What was July but sun and heat and more sun? Terina wiped the droplets from her forehead and wished for the crisp days of October. Grunting slightly, she pushed the wooden cart forward. In the noon warmth, she wanted to simply lie down in the shade beneath it and nap the afternoon away. But she was due in Ladenville before dark, to set up for the next day’s festival.
It had been more than two years since she’d attended the festival, and she didn’t recognize the harsh landscape that surrounded her: the dry grasses, the trees whose leaves were mostly wrinkled and yellow, the dusty creek beds. It should have been a verdant season, but a drought had sucked the life out of the countryside.
Her own hamlet, miles back, was a lucky oasis still green and lush.
Had the townsfolk of Ladenville not spoken to their resident merlin? Bade him summon the rain beasts?
A man carrying a burlap bag over his shoulder approached Terina on the path. Sweat soaked his shirt. He nodded at her and she nodded back.
“Sir, can you spare the time for a short question?” Terina wiped her forehead again.
“Aye,” the man said, but stood away from her, cautious.
“I am several years away from this land, headed to the Brine Festival. Why such dryness?”
The man frowned and spat at the ground. “Our merlin passed on more than a year gone now, and no one left has the knowledge to call the rain.”
Eyes wide, Terina tried to imagine such a scenario. “The Fates are often fickle. My sympathies, sir.”
He nodded again and went on down the path.
Rummaging in her pack, Terina pulled out a flask of water and sipped; the aridness made her thirsty. She contemplated her next steps: Maybe the Brine Festival was a bad idea. Drought made people irritable and less likely to spend their coins. When she slipped the flask back into her pack, her hand brushed the bottle of elixir.
Uncorking it, she sniffed the sweetness of ripe berries. She knew only a brief sketch of the rain ritual—not being a full-fledged merlin, but it was worth a try. She held the bottle above her head, letting the desiccating breeze lift the scent upward.
“Iniye ab-wo neq,” she recited. There was another step that she tried to remember. A tuft of sedge? A handful of creek mud? The small rill that crossed her path contained neither. Every creek stone she turned over yielded only hard, cracked earth.
Digging again in her pack, Terina located the peach she’d squirreled away for a snack. Soft with ripeness, the fruit might work. Holding the peach aloft as she had the elixir, she squeezed it until the juices ran down her arms and dripped to the ground.
She repeated the incantation and waited several moments.
In the deep blue of the sky, the smallest of cumulous clouds popped up.
She waited again, this time for the cloud to spawn more clouds. But the cumulous remained solitary.
With a sigh, Terina cleaned the juice from her arms and closed her pack. Pushing hard against the cart, she persuaded it to roll onward, to the north and east, toward Ladenville.
Behind her, as her one step became ten, and then stretched to a quarter mile, the water vapor in the blazing heavens condensed. Thunderheads mushroomed and spread, cutting off the sun. And the rain beasts rumbled long and low.
More of Dianna’s Stories
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The post promised an autumnal birding phenomenon not to be missed. Steph wasn’t really a birder—she could never tell one sparrow from another—but she did like birds.
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An overnight stay at a small New England inn proves a challenge when the guests in the next room launch their own plans for the evening.
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In the shade of a red maple, Ana helped spread the tablecloth over the picnic table and stepped back to let her family lay out the food: tuna salad, pasta salad, chips, grapes, strawberries, brownies, muffins.
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Emma worked her way through the tables of used books laid out at a community fair in Bucks County. Books! As if she didn’t have enough of them on her bookcases and her bedside table. Balancing an armful of books—mysteries, a literary classic, two romances—she spied a familiar cover.
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The night the eyes appeared in the window for the fourth time was the night Casie moved to the guest room, leaving Benjamin to sleep alone in the master.
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