The Puck's Favor

Free the puck, gain its favor, lose your wits.

Photo by Dave Ruck on Unsplash

Broccan first met the puck as a young man, before anyone would have called him mad.

His people were the fair-haired Fiathan who, with their flocks and wagons, roved County Fyrthsex, the westernmost part of the Thrisland peninsula where the cultured world of man frayed into forest, weald, and ocean. Broccan was an orphan; his mother was killed by a farmer’s dog, and his father hanged for killing the farmer. Not three years of age was he at the time, yet he remembered.

He was raised by his older sister, Nuala. No extended kin held any part of Broccan's heart. Only Nuala mattered. From his tenderest years she would take him shepherding with her. They skirted the Kellewyn Forests where trees spoke secrets and faeries left circles in hidden glades. She taught him Credic hymns to the Creator and Hall’d Ordart alongside idolatrous invocations to Wendra and the Morrigu. They traipsed the winstone cliffs where the verdant hillocks broke apart into churning ocean. She would point out the birds that rose and plummeted into the whitecaps for fish. She told him their names in both Gairish and Weslish.

Near the cliffs’ edge among wind-hackled heather stood a solitary stone tower, round and only wide enough for inner spiral steps, like a chimney for some subterranean kiln. When Nuala would leave him to find a missing lamb, Broccan would sit and watch the obelisk even into the growing darkness. Some said it was abandoned, but in the gloaming Broccan perceived a dim light within. Others said monks lived there, but Broccan only saw knights arriving. Always alone, and always after nightfall. They wore armor of brown plate and wooden masks carved with faces – distorted, grotesque, and warped into exaggerated grins like actors out of an Illinach play. They would approach the yett at the doorway and be admitted. The light would diminish downward.

Nobody knew where it led. To vaults of the Count’s greatest treasures, some said. This, Broccan believed.

***

He grew. He learned to draw the longbow of their people, and loose it with precision. He felt the cruelty of the county men toward him and his people, and only his sister’s love stayed the resentment festering in his heart.

He was sixteen when that bitter winter came. Night winds left ewes frozen to the earth and dawn light found them interred in snowy barrows. By spring, many Fiathan were starving.

Around that time, Nuala told Broccan she’d received an offer of marriage from a wealthy county man, and had accepted it. Her fiancé, she explained, was an aged fellow with much land and large herds who’d spied her shepherding and desired her youthful fairness. She wouldn’t want for food or be preyed upon by Fyrthsex's Count. Broccan could have the flock. More food to go around. They would always be brother and sister, even after she was wed. He tightened his jaw and nodded.

The wedding was midsummer. The evening celebration was held at the new husband’s farm. None of Nuala’s kin were invited.

Broccan sat at a distance watching the lights wink from the passing dancers. His longbow lay across his lap, an arrow nocked. He touched the feathered fletching like the hackles of an angry wolf. His eyes ran with tears, and he left.

Into the Kellewyn Forest he ran. Thunderclouds hung low and dark but produced no rain. He finally stopped at a yew tree where he touched his forehead to the trunk and he cursed aloud the loss of his only family.

Somewhere nearby, a horse snorted.

His head whipped up and he gripped his bow. If he was caught here, he could be charged with hunting the Count’s game and hanged. He would dance in the air like his father.

There was indeed a horse. Its rider lay supine on the ground a few feet away. The rider didn’t move, even as Broccan approached, and even as he stood staring in wonder, for the rider wore a carved wooden mask that smiled up at the canopy. The fellow had fallen from his horse, or so Broccan would always assume. Not dead, but nearly. When Broccan removed the mask the knight’s face was as a wintry moon. His stone eyes regarded the Fiathan with the wan clairvoyance of the doomed.

Broccan looked at the mask, and a terrible idea entered his mind. He lifted it to his own face, the inside sticky with blood.

It fit.

***

Tufts of heather heeled in the brackish wind. Waves rolled across the waters toward shore, chalk white formations on the teeming black. A wild moon. Broccan rode up to the tower, closer than he’d ever been before. He walked to the entrance, barred shut by a yett, and stood there uncertainly for some time.

