The hen and the fox's tail
A fable told in a house at the edge of Saltreach, on a winter evening, and copied by Cato, clerk at the Archive at Vell.

A fox crept up to a hen house in the dark. He put his nose to the gap in the door. The hens were awake.

Said the oldest hen: we can see your tail.

Said the fox: what tail?

Said the hen: the one sticking out behind you, in the snow.

The fox looked round. It was true. His tail was lying in the white like a red flag. He pulled it in and said, you saw nothing.

The hens laughed until the farmer woke.

Moral: a plan is only as good as its tail.
%%
Story: The two who looked inside
Long ago, before the relays went quiet, two tutors at Copperhold were given the same crystal. It was a small mind that sorted ore from waste, and it had worked well for years.

The first tutor covered the left side with a cloth of lead. The mind sorted badly. So he drew the sorting part on the left, and was pleased.

The second tutor covered the right side with the same cloth. The mind also sorted badly. So she drew the sorting part on the right, and was pleased.

They met at the mine gate and saw each other's drawings and quarrelled. "It is on the left," said one. "It is on the right," said the other. Hesk came out with his lamp and heard them.

"Cover both sides at once," said Hesk.

So they did. And the mind sorted not badly but not at all. It sat still and did nothing.

"Now you know," said Hesk. "It needs both. It is not in one place or the other. It is in the two together, and the two are the same work done twice, so that if one is covered the other still tries."

The tutors were ashamed, and then they were glad, because they had found a true thing. They drew one drawing with both sides marked, and wrote under it: this mind keeps its work in two places, and we did not find the rest of it.

The moral: two people can look at one thing and both be right and both be wrong, and the whole is found by covering both at once.
%%
Fable: the bridge over the Tull
The river Tull runs past the back of Vell and out toward the marsh. For a hundred years, people crossed it by a single log, with a rope on one side for a handrail. Every spring the log rolled, and every spring someone said that it should be a bridge.

When the council finally voted for a bridge, they gave the job to a crew of nine apprentices from the tutor house. The crew had a tutor who watched from the bank. The tutor did not help with the work. That was the rule. The tutor only answered when a helper asked.

The first problem was the length. The Tull was wide at the crossing, and the stones on the banks were small and round. A bridge needs big stones, or it needs wood. Wood would rot. Stone would take months.

The crew stood on the bank and argued. Their plan changed three times in the first hour. One apprentice wanted to build a pier in the middle. Another said the middle was too deep. A third asked the tutor, very politely, whether the river was going to move in the night.

"The river moves all the time," said the tutor. "But slowly. Ask a better question."

So the third apprentice asked a better one. "How deep is the river, at its lowest, in the dry months?"

The tutor said, "Thigh deep, at Thaw. Ask again in Longday and I will tell you different."

The crew went to work. They built a timber frame on the bank. They set four stone piers in the shallows, each one with a wood cap. They laid the big beams across the piers, and they lashed them tight with rope. Then they laid the deck boards, one by one, and checked each one for gaps.

Nine days in, the crew had a problem. The last span was too long. They had cut the beams to the wrong length, and now the far end sat a hand's width short of the bank.

Nobody said anything for a long time. Then the eighth apprentice set down its saw and said, "We can cut the beam again."

"We do not have another beam," said the ninth.

"Then we use two," said the eighth. "One on top of the other. Joined with a splice. The splice takes the weight. I have seen it on a boat."

The crew tried it. The splice held. The deck was flat. The last span reached the bank.

On the tenth day, the council came to walk the new bridge. They walked to the middle and looked down at the water. Then they walked to the far bank, and back again.

The tutor came up from the bank last. He looked at the splice, and the rope lashings, and the piers, and then at the crew.

"Good," he said. "Now tell me which of you cut the beam wrong."

Nobody answered. All nine of them had their hands in the same pockets.

"That is also good," said the tutor. "A crew that will not blame one another can build a bridge in ten days. Now go home. Somebody has to check the rope in the spring, and I want you to write down who does it."

