CHAPTER ONE
I WONDER WHAT THE WIZARD WOULD TELL me now, if he could see me standing with my elbows resting atop the stone wall looking down below into the lazy river moat with literal alligator floaties. I wonder what he would say if he could see my swirling thoughts. I wonder how he would advise me to make the world tamer given that the whole world around me has changed.
The moat encircles a castle—again, literal. I shut my eyes and give myself a moment to recalibrate like Dr. Jenkins—my teletherapist and my closest thing to an actual wise wizard—suggested I do when I feel overwhelmed. Close your eyes, breathe, and just let yourself exist in the moment with no expectations, Madeline.
I try. It doesn’t really work. The huge stone castle doesn’t change back into a worn-but-loved wooden facade. The moat doesn’t dry up and disappear from existence to match the Stormsworth Faire of my memory, the Stormsworth Faire of last year, where Mom is sick but still here. Where she is slow and tired but still sits in a folding chair stringing beads for a bracelet.
Everything, literally everything, is different this year. And I’m trying my best to take it all in and accept and breathe through the changes, but it’s hard. So hard.
A memory flashes of elementary-school-aged me being perennially unimpressed by Ren faire structures and castles and life-size papier-mâché dragons, and Mom asking what it would take to thrill me.
A moat, I told her. An actual moat.
But here it is, the one thing I said it would take to make a Ren faire stand out from all the rest, the one thing that would impress me, and she’s not here to see it.
Mom died last year, near the end of the Stormsworth Faire, actually. It all seemed so sudden, even though she had been in and out of hospitals for a while.
I breathe in, exhale, then take in the air again to fill every minuscule space in my lungs while my fingers play with the globe that still hangs from my neck. I tug fretfully at it, like it’s a chain I can pull to hear the wizard’s low rumble or Mom’s light, smiling voice, but the only sounds that reach my ears are of people laughing and splashing in the water below as bored lifeguards watch from their mini turret-shaped stands.
“Please, fair maiden,” an exasperated voice says from behind me, “for the love of the kingdom and also my sanity, do not tell me thou art thinking about dropping that hunk of greasy meat in the moat.”
I jerk upward from where I was leaning against the wall, quickly taking in the paper-wrapped turkey leg in my hand that I forgot I was holding before turning around.
The voice belongs to a bard, but unlike most bards I’ve come across at faire, this one is young, like maybe-my-age young, and he carries a lute. It’s rarer than you’d think to hear a proper lute at Ren faire. Lots of bards and minstrels are perfectly happy with their acoustic guitars, ukuleles, and the occasional accordion, but this is the real deal with a stocky pear-shaped body that blocks nearly the entirety of its player’s slim frame.
He is the most ordinary-looking boy I’ve ever seen. If he was cast in a movie, he would be Teenager #3 or not credited at all. He would be a guy waiting in line for coffee, a blurry figure hunched over a book in the background of a library scene, or maybe, if the casting director was feeling particularly kind, the boy with one line of discernable dialogue on a crowded street. His hair is brown, his skin is white, and his eyes are that kind of muddy dark color that might be brown, might be black, but you’re never going to bother looking closely enough to find out, especially because it’s hard to get past the thick, very non-time-period black-framed glasses that are a touch too big for his face.
“I wasn’t going to drop it,” I tell him.
The bard shrugs and strums a note. “You wouldn’t be the first to drop something in the moat just to watch it splash.”
“It’s opening weekend,” I say dubiously, “and this moat didn’t exist last year.”
None of this existed last year. My finger twitches toward my hip, where my travel journal usually rests, eager to catalog another tally mark beneath the things that are different at Stormsworth heading I know I’ll make tonight. Of all days to forget my journal in Britomart.
“I know,” the bard says, oblivious to my thoughts. “It’s brand new, and already somebody had the bright idea to drop in at least a dozen foam swords and shout, ‘Fight, you fools!’”
I level a look at him. “You dropped swords into the moat? You know there’s always a code of conduct for faire staff and entertainers, right? I’m guessing ‘don’t throw things in the moat’ is on there.”
He grins. “It’s not.”
“Probably because it’s understood,” I say. “You’re going to get fired.”
He plucks at a string without breaking eye contact. He’s the kind of sunshiny that pisses me off: willfully cheerful. Stupidly optimistic and carefree like it’s his only personality trait, which it probably is.
“It’s fine. I know the faire owners.”
And just like that, I’m tired of this conversation. Not because the bard is particularly exhausting—even though he is—or because it’s two in the afternoon and I haven’t eaten lunch yet—even though I haven’t—but because most conversations make me feel tired since my mom died. Because every single one is another string of words that separates me from her last. Every new person I meet is another person that won’t get to meet my mom or see her flitting from stall to stall at faires to laugh with friends.