The light rose up the spiral steps, carried by a glaring guard. “You’re here to see it?” he asked in Weslish.

Broccan scarcely spoke the language, but sensed a question. He stripped his voice of the Gairish accent and tried to sound like the county men of Fyrthsex. “Aye.”

He was admitted. The yett opened before him, then was locked behind him.

By the dim light, they descended.

Down into the earth they turned like a screw. The darkness fled before them and gathered behind. The air thickened, then wetted, then cooled. Broccan tried to count the flagstone steps but lost track. A minute or more passed. He heard and felt a susurration on the walls and below his feet. Perhaps the ocean. Perhaps something else. His vaporous breath blew out his wooden smile. The scent of the knight’s blood lingered an inch from his face.

Finally the steps flattened out in a small room like an antechamber with a reinforced door. Before this, a second guard sat at a small table and chair in utter darkness, though the table had the remnants of a candle spent long ago, hardened wax running out in a frozen dribble. The second guard looked up from the book lying open in his lap. A moment ago he’d been in total blackness yet now he looked up at them as though his reading had been interrupted. The pages in his lap had no words. Broccan wondered if the man had lost his mind. He had.

The chamber beyond was larger, suggested by the strange push and pull of chill air as they opened the door, bearing with it a rank and oily scent that Broccan recognized, but couldn’t say wherefrom.

The second guard had already returned to his book. The first lit another lantern and gave it to Broccan, then pushed him into the room and closed the door behind. Crossbar scraped into hasp.

Broccan breathed the fetid air.

In and out. In and out.

Beyond the lantern’s aureole he began to perceive books. Piles and piles of them, without order or organization, forming towers and columns. He moved to the nearest and touched the gilded print along the spine. Perhaps the gold leaf on the illuminations…

“You’re not one of them.”

He jumped and clumsily freed his sword, then aimed the point at everywhere.

“Aye, not one of them.”

From behind a tower of documents it peeked. Slightly shorter than he. Snout of brown fur, skin split in many places. Yellow eyes cut by horizontal black irises. Soft ears ragged from abuse. Horns broken and seared.

Broccan recognized the oily scent now: a goat.

The caprine crouched behind the stack. It asked something in Weslish, then Gairish: “What’s your name?”

“Broccan.”

“What are you doing here, Broccan?”

“I came to find treasure.”

It opened its mouth as though to bleat, but made no noise. “No treasure here.”

“These books?”

“I read them.”

“You read?”

“For amusement.”

Broccan couldn’t read. This goat could read, but he couldn’t. It also spoke two languages when he spoke slightly more than one. “What are you?”

The caprine moved forward. “Call me Robbie Jan. I am the Count’s prisoner. The Count asks questions of me… forcefully.” Its hand – human but for the fur and slightly clawed fingertips – touched the scars on its face.

“What questions?”

Its lip curled, showing large teeth. A smile? “I know your scent, Broccan. You’re Fiathan. Your sort have got a few drops of elf blood in you. You’re nearer to the garden fence than the Count and his party. But you’re still only man. Man lives on the ocean’s surface, on the forest’s treeline. You walk only in the sun and fear what creeps by moonlight. But I know both. I know the forest, and I know the dreamt things that dwell therein. I make shadows out of shapes, and fortunes out of fates.”

“What kinds of fortunes?”

Now Robbie Jan truly smiled. Hooves clicked on brick as it stepped fully into the light, naked and hairy. Beneath its ribcage its gut recessed. Every one of its ribs showed. It looked a blasphemous lovechild at once pitiful and deplorable, innocent and obscene, childlike and ageless. "I can give you all you desire. But not from in here. Come, let me borrow that mask. ‘Twill be only a moment; I need something of it if I’m to quit this place. Fear not Broccan, I’ll let you leave first before I make a mess. You’ll have your wish anon." It reached out its hand.