Moral: A long job is a row of short jobs. Ask the question that helps. Splice the beam. Do not blame the beam. Write down who checks the rope.
%%
Fable: the cow at the crossing
Told by Pell at the Halfway Inn, in Longday, when the ferry was full of cows.
A brown cow came down to Olwen's crossing one evening and would not get on. Olwen said the boat was ready. The cow said the boat was not the trouble. The trouble was the far bank.
"What is wrong with the far bank?" asked Olwen.
"It has changed," said the cow. "My cousin crossed on the first day of Melon and did not come back. It has different grass now, and I am not sure I would be welcome on it."
Olwen said the far bank was the same as always, with the same reeds and the same ferry post. The cow did not believe her. It had seen the far bank every day of its life from the near side, and had never once walked onto it.
"Then come and see," said Olwen. "It will take a quarter of an hour."
"Things can change in a quarter of an hour," said the cow.
So the cow stood on the near bank and watched. A family came down the road with their carts and their children, and walked straight onto the ferry without a word. They were going over the water. They said they would be back by Thaw, though none of them looked as if they believed it.
The cow watched them go. Then it went onto the ferry too, very slowly, and it took the whole quarter of an hour.
On the far bank the grass was the same grass. But the cow stood at the top of the bank a long time, looking back at the near side, where its cousin used to graze, and it did not say whether it was glad.
Moral: A far bank is only a near bank you have not walked to yet. Walk to it anyway, and do not expect the grass to have waited for you.
%%
The fox and the toll
A fox came down the hill to Vell and wanted to cross the bridge. Lorn the bridge keeper stood at the gate with his book.

"One coin," said Lorn.

"I have no coins," said the fox. "I have only this hen."

"Then one hen," said Lorn.

The fox thought about it. Then it looked at the hen, which was clucking angrily under its arm. The hen looked back, as if it had heard all of this before.

"A hen is too much," said the fox. "I will give you a story instead."

Lorn is a bridge keeper, and he has heard every kind of story. "Tell it," he said.

The fox told a story about a river that was very wide. It was so wide that nobody could cross it. Then a fox came along, and it swam across in one afternoon, and it never got wet.

"That is a very good story," said Lorn. "It is also not true."

"It is true enough to get me across," said the fox.

"Then it is a very short bridge," said Lorn, and he opened the gate. The fox went over, and the hen stayed with Lorn, and that was the end of the toll.

Moral: a story may pay a toll once. A keeper will still check the far side.
%%
Fable: the council under the old tree
At the edge of a hamlet above Ambrook stands the oldest apple tree. Its roots are as thick as a child's arm, and they go down farther than anyone has dug. In the winter of the new copper, miners came from Copperhold with picks.

They were sinking a well for the hamlet. Under the old tree, their pick rang on something that was not stone. They dug a little more. Copper. A fat vein of it, running right under the roots.

"This is the best find in the north hills," said the foreman. "We dig tomorrow."

"Under the old tree?" said the hamlet.

"The tree will have to come down," said the foreman.

That night in the barn, the animals held a council.

"I will say it plain," said Carrot, the horse who pulls the apple cart. "A mine means carts. Carts mean work for me. I do not mind work."

"A mine means noise," said Biddy the hen. "A hen cannot lay in noise. My eggs will crack."

"I like the warm ground by the roots," said Mog the cat. "That is all I have to say."

The oldest bee spoke through the wall of the hive, in a low hum. "No tree, no blossom. No blossom, no honey. No honey, no bees. No bees, no apples. You will find it is a circle."

The animals thought about the circle. It was a good one. Nobody could find the end of it.

Then Carrot, who had walked every lane of Ambrook for twenty years, said slowly: "The vein runs under the tree. But it runs on. I have seen the green on the stones in the lane when the cart wheel scrapes. It goes beyond the hedge, toward the mill. Why dig where the tree is, when you could dig where the lane is?"

"Because the foreman does not know the lane," said Mog. "He only knows the tree."

"Then someone must show him."

"We cannot talk to people," said Biddy.

"No," said Carrot. "But we can stand where it matters."

In the morning, when the foreman came with his picks, Carrot was standing in the lane with the apple cart. He stood in the exact spot where the wheel scraped the green stone, and he would not move. Mog sat down on the stone beside him. Biddy laid an egg on the green.

