Fairy Tale excerpt: The King's Highway and Forgotten Garden

He didn’t remember how it had begun, or how long he’d suffered the scaly skin and the ache between his shoulder blades. Headaches that sliced upward through the base of his skull and burned through his temples left him heaving and gasping, barely able to shelter himself in the nearest shrub, before his gut spewed forth like the fiery mountains across the far valley. For days uncountable, he’d lain lost and timeless in his dark cottage, praying for the sun to set and not knowing if it did. Pale and watery as the thin moon above, he stumbled on rattling legs to his empty cupboard and cold hearth with such a hunger, and such a thirst.

Because he had nowhere else to go, he returned to his job of clearing field and forest for the King’s Highway. From cool sunrise to dusty twilight, he bent his back to the repetition of digging and chopping, hauling and laying gravel. His fellow laborers shook their heads, and some stopped to clap him on the shoulder with a rough joke about too many tankards. He returned their greetings with a grimace and a grunt.  And all too soon, they turned away to their own labors, and left him to himself.  The road, as well as the day, was long for all of them. They paused only at noontime to rest in the shade outside the King’s Garden.

That was where he first saw her, first heard her singing rich and low, a crazy girl enchanting weeds to wonders, transforming thorns into thimbles of sweet berries, and delighting over pale flowers that blinked like the flash of a firefly, and were gone. Her dark-lashed eyes glowed green, and warmed the deep blue depths of his own. Come evening, she brewed potions that eased his headaches, and massaged warming oils into his aching shoulders. He marveled at the strength in her small brown hands, and enclosed them in his own, and they were wed.

By the time their first child was born, his headaches had gone and he said he had no need of her salves. The King’s Highway required his strong shoulders, he proclaimed, and the King’s Garden could find itself another drudge. She was to give up her herbal craft and tend to kettle and kinder, while he journeyed to the far end of the road, beyond the fen and beside the mountain.

By the time his father returned from the Highway, the child was old enough to hold himself up at the table and mouth the gold coin his father had brought home. The child’s eyes were wide and watchful of the thunder and heat of this man, so unlike his mother. The girl, now wife and mother, wondered at the cost of such coin, barely recognizing the boy she had married in this man from the mountains. 

Yet he delighted in his son, tossing the child high in the air with a roar, and catching and holding him in the protection of his well-muscled arms. At first the boy was frightened.  But soon he grew to love the flight, and even more, the return to the warmth and scent of his father’s broad chest.

She was also frightened. In the passing days of his time at home, she had noted the growing unsteadiness in her husband’s gait, and the loss of sureness in his hands. When she urged him to be more careful, he turned his roar upon her, eyes darkened to midnight.  Silenced and chastened, she turned on her garden, pulling savagely at the weeds she once would have nurtured, replacing berries with potatoes, and flowers with kale...

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The King's Highway and Forgotten Garden-Full text 

© Liz Husebye Hartmann