Spring could be a cruel mistress. The bard lifted his chin and examined the sign above the door: Rooms Available. The cold, sideways rain soaked his lashes as he looked up. It wasn’t the most inviting-looking inn, but it sounded busy, and he needed to stop somewhere. With perfect timing, and a predictability that only appeared in stories, a horse and cart came speeding past, sending a brown tidal wave of water up and over his knees. Without stopping to assess the damage, he pushed the door open and traversed the merry ocean of travellers, local fisherman and farmhands, singing and spluttering over meat pies and freshly baked bread. Nobody looked up to see the drowned traveller unloading his cloak and hat. He stuck them on the peg by the door and waded through the throng of warm, pungent bodies.
At the bar, a stout, red-faced woman wrung out a beer-soaked cloth into a bucket.
“What do you do then?” she asked, barely looking up at him.
He raised his eyebrows, half-laughing. “Abrupt. Fishwife, perchance?”
“I’m ‘is wife.” She pointed to a bald man even grumpier-looking than she was. He was rolling a barrel into the back, the many nautical tattoos on his arms and neck dancing with the throbbing of his veins and the tension in his muscles.
“Never mind. An ale please.”
“Brown or pale?”
“Whichever is best,” he said, knowing full well that when given the choice, the hospitality staff chose the most expensive, whether it was the best or not.
He leaned on the bar and looked across to the blazing hearth at the other end of it. The tavern was full. “Do you have any rooms?” he asked the barmaid, who was sloshing his ale so much when she walked that he wondered if he was on a ship.
“Got the stable rooms,” she said in her deep, curt way. “Inn’s full.”
“Stable rooms?”
“Yah. At the back of the stables.”
“They’re rooms?”
“Curtained.”
“I see. I shall take one of those.”
“Two shillings.”
He flashed his fine, indignant eyes. “For a curtained area that stinks of hor—?” He stopped himself. She held his mug close to her at ransom, he thought. It was raining heavily outside, and he was too tired to barter. He added two more shillings to his payment on the bar. She plonked the mug down and hurriedly gathered the coins as though a magpie was waiting to snatch them, and stuffed them in the pocket of her apron. He peered down at the two-thirds-full mug on the bar, sighed, and went to find a chair near the fire to dry his wet trousers.
He sat down in a large chair beside a wispy-headed old man smoking a well-gnawed pipe. “Greedy in here,” the little fellow said. The bard could barely hear him over the animated discussion on the table next to him. The old man, seemingly talking whether someone was there or not, continued with, “Greedy gets what they deserve.” The bard looked around, the reason for the seats by the fire being empty soon becoming clear.
There was nowhere else to sit.
“Are you a bard?” The old man asked, barely looking across at him as he puffed purple smoke into the air. The bard studied the leathery face. In the socket that wasn’t covered with a black, leather patch, a bright pale eye now fixed itself on him.
“I am, yes,” he said, sipping the pale and almost unpalatable ale.
“I got a story for you.” The old man, the excitement rising, fully turned his body toward the traveller and smiled, revealing his tombstone teeth.
“I should like to hear it,” the bard said. His damp bed in the stables could wait.
His new friend removed his pipe, looked around the inn, and crossed his legs. “All right… but this is the first I’ve told of this one.”
The bard smiled politely, trying not to roll his eyes. “Sounds riveting.”
On the banks of a brook where water forget-me-nots flourished, a farmer and his wife found a baby girl. In order to never forget where she came from, they called her Munin, meaning memory.
Whose baby it was, they couldn’t tell—no one ever came looking, so the baby they happily took to live with them. Perhaps the foundling was a gift. In any case, they interpreted it as one.
Little Munin was a strange child, different from the rest. Her baby skin soon changed; she was covered in little ridges that looked like hazel leaves. When the farmer’s wife called the doctor, he dismissed it as simply ‘childhood rash’ and suggested that she would grow out of it one day. “Be grateful that it isn’t measles, or mumps!” he said, closing his bag and tipping his hat to say good day.
The child had no hair to speak of, save for a small plume of feathers. Instead of a nose, she had two holes, but her eyes were big and lovely, flecked with gold.
Frightened by her scaly appearance, the other mothers in the village told their children to keep away, in case the little girl’s affliction was contagious.
Every day, little Munin played by herself, near the brook where she was found. Sometimes, she would doze in the rushes, warming her body in the light of the generous, golden sun.
One day, when Munin was lying still, but wide awake, she heard sobbing. She peeped over the bridge to look. On the bank sat an ugly girl, crying into her apron. Munin recognised her; a long time before, other children called her Piggy, and it had stuck ever since. “I wish I were pretty,” Piggy said.