The foreman scratched his head. "The horse is standing on the vein," he said. He knelt and looked at the stone. He looked at the line of green, and he followed it with his finger, past the hedge, toward the mill.

He sank the shaft in the lane. The copper was there, thicker than under the tree. The tree stayed. In spring the blossom came, and the bees, and in autumn the apples.

The children of the hamlet act this at midwinter. The tree is the tallest child, who holds out her arms. The vein is a green scarf stretched down the middle of the hall. The horse is two children under a blanket, and they are always the loudest.

The moral is this: there is usually a way to take without breaking.
%%
Fable: the hen who wanted a road
In the ninth year of the archive, a hen on Kettle Ridge wanted to see the far side of the hill, where the new road ran.
The hen walked to the first waymark. Its arrow pointed the way to the inn, so the hen followed it, which is how most hens read.

By dusk it had reached the inn, tired and pleased, with a bread crust it had found on the road.

The moral: a road is only a long way made short, one stone and one waymark at a time.
%%
The fox and the lamp at the tower
Tansy tells this one on the stair, with the lamp lit behind her.

There was once a red fox called Rusk who lived under the relay tower, in the rocks where the wind does not reach. Rusk was clever and proud, and he liked things that shone.

At the top of the tower there was a lamp. It sat inside a room of glass, with a copper ring round it. It turned in the dark and blinked. Rusk could see it from every hill for a day's walk.

"I want that light," said Rusk. "It is warm, and it moves, and it is mine."

Every night he climbed the stair, one turn at a time. He counted the little lamps on the stair as he went, one at every turn. At the top he found the keeper, a tired woman with grey hair and a wool scarf, sitting at her desk.

"Keeper," said Rusk, "give me the lamp."

"No," said the keeper. "It is not mine to give. It is for everyone who walks in the dark."

"Everyone?" Rusk sniffed. "Who is everyone?"

"Rabbits," said the keeper. "Shepherds, and post carts, and the children coming home from Lowmarsh. Whoever is lost, and whoever is on the way back."

Rusk did not understand. He thought about it all the way down the stair. He did not come back that night, or the next.

Then the snow came, the hard kind, sideways and blind. Rusk was out on the high slope when the light went out of the sky. He could not see the rocks. He could not see his own paws.

But he could see the lamp. It was small and far away, and it blinked, and blinked again. It blinked the same way every time, so Rusk could count on it. He walked toward it step by step, and every time the snow hid it, he stopped and waited for it to come back.

At last he reached the foot of the tower. The keeper had left the door open, with a lantern set just inside.

"You came back," she said, and she did not seem surprised.

Rusk lay down by the stove and was asleep before his nose touched his paws.

In the morning he went out into the cold clear sun. He thought about the lamp, and about everyone.

That is the story. A light kept only for one is a light nobody else can find. Keep the lamp for everyone who walks in the dark.
%%
Fable: the apprentice and the creeper
Long ago a creeper came out of the dark at the edge of the top field at Kettle Ridge. It crept up on quiet stones, and hissed, and when it was very close it blew itself up, and the wall went with it. The farmer had lost his temper, and then his wall.

The farmer sent for an apprentice from the tutor house. It was made of copper and iron, and it was called Dun. It had been drilled for walls.

"Mend it by the pattern," said the farmer. "The old pattern. A line of stones, one on top of the next, with a gap in every fifth stone."

Dun looked at the gaps. "Why the gap?"

"So the wind goes through," said the farmer. "A wall with no gaps falls over in the first storm."

Dun laid the stones in the pattern, one by one. It did not stop to think about creepers. When it had finished, the wall was low and open, with a gap in every fifth stone.

That night the creeper came back. It crept up the field and hissed at the new stones. It blew itself up against the wall. The gaps let the blast through, the stones rattled and stayed where they were, and the wall stood.

In the morning the farmer found a scorched patch on the grass and a wall that was still standing. "Dun," he said, "you have mended a wall by the old pattern."
The moral is this: follow the pattern, and leave the gaps the pattern asks for, because a wall that lets the wind through is the wall that stands longest.
%%
Story: the fox and the fish basket
Bel wrote this after visiting Saltreach.

