Once Upon a Summer Day Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword

  Chapter 1 - Whisper

  Chapter 2 - Colloquium

  Chapter 3 - Counsel

  Chapter 4 - Summerwood

  Chapter 5 - Entreaty

  Chapter 6 - Autumnwood

  Chapter 7 - Winterwood

  Chapter 8 - Turnings

  Chapter 9 - Prisoner

  Chapter 10 - Flight

  Chapter 11 - River

  Chapter 12 - Reft

  Chapter 13 - Turret

  Chapter 14 - Beeline

  Chapter 15 - Poniards

  Chapter 16 - Gnome

  Chapter 17 - Dance

  Chapter 18 - Torrent

  Chapter 19 - Garden

  Chapter 20 - Mire

  Chapter 21 - Majority

  Chapter 22 - Stone

  Chapter 23 - Black Wind

  Chapter 24 - Moonlight

  Chapter 25 - Adieu

  Chapter 26 - Wyrd

  Chapter 27 - Riverbend

  Chapter 28 - Interlude

  Chapter 29 - Idyll

  Chapter 30 - Pooka

  Chapter 31 - Exaction

  Chapter 32 - Legend

  Chapter 33 - Riders

  Chapter 34 - Events Past

  Chapter 35 - Soaring

  Chapter 36 - Veldt

  Chapter 37 - Échecs

  Chapter 38 - Caravan

  Chapter 39 - Arrows

  Chapter 40 - Seacoast

  Chapter 41 - Dark of the Moon

  Chapter 42 - Lot

  Chapter 43 - Fey Lord

  Chapter 44 - Doom

  Chapter 45 - Sinistral

  Chapter 46 - Daggers

  Chapter 47 - Flight

  Chapter 48 - Troth

  Chapter 49 - Minion

  Chapter 50 - Acolyte

  Chapter 51 - Manor

  Chapter 52 - Vows

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Praise for the Novels of Dennis L. McKiernan

  Once Upon a Summer Day

  “An interesting twist. . . . McKiernan’s writing is evocative, and much of the novel’s enjoyment comes from sinking into the story. He paints vivid landscapes and provides lots of good action sequences. The book is valuable as much for the journey as for the destination.”

  —The Davis Enterprise

  “Romantics rejoice! McKiernan’s retelling of [this beloved fairy tale] is the way it should have been done the first time around. . . . The lines between good and evil are clear, and romance and chivalry and true love are alive and flourishing.McKiernan’s magic invites readers to dive completely into the story, as children do, and conjures the same overwhelming wonder that children experience.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “McKiernan embellishes another classic fairy tale in this enjoyably frothy fantasy. . . . Keep[s] the reader turning the pages.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “McKiernan takes the tale in some unexpected directions. He also offers an engaging, clever, and resourceful hero in Borel, as well as entertaining sidekicks in Flic, Buzzer, and Chelle herself. Recommended.”

  —SFRevu

  “Steeped in tradition and timelessness, and should appeal to fairy tale lovers of all ages.”

  —Library Journal

  “McKiernan always manages to enchant his readers with his fabulous fantasy novels.”

  —Midwest Book Review continued . . .

  Once Upon a Winter’s Night

  “Exuberant . . . never less than graceful . . . a solid, well-rounded fantasy that readers will enjoy as much on a summer beach as on a winter’s night.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Engaging.”

  —Locus

  “Intelligently told, romantic . . . and filled with the qualities of the best of the traditional fairy stories.”

  —Chronicle

  “Prepare to be transported to the fairyland of childhood. . . . Enchanting.”

  —Booklist

  “A superb fairy tale. . . . The story line is charming and magical as it takes readers on quite a ride in the realm of [Faery]. Dennis McKiernan escorts fantasy lovers into an enchanted place that deserves more tales.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “Imaginative. . . . Displaying a certain mastery in his ability to imitate older poetic forms of composition. . . . Those who enjoy fairy tales and folklore will likely be delighted.”

  —SF Site

  Red Slippers: More Tales of Mithgar

  “Alternating between high tragedy and earthy humor, the twelve stories in this fantasy collection from bestseller McKiernan entertain while touching on complex moral and philosophical issues . . . appealing.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Elaborates on old themes and introduces new motifs in the richly developed world of Mithgar. . . . Filled with likable protagonists, this volume is an excellent choice.”

