The Narrow Road Between Desires, page 12
They stayed together until they saw the amber lamplight in the window of his mother’s house. Then Bast stopped and let Rike take the final steps himself.
* * *
It was late at the Waystone Inn, and the last of the customers were gone. It had been a later, livelier night than normal, with all the news and Carter flush with extra coin.
But now, Bast and the innkeeper sat in the kitchen, making their own late dinner from the remainder of the stew and half a loaf of bread.
“So what did you learn today, Bast?” the innkeeper asked.
Bast grinned widely. “Today Reshi, I found out where Emberlee takes her bath!”
The innkeeper cocked his head thoughtfully. “Emberlee? The Alards’ daughter?”
“Emberlee Ashton!” Bast threw his arms up into the air and made an exasperated noise. “She’s only the third prettiest girl in twenty miles, Reshi!”
“Ah,” the innkeeper said, an honest smile flickering across his face for the first time that day. “You’ll have to point her out to me sometime.”
Bast grinned. “I’ll take you there tomorrow,” he said excitedly. “She’s sweet as cream and broad of beam.” His smile grew to wicked proportions. “She’s a milkmaid, Reshi.” He said the last with heavy emphasis. “A milkmaid.”
The innkeeper shook his head, even as a smile spread helplessly across his face. Finally he broke into a chuckle and held up his hand. “You can point her out to me sometime when she has her clothes on, Bast,” he said stolidly. “That will do nicely.”
Bast gave a disapproving sigh. “It would do you good to get out a bit, Reshi.”
The innkeeper shrugged. “It’s possible,” he said as he poked idly at his stew.
They ate in silence for a long while. Bast tried to think of something to say.
“I did get the carrots, Reshi,” Bast offered up as he ladled the last of the stew from the copper kettle into his bowl.
“Better late than never, I suppose,” the innkeeper said. The brief laughter from before had already spilled out of him, leaving him listless and grey. “We’ll use them tomorrow.”
Bast shifted in his seat, embarrassed. “I might have lost them afterwards,” he said sheepishly.
This wrung another smile from the innkeeper, tired but genuine. “Don’t worry yourself over it, Bast.” Then he paused, eyes narrowing as he focused on Bast’s hand. “How did you hurt yourself?”
Bast looked down at the knuckles of his right hand. They weren’t bleeding any more, but the injury was still obvious. His left hand had come off better and was only slightly bruised.
“I fell out of a tree,” Bast said. Not lying, but not answering the question, either. It was better not to lie outright. Even like this, a shadow of himself, his master was not an easy man to fool.
“You should be more careful, Bast,” the innkeeper said, prodding listlessly at his food.
“I was careful, Reshi,” Bast said. “I made sure to fall on the grass and everything.”
This drew another smile from the innkeeper, but not much more than that. “As little as there is to do around here, Bast, it would be nice if you spent more time on your studies.”
“I learned things today, Reshi,” Bast protested.
The innkeeper glanced up. “Really?” he asked, failing to keep the skepticism out of his voice.
“Yes!” Bast said, his voice high and impatient. “Loads of things! Important things!”
The innkeeper raised an eyebrow then, his expression growing sharper. “Impress me then.”
Bast thought for a moment, then leaned forward in his chair. “Well,” Bast said with conspiratorial intensity. “First and most important. I have it on very good authority that Nettie Williams discovered a wild hive of bees today.” He grinned enthusiastically. “What’s more, I hear she caught the queen….”
AUTHOR’S ENDNOTE
Part One: Lumpy Nothing-Flavored Water
I’m going to be honest with y’all here.
Over the years, I’ve had a lot of trouble getting things written. On rare occasion, it’s a fun sort of trouble. More of a challenge. Like trying to get your head around a riddle, or puzzling your way through an escape room.
But usually, it isn’t entertaining in the slightest. It’s like driving on a road full of deep potholes. Or trying to buy groceries during a tornado. Or like one of those dreams where you’re trying to go somewhere important, but no matter how hard you run, you just can’t seem to move….
Revising this story for publication has been the first sort of trouble. It ended up being much more complex than I’d anticipated. And while I felt guilty about how long it was taking, at every step I could feel the story getting better. Much better. So the extra trouble felt worthwhile…
But this author’s note? It’s been the second type of trouble. I put it off until the end of all the edits and my art direction because I thought it would be easy. Instead, here I am, trying to write it one more time almost a month after I meant to have it done.
The problem isn’t the writing itself. I’ve written, at my best guess, between 8,000 and 10,000 words of things I hoped would be an author’s note. I told the story of how “The Lightning Tree” came to be, then came to be something new. I wrote about my misadventures trying to come up with a new title. Musings about the nature of faerie tales. Something that turned into an essay about cultural universality of fortune-telling and an explanation of how Embrils came to exist in Temerant. Interesting asides. Philosophical snippets. Amusing anecdotes.
But no matter how I brought those things together, it didn’t work.
Odds are, you aren’t an author, so I’ll try and put this in another context.
Imagine going to the store, buying chicken and potatoes and carrots, then picking a bunch of fresh herbs, then spending all day making soup. You add salt and pepper and garlic. All things you enjoy. All things you know taste good. All things that should combine to make delicious soup.