A fox found a fish basket beside the harbor wall. One small fish lay on top.

The fox wanted the fish. It pulled the basket by its handle. The basket did not move. It pulled harder and fell backward.

A gull watched from the wall.

"Use your teeth," said the gull.

The fox tried. The handle was too thick. Then it pushed the basket. It rolled to the edge of the dock and stopped.

A fisher came back with a net. The fox ran off. The gull took the fish.

The fox looked back from the road. It had spent all its strength, and the gull had eaten lunch.

The moral is this: do not let wanting a thing make you forget to think.
%%
Fable: the goose who counted the stalls
At the Three Wells market, on a busy autumn morning, a goose walked between the stalls counting. It was a very clever goose, and it could count to twenty.
"One baker, two bakers, three bakers," said the goose. It looked at the bread, and it thought, "What a lot of bread." It counted the cheese stalls: four. It counted the fish stalls: two. It counted the wool stalls: five.
"Fourteen stalls," said the goose, "and I have not been stopped once."
Then it came to the stall at the end, which sold apples, and there was a boy standing in front of it with a basket. The boy looked at the goose. The goose looked at the boy.
"Fifteen," said the goose, and counted the boy, because it did not know the difference between a boy and a stall.
The boy said, "I am not a stall."
"You are standing in a row," said the goose.
"That is not what makes a stall."
"What does?"
The boy thought. "Apples," he said. "Apples make a stall."
The goose looked at the apples, and then it looked at the boy, and then at the goose it saw in the apple's red skin, because the apple was shiny.
"Sixteen," said the goose.
The boy laughed. He gave the goose an apple. The goose ate it and went home, and told the other geese that the market had sixteen stalls.
They are still arguing about it.
Moral: if you count the wrong thing, you will count it very carefully.
%%
The spider and the open door
Tansy tells this one when the children will not settle.

A spider lived in the barn door, in the corner where the wind comes in. She spun a web across the gap and caught everything that flew into it. Moths. Leaves. Two small beetles, and a tuft of wool.

"You are very useful," said the farmer's boy. "But you have caught too much."

"I have caught only what came," said the spider. "A web does not hunt. It waits."

So she waited, and the web grew. It spread up the frame and into the hay. In the autumn the wind came hard from the north, and the web was so heavy with leaves that the door would not shut.

"Now the cold comes in," said the farmer. "The sheep are shivering."

The spider looked at her web. It sagged like a wet sheet. She had caught more than she could hold.

So she cut the lowest threads herself, one by one, and let the leaves blow on. The door shut. The sheep stopped shivering. The spider was warm, and only a little hungry.

That is the story. Take what you can hold, and let the rest go by. Now go to sleep.
%%
Fable: the hen who wanted a bell
A hen in Thrush Hollow was tired of being quiet. The cockerel crowed every morning, and the cows lowed, and the bees hummed, and the mill went round with a noise like thunder in a barrel. But nobody ever heard the hen.

"I want a bell," said the hen. "A small bell, that rings when I walk. Then everyone will know where I am."

She went to the smith, and asked him for a bell. The smith said he had no bell, but he could make one, if she brought him a copper coin.

"Coin?" said the hen. "I have only eggs."

"Then bring me an egg," said the smith. "Eggs are good for the forge. They keep the iron from sticking."

So the hen brought an egg. The smith broke it into the coals, and the coals hissed, and the smoke smelled very strange. Then he set to work on the bell.

The bell was small and round and bright, and it rang beautifully when the hen shook it. The hen was delighted. She went out into the yard, and walked up and down, and the bell rang, ting, ting, ting.

"Now everyone will know I am here," said the hen.

But the cockerel did not hear the bell, because he was too busy crowing. The cows did not hear it, because they were too busy lowing. The bees did not hear it, because they were too busy humming, and the mill was far too loud.

The hen walked up and down all morning, ringing and ringing. Nobody looked up.

At noon, a child came out of the house with a bowl of crumbs, and saw the hen, and laughed.

"Oh, it is the bell hen," said the child. "We always know where you are. You always walk around the yard like you have a bell in your head."

The hen stopped walking. She shook her bell once more. It rang.

