The Old Well
Wren was not supposed to go past the willows. Everyone in the village said the far meadow belonged to the wind and the wild bees, and that was reason enough for most children to stay away. It was exactly the reason Wren went. She was chasing a thread of music — thin and silver, the kind you hear at the very edge of hearing and aren’t sure you heard at all.
It led her through the long grass to a well she had never seen: round, grey, furred with moss, a little peaked roof leaning over it like a tired hat, a wooden bucket swinging on a rope though there was no breeze to move it. Wren leaned over the rim. The music was coming from down there, rising out of the dark like warmth out of an oven.
“Hello?” she called, and her voice fell in and did not come back.
She leaned a little further. Just a little. The mossy stones were cool and slick under her hands, and the dark below smelled not of cold water but of earth and honey and something like candle smoke.
“Is someone there?”
The stone gave way. It happened so gently it hardly seemed fair to call it falling. One moment she was bent over the edge; the next the rim was above her, the round mouth of the well a coin of evening sky shrinking smaller and smaller, and Wren was sliding down and down into the singing dark. She did not scream.
Later she would wonder about that. Perhaps it was because the music had grown louder, and the walls had begun, very faintly, to glow.
Down and Down
The fall became a slide, and the slide became something almost like flying. The walls of the well were not stone anymore but root and soft moss, threaded all through with veins of pale light, as though someone had buried a hundred lanterns in the soil and let them grow. Wren slid past them on a cushion of moss and cool air, slower and slower, the way a leaf comes down rather than a stone. She landed in a heap of something soft — moss, again, deep as a feather bed — and lay there blinking.
Above her there was no sky. There was a ceiling of dark earth, impossibly high, and hanging from it were clusters of crystals that glowed a warm honey-gold, lighting a cavern so vast that the far walls were lost in haze. Streams of clear water wandered across the floor between mushrooms taller than she was. The air hummed faintly, the same silver music, closer now, like a sound you could almost warm your hands at.
Wren sat up slowly.
“Oh,” she breathed.
It was all she had. She had read about caves — about darkness and bats and the careful fear of getting lost. This was nothing like that. This was a place that wanted to be seen.
Every crystal seemed turned toward her like a face; every stream caught the gold and carried it along. She got to her feet, brushing moss from her cardigan, and turned in a slow circle.
“Where am I?” she whispered. Nobody answered.
But somewhere off among the glowing mushrooms, small and quick, something — someone — went very still, and watched her with bright and curious eyes.
The One Who Found Her
The someone stepped out from behind a mushroom, and Wren nearly laughed in surprise. He was a boy — or near enough to a boy — but no taller than her waist, broad and sturdy as a little barrel, with a round face, copper-red hair that stood up in tufts, and cheeks pink as autumn apples. He wore a forest-green tunic and a belt so wide it was nearly a shelf, and he carried a small brass lantern with a single golden crystal glowing inside it. He stared at her.
She stared at him.
“You’re a topsider,” he said at last, in a voice full of wonder and a little alarm. “You actually came down the old well. Nobody comes down the old well. It’s been shut for a hundred years.”
“I didn’t mean to,” Wren said. “I fell.”
“You fell.”
He said it the way other people might say you flew. Then he remembered his manners, planted the lantern on a stone, and bowed so deeply his hair nearly swept the moss.
“Tovi,” he announced. “Lamp-tender, third rank. Well — second rank, soon, if the Keeper ever notices.”
“Wren,” said Wren.
“Wren,” Tovi repeated, trying it out. “That’s a bird, up top, isn’t it? A small brown one that sings far too loud for its size.”
“That’s the one.”
Tovi grinned, and the last of his alarm went out of him like a snuffed candle.
“Well, Wren-the-bird,” he said, lifting his lantern again so its glow washed over them both, “you’ve fallen straight into the Lantern Kingdom. And I expect you’ll be wanting to go home before supper.”
The Lantern Kingdom
Tovi led her along a path of smooth pale stones, and as they walked the cavern opened like a book. Wren had imagined a few huts, perhaps, or a cosy burrow. She had not imagined a city. Bridges of carved stone arched over the wandering streams, strung with lanterns like beads on a necklace.
Whole houses had been hollowed into the great pillars of rock, their round windows glowing. Dwarves were everywhere — short and sturdy, every one of them, hauling barrows of glittering ore, tending gardens of silver mushrooms, sitting on doorsteps mending boots and humming the silver tune that Wren now understood was simply the sound of the kingdom going about its day. They crossed the tallest bridge, and Wren stopped in the middle of it to look. Below her and around her and above her, the Lantern Kingdom spread out in every direction, gold upon gold upon warm gold, until the lights blurred into the haze like stars seen through summer leaves.
