; and Lavender Blackwood had an early crop of pumpkins to offer, together with beets, redcurrants, colourful bunches of carrots and striped marrows. The reassuringly familiar sights and scents eased Helewise’s spirits.

Maud approached as she set down her baskets, and nodded at a nearby knot of motley folk. ‘What do you make of them?’

The two women wore gowns of cerulean and azure, their tawny-gold hair decked in flowers. Their male companion wore a coat as vividly red as their dresses were blue, and a forest-green ribbon was woven through his long braid.

‘I have never seen their like,’ said Helewise.

The three approached soon afterwards and fell to inspecting her wares, with a minute attention which puzzled her. Clearly they were not satisfied with what they found. They threw down her sweetpeas in disgust, and began speaking to her in fluid strings of words she could not understand. Berating her, for by their manner they were much displeased. They gestured at the market with great sweeps of their arms and expressed their dissatisfaction at great length.

Eventually it occurred to one of the women that Helewise did not understand, for she cut off her flow of words and began again, haltingly, in Helewise’s own tongue. ‘Where…’ she said, and frowned. ‘Where is the…’ A word followed in that other language, and Helewise was lost again. It sounded like alorin, but she could make no guess as to its meaning.

‘I do not know what you mean,’ Helewise told her, careful to keep her tone polite but firm. She was beginning to feel alarmed by their clear dissatisfaction, so far in excess of anything she had expected, and she could not understand why it appeared to be directed at her.

The woman let out a great sigh, and dismissed Helewise with a wave of one bejewelled hand. She and her companions moved away, but their place was soon taken by others, and the peculiar scene was re-enacted over and over again during the course of the morning. Helewise alternated between selling her flowers to the residents of Berrie and answering the same question from the market’s outlandish visitors: ‘Where? Where is the alorin?’

Then came a lady whose appearance cut Helewise to the core, for she was no bejewelled vision like the rest. She was scarcely taller than Helewise, thin to the point of frailty. The men and women thronging the marketplace varied greatly in appearance: some of them were as pale as Helewise, with yellow or golden hair and bright blue eyes. Others were as brown as her best honey or darker still, their hair painted all the rich tints of autumn, or as black as the ink with which she wrote her letters. They made a fine sight, and Helewise did not tire of admiring them, regardless of their behaviour.

The woman before her now was… colourless, like a clear glass emptied of its contents. Her skin was pallid to the point of translucency, blue veins marking her face and neck in an exquisite, but shocking, tracery. Her eyes were ice-white, though the left was graced by a faint hint of sea-green on the wane.

She was not in good health. Her movements were stiff and halting, and she took sparse, shallow breaths through cracked lips.

‘Alorin?’ she said, her voice barely a whisper.

Helewise shook her head, and felt, for the first time, a sense of compunction for her inability to satisfy the incomprehensible request. The woman did not berate her as the others had, nor did she appear to feel any anger. She merely gazed at Helewise with infinite sadness, and bowed her frail head in a gesture of exhausted acceptance. She moved away without another word, and Helewise could only watch her go, and regret.

‘Right,’ said Maud from behind Helewise. ‘This is ridiculous.’

Helewise turned. Maud Redthorn stood with arms folded, watching the colourful visitors with an expression of disgust to match their own. And no wonder, for the pallid woman’s weary composure was at odds with the loudly-voiced dissatisfaction of her fellows. Their collective anger was growing; soon, thought Helewise, they might progress from aggrieved words to a more direct expression of vexation.

‘What is alorin?’ said Helewise. ‘I think it must be important.’

‘Obviously,’ said Maud. ‘But I’ve no more idea of what it might be than you do.’

‘Did you see that woman?’

Maud looked about, frowning. ‘Which particular one?’

‘The pale one.’

‘I do not know who you mean.’

Helewise glanced about, hoping to see her, but the lady had gone. ‘She was ill, in some strange way. I am sure of it. And, Maud…’ Helewise hesitated, afraid that if she spoke her thoughts aloud they might in some way become more real. More true. ‘Maud, have you noticed that Ambrose is looking different?’