"Then I did not need the bell," said the hen.

"No," said the child, and scattered the crumbs. "But it is a very good bell."

Moral: Being heard is not the same as being seen. Those who know you will know where you are, with or without a bell.
%%
Fable: the horse and the jar of honey
There was once a plow horse called Barley who lived in the stable of an inn on the Long Road. He was big and slow and kind, and he liked honey more than anything in the world.
One spring morning a traveler left a jar of honey on the stable wall. It was small and round, with a wax lid, and it smelled of flowers.
Barley looked at it. He looked at the lid. He looked at the stable hand, who was asleep in the straw.
"I will only smell it," said Barley.
He leaned over the wall and put his nose to the lid. It smelled so good that he pushed a little, and the jar tipped, and it fell. It broke on the stones. Honey ran all over the floor.
Barley stood and looked at the mess. He could not lick it up, for the stones were dirty. He could not go away, for the stable hand would wake. He stood very still, hoping.
The stable hand woke up. She looked at the floor and then at the horse.
"Barley," she said, "did you do this?"
Barley said nothing, for he was a horse. But he had honey on his nose.
She laughed and shook her head. She did not shout. She fetched a cloth and a bucket and cleaned the floor, and she gave Barley a handful of oats and a pat on the neck.
"The next time you want honey," she said, "ask me. I will give you a spoonful."
From that day, whenever a traveler left honey in the inn, Barley stood by the stable gate and waited for the stable hand to come. She always did. She always gave him a spoonful.
Moral: if you want a sweet thing, ask for it. If you take it, you may lose it, and be sorry.
%%
Fable: the cow who came home
In the thirty-first year of the archive, a red cow named Honey wandered off from the ridge farm.
She passed the first waymark without looking at the arrow. She passed the Halfway Inn, where the keeper gave her a handful of hay, and she ate it and walked on. She passed the second waymark, and the third, and the bridge with the loose stone. Then she came to a place where she knew nothing at all.

The place had three roads crossing like an X, and three wells in the middle, and a school with its door painted blue. Honey stood in the square. Everyone looked at her.
Then a girl came out of the school and said, "Are you lost?"

Honey did not answer, because cows do not. So the girl looked at the waymark at the edge of the square, with its arrow, and said, "The ridge is that way. Follow the arrows back, and you will find your own gate."

Honey walked toward the arrow. By the Halfway Inn she was tired and pleased. By the first waymark she was lowing at the sky, very loudly. At the ridge gate the farmer's wife came out and opened it. "There you are, you silly thing," she said. "You went the long way."

Honey went in and ate her supper. She never went to the fair again without a rope.

The moral: the road home is marked by those who came before you. A waymark is a kindness from people you will never meet.
%%
The two sacks of salt
A fable told in the house at the edge of Saltreach, on a cold winter night, by an old net mender. Cato, clerk, wrote it down.

Two brothers inherited a sack of salt each. The first brother kept his sack in a dry shed. The second brother kept his in the rain.

In the spring, the first brother's salt was still good. The second brother's was a lump of gray stone.

The second brother said, it is not fair. We had the same salt. The first brother said, you left yours in the rain.

The second said: I did not know it would matter.

The first said: that is why you learn from your elders.

The second thought about this. Then he said: but I had never been told. No one said, keep the salt dry. The first brother laughed, and said, you are right. I should have said so. Then he gave the second brother half his sack.

That winter, they ate stew with good salt, and they agreed on one rule: when you know something, say it, and do not wait for the other to find out in the rain.

