Travel, Always
Magrose’s life wasn’t too different from most children’s; she lived with her father, Aamon, in their home, and they traveled to find business for his craft. They ate and slept under the stars at night, traveled the land by day, and for those two things they were content. He was always teaching her songs, for he loved music,
"As dearly as the earth and sky, but more than those I love you, and I long to hear you sing with me."
The two would sing along the paths during the day, and Aamon would sing alone at night after she had fallen asleep. Whenever they sang, it was always in the key of the small organ playing from the cart’s interior, a slow methodical tune whose rhythm kept pace with their speed along the road. This was their life, simple and happy, for many years.
It was a revelation to her when, in a passing conversation with a customer’s son, she learned most children had two parents. While that had created some small questions about her parentage, Maggie didn’t start asking about her mother until a few years later; Maggie was not without friends while traveling on the road, and though they were transient, most children were eager to be friendly, play, and talk. In another town, while stopping to attend to a client whose payment warranted an extended stay, Maggie had briefly become friends with a tanner’s daughter. The girl was a little older than Maggie, and as such had the right to decide what the two would play. Upon meeting, their first order of business, she had proclaimed, was to make circlets out of dandelions so that they could be mistaken for royalty. With disbelief Maggie had watched as the stems were woven together and tied into chains, though when her circlet was finished she’d donned it with glee and satisfaction. Maggie had been skeptical that crowns could be made from dandelions, but it was soon clear that the older girl knew many important things she did not. Maggie learned a great many things in the week the two played together, like how leather was actually cow’s skin, how most boys weren’t a smart as girls because they grew slowly by comparison, and how a child was made:
"See a Mum and a Dad, when they get old enough that they haven’t got much else to live for, they make a wish and it either turns into a baby or a pile of gold. If you get the gold first you become a king or something like, and if you get the baby first you never get any more wishes after that."
This seemed sensible enough to Maggie. Later that night Maggie had asked her father where her mother was. All he said in response was,
"We were not what she wanted. She chose to follow her own path."
Maggie was still very young, so this answer, too, seemed very sensible; she enjoyed her life sitting atop their cart, alone under the sky as they roamed along the countryside. Any toy, piece of clothing, or sweet thing she ever wanted, her father bought for her, and any illness she contracted or injury she ever received was swiftly cured or mended. She was happy with just a father and no mother, she reasoned, and though she found it curious that her mother would want to be elsewhere, she imagined her mother must be happy too; she could be adventuring somewhere, or maybe driving her own cart from town to town, alone and free to do as she pleased.
Over time, these thoughts developed into a game; if her father seemed familiar with any women he dealt with, she would try to guess if one of them could be her mother. She would ask her father sometimes with certainty,
"That was my mother wasn’t it? That was her!"
She would go on, inventing the story of how they met, or how the details of the woman’s clothes were a sign of true nobility, or surely that her hair was so similar to Maggie’s that it must be her! And, when it was finally his turn to answer, he would grin and finish the game with the same, small song:
"Magrose, sit atop the cart and watch the path with quiet heart."
His calming voice (and perhaps it was helped by the knowledge that she wouldn’t get any answers) would calm her eagerness, and she would return dreamily to watching the world pass her by. The noise of her questions would dull, but the quiet, subtle desire for something she could not name would reflect back at her from the mountains that were always in the distance, or a creek babbling nearby but just out of sight.
Her father spent most of his days inside the cart, working on the charms he sold to people from all over: spells that would make crops grow, or heal strange growths, or rid someone of a curse placed on them by a jealous suitor. He was a bone-worker, and though Maggie didn’t understand the nature of his work completely, she knew that it was his magic that pulled their cart along it’s way.
