The Gardener of Winder-Tide Seeds

Little green stalks of rosemary and lavender⌥ grew between the paving stones of the broad path that led up to a double brass entrance door. Music, soft and enticing,with the inexorable beat of a magician’s drums, came from inside the green tower. If Linnie had been human, she might have said that growl of drumbeat entered her body, called gently to the blood that ran within her. But she was not human, and she walked on music the way other folk walk on air. It came to her that the gardener was a sorcerer,and his song was feeding this strange green tower; and she undid her hairpins, one by one, letting her long golden hair fall free, so that it might knot itself and be caught in the moving current of the song, and so hold her steady and safe from the spell of the drums.

Courage gathered at its deepest root will burst, and so, though she had come in anger, Linnie now stood before the oaken door and could not lift her hand to knock. Dragonfolk are brave; but it is one thing to sap a unicorn’s strength with tales and tearful flattery, and then turn on the single horn when it lies in your hammock; and it is another, quite another, to come upon a sorcerer’s wizard-weeds in bloom when the song is up, and the composer at home. So Linnie made soft words and coaxed her hand to the knocker and soon enough she had made sufficient noise; and the door swung open.

She had thought to see a wishing well, perhaps, or a genie’s lamp lying on a worn carpet beside a chest of potions; or even—if the tales were true—a casket somewhere lying open and empty, whose secret would be the answer to her woe. But standing in the door was—was a man. He was handsome enough, as men go. Tall, with blue eyes and brown curls on his head and a beard like a prince of a yearling goat. His voice, when he spoke to her, was soft and deep and slow as tide.

“You are—” he said, offering her a slender hand she had not asked for.

“A linnet bird, just passing by,” she stiffened, too proud to give her name away to parched-throat folk.

He stood considering her, and she him. At last he said, “I am the gardener here. And you are a daughter of the empty hills, and there is sorrow that rides your shoulders like a raven.”

“That,” she said, “is a very large mouthful of words for a lone man to chew in one bite.”

“Is it?” he said. “I do not think so. Come in, lady bird, and tell it to a friend.”

And Linnie stepped across the threshold, thinking to herself, Friend is it now? We shall see. But she said aloud, “I come seeking that which all dragonfolk seek, at one time or another. A cure for bitter heart’s-own loss.” “Ah,” he said, closing the door. And she saw then that the green light within the tower was not sunlight at all, but a cold brightness shining from the walls themselves, as if the whole tower were one great emerald lighted from within. And the music which had seemed so gentle outside now pressed close and warm and heavy as a summer noon in the grasslands when the cicadas sing too loud for thought.

“Sit you down,” said the gardener gently, “in this chair of earth, and let your sorrow be a seed that I may grow you a joy.”

But Linnie stood where she stood, her hair undone and her eyes like moons in the green light, thinking, He’s quicker than a lad at spinning words to catch a lass, and loath I am to sit upon sorcerer’s soil. Then she thought again, I am come too far to turn back now for fear of muddy skirts. So she sat, and the chair was warm as living earth, and smelled of rosemary and thyme and sweet basil.

And the gardener sat across from her, folding his long hands, and waited.

So Linnie told him all her tale. Not just the easy parts, like finding the unicorn weak and weary and luring it home with promises of moon-beams in a cup and regrets that do not run true gold. But the hard parts too. How she had grown to love the soft night-whisper of its breath at her hearthside and the gentle way its horn had traced patterns of forgotten dreams upon the air while she slept in her hammock. How she had begun, slowly, to forget the taste of hare and deer in her mouth and remember instead the sweetness of wild honeycomb and berries white as snow. And how, last night, she had awakened to find the unicorn vanished, leaving only a single white feather upon her pillow and a hollow place inside her colder than the emptiness of nine windbitten winters in the hollow hills.

“And the name of your sorrow?” asked the gardener softly when she was done.

But Linnie could not speak the name of the thing she had lost, for it was too great a sorrow for words. So she just looked at him with eyes that held all the lonely sea-marshes of the world reflected in their golden-brown depths.

And the gardener sighed, a long sigh like wind through autumnal bones, and rose from his place. He walked to one of the green walls, and touched it, and a narrow door appeared where no door had been before. Then he reached within and drew forth—

“A seed?” Linnie said, puzzled, for this was surely answer unbecoming a journey long and perilous, through moon-lighted meadows and perilous waters un-numbered.

But the gardener only smiled his slow smile that was not quite in unison with the sadness that rode like a shadow at the back of his eyes. “A seed,” he agreed. “But not any seed. This is a dragonkind seed, the last of its kind anywhere under heaven or below the world. Plant it in earth that has been well loved and tended, water it only with tears that fall freely from sorrow too great for speech, and come back when seven Winter-Tide-turns are safely woven again into Summer-Light beginnings. If you have tended it well, and spoke true to the sorrow that planted it, perhaps—but only perhaps—there will be a blossoming. Perhaps a joy to match your grief.”

And Linnie took the tiny seed between her thumb and finger—so small it could have been lost in a single fold of her cloak—and thought, All this way, for this? But she was dragon-born, and dragon-folk are patient as stone when hope is all that’s left to hold. So she thanked him quietly, her voice husky with unshed tears, and tucked the seed within the warm hollow between her heart and her singed-scaled wing.

And the gardener stood watching her go, his shadow stretching long and lean and lonely as a wolf’s on the green-lit floorboards after the moon goes home. Then he turned away, back to his humming green walls and his lonely garden full of strange and wondrous things.

But Linnie did not look back. She walked down through the sweet-smelling meadow, past the curious bleating of maize-girls and the bright-eyed gossiping of pumpkin-boys turned too early from their vines. She walked through the village where children stopped their games to stare after the tall golden stranger with hair like sunlight on wheat-fields and eyes filled with faraway lands. She walked through the gate and out again into the wide, wild world; and only when the last tower of the green city was a small green dream come true, lost and fading behind her in the morning mist, did she lift her wings for home.

Seven winter-tide-turns... That’s a long sleep, even for dragon-folk. But Linnie curled herself tight around herself in the deepest hollow of her cave beneath the hollow hills, and closed her eyes, and dreamed—dreamed of empty forests carpeted with snow where unicorn tracks lay white-on-white and vanished, un-followed; dreamed of green towers and golden seeds and something small and fragile growing roots in the darkness deep beneath her heart.

And some say—some say—that if you walk through the wildwoods in the heart of winter when the snow is deep and the moon is full and the old songs walk abroad in lonely places—you may hear a crying like a dragon woman weeping soft tears to melt the snow; and if you follow that crying true—true as your own heart’s deepest sorrow—you will come at last to a secret place where a new thing green and strange is growing beneath the snow, beneath the stone, beneath the old forgotten bones of yesterday’s sad tales.

But that, my grandmother said when she told this tale to me on long winter evenings by the firelight, turning her golden wedding-ring thoughtfully round and round her finger the way she always did when truth and lesson walked hand in hand—that is another story for another night, and this one, now, is done.

Moral: Follow the soft crying of your own sorrow true, and plant its tears deep in earth’s bones. What grows may not be what you sought—but if tended well with patience and gentle hands—it will surely be roots enough to save your heart when storms come home to roost.