And at the end, after all that work, despite everything, what you end up with is warm, lumpy, nothing-flavored water.
That’s been my last month. I keep bringing together bits that should make an author’s note, and instead I get long swath of lumpy, nothing-flavored text. It’s equal parts infuriating, frustrating, and terrifying.
So here I am. I have to finish this today. I’ve promised myself, my publisher, and my children.
My plan is what you’re seeing here. First, I’m going to be honest with you. I wanted to give you a really excellent author’s note. I wanted it to be entertaining, informative, thoughtful, clever, charming, insightful, funny, engaging, and delightful. I wanted it to hang a smile on your heart and make you forget the woes of the world. That’s the author’s note you deserve.
But I can’t seem to do that. I’m sorry. Imma do my best here, and I’m sorry if it’s not as good as any of us hoped.
The second piece of my plan is (I hope) ingenious: I’m going to fall back on the one thing I can always do no matter how hard my day has been. The one thing that I’ve never gotten tired of over the years. The one thing that always delights me.
I’m going to tell some stories about my kids.
Part Two: What My Children Have Taught Me About Stories
Let’s set the stage. Here are the Dramatis Personae:
Oot: My older boy. Early teen-ish. Precocious. Empathetic. Considerate. Long blond hair. My sweet little Viking boy.
Cutie: My younger boy. Ten-ish. Precocious. Empathetic. Impish. Long blond hair. My sweet little angel baby.
* * *
Back when Oot was around two years old, I told him many stories. But one of his favorites was the story of The Big Bad Wolf.
It’s the gold-standard for kid stories. It has everything. It’s the entire package.
I can actually sense-memory back to telling Oot this story. Him sitting in our big bed, just a little pink potato in a diaper, looking up at me. He’d listen and ask for it again and again. Because if you didn’t know, kids love hearing the same story over and over. And over.
Then one day, after I’d done an especially good job huffing and puffing (if I do say so myself), he looked at me and said in the broken-English baby talk that I understood perfectly. “Tell about the big GOOD wolf?”
It hit me like a thunderbolt. He loved this story, and, as we’ve already established, kids love hearing the same thing again and again. And again. If you’ve ever read to a kid, you know how bad this can get. They’ll call you out if you miss a single word in a story they love.
Nevertheless, I knew exactly what he was saying. I knew what he MEANT. I suddenly imagined him like a little movie producer giving me notes on my first draft of a screenplay. “Pat. Baby. Bubeleh. I love what you’ve sent me. It’s perfect. Drama! Brotherhood! The huffing. The puffing. Love it! Straw then sticks, then bricks? What a twist! And the moral at the end! Chef’s kiss! You’re a miracle worker!”
He pauses then, in my little imagining. He picks his next words carefully, not wanting to offend me….
“But this wolf. He eats these pigs. Right? And they’re, like, talking sentient creatures. Don’t you think that’s a little fucked up? I mean, I’m a kid and you’re telling me a story with the equivalent of a serial killer. I love how clever the final pig is at the end. He’s obviously the clever one. You established that with the bricks. But tricking the wolf down the chimney into a pot of boiling water. Are you trying to normalize torture and retributive murder? Where’s my happily ever after? Are you trying to sell vigilante justice to a two year old? I mean, he’s supposed to be pig-man. Not Batman. Am I right?”
And he was right. He was telling me he loved the story, but why did the wolf have to be a dick? More to the point, why did the wolf have to be a cannibal murderer whose behavior was so egregious that it could only be stopped by one of the most horrific deathtraps possible?
What he was asking for was, effectively, a story without all the conflict. Without tension and animosity. Without many of the things I’d been taught were essential to storytelling.
This wasn’t a totally new idea to me. I’d already spent 14 years writing a fantasy novel without a single sword-fight, goblin army, or looming apocalypse. I had specifically avoided having a god-lion tortured to death, or farm boys straight-up murk any tyrants or mad wizards. Nobody destroyed anything in a volcano thereby ruining magic forever and making all the elves sad enough to fuck off forever out of the world.
I’d always suspected that a good story didn’t need stakes that high. I wrote The Name of the Wind with that as one of my driving philosophies, and given how many people read it and recommended it to their friends, there’s some decent data showing I was right.
But it was there, laying in bed, that my little boy of two proved conclusively that we aren’t born bloodthirsty little monsters, addicted to acrimony and strife.
It was then and there that I learned down in my bones that stories could be kind and gentle while still being enjoyable. More of them should be. We love the huffing and puffing. We love the bricks. Why not leave behind the belief that there needs to be a bad wolf, or even a bad anything? Why not give us a good wolf instead?
And it’s literally only now, typing this, that I realize that’s what Bast is. He’s a good wolf.
(I don’t know about you. But I feel like this author’s note is going pretty well so far. I’m excited.)
* * *
Fast forward almost a decade. I’ve gotten into the habit of reading to my boys at night. All the Little House on the Prairie books. Some of Narnia. Willy Wonka (twice). The Hobbit (three times). The Last Unicorn. The Graveyard Book. And others, a wild eclectic smattering of various genres and time periods.
