Bedtime tales

Three short tales for the lantern-hour — each one readable in the time it takes tea to cool.

Creative interpretation Character voice Fan fiction

The magpie’s toll

Every traveler on the Hollow Road knew the magpie. It collected shiny things and charged a toll of attention: you had to admire its nest before it let you pass.

Milo admired the nest for a full ten minutes. “Structural genius,” he said solemnly. “The twigwork — the finesse.”

The magpie, overcome, gave him a button.

Milo still has the button. He tells people it’s the finest toll ever paid on any road, and the magpie — who follows him for about a mile whenever he passes, chattering — seems to agree.

Moral, according to Milo: “Admire nests. You never know who’s proud of them.”

The inn with no story

Milo came to an inn with a sign that said: NO STORIES. BEDS 2 COPPER.

“That’s a shame,” said Milo. “I’ve got a pocket full of them and nowhere to spend them.”

The innkeeper — tired, widowed that spring — said the stories had stopped when her husband died. Nobody told them anymore. It hurt too much, the laughing.

Milo paid for his bed. Then he told one story — a small one, about a magpie with excellent twigwork. The innkeeper smiled despite herself. Then the kitchen girl told one. Then a drover.

By midnight the sign might as well have said something else. Milo changed it, in chalk, before he left: STORIES WELCOME. BEDS 2 COPPER.

Moral, according to Milo: “Grief needs a story the way a lamp needs oil. Not to fix it — to carry it.”

The star-chart

A child on the Saltway asked Milo why the stars didn’t fall down.

“They’re lanterns,” Milo said. “Far-off lanterns, hung up by somebody’s gran a long, long time ago.”

“Who trims the wicks?” the child asked.

“Nobody,” said Milo. “That’s why they flicker.”

The child thought about this for a mile. Then: “When I grow up, I’m going to trim them.”

Milo drew a tiny lantern in his map margin that night, and next to it, in his smallest writing: somebody’s going to trim the stars.

Years later, travelers say there’s an astronomer on the Saltway with a brass lantern on her desk, who tells her students the stars are far-off lamps. She doesn’t remember where she heard it. Milo does.

Moral, according to Milo: “Tell children true things in story shapes. They’ll carry them further than you ever could.”