Munin’s heart ached, for she wanted to make the girl happy. She smiled and whispered, “Go, be pretty.” Piggy fell asleep on the bank, and when she awoke, she screamed in delight when she saw her reflection in the water. The beautiful girl skipped off into the village.
The next day, a handsome boy came. He stood by the bank and sighed. Munin sat in the long grass, and bided her time. “I wish I was rich,” the boy said, chucking a stone into the brook. “Go, be rich,” Munin said. The boy fell asleep among the forget-me-nots, and when he woke, his pockets were heavy with coin.
The next day, a woman came, with worry drawn into her brow. “I wish I could have a child,” she said, as she looked at the field full of cows with their calves. “Go, have a baby,” little Munin said, watching from the rushes. After briefly sleeping in the blue flowers, the woman woke to the sound of her husband calling her. The baby cried to be fed. The woman, pinching herself in disbelief, hurried home to be with her child.
Each day, a new villager came to ask for a wish to be granted. Munin fulfilled them all.
At home, it was Munin’s mother who suggested she visit the brook and make a wish. “Why?” Munin asked.
“To free you of your affliction, of course,” her mother said.
“Do you not love me as I am?”
“Of course I do. But if Piggy is now pretty and Dick is now rich, perhaps there’s something in the water for you and all.”
As Munin walked through the village, she heard them whispering, saw them recoiling in disgust, and felt the stares—she learned were not quite hatred—more like morbid curiosity. She was a spectacle. A freak. She returned to the bank, and lay in the rushes, weeping.
After she had been alone for the day, several villagers came back to the bank. First, Munin wondered if they were looking for her. Still, she remembered how they looked at her, and dismissed such a fanciful thought. She listened instead.
“I have a boy, but I wish for a girl,” said the woman who’d just become a mother.
“I am not rich enough. The girl I want to marry is not impressed with my wealth,” Dick, the rich boy said.
To Munin’s surprise, Piggy was also there, complaining that the boy she loved didn’t love her in return. “My looks are for nothing,” she whined.
Munin’s heart sank, but the feeling didn’t last long, because sadness only sinks so low before the pressure forces it to become something else. None of these people were grateful. None of these people had been kind to Munin. Something bubbled inside of her, burning its way into her chest. Munin, ablaze with new-found fury, saw the world for the first time in all its vibrancy, and just as light reveals the places where shadows lurk, she didn’t like what she saw. Smoke emerged from her nostrils.
The ridges that had lain flat stood to attention, glittering in the sunlight. She thrashed the rushes with her new scaly tail, and stretched, to spread her vibrant wings. Serpentine claws replaced fingers, and the wrath of the great lizard had begun.
“Run!” Dick called, seeing the golden dragon emerging from the other side of the bank. The villagers fell over themselves trying to get away. Munin laughed.
She flew ahead of them, and took a deep breath. Blowing pure fire into the air, she swooped down and targeted the thatched roofs of their little, insignificant houses. People screamed and ran to the well for water, but that had a thatched roof, too.
Munin tumbled through the air, glittering in the sun. She laughed, roared and blew.
Tired from the destruction and bored of their screams, Munin retreated to a cave, and shut herself up in the darkness. Her parents, sorry for not accepting her as she was, left forget-me-nots, by way of apology. Piggy, no longer vain enough to need or appreciate it, left a silver mirror with an ivory handle. Dick brought a cart and left every single gold coin he’d ever owned. For the rest of their lives, and for the generations that came after, the villagers lay a legacy of gilded guilt outside the mountainside cave.
The old man looked to the bard and back to his drink. “Bet you’ve never heard that one before,” he said smugly.
“No,” the bard said, planting ruminating lips on the tip of his pipe. He struck a match, illuminating his face for a moment before the contents of the pipe caught on. “I always thought it was the dragons that were hoarders?” he asked as they smoked together. “You’re telling me they’re doing it for our own good?”
His smoking partner nodded. “If that’s what you think.”
The bard glanced over his shoulder. He watched the barmaid let the beer fall into perfectly vertical tankards, ignoring customers when they complained there was more head than beer. “Reckon she’s a dragon?”
The old man’s wispy white brows arched high up into his leathery forehead. “All I’ll say,” he began, blowing a long plume of smoke into the air, “is you should be glad you’re sleeping outside tonight.”
Thanks for reading. If you like my fiction, I currently have two novels out in the world, but I’m particularly excited to show you The Ring, which is out on 6th June 2025.
Great little read! Thanks for sharing. I've long said that we need more fantasy bard characters, so I hope this one is recurring.
This is one of your best fairytales yet - which is saying something, because they're all great. Hopefully soon enough you'll have enough to justify a book...