A Knot in the Grain by Robin McKinley Page A

go.”
    It was a struggle for Gelther, for he loved hunting best of anything when there were no wars to be fought; but he was fond of his wife, and she had never asked him such a thing before. Indeed, she asked him little enough at any time—and, well, she was a woman, and the Regent had been very queer to her for many years, and it was perhaps understandable that she should be a little, well, superstitious about something that reminded her so suddenly of the bad old days. She’d been the one who’d patched him up then too; it had probably been worse for her. And the villagers were probably exaggerating the beast’s size anyway. “Very well,” he said, a little wistfully.
    She smiled at him, and there was such love in her eyes that he smiled back, thinking, I could not have had a better wife; four sons she’s given me. Then he rose from the table and slapped his eldest on the shoulder and said, “So, my son, we must find our amusement elsewhere; have you tried the new colt I bought at the Ersk fair? I think he’ll just suit you.”
    Two days later the queen walked out of the palace in the early afternoon, alone. She often did; she liked to visit the tomb of her parents on the hill beyond the city by herself; and her waiting women and royal guards, who would rather have made a parade out of it, had grown accustomed to the queen’s small eccentricity, and no longer thought anything of it. But this time she did not return. A great hue and cry went up, in Arn and in Vuek and everywhere that messengers could go, from the mountains east, north, and west, even beyond the desert in the south to the great sea; but she was never seen again by anyone who brought word back to her mourning husband and country.
    The villagers who had been frightened by the reappearance of the great stagman, as they had first seen him twenty years ago, were relieved when he disappeared again; and since news travelled slowly and erratically to them, none noticed that the stagman vanished for the second and final time two days after the Arnish queen walked out of her palace and did not return.

Touk’s House

There was a witch who had a garden. It was a vast garden, and very beautiful; and it was all the more beautiful for being set in the heart of an immense forest, heavy with ancient trees and tangled with vines. Around the witch’s garden the forest stretched far in every direction, and the ways through it were few, and no more than narrow footpaths.
    In the garden were plants of all varieties; there were herbs at the witch’s front door and vegetables at her rear door; a hedge, shoulder-high for a tall man, made of many different shrubs lovingly trained and trimmed together, surrounded her entire plot, and there were bright patches of flowers scattered throughout. The witch, whatever else she might be capable of, had green fingers; in her garden many rare things flourished, nor did the lowliest weed raise its head unless she gave it leave.
    There was a woodcutter who came to know the witch’s garden well by sight; and indeed, as it pleased his eyes, he found himself going out of his way to pass it in the morning as he began his long day with his axe over his arm, or in the evening as he made his way homeward. He had been making as many of his ways as he could pass near the garden for some months when he realized that he had worn a trail outside the witch’s hedge wide enough to swing his arms freely and let his feet find their own way without fear of clutching roots or loose stones. It was the widest trail anywhere in the forest.
    The woodcutter had a wife and four daughters. The children were their parents’ greatest delight, and their only delight, for they were very poor. But the children were vigorous and healthy, and the elder two already helped their mother in the bread baking, by which she earned a little more money for the family, and in their small forest-shadowed village