I wrote my Yule/Christmas story, "Sir Constantine and the Changeling" after reading Medieval beliefs about Changelings and also when I came across the wonderful Yule Goat in Northern European customs.
Note: I took the Medieval Yule Goat from Yule Customs from
Medievalist Net.
It’s a
northern custom, one which I think would have been part of northern england,
since the Scandinavian custom of Mumming had survived in the region right up to
my mother’s time. Lindsay
Here's the blurb and the opening of my novella:
Blurb
He had hurt and
betrayed her in the worst way possible. Could Kari and Constantine save their
marriage?
In a
medieval world that believed in God, saints, spirits and the fey, there were
also darker forces to be feared. Malicious fairies could steal human babies
away or substitue their own children—changelings.
Kari and
Constantine have been apart for two years, he on crusade in the Holy Land, she
left behind in his lands to raise their unborn child alone. When her husband
returns with his Templar brother Hadrian in tow, the separation she and
Constantine have endured, plus Hadrian’s evil influence, leads to terrible
accusations between them. Her husband thinks now that her beloved baby son
Valentine might be a changeling.
In the face
of such a charge, and remembering an older tragedy, Kari feels she has no
choice but to flee Constantine’s homeland and retreat to her own country of the
high waterlands.
Constantine
follows her. Realising what he has done, he begs his wife to return with him,
but can Kari trust him again? And will he ever accept Valentine as his true
son?
At the time
of Yule, many things are possible, and as Kari and Constantine strive to
rebuild their relationship, the snows, an old hut and the Yule Goat will all
play vital parts.
Excerpt
Sir Constantine and
the Changeling
Lindsay
Townsend
December, the High Water Country, Northern England,
1194
“Climb one finger-width closer and
I will send you arse-first back over the waterfall.”
Sir Constantine stared up into the
unblinking eyes of his wife, his pregnant wife, and froze, motionless, on the cold
rock-face.
“Da, Da—” The babe strapped to her
back, cause of all our troubles,
reached out to him with chubby hands.
“No, dear one, daddy must pass me
first.” And he will not, her glinting eyes promised.
A staff loomed into view, aimed at
his face. It was long and sturdy enough to poke him off the rock and flick him
like a skidding stone down into the icy pools at the base of the waterfall, and
he knew that one wrong move, one word amiss and she would strike.
Why should she not? A long, too-silent
part of his conscience sneered. You did
not believe her when it mattered.
“Kari.” He easily pitched his voice
above the early winter trickle of the fall, though his mouth was dry. “Please,
Kari.” Let me come up. Let us speak
together.
Those last words remained trapped
like dead leaves in his throat as an unknown feeling, a dropping, sticky
sensation that oozed in his chest, overtook him.
“You have no right to speak my
name, husband.” Her scorn burned brighter and more clean than dragon fire. “You
lost all rights to me and mine when you denied my son, our son, you imperial bastard.”
She had once been proud of his old
name, even called him “Emperor” in their bed. Now she took that pet name and
refashioned it into a spear for his heart. The sweeping sickness grew stronger
than the scorching ache in his arms and legs. This is shame. I am ashamed.
“Da, Da, Da.” The little boy on her
back chanted, waving his arms.
“You are well?” Constantine asked,
as if he and his wife were not estranged, that she had not fled his house almost
a month ago at All Hallows Eve, slipping away while he was visiting his
brother.
His icy, tingling fingers tightened
on the rock-face as he considered his sibling. As was his habit, Hadrian had
secreted himself away from others to pray in the church. I thought it holy, then, and did not see his act for what it was, a
denial of fellowship. Constantine shook his head. I have to break free of my older brother. He has already cost me too
much. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Kari?”
“As you see.” She gave him nothing
but a final verbal smack. “We are thriving.”
“But you cannot stay here much
longer. Not through the winter.” He tried to fashion his dry voice into a coax.
“It will be Yule soon, and Christmas.”
