Lessoc Fountain - a fairy-creature tale

Ch. 3.1 The Locket

Her stomach clenched as she strayed further from the road.

"Stay on the path." Cocot's mother had told her often enough. She took each step up the stairs carefully, not making more than whispers of sound with her feet. It was day and if she wasn't on the road, at least she was on a path.

She frowned, shaking thoughts of her mother from her head. Her fingers reached up to take the silver, heart-shaped locket hanging on her chest and squeezed until it hurt.

It wasn't her fault her mother was dead. At worst, it was an accident, but most likely just a coincidence. She hadn't killed her mother.

But it was after the bright bit of crystal had fallen out of the locket and disappeared in her hand that she had begun to see the field fairies, and sometimes other things among the trees. Faces. Hands. Skittering movement. Today, she saw nothing. There had been a drop of blood and a pin prick on her palm where the shard had landed.

The locket's sides bit into skin. Trees loomed high above and the foot path wound between them, hugging the steep side of the hill.

They had only come one time this way and Cocot had never ventured into the forest alone. Not that she remembered, anyway.

Nothing would harm her if she stayed on the path and it was day. She repeated it and believed it until she reached the last bend before the fields. This final curve around the rocky face of the hill had been difficult for her mother. She had been coughing despite the heat of the end of summer, had drawn her hood far over her face. It had saved them so much time, though, to take the shortcut.

Her mother's hand had been trembling in Cocot's. "Only during the day," she had said.

To reach the field, Cocot had to walk past an ancient spruce growing from a crevasse in the cliff – a lichen covered evergreen with great, drooping branches and deep shadows at its roots. Next to it was a mountain stream that cut the path in two.

The wind whispered among the needles, making sounds that could almost be words. She thought she understood the word lonely.

Heart racing, she sprinted past the tree and across the fallen trunk that made a bridge to the fields. She only slowed when she reached the sunlight.

Squaring her shoulders, she marched across the green field.

The farm house was a large building standing two stories high; the front part was of stone with wooden beams and served as the home, while the larger, wooden part in back was the barn. She knocked at the front door and when no one answered, decided to check the barn. As she rounded the corner, she nearly bumped into the farmer; a grumpy old man, gnarled and grizzled with age.

"Oh, I'm sorry! Excuse me," Cocot apologized. "I came here to ask if I could purchase a few—"

The man continued walking brusquely past her, not even looking at her. Cocot fell against the barn to get out of his way.

"Excuse me!" she called, after recovering from her surprise. Maybe he was going blind, she thought.

He kept walking away as though he didn't hear her, grunting some with the effort of carrying two heavy pails of milk.

Maybe he was hard of hearing, too. She huffed in frustration. Last summer, the farmer had employed a couple of farmhands; she would look for someone else to sell her what she needed.

She walked up the hill past the barn and finally spied a boy on the other side of the pasture repairing a wood and wire fence. Filing past huge cows with their faces buried in the grass and bells clanging loudly, she finally reached him.