Story: Be a Helper (part one)

Be A Helper

(part one)

Now it is the case with sprites, that one strong rule curtails them. In the Fairy Realm are a thousand variants, as to types and strengths of magic; and likely a thousand areas of specialization. Groundworts and lugdors have their wishes, as do common newts and flying squirrels, as do full-grown men and women.

A sprite has the power to grant any wish, provided it is helpful to its requestor. In the Council’s opinion, given in the case of Nuthatch v. Charming (Prince), the Sages have noted that everything is ultimately unhelpful to everyone. The recipient of a wish must therefore have expected it do good, whether it eventuated so or not.

This ruling (which is Magic’s, not the Council’s) circumvents greed, and lust, and cowardice, and all shades of anger, and goes far even against false humility.

Bede Dwale was a sage, though not the Council-worthy sort. He kept an excellent house, a tidy and pleasant house, with ground-floor rooms for himself and Jorinda, and three upper stories for boarders and guests. Five beds on the first; next, a private apartment; above, boxed provisions against flood and invaders. But four beds even in these attics—and against the threat of a royal visit, a pair of elfin cabinet beds, canopied and curtained. Bede’s house was especially open to sprites; he had made it his personal quest to rescue and teach meaningful work to as many as word-of-mouth brought his way.

His rooms just now accommodated a handful. The apartment was Bunting and Finch’s, mother and daughter, all theirs for the festooning, the refurnishing, the emptying and filling of closets…

As, on a technicality, sprites are permitted to please one another’s goodhearted whims.

And as they are goodhearted creatures.

Bede had his three bachelor sprites as well, each straggled in independently, each a refugee from some damaging excess. (Left to judge for themselves, sprites have a fatal inclination to hear without listening.)

The month was March, the weather unseasonable. Dire winter a week ago; summer today. Bede farmed at the Realm’s edge. The western End of Things was thought to be touched by ocean, but all the land a sane person would set foot on was flat between forbidding cliffs, and the undulating hills known as the Pocketlands.

Over the horizon one saw a scrub of scald and despair; beyond, very far to be seen, were mountains. Bede’s six hills had no roads. The people who farmed here walked to their barns, their orchards, their fields, and the paths they needed grew in place.

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Be a Helper

Be a Helper (part two)

(2021, Stephanie Foster)