Farrier
Carac stood at the top of the hill, looking down into a wooded valley as the sun started it’s long climb into the morning sky. He wasn’t happy to be awake. He never started mornings happy. The rich smell of cow dung, the sound of chickens, and the insistent clang of metal on metal was not his way. It was his father’s way. Carac was son to Merek, principle blacksmith of the village of Harth, key waypoint on the southern trail towards Arrowyndale, first guardianship of the crown. All of this title was foolishness to him. Carac cared for none of it. In his eleven years he’d only once touched a hammer to that curious bend of metal that shoed a horse’s clod feet. He didn’t understand why horses needed shoes. He didn’t understand why the women of the village thought the task so popular and necessary. Likewise, he did not understand why his own mother found the attention so draining.
Carac preferred to spend his mornings on this hilltop, his back to the village and his eyes fixed on the road that wound through the forrest. When he was small his mother would speak stories about wood fairies. She told him of one, Sahna, who would kiss little boys and with her powers make them fly like birds. However, if they flew too long their noses would start to grow long and hard, curving downwards until they became almost as beaks. If they continued to take the fairies kiss after that they could themselves become crows or swallows or hawks and be lost to the world of men forever.
Terrowin had a long crooked nose. He’d not noticed it until after his mother’s tales. Terrowin was son to Ulric the farmer and the fifth child of the line. The second boy, he was often reminded. The second son was never the inheritor, so he had to work harder to find a space of his own. Carac thought Terrowin might have wanted to find a birds space, so he asked him just once about his nose. He asked if he’d taken the fairies kiss and Terrowin punched him in the stomach. Carac didn’t ask about much after that.
Now, as his looked into the forrest he thought he saw lights moving among the trees. It was very hard to tell, because it was morning and the rays of the new sun cut through the branches and played off the morning’s dew, but he still thought he saw lights. He thought, perhaps, he saw fairies. He wondered if his mother’s stories were always just stories or if they could be real. He wanted to see the fairies. He wanted just one brief kiss and the chance to fly above the trees and feel the wind move through his hair and past his ears in a great woosh the way it did when he slid down Maker’s hill in the winter. He wanted to have an adventure. He wanted to see something more than his father promised. He wanted more than horse hooves and pounding of a hammer on anvil and the curious smiles it brought.
He wanted a life of his own.