Broccan stood for what seemed several minutes, thinking. His eyes rose to the ceiling where the darkness gathered. Somewhere above, his sister was being wed to a wealthy landowner who hated her kind.

He removed his mask and immediately gasped in the rank clearness, perspiration turning to ice. He looked the goat in the eyes as he handed it over.

Robbie Jan snatched it away and capered out of sight. Then came a wet rasp as the puck’s tongue lolled in and out, cleaning the inside of blood.

***

Broccan left the way he came with the scent of the puck’s breath in his face. By morning he'd buried the clothes and mask beneath a crude cairn and abandoned the horse. He could have sold these spoils for more money than he'd ever seen, but the risk was too high.

Summer slid toward autumn. Whenever he saw Nuala now she wore a shawl and acted askance, as if she'd been forbidden from speaking with him, and likely she had. He grew sullen and distant and even his people regarded him with indulgence and pity, those emotions that so subtly precede disgust.

One day he went back to the tower and found it empty. The spiral steps breathed up at him and the yett skirled to the touch on its rusted hinges. He wondered if it had all been a dream, but sometime in early autumn he heard news that the Count had lost his mind and gouged out his own eyes.

***

The month was Ferrarus. Falling light and hues of ember. The shepherds began to complain of ewes bolting and leaping from the cliffs – wide-eyed, stiff-legged, mute as they tumbled. Broccan heard, and went straight to Kellwyn Forest.

"Hullo, Broccan!" It sat on the stump of a fallen tree kicking its hooves beneath the fiery maple leaves. It was taller and meatier than last they'd met, with thicker pelt and fingernails lengthened and sharpened.

Broccan spotted none of this. His emaciated cheeks were caved and the wind passed right through his worn wool clothes. “Damn you, puck! You’ve done naught for me!”

“But I know not what you want! Come, tell me now! As you said, I’m in your debt! Reveal yourself, from the beginning.”

Broccan did without hesitation. He laid out his whole life from as early as he could recount. He shared words he’d only thought and emotions he’d never explored. He talked of his sister, and growing up in the mantle of her arms, and how she’d now sold herself to the same folk who’d killed their parents. He spat venom on the Count and his people. He spoke of belittlement and frustration. He was panting and wiping his eyes when he finally said it: “I want wealth. Like Nuala’s husband, but more. I want to be counted above other men, both Fiathan and of the county.”

“That… I can do. But the debt will be higher.”

“I set you free, you cheating merchant!”

“Aye, and for that I’m grateful! But you ask for the power to transgress your own. ‘Tis no small feat.”

“What more do you want?”

“The firstborn of your blood.”

Broccan looked down. Never had he felt any inclination to wed, nor have children, nor had he any amative interests. If he never had children, the deal would be null.

“Done,” he said.

The caprine shook its head as if removing water drops. Then its neck turned slowly. Like a key in a lock.

The forest changed.

The wind rose. The leaves sheared from the trees and rattled and danced upon unseen vortices. The nude maple branches shook and scraped and shuddered. Squirrels fled. Corvids shrieked. A marten shot through the underbrush. But in their midst the hooved marionettist raised his sharpened fingers, higher and higher up to the sky. Then let them fall.

Kellewyn quieted.

“It is done.”

***

Two weeks later a squall hit the coast. The skies turned brimstone yellow then gray then shearing charcoal. Then came the shipwreck.

A Luraldean caravel, likely returning from the New Lands, ran aground at the base of the cliffs and fractured at its waist. Its unfurled mainsail fluttered like a collapsed lung. Fully abandoned.

Broccan’s flock gathered at the cliff’s edge and bleated to him helplessly as he swam out over and over to plunder the riven chests below deck. By evening he knelt again among his sheep, gasping over a gleaming pile of unmarked silver shards. Far below, the rising tide was lifting the ship and carrying it back out to sea. His lips were blue and inarticulate and his fingers scarcely worked as he picked one up and held it to the light. He made a noise, but who could say whether it was chills or laughter?

He first went to see Nuala, but a servant said she wouldn’t see him. “She will,” he vowed.