“Expect me to return for a Church
festival, the three masses and more?” Her threatening staff jerked closer. “You know nothing. Get back to
your own lands, Sir Constantine, and leave me in mine.”
“Daddeee!” The infant on her
shoulder wailed, tiny face reddening as his fists beat impotently against his
mother’s shoulder.
“Please,” he begged. “For the
child.”
“Which one?” she rejoindered at
once, but the hovering timber vanished and Kari whirled about, as dainty on top
of the waterfall as she was in a great hall, dancing. He tracked her rapidly
departing figure and only when she had disappeared behind a screen of wild
roses full of bright red hips did Constantine think to move. Stiff and shaken,
by the time he had reached the summit and any kind of safety, his wife was long
gone.
****
She had left him a trail of snapped
twigs and crushed grass to follow, too obvious not to be deliberate. And I have found her only because she wished
it. Again, he was reminded that these were her lands. Crouching by a spring
with a rough X scratched into the mud beside it—his wife’s doing, and the rune
for Gebo, good fortune, meaning the water was safe to drink—Constantine cupped
his hands into the clear cold liquid.
As he quenched his thirst, he
thought of Kari and their history together, his mind replaying the past in
sharp and acute detail.
He had first met Kari at a summer
three-day joust and country fair when she was sixteen and he a fresh-knighted
nineteen. Even as she was then, eel-skinny and a little clumsy, he saw her
kindness to servants, her haste to protect those she cared for, her love of
infants, and her skill with basket weaving. A younger daughter of a lord of the
highwaterlands, Constantine had treated her as an indulged little sister,
taking her hawking whenever he had free time and listening with real interest
as she spoke of old springs and ancient magicks.
The second time he saw her at a
distance, with fresh graves between them. A deadly fever had taken her parents
and older siblings. She had survived only because she had been sent to an
aunt’s house to learn the ways of a formal court. Watching her pale, stricken
face, her blank, beautiful eyes, Constantine had wanted to do something,
anything, to bring back her vital smile. That evening after the funerals he had
sent her a letter, wanting Kari to know she was not alone, that others thought
of her. From then, they had written to each other for two years and life went
on.
So matters might have remained, but
his father had taken him aside during a melee where, after that day’s fighting,
Karin had been one of the damsels reading to the injured knights in the largest
tourney tent. Constantine had been close to bellowing a greeting across the
great tent, he was so glad to see her.
Of course his father had noticed. “You
like the wench?” Lord Lucian asked bluntly.
Aching from battle and imagining
Kari’s cool hands on his sore shoulders and her low voice telling him stories
of King Arthur, Constantine managed a grunt of assent.
Lord Lucian stroked his ginger
beard. “A good match for you, a third son with a newly-won tiny manor,” he
stated, making no bones in being straightforward. “Her demesne is but five
miles from your own. She is an heiress now but her lands are mainly woods and
water and pasture, rank with springs and old magic, and there is no large castle.
They live in tents, I do believe.”
“Only in the summers.” Constantine
had learned this from his letters to Kari. “Kari’s folk live out in their wild
lands in the good weather. Winters see them indoors. Kari’s kin have a stone
and turf keep with stables larger than their quarters.”
“Our
beasts are important to us,” Kari had explained, in a note, when
Constantine exclaimed—by letter—over that particular living arrangement. After
that, Constantine had let the matter go, merely vowing in secret that he would
be in no great hurry to visit Kari’s keep for Yule.
Listening and understanding more,
Lord Lucian fixed his lad with a piercing look. “Herbs and baskets and fish are
the dues owed by her family, nothing more. Even the king does not dispute it. Still,
some of the springs in those wild lands will cure troubles of the mind and
heart, so long as the family are respected. She will need a light hand, my
son.”