She’d learned this on a rainy Spring day just a little past her seventh birthday, while they were traveling from Grimslow to Fortnight. Bumping along the slick road, their cart suddenly lost traction and slid off the path. One of the wheels had ridden up on a large, jagged stone while the other lay trenched in the earth, shattering the fragile bone axle which secured the two wheels. The cart’s left wheel came free as the axle broke, the right side careening over the edge of the upturned stone. After a very rough landing then cart pivoted in circles, spraying up mud and digging a wide, circular trough into the path. Through this ordeal, Maggie and her father had been thrown abruptly into the ceiling and then into the cabin walls. As the axel spun freely, the small organ in the cabin to begin whirring at a faster tempo. Maggie’s heart felt as though it were conducted by the organ, immediately racing as if to keep up with the mad whirring of the device. Then, after the split second of weightlessness, the shock of the fall and resulting impact had smacked the wind out of her stomach. Fortunately, the great swinging force of the spinning cart only persisted for a moment before her father’s strong and nearest arm wrapped around her like a vice, while the other reached up to the organ and pulled a pin from it. All went quiet and still, and only the muted noise of rain outside the cart remained. In the whole of her short, young life, Maggie had never experienced her mortality so keenly. Her father carefully cradled her and extracted them both from the wreckage. She clung to him for the better part of an hour, emptying her emotions into the lapel of his traveling leathers. Never stirring her from his embrace, he gently checked her for injury. Only once satisfied Magrose was both physically free from harm and no longer distressed, did Aamon move to tend to the cart.
Her father was a man dedicated to preparation and caution, and as he repaired the cart he explained its making and workings to her; structurally, it was completely made of animal bone, enchanted to be durable under normal conditions. But spells do not maintain themselves, and it had been rainy for almost a month.
“Water is usually flexible, the base of power for many spells and workings. Rain, however, is a leech,” he had explained. "Even so, working spells in the rain is not a problem if you can work them under cover."
As he repaired the axle, Maggie had been tasked with providing cover by holding a long, thin leather sheet above him. She couldn’t manage this without spreading her arms to their full length and gripping each end, and she had fun for a while imagining herself to be the handle portion of a living umbrella. Once the two had attended to the outer mechanisms and renewed the spells on the cart’s exterior, they moved on to the organ inside. The small organ in the cabin was also made of bone, though these weren’t like the large whale ribs which created the larger structure of their cart, or the bear vertebrae and femurs that composed the wheels and spokes. Almost as if looking at it for the first time, she saw clearly that the organ was made of small, thin, segments of bone from a multitude of bird wings. They had been meticulously cemented into rings to form the organ pipes.
"And not just any birds Maggie," he’d said, "All of these bones have been gathered from songbirds, and their gift is very precious. It’s important we treat this instrument with great respect. This organ is how their song lives on, and how we too move forward along our path."
The box shaped mechanism attached to the axle was well beyond her comprehension. Composed entirely out of some kind of chitinous material, it looked to Maggie like a great beetle. Her father explained that, by these mechanisms, the movement of the cart would force the organ to grind and create the song, which, in turn, propelled their cart when he wasn’t singing. This was the first time that Maggie realized the power of the songs her father sang. Though such power intrigued her, she couldn’t help but quietly mourn the bones of so many birds. After repairing the cart and beginning on their way again, Maggie looked through the rain at passing trees and apologized to imagined families of birds.
Some nights when stopping in a village Aamon would leave her alone, locking her in the cart and promising to be back before dawn. He would return, singing a song he had learned from his master as an apprentice the whole way:
"I’ve your promise in my satchel,
if your promise proveth true,
I’ll have a spell for you my dear,
I’ll work the bones for you.
Your bargain made will carry
pleasant notes beyond the veil
but if you think to cross me dear,
Your bones will join my peal."
It was a strange song to hear her father sing; she only knew him to be gentle, and couldn’t imagine any curse coming from his lips. He had told her that this song was part of a binding; the people he made spells for did not always hold true to their word, and though in the past he had been remiss holding his clients to their promises, he had learned to be more cautious. The song, sung after a deal had been struck, would assure swift retribution befell those that could not uphold their end of the bargain. That was all Maggie knew, and all she cared to know. It impacted her life very little as she grew, for all who knew the bone-worker Aamon knew not to cross him; never once in her childhood had her father needed to call upon the bones to extract payment or exact revenge. Even the folk who were strangers to Aamon and his child Maggie had but to look at his necklace to know what kind of fate befell his betrayers. He wore only one bone in the pendant of his necklace: a knuckle from a finger, sized as if from a woman’s hand, with a ring of rusted iron round it.