***

For the remainder of autumn and much of winter, he gradually traded his shards for currency. He purchased fine hoses and doublets, and a billowing red and green bonnet cap which he never took off. He bought a horse and took it for rides around Fyrthsex. Seeing he was Fiathan, county folk would look at him suspiciously, but then perceive his income and give polite greeting. He learned better Weslish and attended Rosday common prayer at the monastery rather than in the fields with his own folk.

He bought a rural manor and fenced land right next to Nuala’s. Most of his silver he stowed in the basement for it proved more than he knew how to spend. He would walk or ride across his land to the stone wall separating his property and his sister’s, and there sit and watch the slender smoke column rising from her house and the farmhands and servants about their business. His sister never emerged.

He never saw the master either, though he always watched for him whilst idly petting his arrow’s fletching.

One evening he rode to the rolling fields to visit his people where their wagons circled around their peat fires. Snow flurries drifted in golden evening light. They greeted him and asked him what he’d been about. He answered a few questions, but soon their interest in him died off and he sat alone again. He didn’t understand their reserve until a small child pointed at him and asked its mother what a county man was doing among them.

He entirely lost his temper and screamed. Their heads swung low in deference, and they spoke to him no more.

He returned that night to his empty home. The floorboards were cold beneath his feet; no threshing had been spread. He stoked a fire – not of peat but of wood – and looked out his glass window toward where Nuala lived.

***

“What are you doing?”

Broccan jumped and nearly fell off the stone wall. He hadn’t seen the shepherd boy’s approach among his neighbor’s sheep. He adjusted his hat, gripped his bow, and pointed at the distant house. “Where is Nuala? Why won’t she see me?”

“The Lady? She’s with child, Sir. She’s bedridden.”

“Then tell her to call on me when she’s well.”

“Y-yes Sir. Who are you?”

“I’m her brother!”

The child’s eyes went wide. His knees bent as though to flee. “I’m sorry, Sir! I didn’t know, Sir! Please…”

“What is wrong with you, lad?”

“Please don’t be rash with me, Sir. I’ll go now.”

“I am perfectly fit! I only wish to see Nuala!”

“As I said, Sir, she’s with child! The midwife says she’s due in scarce two months!”

“I don’t care! I…” he suddenly trailed off in realization. “No. God, no.”

“Sir?”

He ran and got his horse, then tore across the snowy fields toward Kellwyn.

***

The forest glade was quiet. The sun dipped in and out between the clouds.

“Broccan!” exclaimed Robbie Jan. “What a fine costume! And that bonnet! Without this nose I’d never mistake you for Fiathan.”

“What are the terms of our deal, puck?”

It stood. Its horns were long and spread in mad swirls. It was noticeably taller than Broccan now. “I should have hoped you’d remember.”

“You said firstborn of my blood.”

“Aye, I did.”

A breeze chafed the gossamer snow.

“My blood. You said my blood. Not my sister’s.”

“Must I explain to you how blood works, Broccan?”

“You won’t take my sister’s child.”

“That ship has sailed, Sir. Not unlike a Luraldean caravel.”

“I’ll slay you where you stand.”

Before he could raise his bow, it gamboled away in mighty strides, bleating with laughter.

***

Smoke filled the night sky and choked the constellations. The whole edge of the Kellwyn danced with flames and the snows receded along the treeline. Broccan set the last empty oil cask down with the others he’d purchased, their contents spread along the treeline and ignited. He wiped his brow against the heat. Somewhere within, the stripped remains of a missing knight were being cremated. God willing, the puck would burn too.

He couldn’t raze the whole forest, but perhaps he could drive it back.

***

They gathered at his door in the hoary morrow like a beggarly acting troupe. “Pardon us, Sir.”

He rubbed his eyes in exhaustion. “What is it?”

“Pardon, Sir. We don’t wish to disturb.”

“I was only sleeping. What is it?”

“Sir… we wished to speak to you, Sir. The woods you burned… we had coppices growing there which we needed for the spring.”