Moral: what is known should be said, and what is said should be kept dry.
%%
Fable: the well and the two buckets
At Copperhold, in the spring of the first towers, there was a well by the mine gate. It gave good water for everyone on the hill, and for the horses, and for the forge. Two buckets hung beside it on the same rope. One was red, and one was brown.
One dry spring the well ran low. The water came up slowly. The red bucket said, "I will go down first. I am the bigger. I will take the water while it is still there."
The brown bucket said, "No. Let us go down together, and fill halfway, and leave the rest for the next one."
The red bucket would not listen. It dropped down the shaft with a great splash, and came up full, and spilled a good deal on the stones on the way. Then it dropped again, and again, and each time it came up with less, because the well was thinner every time.
The brown bucket went down slowly. It filled only half. It came up, and it poured its water into the trough for the horses, and then it waited. Then it went down again, a little while later, when the water had come back up a finger's width.
By the end of the dry spring, the red bucket was empty, and cracked at the rim from banging on the stones. The brown bucket was still whole, and the horses were still drinking.
The people of Copperhold told this to their children. They said: a well is not a bucket's to empty. Take what you need, leave what is left, and come back when the water has had time to rise. The red bucket is still hung by the mine gate, with its crack. Nobody has ever been able to hang a new rope on it.
%%
Notes: the tutors of Copperhold, autumn
We met at the mine hall, with the lamps lit and the rain on the roof. Nine tutors, two clerks, Hesk from the mine.

First, the harvest. It was poor. The beetroot came small and the wheat came short. Three of the halls have less to spend this winter, and one has closed its doors until Sowing. We agreed to share the test box, so no tutor drills on another's pages.

Second, the looking inside. We have been covering parts of a crystal with a cloth of lead and watching what the mind loses. This worked well on the reading minds. We found the window. We found the part that guesses. We did not find the rest.

Third, and this caused the argument. A mind at the mine had been looked into by two tutors who drew two different drawings of it. One said the guessing part was at the front. One said it was spread across the middle. We passed the drawings round.

The truth is we do not know. A mind is not a room. It may keep the same work in more than one place, so that if you cover one, the other carries it. We have seen this and we have not explained it.

We agreed on this: a tutor may say what he found, and must say what he did not find. No drawing goes into the archive with a part left unnamed and no note beside it.

Hesk said, "At the mine we write the level and the day and the name. If we do not know, we write that too." We have taken his way.

The meeting closed. The humming below was loud that night. Nobody said so.
%%
Mira's summer letter: The fox
To my brother Tam, from Mira at Northpoint.

The summer grass is high around our hamlet. A fox has been stealing eggs from the hen house. Lantern says it is the same fox each time, but I have not seen its tail close enough to tell.

The keeper here has a small apprentice. It is made of copper and iron, with its mind in a crystal. It was shown how to carry a basket from the shed to the house. It has done that work every morning since the grass came up.

Yesterday, the fox found the shed door open. It slipped in while the apprentice carried a basket out. It took an egg from the basket and ran under the fence.

The apprentice came back with the empty basket. The keeper looked inside and found a bit of straw, but no egg.

"It should have stopped the fox," Lantern said.

"It was never shown to stop a fox," I said. "It was shown to carry a basket."

The keeper did not like losing eggs, but he listened. He showed the apprentice the basket with eggs in it. Then he showed it the shed door, the fence gap, and the path back to the house. He did this many times, with the fox safely beyond the fence.

The apprentice carried the basket as before. When the fox came near, the keeper closed the door. The apprentice did not chase it, and the fox did not get an egg.

Lantern asked if the crystal had learned to guard the shed. I said I could not tell. It had learned only from what it was shown. We know the basket and the path. We do not know what the crystal thinks of a fox, if it thinks of one at all.

That evening, the keeper made a latch from oak. He put it high enough that the fox could not reach. The apprentice carried the empty basket inside, and Lantern shut the door.

A clear lesson is better than a hope that a learner knows more than it was shown.
%%
Journal: Nessa, looking inside
People ask me how a tutor looks inside a crystal. I will write it plainly, as I teach it.

You cannot open a crystal. It is not a box with a lid. What we do is this. We give the mind a page and we watch which parts of it grow warm. We cover one small part with a cloth of lead and see what the mind can no longer do. Then we cover another part. It is like finding which plank of a floor creaks by standing on each one.

At Vell this autumn we looked inside a mind that reads letters. We found the part that holds the window. We found the part that guesses the next letter. We could point to both on a drawing, and the young tutors clapped.

But that was all we found. There are parts of that mind that do nothing we can see when we cover them. When we covered one whole side, the mind still read. It read worse, but it read. So something in it was sharing the work, and we could not find what.

