Dear reader, this week was the Hallinox Festival, which is my favorite holiday of the year! I think you may have something similar in your world; it takes place when the day and the night have reached equal length, and it celebrates the end of the harvest time and the beginning of the fall. Folks say it’s also when “strange creatures” begin to wake and roam the earth, but mostly I think that’s just to frighten the children. The festival is held outdoors with games and dancing, which are all wonderful, but my favorite part of Hallinox is the stories. I love the tales of long-lost magic and monsters. At home I was usually the one to tell a story, since I had memorized all the ones Auntie Ember knew as well as the ones from my book of faery stories. But this year I was looking forward to finding out if Greenwood had any tales I had never heard before.
So on the evening of the festival, just as the stars began to wake, I left my cottage and made my way towards the village green. I could see the light of a fire before I could hear the people, and just like on market days, oh goodness, there were so many people. But it wasn’t so bad; there was cheery music for groups to dance to, and a few vendors selling their goods. I walked around for a while just looking at everything. Oh, it was all so beautiful. I even bought a punched tin lantern, known as a Long Night Lantern, to keep lit through the fall and winter. Then I saw the storyteller. He was surrounded by children, and as I passed, I caught enough of his words to recognize the story he was telling, one about two children lost in the woods and a witch with a house made of sweets.
I sat down on a bushel of hay, feeling a little disappointed, and well, oh, a little lonely. But then Mrs. Hume sat down beside me and asked me how I was getting on and why I wasn’t dancing with the other young people or bobbing for apples. I laughed. If I had the Courage remedy done, I might have used some myself for the evening; the dancing looked like fun. So I told her that what I had really wanted was to hear a new story.
She smiled at me with a twinkle in her eye and asked me what I knew about the forest. Well, I told her “not very much”, only that people said it was strange. She explained that most of the villagers think the forest is cursed. At different times, when men had tried to cut down the trees, their axes would break. No one, not a soul, had ever managed to fell even a single sapling. Mrs. Hume laughed “that didn’t make it cursed, that made it protected!” When Mrs. Hume was a small child, she said she had gotten lost in the woods once. She was chasing what she was certain at the time was a faery, though now she’s not so certain it wasn’t just a butterfly. She followed it so far into the trees that after she had lost its trail, she wasn’t sure which way she had come from. Oh goodness, if it had been me, I would have been ever so frightened. But she said she wasn’t scared because just then she saw a candy placed very carefully on a yellowing leaf. It was cinnamon flavored, though not the hot kind she told me, a sweet one, like cinnamon mixed with honey. She declared it was the best candy she had ever tasted, and as she continued on through the trees, she found another one not far off, and then another and another, until finally, with a mouth full of candies she reached the edge of the wood. Of course, her mother had been very worried and scolded her for wandering off. Worst of all, Mrs. Hume said, her mother made her spit out the candies into the dirt, fearful they might be poisoned. But, and here she pulled something from her pocket, she had kept one hidden. And goodness, there, wrapped in a handkerchief in her hand was the little cinnamon candy she had kept all those years!
Mrs. Hume mentioned she knew another story about another little girl, one with green skin who had come wandering out of the forest, not knowing her name or where she had come from. And while it was the same forest, she said it wasn’t her story to tell. Then she laughed, and added that besides, she wasn’t sure what the ending to that tale was anyway. I smiled and thanked her for her story before returning home. All the way back I thought about the forest. Oh dear reader, I have so many questions. Where had the candy come from? Where had the green-skinned girl come from? …because of course that was me. I was the little girl who didn’t know where she had come from, who Auntie Ember had found and cared for. And I wonder, even now, how that story might end.