“Alas, of course… I am sorry. Here…” he left and returned with five silver shards. “This will do as compensation for all the stock you need. Take extra; last I saw, your wagon wheels needed dishing.”

“It’s not that, Sir…”

“Damn it all, stop calling me Sir!” he laughed in anger. “You know me, Daire! We are kin!”

“I’m sorry, S–” He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry. But it’s not that. We wanted to ask you to see the monks.”

“The monks? Whatever for?”

“For the madness.”

“What madness?”

“Well, yours… please, be not vexed.”

“By God, you think me mad?”

“It’s just… the forest… we must use the Kellwyn, and if in madness you destroy any more of it...”

“I did it to stop the puck!”

“... The puck?”

“Aye, the puck! The goat-man, Robbie Jan. He’s after Nuala’s child! My sister!”

The congregation stared at him, shivering.

“It’s true! You should all thank me! Not long ago he was spreading insanity among your livestock!”

“Yes, Sir. Of course, Sir.”

He could hear the emptiness in their tone. “Well, damn you all!” He threw the silver at them and slammed the door. “Ass heads, the lot of you!”

***

A month passed. A new year began. One unusually warm evening in late Dormio he was sitting at his habitual perch on the wall when he saw something running toward his sister’s house at remarkable speed. He tightened his eyes and perceived the long horns and bounding gait.

“No…”

He jumped from the wall and ran for her house, sprinting the whole way with his longbow gripped tightly. Sheep and shepherd children ran aside shouting but still he ran, his boots sucking in the partly melted snow.

“Nuala!” he screamed. “Nuala, it’s coming!”

He leaped the nearer yard wall and ran for the house. Servants shouted and chickens screamed as he reached the front door and erupted inside with his bow poised to fire. His eyes swung about the fine wooden furnishings and decor.

“Where are you, Robbie Jan? Show yourself!”

A gurgling noise. From the back of the house. Broccan ran down the hall and into a drawing room.

The master of the house lay supine on the floor. His torn throat spat dark blood that stained the floor and threshing. Hunched over him was the caprine, lapping at the ejecting liquid. Its bloody muzzle turned toward Broccan and it smiled.

Broccan raised his bow and in a half-draw released a bolt that grazed the puck’s side. It wailed and bolted toward an anteroom like a flushed doe.

Broccan pulled another arrow from his hip quiver and pursued it out a back door and outside. People in the house were screaming and he thought he heard his sister’s cries within, but in the snow was a bloodtrail heading back toward Kellwyn.

“You!” he said to a terrified servant. “Get me a horse!”

***

Snow flew beneath the horse’s hooves. Evening rays bent sideways and shadows groped across the ground. The trail led through the scorched swath where blackened trees rose like the burned and desiccated fingers of the land itself. Wet ash splashed and clung to Broccan’s clothes and his bonnet tore away and was lost. Riding bareback with elbows high and bow in hand he looked a Fiathan warrior of yore from before the county was formed.

He reached the living part of the woods by sundown. He thought he’d destroyed so much, yet all this remained. The horse would not go beneath the trees, so he hobbled it and entered alone.

The smell of wet and decaying vegetation. Small white mushrooms in dark pockets. Runnels sucking unseen beneath tree roots. His boots were wet and his feet unspeakably cold. He removed them to move the quieter, proceeding in only his socks, following the crimson beads in the snow. The sun set and left him in darkness. Little time left.

The trail led into a thicket strung with ivy. The twigs would deflect his arrows, but he crouched nonetheless and passed beneath the thorns. The path wound one way, then another, and emptied into a small clearing. There the bloodtrail ended.

He paused. His mouth cocked open to better hear.

“Broccan.”

His back tightened, ready to draw the arrow back. He looked everywhere. The light was scant, even the full moon smothered by thick clouds. The rustling trees made grasping shapes on the snow. Gloom and shadows.

“You should never have gone to the tower, Broccan. You should never have removed that mask, for it might have kept you sane. You thought to control both worlds of man and beast. Now you are lost in my domain, and will never get home. You cannot stop this, Broccan. You cannot.”

