the young stranger

(Grigovian fairy tales 4)

It was the Week of the Lit Windows. As was their custom, the townspeople had placed candles in the windows that faced the road and gone to bed with their doors unlocked. Unlike the year before, however, winter had arrived early, furious blizzards piling the snowbanks high and keeping everyone but the most hardy inside. All hoped that someone would bring a change in the monotony, that a visitor would arrive to enliven the dark and dismal evenings.

Sure enough, one evening, a strange young man burst through the door to the Kiergoyast household. He stamped the snow off of his boots and leaned his wood-framed pack against the wall in the small foyer, where it dripped onto the polished floor. Iyoan Kiergoyast and his wife, Baruwvel, showed the stranger to his quarters and invited him to dinner. They pulled out his chair for him, the place of honor at the far end of the table, next to the youngest children. The young man told tales of crossing the high mountain passes and fleeing bandits in the sun-drenched valleys of far Hinntia, which, he claimed, lay many weeks' journey to the south, and to the east. After dinner, he shared a pipe of fine czabtyip with Iyoan and told the children stories of magnificent foreign beasts before he excused himself and went to bed, falling asleep promptly. No one heard or saw the young man leave, but the next morning, to their delight, the children found small carvings of strange animals sitting in their wooden eating dishes. The eldest girl, however, a maiden of 16 years named Opol, said she had awoken in the middle of the night to find the strange young man standing in the foyer, dressed only in his underthings and leaning mightily against the door whilst holding a knife in his hand. She claimed that his eyes had flashed with an unusual inner light and that he seemed convinced something was trying to come through the door, although she had heard nothing but his frantic panting.

Some months later, during the Festival of Life's Reawakening, a neighboring family told a similar story. A strange young man had come to their house near the end of the Week of Lit Windows; he had carried a traveling pack of unusual construction; he had given the children small wooden figurines; and he had roamed throughout the house, late at night, with a knife in his hands, although he had not brought to anyone harm, nor had he violated either of their beautiful young daughters. The village seer, an white-haired old woman named Uulanthia, said she'd had a dream in which the young man revealed himself to be the long-lost son of Queen Pylta Pyltandyennd, and that his nightly vigilance had paid off when he thwarted a group of prince-killers, who had been indeed following him, by waiting for them into the wee hours of the morning and dispatching them with swift thrusts of his blade as they came through the door.

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