Everything, literally everything, feels like a reminder that she isn’t here at our favorite faire.
Which I knew, of course. I knew that this faire in particular would be the hardest to weather without Mom, because this is Stormsworth. This is where so many of Mom and Dad’s older friends who have left the circuit come each year as a kind of homecoming. It also used to be one of the more humbly decorated faires, and for that reason, it was one of Mom’s favorites.
She loved the ramshackle stalls, the dirt pathways, the baseball-diamond-turned-arena. She said it felt like home. And because I grew up coming here, grew up looking forward to it year-round as a place where aunts who were not aunts and uncles who were not uncles would scoop me up in hugs and say things like, My, how you’ve grown and Already taller than your mother, it felt like home to me, too.
And it was the last faire she attended.
So I’m too tired to play with this bard, even though it’s a rarity to see someone my age who is not a patron and even rarer for it to be someone I’ve never encountered in the circuit before. He’s definitely a local, definitely someone who got an “in” because he knows the new owners. I haven’t met the new owners, but I’m nursing a quiet grudge against them because they scrapped every little thing about the old Stormsworth Faire in favor of this overproduced, expensive monstrosity.
“This is lunch for my dad,” I say to the bard, meekly gesturing behind me with the turkey leg. “I’d better take it to him before it gets cold.”
“Wouldn’t want that, Gwen,” he says, falling in line with me as I turn to walk back toward our stall. I open my mouth to tell him my name isn’t Gwen—and I have no idea why he would think it is—but he cuts me off with a waggle of his eyebrows and “This sounds like…” He pauses for dramatic effect. “… a Journey.”
I unfortunately recognize the first few notes he plays.
“God, please don’t,” I beg. “Also, ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’ isn’t exactly a song from the Renaissance.”
“Eh,” the boy says, still strumming, still annoyingly walking beside me. “Nobody cares, so long as you throw in a hearty ‘huzzah’ once in a while.”
He loudly sings the opening line of the song, and somehow manages to yell “Huzzah!” even more loudly after the girl takes the midnight train going anywhere. The answering “huzzah” from nearby faire-goers is—as is typical—on the tipsy side of enthusiastic.
I envy the girl on the train from the song. I’d pay a hefty price to be anywhere else right now. People are staring at us, smiling at us. The attention makes my skin itch, and I’m achingly aware of where my elastic faux corset digs beneath my arms.
“Would you quit it?” I whisper-yell under my breath, grabbing the bard’s arm.
My actions regrettably have no effect on his strumming, but he does stop singing and turns to smile at me.
“Gwen, you wound me. Is it the song? Because trust me: I know plenty of others.”
“Just stop,” I say. “Please. And my name’s not Gwen. It’s—”
“No, no.” He holds up his hands, cutting me off. “Your name is Gwen. I won’t hear of you being anything else.”
His tone is easy, jovial. Too jovial. Like we’re friends. And maybe it’s because I was just thinking of her and Stormsworth and everything, but it reminds me … It reminds me a little bit of Mom. She was exuberant, too.
I don’t mean to snap at him so harshly, but I do.
“Go away, bard.”
My words must not come out as menacing as I thought, because his grin only widens.
“Don’t be mad, Gwen. We’ve only just met. I can’t possibly have annoyed you yet. That’s not scheduled for another”—he pushes back a sleeve and checks his very not-Renaissance Apple Watch—“ten minutes.”
We’re almost to the stall now, and I can’t bear letting him near Dad. Dad, who will look relieved and happy and a bit sad all at the same time when he sees me with someone else my age.
He’s worried about me. I know because he’s been doing that thing where he hovers a little more than usual after my Thursday appointments with Dr. Jenkins. And he’s constantly asking “All right, Maddie?” or “Called Fatima lately?” when he thinks I’ve been too quiet for too long, which is often. Which isn’t fair, because he’s quiet, too.
I stop in the middle of the stone path—the one that just last year was reddish-brown dirt—and face the bard.
“You’re ahead of schedule,” I mumble to him. “You annoyed me the second I saw you.”
For a moment, he looks hurt. His eyes—decidedly brown now that I’m looking—squint a little at the corners and his lips curve down. He recovers quickly, though, and the bright smile of a bard with no worries or cares slips back into place.
“But I need a muse, Gwen,” he says, holding up his lute. “For my songs.”
“Then I suggest you keep looking,” I say, turning on my heel. “Go bother someone else.”
I blessedly don’t hear his footsteps or strums following me. Good riddance. And yet something in my heart jerks sideways when I glance behind me and see him walking away, his shoulders slightly lowered. The nudge of guilt makes me angry, and when I hear the distant opening chords of “Dancing with Myself” on a lute, I get angrier.