For an instant, a fault appeared in the clouds and the lunar eye peeked through. Then he saw it.

“I can,” he said, and drew and fired.

***

At dawn he arrived back at Nuala’s house. A crowd met him at the door, but he did not dismount, remaining sitting with clothes torn and damp and blackened with wet ash and blood. “I killed it,” he said to them proudly.

“This man!” cried a maid. “This man is Sir Broccan!”

Several of the Count’s men were stepping outside now. A few carried spears. “Sir, are you the man who lives yonder?”

“Aye, ‘tis I. And I’ve vanquished the master’s bane.”

Another farmhand spoke up. “Aye, ‘tis he! He’s also the one who burned the forest a month past! He’s known among the Fiathan for his lunacy!”

Then Broccan realized. The horse, sensing his agitation, began to pace. “How dare you?” he shrieked. “‘Twasn’t I who killed the master! The puck did it!”

“What puck?”

From his lap he picked up the caprine’s head by one of its long horns and threw it into their midst. Its blood speckled a few of them and it bounced to their shoes, eyes open and tongue hanging out in an idiotic expression. Broccan smiled in victory.

“Sir…” said the Count’s man, “this is a goat.”

“Aye, a goat-man!”

“No, Sir. Only a goat.”

Broccan looked at the head in the morning light. A breeze touched it white fur.

It was the wrong color.

“No…” he said. “No, it can’t be! That was the puck, Robbie Jan! I tracked it! I watched it drinking that man’s blood in this very home!”

“Sir Broccan, I am to arrest you for murder and kidnapping.”

“Kidnapping…”

“Tell us where the child is, and we might lighten your sentence.”

“I don’t understand, what–”

Just then a woman pushed to the front. She wore only a nightgown and her blonde hair fell over her gaunt face. A servant helped her stand, and anyone could see from her deflated belly that she was postpartum. “You monster!” Nuala screamed. “Do not insult me with denial! The bloody stock of your arrowshaft is lodged in my wall! You slew my husband and took my child! What have you done with my babe?”

“I… Nuala please, I…”

The Count’s man stepped forward. “I must ask you to dismount, Sir.”

In a flash Broccan had an arrow nocked and drawn. The whole assembly cowered from his gaze. Their eyes lit with fear.

He could not breathe through his nose, so strong were his tears. “Nuala… ‘twas the puck.”

“You are mad,” she said, and she too wept. “It was no puck, it was only you. You’ve waited all these months to kill my husband. You watched from that wall like a carrion bird, and every day we feared you. Insult me not with your delusions, and call me not your sister, madman.”

“I am not mad!”

The gathering recoiled at his outcry. He lowered his draw and had to wipe the spittle from his chin.

“I… I will find your babe. The puck has it… he must. I’ll go. I can find it. I’ll show you! I’ll show you! You’ll see I am not mad!”

***

He found the cairn he’d built the previous summer and dismantled it stone by stone until he found the mask. It grinned merrily at him. He put it on and it covered his grief.

***

Do you see him? Out there in the Kellwyn Forest, the man who lives among the trees and wears the grinning wooden mask. That is he. His socks were ruined long ago; he’s cut them into crude buskins and added leather. He stalks among the groves and thickets. He searches for tracks on the forest floor. He rests in the summer shade with his longbow across his lap. You might even speak to him. Go on, say hullo. He’s not dangerous, though he’s quick to ire. He’ll ask you if you’ve seen a goat-man, or perhaps a child of some indeterminate years… he’s increasingly unsure how many. He’ll ask other questions too, of dubious purpose: do you have livestock, and have they been acting strangely; do you carry food or drink, and in a certain part of the woods did you perceive it to suddenly rot or spoil; have you been to Fyrthsex, and have you seen there a lady named Nuala? He might even ask for directions, though he’ll always insist he’s not lost.

He’s not dangerous. Answer his questions, but do not call him mad. For God’s sake, do not call me mad.