‘A bit pale,’ said Maud.

‘Yes. Exactly.’ Helewise thought also of the paling of Bellerose Woodbriar’s formerly red hair, and the increasingly frailty of the Aelfwine sisters. She sought futilely for words with which to express her concerns, only half understanding them herself, and at last gave up the endeavour. There was no making sense of it.

The notes of a violin cut across the tumult and, to Helewise’s surprise, all of the bejewelled folk ceased speaking at once. They stilled abruptly, almost as though they were frozen in place, and their heads turned to gaze, expectantly, at the far side of the square from where Maud and Helewise stood.

In strode the fiddler, a man with rich brown hair tied back in a tail and a many-coloured coat. He moved with the assurance of power, his consequence increased by an entourage of seven men and women in rainbow-shaded cloaks. He took up a station in the centre of the square and let his bow still upon the strings. As the piercing notes faded he began to speak, and though Helewise could no more understand him than she had the rest of the bejewelled folk, the import of his words was clear enough. Whatever they sought was not to be found here.

The motley people began, regretfully, to leave, their anger draining out of them under the force of the fiddler’s speech. Without the energy of their fury, they seemed to Helewise as beaten and weary as the pallid lady, and her heart stirred with pity for them.

Maud spoke. ‘There is a man who knows what’s afoot.’

‘Yes,’ said Helewise. She gathered her resolve, stepped away from her flowers, and marched in the direction of the fiddler. Maud came following behind.

‘These people,’ she said as she reached him. ‘They are all sick. Aren’t they?’ She realised belatedly that she ought to have offered some manner of greeting first; politeness dictated such. But it was too late now, so she stood her ground and waited, grateful for the silent but supportive presence of Maud beside her.

The fiddler was taller than she, though only by a little. Nonetheless, he contrived to stare down at her in a fashion that made her feel much smaller indeed.

Helewise thought of Ambrose, and lifted her chin.

‘How did you come to know that?’ said the fiddler. His accent was strange, but he formed the words of her language precisely and with confidence, and Helewise’s heart eased a little. At least she would be able to talk with this one.

‘I cannot say,’ she replied honestly. ‘It is merely an impression I have received.’

‘You are observant.’ He threw his violin and his bow into the air with a negligent flick of his wrists. They vanished into the mist, and did not come down again. ‘Helewise Dale,’ said he next, with an enlightened widening of his eyes. ‘I understand.’

‘How come you to know me?’ said Helewise, too surprised to be civil.

‘The earth knows you,’ said he cryptically. ‘And the bees speak of your husband.’

Helewise was too bemused by these pronouncements to muster a reply. She was stung to perceive a flicker of amusement in the fiddler’s black eyes.

‘What is the alorin they are all asking for?’ Maud interjected. ‘They have driven us fair to distraction all the morning with their asking and asking.’

‘And it seems they have not found it,’ added Helewise. If the word referred to some common or ordinary thing that was customarily grown in Berrie, they would have discovered it by now, and gone away satisfied.

The fiddler did not seem disposed to make any reply. He looked from Maud to Helewise, his expression unreadable. ‘How fares Ambrose?’ he said, as though Maud had not spoken at all.

‘He is well,’ said Helewise, for though Ambrose’s pallor might disturb her, she had not yet discerned any other symptoms to cause alarm.

‘Is he,’ said he thoughtfully, and his mind clearly wandered far from them.

He remained lost in reverie for some moments, in spite of Helewise’s attempts to regain his attention. When his thinking was done, he did not see fit to share the results of his ruminations with Helewise or Maud. Instead he merely fixed the former with a swift, penetrating stare, then turned his back upon them both and walked away, his steps brisk. His entourage fell in behind him, soon blocking him from Helewise’s sight.

‘How rude a man,’ said Maud.

‘And how puzzling.’ Helewise gazed after him, half hoping he might return. But he did not. His departure appeared to operate as some manner of signal to the rest of the market’s outlandish visitors, for they trailed away in his wake in twos and threes, and before long the square was empty once more of anybody save those who lived in the town.