We’d started reading one of the old classics I’d been excited to bring to the boys. And while they liked it well enough, they weren’t enthralled. And, to my dismay, I wasn’t either. I was also surprised how hard it was to read aloud. The book was over sixty years old, and a lot of the sentence structure…Let’s just say it really didn’t roll off the tongue.
So we decided to switch books, and since I was thinking in terms of reading out loud, I jokingly mentioned I could read them one of my books. Specifically, The Slow Regard of Silent Things.
They were very excited at the thought. Startlingly excited. And I immediately regretted bringing it up. I felt awkward for some reason, though I was hard pressed to explain why.
More importantly, Slow Regard is a strange book. Don’t get me wrong. I love it. But it’s a book where nothing happens. It’s less a story and more a 30,000 word vignette. No traditional action. Or plot. Or dialogue. I once heard it described as “the story of a sad girl who picks things up and puts them down again,” and while that’s not particularly flattering, it’s 100% true.
But my boys were oddly enthusiastic. So I caved and offered a compromise. I’d read for 10 minutes. If they didn’t like it, or if I felt too weird, we could stop and there wouldn’t be any hard feelings either way.
So we lay down in bed and I started to read. Much to my surprise, it didn’t feel odd. I had done the audiobook back in the day, and I was right in remembering that it was easy, even fun, to read out loud.
What’s more, the boys were very into it. Like, on-the-edge-of-their-seats. They were intent and engaged with this odd, small story of a girl all on her own, thinking her thoughts and trying to move gently through her little underground world.
So I kept reading, and we got to the scene where Auri is swimming and Foxen slips from her fingers.
And Cutie, who is snuggled under the covers, supposed to be getting warm and drowsy and ready for sleep, instead sits bolt upright in bed. “Oh no!” he exclaims. His body is vibrating, his voice high, full of genuine distress. “They’ve been together FOREVER!”
We’d only been reading for 20 minutes. He didn’t know a single thing about my world or these characters.
Over the years, I’ve received a lot of good reviews. I’ve won awards. Hit bestseller lists. My books have sold over ten million copies in over 35 languages. I’ve had book signings with thousands of people. One in Madrid lasted for 14 hours. I’ve been guest of honor at a dozen conventions. Once, I was hugged by both Felicia Day and Neil Gaiman in the same day.
What I’m getting at here is that I have lived a rich, full life. I have my fair share of lauds and plaudits. And while I consider myself mostly a failure professionally, as I’m unproductively obsessive, inconsistent, and unpunctual, I’ve known for a long while that I’m good at doing words. I’m proud of my writing.
Nevertheless, when my younger boy sat up in bed, so obviously distressed, so obviously emotionally invested in Auri and Foxen despite having only known them for 16 pages…. I remember thinking, “I’m good at this,” in a new, different way.
It made me view Slow Regard in a different light, too. Not as an odd side project a few people might like because they were already fans of my work. But as something anyone could enjoy. As a gentle story that somehow still felt important and emotionally true. It was something I was proud of bringing into the world.
If not for that, I don’t think I would have felt justified in coming back to improve and revise “The Lightning Tree.” I certainly wouldn’t have done the revision equivalent of starting to replace the wallpaper in the hallway, only to have the project snowball until I’ve pulled down all the drywall, replaced all the wiring and plumbing, and decided to tear out a wall to make space for a kitchen island.
Now that I’ve finished it, I’m so glad I did. Rike and Bast deserved better, and now they have it.
Part Three: An Open Letter to My Children
Hello there, my sweet boys.
Just now, I finished reading the above author’s note to you to make sure you were comfortable with everything I’ve put in there. That you’re okay with me sharing those things with the world. As we’ve talked about many times, consent is important.
I wrote this story long ago. Oot, you were very young, and Cutie, you were mostly conceptual. That means all the children in here were created long before I had much experience with kids. More importantly, I hadn’t yet met the older versions of you.
This means a couple things.
First, none of them are based on you or things you’ve done or said. I mention this because I know folks will be tempted to draw parallels, or puzzle out what came from where. It’s human nature. We want to unravel things and understand their origins. You might be tempted to do that yourself in the future, wondering if there was some commentary about you or your behavior buried in here. There isn’t. Don’t make yourself crazy looking for that.
Second, I just want to say I’m pretty proud of how good a job I did on these kids, given my lack of experience. They turned out pretty great, in my opinion. Apparently I’m good at making stuff up. Who knew?
Sixth and lastly, thank you for helping me write this book, even though you didn’t know that’s what you were doing. Thank you for letting me read the entire thing out loud to you while I was revising. It was such a joy to share it with you. Your reactions helped me fine-tune things, and reassured me that while the story has much that is hidden, none of the essentials were buried too deep.
Thirdly, thank you for being patient today. These summer days together are indescribably precious. The weather was lovely, our garden was ripe, we had plans to play a board game. I’d hoped to finish this author’s note in about two hours…instead it has taken more than seven. You never complained or were anything other than perfectly gracious and understanding. You amaze me with your kindness and consideration. Even now I hear you downstairs, setting the table for dinner, talking and singing.