“And space, at times, for her to be
alone,” Constantine added, recognizing that aspect of Kari from the way she would
slip away from the twittering of giggling damsels, from her walking alone, at
dawn and dusk. She likes her solitude, but always has a
smile of welcome for me. He grinned, despite his sore head. “She suits me,”
he admitted, glad that fate had worked it so his newly-gained portion of lands
and hers were so close. We are neighbors
and soon will be more.
They had married that spring and he
had been stunned with joy—doubly so when Kari became pregnant. All that blazing
summer he had lived a heaven on earth.
And then, with the falling of the
leaves, a summons had come to him from his overlord. Ordered to accompany King
Richard on crusade, Constantine had reluctantly bid Kari farewell and set out
for Outremer.
He had been gone two years, with no
word from his wife. He sent letters and was certain Kari did the same, but none
of hers reached him, nor, he learned later, did his to her.
Into the aching gap in his life,
his elder brother Hadrian came and filled a tiny part.
Constantine scowled as he now
thought of Hadrian, brother and knight Templar. I was blind to my brother’s prejudices, so relieved to have close-kin
near that I never questioned what he told me. Looking back, Constantine
could see his older brother’s whole battle array. In Outremer, fighting
together, guarding each other’s backs, he had never understood. Hadrian’s
slingshot comments were part of a cunning strategy, intended to drive a fatal wedge
between Constantine and Kari.
Hadrian had started his evil
campaign small. “We warriors are God’s chosen,” he said, often by the camp fire
of an evening, then, “Others not so much, especially those daughters of Eve.”
Over the months Hadrian told tales
of valiant crusader knights and the less-than-true, stay-at-home daughters of
Eve. He never called them womenfolk and never praised them.
Why
did I not notice that?
Hadrian never asked after Kari,
even when he saw Constantine writing to her. “You do God’s work here, what
could be finer?” he scolded, whenever Constantine sighed for his wife and home.
Why did I never understand the ruthless
danger of Hadrian’s dislike?
Constantine often
mentioned hay-making or wool-shearing or other tasks of home, glad and proud to
share them aloud, for it seemed then that he and Kari were close again. Hadrian
would simply remark, “You allow your wife to rule?”
“Her own lands
and portion, yes,” Constantine had answered each time, feeling aggrieved when
the other warriors ranged about the fire-camp laughed at his “softness”.
By the time he
returned to England, burned by eastern suns and quietly sickened by the
slaughter he had seen, the waste of life, he had stared at the green woodland
and luxuriant meadows of his lands and thought them wonderful, but strange.
Kari, his wife,
the one he had once called mate, was stranger still. She moved differently to
what he remembered, smelled differently, and she had a child. From the instant
Constantine met the babe Kari called their son, he had been jealous. This
interloper had taken his place on Kari’s breast, had first claim on her
attention, was even in their bed at night.
“Why is that
child not in a crib?” he demanded, after their second night bundled together.
Hadrian had asked him that, down in the tilt yard that morning, and Constantine
decided he wanted an answer.
“His name is
Valentine.” Kari spoke through a clenched jaw. “We agreed on that, my lord, a
Roman, imperial name, before you went off on crusade and left me.”
He hated her
tone and her narrowed eyes and the way he instantly wondered what name for the
brat she might have otherwise preferred. “My question remains.”
Kari did not
answer, merely swooped like a hawk over the bed and lifted the squirming
toddler onto her breast, where the boy turned and looked cool, smug eyes of
possession at him. Hating his own pettiness, Constantine kept staring back even
when the little boy was gently laid into a soft, moss-lined cradle.
Only when he was
settled and given a soft rag doll to hug and a woolen blanket to keep him warm
did Kari turn. When she did, Constantine almost flinched.
“He kept me
company,” she said in a quiet voice, ignoring the wide-eyed maid and page who
scurried about their sleeping space in their small, private solar off the main
hall. “As you did not.”
You can read the full story in
ONE YULETIDE KNIGHT, which is only 99cents/99p as part of a Black Friday Deal