  —Library Journal

  “Those who seek long, absorbing yarns in the classic mode will honor and enjoy [Red Slippers].”

  —Booklist

  “Terrific . . . a powerful anthology that will leave a grateful audience wanting to share more pints with the crew of the Eroean.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “The influence of Tolkien can be seen in the stories of Mithgar. You can see some similarities in the characters. But they are not just another rehashing of the same tale. They have their own unique flavor. Something you can curl up with on a dreary day to escape into another world and rejoin old friends.”

  —SFRevu

  Silver Wolf, Black Falcon

  “McKiernan brings his Mithgar series to a triumphant conclusion.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “In the tradition of Tolkien, the author blends lore and prophecy with vivid battle scenes and emotional drama. A tale of high fantasy that should appeal to most fans of epic fiction.”

  —Library Journal

  “A page-turner.”

  —VOYA

  . . . and his other novels

  “Once McKiernan’s got you, he never lets go.”

  —Jennifer Roberson

  “Some of the finest imaginative action. . . . There are no lulls in McKiernan’s story.”

  —The Columbus Dispatch

  “McKiernan brews magic with an insightful blend of laughter, tears, and high courage.”

  —Janny Wurts, author of Traitor’s Knot: Alliance of Light

  By Dennis L. McKiernan

  Caverns of Socrates

  BOOKS IN THE FAERY SERIES

  Once Upon a Winter’s Night

  Once Upon a Summer Day

  Once Upon an Autumn Eve

  BOOKS IN THE MITHGAR SERIES

  The Dragonstone

  Voyage of the Fox Rider

  HÈL’S CRUCIBLE:

  Book 1: Into the Forge

  Book 2: Into the Fire

  Dragondoom

  THE IRON TOWER:

  Book 1: The Dark Tide

  Book 2: Shadows of Doom

  Book 3: The Darkest Day

  THE SILVER CALL:

  Book 1: Trek to Kraggen-cor

  Book 2: The Brega Path

  Tales of Mithgar (a story collection)

  The Vulgmaster (the graphic novel)

  The Eye of the Hunter

  Silver Wolf, Black Falcon

  Red Slippers: More Tales of Mithgar (a story collection)

  ROC

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson
Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

  Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First Roc Mass Market Printing, April 2006

  Copyright © Dennis L. McKiernan, 2005

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-09806-6

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  Once again to all lovers,

  As well as to lovers of fairy tales

  And to the Chelle we know and love

  Acknowledgments

  My dear Martha Lee, my heart, for the millionth time let me say I appreciate and am grateful for your enduring support, careful reading, patience, and love.

  And again I thank the other members of the Tanque Wordies Writers’ Group—Diane, Katherine, John—for your encouragement throughout the writing of this Faery tale.

  And thank you, Christine J. McDowell, for your help with the French language. (I would add, though, that any errors in usage are entirely mine. Of course, the errors in English are mine as well.)

  Thank you, James C. Grams, for your knowledge of wines and the patter of sommeliers, some of which appears herein.

  Lastly, thank you, Grandmaster Tal Shaked, for allowing me to use your chess (échecs) problem in Chapter 37. (A fuller explanation of that specific puzzle can be found in the Afterword.)

  Foreword

  Are fairy tales but relics of altogether greater stories that A once might have been told, pale remnants of much longer, even epic sagas? To me it seems a possibility. Oh, perhaps not all fairy tales are faint echoes of once-mighty shouts, but I think some of them surely must be.

  You see, what many contend is that most fairy tales are stories from way-back-when, tales that were orally passed from person to person, and so they were unadorned and short and rather easy to remember. And many of them simply were to entertain, while others had a point to be made, whether it be a moral or a truism.

  Some of the most beloved stories, those most likely to be passed from folk to folk, were co-opted by religion, and the heroes and heroines were said to be part of a particular religious group, whereas the villains were part of the old order—witches, goblins, trolls, and the like. Hence, these tales were used by whatever religion seized upon them to foster goodwill or belief, or to recruit. And some of the tales were shortened again to do this, or so I do believe.