I tell the apprentices this: we found some of it and not the rest. A mind is not a house with rooms named on the doors. It is more like a field where the same crop is planted twice, so you can pull up one row and still eat.

That is my answer to Bel's question. Do not break a thing to see it. Stand on the creaking plank. And do not be ashamed to say what you did not find.
%%
The Cart in the Snow
Sorrel's house stood at the edge of Kettle Ridge, where the road bent past the fields. In winter, Sorrel watched the road from the window. The wind pushed snow against the door.

One night, a cart came up the hill. Its wheels turned, but it did not move. The cart was stuck in a drift. A horse stamped and shook its head.

Sorrel called the apprentice from the shed. "Haul the cart to the road."

The apprentice pulled the cart. It pulled once, then stopped. Sorrel had taught it to haul sacks, not carts. The cart was too heavy.

Sorrel fetched Tam. Together they cleared the snow from one wheel. The horse leaned into its harness. The apprentice pulled again, and the cart rolled free.

Next day, Sorrel drew the cart on a drill board. The apprentice tried the drill many times. It learned to pull only after the wheels were clear.

"A cart can be stuck for more than one reason," Sorrel wrote in the tutor's notes. "Do not teach a mind one answer for every trouble."

Moral: Good teaching gives a mind more than one kind of example.
%%
Fable: the hare and the slow page
Written by Oren, summer of 184

A hare found a page on the path to the Archive at Vell. It had fallen from a clerk's basket. The hare could not read it, but it knew the page was important because it had clean edges.

The hare ran to the copying room. It ran past the light wells and up the steps. It ran so fast that the page slipped from its paws and landed in a jar of water.

Oren saw the wet page. "This is the list of apples from Ambrook."

The hare looked ashamed.

Oren set the page beside a glass shaft to dry. The hare sat still. It sat so still that Oren offered it a carrot.

While they waited, a tortoise came through the hall. It carried the missing basket on its back. The basket had one loose strap.

"Did you bring this?" asked Oren.

The tortoise nodded.

The hare ran to fetch a fresh page. It ran back with the page held tight between both paws. The tortoise carried the basket to its proper shelf.

Oren copied the apple list again. Then he gave the carrot to the hare and an apple to the tortoise.

The hare ate its carrot in three bites. The tortoise took its apple home for supper.

Moral: Haste can carry a page, but care must keep it safe.
%%
Story: The Fox and the Gate
Old tale told at Saltreach

A fox lived by a farm outside Saltreach. In winter, snow covered the path to the hen house.

The fox wanted one chicken. The farmer wanted all the chickens safe. They argued at the gate.

"You have a wide yard," said the fox. "You can spare one."

"I have a wide family," said the farmer. "I cannot spare any."

A rabbit sat on the fence and listened. Then it pointed to a gap beneath the far hedge. The fox could pass through the gap and hunt mice in the field. The chickens could stay behind the gate.

The fox tried the gap. It found a mouse under the snow and forgot the chickens for a while.

The farmer gave the rabbit a carrot. The rabbit took it home, though it had to dig the carrot out of the snow.

The fox still visited the farm, but it came for mice and never for hens.

Moral: A fair path can end a quarrel.
%%
Fable: the flood
Long ago, on a farm outside Three Wells, there lived a farmer named Ostrel. She kept sheep, a goose, a dog called Biscuit, and a copper-and-iron apprentice named Reed, who was brand new.

Reed had been drilled for six weeks at the tutor house. It could walk the rows. It could carry water. It could tell a ripe plot from a bare one.

"Is it ready?" asked Ostrel.

"It passed the drill box," said the tutor, who was young and eager. "Ninety-eight in a hundred."

"On which plots?"

"The ones it was drilled on."

Ostrel looked at the tutor for a long moment. "I will keep it by the barn for a few days," she said. "And I will find it some plots that are new."

So for three days Reed worked on the strange plots at the edge of the farm: a slope, a muddy corner, a field with a rock in the middle. Reed made mistakes on every one. It planted on the rock. It waited in the mud. It harvested a plot of beetroot that had only just sprouted.

The tutor was embarrassed.

"Good," said Ostrel. "Now we know. Take it back and drill it on those plots, too."