“It’s beautiful,” she said softly, and meant it more than she had ever meant anything.
“It’s home,” said Tovi, but he looked pleased.
Then the thought she had been holding off arrived all at once, the way cold water finds you. The well was shut. She had fallen a very long way down. Up top, the evening would be turning to night, and her mother would be standing at the gate, calling her name into a meadow that did not answer.
“Tovi,” she said carefully, “how do I get back up?”
Tovi’s grin faltered. He looked down at his lantern, and then, for a long moment, at the impossibly high and starless ceiling.
“Ah,” he said. “That.”
The Keeper of the Old Lights
There was only one person in the whole kingdom who might know, Tovi said, and that was the Keeper of the Old Lights. They found him at the very edge of the city, in a round room whose walls were nothing but shelves, and whose shelves were nothing but lanterns — hundreds of them, thousands, some bright, some dim, some dark and cold as winter stones. An old dwarf sat among them, his beard long and white as a frost, a deep-blue robe pooled around him and a round felt cap upon his head. He was polishing a lantern that had gone out, very patiently, as if patience alone might wake it.
“Keeper Orin,” said Tovi, suddenly shy. “She fell down the old well. She needs the way up.”
The old dwarf looked at Wren for a long, long moment. His eyes were kind and crinkled, and very tired.
“The old well,” he murmured. “I lit the lamp at the bottom of it myself, child, when I was younger than Tovi. Then it was sealed, and the lamp went out, and the stair beside it was let to crumble, for no one came down and no one went up.”
He set the cold lantern gently on his knee.
“The way is still there. But it is dark now, all the long way, and a dwarf cannot climb to the top — the topside light is too much for our eyes.”
“Then how?” Wren began.
“You will carry a light,” said Orin, “and you will climb. And Tovi will go with you as far as a dwarf can go.”
He reached down, chose a small brass lantern with a steady golden crystal, and pressed it into her hands. It was warm.
“Mind you don’t let it go out,” he said. “A light shared is not so easily lost.”
The Long Stair
The old stair began behind a curtain of roots and went up, and up, and up, until even thinking about it made Wren’s legs ache. For a while it was easy enough. Tovi went first, then Wren with her lantern, and the golden crystal threw their two shadows long and friendly against the wall. They talked to fill the dark — about birds, about boots, about whether stars were only the topside’s lanterns hung very far away.
Tovi was certain they were. But the higher they climbed, the colder and quieter it grew, and at last they came to a place where the steps had crumbled into a steep, broken slope, and the dark above pressed down close. Wren’s lantern flickered. She felt the old well-fear then, the one she hadn’t felt while falling — the fear of being small in the dark a long way from home.
She stopped. The light shivered and shrank.
“It’s going out,” she whispered. “Tovi, it’s going out.”
“It isn’t,” said Tovi, climbing back down to her.
He cupped his sturdy hands around hers, around the lantern, and held on.
“See? Two of us. A light shared, the Keeper said. Breathe slow, Wren-the-bird.” So she breathed slow.
And whether it was the breathing or the two pairs of hands, the crystal steadied, and warmed, and burned clear and gold again — brighter than before, bright enough to show the next good step, and the next.
“This is as far as I can go,”
Tovi said at the top of the broken slope, blinking up into a dark that was, very faintly, beginning to thin.
“Topside light. My eyes.”
He smiled, though it wobbled.
“Go on. You’re nearly there.”
Back to the Meadow
Wren climbed the last of the way alone, but she did not feel alone, because the lantern was warm in her hand and full of Tovi’s stubborn, steady kindness. The dark thinned to grey, the grey to a soft blue, and then her fingers found the cool mossy rim of the well, and she pulled herself up and over and out into the meadow. It was evening — the same evening, somehow, as though no time had passed at all up here. The grass was silver with dew.
The first stars were coming out, one by one, and Wren looked at them for a long time, and could not help thinking that Tovi was wrong, and also that she would never tell him so. In her hand, the little brass lantern glowed on, warm and gold, the one piece of the Lantern Kingdom she had carried up into the air.
When she cupped her hands around it, she was almost sure she could still hear it — that thin silver thread of music, faint and far below, going about its day.
“Goodnight, Tovi,” she whispered down into the well. “Goodnight, Lantern Kingdom.”
From far, far down, so faint she might have dreamed it, the music seemed to lift, just for a moment, as if in answer. Then Wren turned and walked home through the dewy grass, her lantern lighting the path, to where her mother stood at the gate calling her name into the dark — and she called back, and ran, and was home in time for supper after all.