“Here,” I say, irritably stepping into our stall and shoving Dad’s turkey into his hand. “Dennis said to tell you hi and to come get your own leg next time.”
Dad’s bushy eyebrows scrunch over his nose, the only indication that he has detected my foul mood.
“All right, Maddie?”
I try not to sigh. “Fine, Dad.”
A long pause as he wrestles with the paper of his lunch.
“Not hungry today?”
“Big breakfast,” I say. Which is true, but not the whole truth. I’m too flustered by the changes to eat—and by the bard, if I’m honest with myself—but there’s something else that’s been bothering me. With the stall momentarily empty of customers and my guilt-fueled anger bubbling in my stomach, I drag my workbench stool over in front of Dad’s cash register.
“How did you not know about this?” I ask him.
Dad finishes chewing. “About what?”
I point over my shoulder toward the faire. “That.”
“Oh,” Dad says. “That.”
As if there would be anything else to talk about.
He pauses to take a bite of turkey, chews like he’s trying to break the world record for slowest mouthful of food ever consumed, and then coughs into his elbow. “I guess I did know about it.”
I figured as much, which leads me to my next question. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Dad isn’t like Mom. His emotions don’t flash across his face for anyone to read. You have to know where to look, and then really look, to get an inkling of what he’s thinking.
“It was a lot, Maddie,” he says after taking forever to chew again. “I knew Stormsworth would be different—the structures, the events, the setup, everything. And I didn’t think you could handle any more … news.”
“But how did everything change?” I persist. “Marge and David didn’t have this kind of money. Where did they get the cash to revamp everything? And why would they sell it afterward?”
“They don’t. They didn’t.”
I pause as my brain fumbles for answers. “Oh my god. They died, didn’t they? Is that what you’re afraid to tell me?”
Dad’s eyes widen. “No, no. They just retired, kid. They were old, you know? This place was a passion project and then the new buyers swooped in with an offer they’d be crazy to refuse and then changed everything. It happened … Well, it happened last August. I heard about it through the grapevine, of course, but I didn’t want to bother you with it when you were … when we were still…”
Dad gets quiet in the way he does when he looks too directly at the hole where Mom should be. I’ve never mentioned it to Dr. Jenkins or to Dad, but when he gets the faraway look in his eyes, the one where he’s flipping back through his own memories of Mom, it makes me scared. It makes me worried one day he’ll go into the memories and not come back.
The story goes that when Dad met Mom, he was reading a book and looked up to see a princess standing before him.
“Bright as starlight on a dark winter’s night,” he used to whisper to me when I’d request the tale of their meeting as a bedtime story. “But prettier. Much prettier.”
Dad didn’t want to go to the Renaissance faire. His friends dragged him out of their college dorm, away from his precious studies for a day of drinking beer and betting on jousting matches. As always, Dad managed to sneak a book with him and eventually lost his boisterous friends and sat in the corner of the smallest tavern alone to read in peace.
He was halfway through his latest reread of The Lord of the Rings, he said, when he felt someone staring at him.
When he looked up, there was Mom, shirking her princess duties to get closer to the long-haired, bespectacled boy with the frown between his eyebrows and the finger poised to flip the page.
“I never dropped books,” Dad would say. “I always set them down, and I usually wasn’t happy about it. But when I saw your mom for the first time”—and he would always pause to laugh here—“I forgot all about my book. I forgot about everything except her. Just her.”
Mom would usually come in at that part of the story, folding herself tight into Dad’s other side, all three of us crammed on the bottom bunk that served as my room. She would kiss his cheek, reach across to smooth back my hair, smile, and say, “It was only the once, but it was such a loud thump in the quiet tavern, we both jumped and he spilled his ale.”
Sometimes I would demand to see Dad’s copy of The Two Towers, the pages forever rippled by the upset beer, but usually I would just tuck myself farther into our little family nest, reveling in my parents’ love story.
I try to remember the nest and keep some of the bitterness out of my voice when I say, “You should have told me. You know it’s my favorite faire, that this was Mom’s last faire.”
Dad flinches, but I press on. “Why the hell wouldn’t you mention it was going to be different this year?”
“It’s not all different,” Dad argues. “The new owners have employed most of the usual crowd. It’s the people who make this place special, you know? That hasn’t changed.”
It’s cheesy, what he says, but it makes me think of the bard again, of snubbing him and his enthusiasm that reminds me of Mom. It’s not Dad’s fault—or the bard’s, for that matter—that everything is different. It’s not the bard’s fault that his enthusiasm brushed up against memories of Mom.
I pull on the globe around my neck again.
“I’ve changed my mind,” I tell Dad. “I’m going to go grab some lunch.”
Copyright © 2023 by Ashley Schumacher