  But as I said in the foreword of another book (Once Upon a Winter’s Night), back when bards and poets and minstrels and the like sat in castles or in hovels or in mansions or by campfires, or entertained patrons as they travelled along the way, surely the original tales were much longer, when told by these “professional” storytellers, than the tellings of the less skilled. And so the bards embellished their tales with many more wondrous encounters than the later, altered—shortened—versions would have them be. After all, in the case of a bardic storyteller, she or he would hold audiences enthralled for long whiles with accounts of love and seduction and copious sex and bloody fights and knights and witches and dragons and ogres and giants and other fantastic beings all littering the landscape of the tale as the hero or heroine struggled on.

  And so, I believe it is entirely possible that many of these splendid bardic sagas were severely shortened as the number of bards dwindled, and the people who were left to remember and pass on the tales simply didn’t have the oratory skills to tell stories of epic scope. And so they grew shorter and shorter over time as particular portions of a tale went missing bit by bit, until they were pared down to the point where practically anybody could tell the story.

  For example, were some great bard to tell a grand and glorious tale of the scope of, say, The Iliad, or The Odyssey, or even The Lord of the Rings, and were any one of these orally passed down through the ages from person to person, and if those passing on the tale were “common” folk, I believe the story would have dwindled a bit with each telling. And then, if one far-after day some Grimm brothers decided to write the beloved story down as it had come to be told, it might turn out to be an eight-page fairy tale.

  Yes, I admit that’s quite extreme, but I simply use it to make a point: that oral tales are difficult to pass on unless they are simple and short and rather easy to recall, or unless the people involved have phenomenal memories.

  Thank heavens for writing, eh?

  Don’t misunderstand me; I am not putting down the fairy tales we’ve all come to cherish. I love them dearly: from the simplest “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” and other tellings I heard from my mother and grandmother to the Andrew Lang collections—The Crimson Fairy Book, The Red Fairy Book, The Pink Fairy Book, and on through Orange, Yellow, Olive, Green, Lilac, Blue, Violet, Grey, and Brown: i.e., the spectrum—to the works of more modern writers, such as Dunsany and White and Tolkien (arguably, they were fairy-tale writers though their works are labeled fantasy these days), to some of the works of current writers.

  What I am saying instead is I’ve always felt that many wonders were lost by what I think might be the shortening and altering of each age-old folk and fairy tale to fit a different song from that which the old bards and my Celtic ancestors would sing.

  And so, a few years past, I wrote my first “restored” fairy tale (Once Upon a Winter’s Night) to tell (in a traditional manner and style) one of the time-honored tales as I think it once might have been told. And now here I am again with Once Upon a Summer Day, my second “restored” fairy tale. And once more I have chosen a tale that not only is one of my favorites, but is a favorite of people around the world.

  And since it is a romance in addition to being an adventure, once more you will find French words sprinkled throughout to represent the “Old Tongue.”

  By the bye, in my version of The Blue Fairy Book this story is but six pages long; the version of the Brothers Grimm is even shorter and probably better known. I thought that much too brief, and, as is apparent,
I did lengthen it a bit. But then again, I claim that I am telling the “real” story, and who is to say I am not?

  Dennis L. McKiernan

  Tucson, Arizona, 2005

  And so take care, beware,

  for they will seek revenge.

  1

  Whisper

  There is a place in Faery where eternal summer lies upon the land; it is a region of forests and fields, of vales and clearings, of streams and rivers and other such ’scapes, where soft summer breezes flow across the weald, though occasionally towering thunderstorms fill the afternoon skies and rain sweeps o’er all. How such a place can be—endless summer—is quite mysterious; nevertheless it is so.

  Separated from this magical realm by a great wall of twilight is another equally enigmatic domain, a region graced by eternal autumn, and here it is that crops afield remain ever for the reaping, and vines are overburdened with their largesse, and trees bear an abundance ripe for the plucking, and the ground holds rootstock and tubers for the taking. Yet no matter how often a harvest is gathered, when one isn’t looking the bounty somehow replaces itself.

  Likewise, lying past this realm, beyond another great wall of half-light, there stands a land of eternal winter, where snow ever lies on the ground and ice clads the sleeping trees and covers the still meres or, in thin sheets, encroaches upon the edges of swift-running streams, and the stars at night glimmer in crystalline skies.