Pattern Sense Read online

Pattern Sense

  F.T. McKinstry

  Copyright 2015 F.T. McKinstry

  All Rights Reserved

  Publication History

  Tales of the Talisman

  Volume 10 Issue 1, September 2014

  Table of Contents

  Start of Pattern Sense

  Thank You

  Wizards, Woods and Gods

  Outpost

  About the Author

  Other Titles by F.T. McKinstry

  Connect with F.T. McKinstry

  It all started with a mouse.

  Persistent creatures, mice, driven as all things are by the turn of winter’s gaze, but with the added cunning of the nocturnal. In early autumn, they found a crack in the eaves of Melisande’s cottage on the wooded outskirts of Ull. The swordsman had repaired the crack before returning to the towers and yards of Osprey on Sea, the great hall over the snow-draped Thorgrim Mountains, where he served. What a swordsman knew of carpentry, well, that was open to question. But he knew other things. Nice things.

  As the moon waxed, the mice kept Melisande up at night, their tiny feet pattering in the rafters, claws scraping, teeth gnawing. How such a small creature could make such a racket eluded her almost as much as her lover’s carpentry skills. The cat, being wise in the ways of the season, knew all, for he did not sleep at night, not when the moon was bright and certainly not when leaves spiraled down to carpet the frosty earth. No, he hunted. But the mice knew that.

  It was the eve of the Hunter’s Moon when Melisande first noticed something odd in her latest knitting project, a thick winter tunic for the young goatherd who lived at the bottom of the hill. The wool, deep brown as the smoke-stained rafters of the cottage ceiling, formed gaps where the sleeve joined the yoke, much like the cracks between a wall and a roof. Deep in her mind, the observation awoke a visceral awareness of interconnection, the wisdom of the natural world, a tapestry of patterns, lines, curves and counts as perfectly cast as a well-stitched swatch.

  Pattern sense, her mother once called it; at least Melisande thought it might have been her, though it could have been her grandmother, or one of the old women in the village. Come to think of it, her mother had turned a dark eye on such things. Being of a wilder mind, Melisande picked up her needles, hummed softly and wove a neat kitchener stitch over the gaps in the armpit of her work.

  She did not hear the mice that night, the night after, or the night after that. Melisande wondered if the cat’s vigilance had finally paid off. Clever hunters, cats. So she told herself as her pattern sense curled quietly as a snake in an ivy patch, to rest with both eyes open.

  ~*~

  The swordsman did not return to Melisande that winter, though she plucked and snipped the white woolen threads of a blanket’s edge to keep the snow from the woodland path to her cottage. When the snows melted and she had folded her woolens and hung her snowshoes behind the door, still, he did not come. Accompanied by her old gray knitting bag, she wandered the streets of Ull and the sheep-dappled foothills of Thorgrim listening for rumors of war, but heard none. When the air became hot, she knit brindled patterns of drops and sky to soak the earth with rain. She knit green leaves and pulled threads of weeds from the vegetable patch, leaving purple violets here and there to grace the air with her lover’s favorite scent. But he did not return, as he had each moon for two suns past.

  Perhaps he had found another sweetheart. A younger woman unstained by time and pattern sense. Why would he stay with a votary of needles and wool? Men such as he did not take wives or stay with lovers. They roamed like tomcats.

  Still, she waited.

  On the first day of summer, Melisande rose early, put on water for tea, fed the cat and went outside into the fog that cloaked the forest. A goat bleated in the mist. The village carpenter, in return for blankets for his children, now protected from cold and smiling in their dreams, had built her a shelter surrounded by a sturdy fence. It was now home to a nanny that the goatherd gave Melisande in return for his tunic, a very fine tunic, he said, that banished the rain from his bones.

  After feeding the goat, Melisande fetched her tea and her knitting bag and walked to the stone bench on the edge of her garden, thickening with seedlings the village women had given her in return for tea cozies, placemats and shawls. Nary a puff of steam, drop of ale or chilling draft eluded her stitches, they claimed.

  She drew forth the folds of a cloak for the constable’s daughter. Pale green as fresh grass, it had an intricate symmetrical pattern of wine-red climbing roses with dark green leaves. The shepherd’s wife, in return for a dress of silken flax, dyed and spun the knitter’s yarn in lovely colors of summer fields. Melisande drew a deep breath as she gathered up her needles and spread the soft, fine wool across her lap...

  Her mind went blank.

  In the center of the back, in a red rose tinged with pink and shimmering with dew, was a ragged hole. Blinking, she pulled it up and touched the popped loops of several missing stiches. She muttered an ugly word fit for swordsmen over drink. When was the last time she had dropped a stitch?

  She jumped as something clattered on the other side of the cottage. Hoofbeats. Her arm hit the teacup by her side, knocking it off the bench with a clink and a splash. Between the trees beyond the path, a rider came into view. Melisande’s heart turned a triple beat as he dismounted.

  Leaving her knitting by the garden, she ran to the swordsman, ignoring the sadness on his broad shoulders and the way his hand slid reluctantly from the reins of his dark charger. She flung her arms around him like a girl. He returned her embrace but weakly. Chilled, she withdrew. Age touched his long dark hair and the stubble on his face. His gray eyes held something she had not seen before, a blurred focus like that of a seedpod closing to an early frost.

  “Othin,” she greeted him. She had never felt the name, taken from a god of wisdom, trickery and war, much suited him. Now, it seemed to. Her joy soaked into the ground like spilled tea.

  “Melisande,” he returned, avoiding any affectionate nickname or other.

  Details became clear and distant at the same time. He did not retrieve a bag from his saddle. Instead of the gentle garb of a man come to rest in the company of his woman, he wore the trappings of his station: shining mail, polished leather and glinting steel. Melisande stepped back, engulfed by a storm tide of self-conscious alarm. White threads in her hair, thin cracks on the corners of her eyes, she had become a priestess of pattern sense, a cruel goddess of time gone by, icy fingers of midwinter nights and a careless hole in the rose-red heart of her finest work.

  “Do you go to war?” she asked, knowing it was not so.

  The swordsman lowered his gaze briefly, as if to gather resolve from a void untouched by need. “I have taken a wife.”

  Melisande stepped back again, catching her foot on a stone as the blood left her cheeks. Her heart started to pound. “Why return only to tell me this?” A reasonable question.

  “I wanted you to know. I am sorry.”

  He turned from her with controlled urgency, mounted his steed and rode away into the morning mist without looking back.