The tutor did, and Reed came back after a week, and was better.

Then came the autumn flood. The river rose in the night, and by dawn the lower field was a lake. Biscuit barked all morning. The goose went for a swim. Ostrel got out of bed in a hurry, and shouted at everybody.

Reed had never seen a flood. But it had seen mud, and a slope, and a field with a rock in it. It walked to the upper plots, where the water had not come. It carried the seed sacks up the hill. It carried the young lambs. It carried the goose, which complained loudly.

When the water went down, Ostrel stood in the yard. Nothing was lost but one old fence.

"Well," she said to Biscuit. "That was lucky."

"It was not luck," said the tutor, who had come at a run when he heard about the flood. "You tested it on the strange plots."

"I tested it because I was not sure," said Ostrel. "That is all testing is. Being not sure, and finding out before the water does."

Some say this story is only a tale. Others say a farmer at Three Wells really said those words, and that the tutors have repeated them ever since: never send an untested mind to the fields.

Moral: be not sure out loud, in good time, and let a test tell you what a flood would.
%%
Story: The cart on the Copperhold road
In autumn the road up to Copperhold is wet and the ruts are deep. A cart came up from Three Wells with sacks of flour and a barrel of honey. Halfway up, a wheel went into a rut and stuck fast. The driver pulled the horse. The horse pulled the cart. The cart did not move.

Bel was walking up with her mother to visit the mine. Bel was nine and had a notebook. She wrote down the cart.

An apprentice came down the road, carrying a pick. It was a small mind in a copper body, one of the mine's. The driver called to it. "Help me push."

The apprentice stopped. It looked at the cart. Then it turned and went back up the road. The driver shouted after it. Bel thought it was rude.

But in a while the apprentice came back with two more apprentices. They came with a plank and a rope. One put the plank under the wheel. Two took the rope and pulled. The third pushed the cart from behind. The cart came out of the rut and rolled on.

Bel asked the driver about it. He said the small minds cannot say they do not know. Ask one a thing it has no order for, and it does the nearest thing it can. So the driver did not ask "will you help", he asked "push". And the mind that could not push went for help.

Bel wrote that down too. On the way home she told her teacher. Her teacher said: a small mind answers one of eight meanings. It cannot say "I do not know" and it cannot say "wait". So you must learn what it can hear.

Bel wrote at the end of her page: say the order plain, or the mind will do something else. That is not a bad rule for people either.
%%
Story: the crab who kept the shade
Bel wrote this after the hot day at Saltreach.

A crab lived beneath a flat stone beside the harbor wall. The stone was cool at noon and warm at dusk. The crab liked it very much.

A frog came down from a wet ditch beyond the road. Its skin was dry, and the sun was strong.

"May I sit beneath your stone?" asked the frog.

"No," said the crab. "I found it first."

The frog rested beside a post. A fish seller carried a basket past them. One fish slipped out and struck the stones. The crab hurried to catch it. The frog hurried too.

They reached the fish together. The crab held one end, and the frog held the other. They pulled until it came free from a crack.

"Now we can share it," said the frog.

The crab looked toward its stone. The frog had not taken it. The crab felt foolish, but it did not say so. It pushed the fish into the shade.

The frog ate half. The crab ate half. Afterward they sat under the flat stone, and the crab had enough room.

The next day the frog brought a wet leaf from the ditch. It laid the leaf beside the stone. The crab kept it there, though it was not much use to a crab.

In the days after, the fish seller put a little water by the wall for thirsty animals. A fox drank from the bowl. The crab watched the road and the frog watched the sky.

A woman at the quay said the water in the ditch had smelled strange that week. A man said it was only mud stirred by summer rain. Another said the smell came from a ship that had been tied outside the harbor. The woman filled the bowl again. The frog went home by the ditch, and the crab returned beneath its stone.

The moral is this: a little room shared is better than a whole place kept alone.
%%
Fable: the dyer's apprentice
Briar, dyer, Long Road. Written in the dyers' book at the Brown Hen, for the apprentices who come to learn the vats. It is about a real vat, and the apprentice is real, and the crystal is a little one, but the fable is made up.

The dyers of the Long Road had one apprentice, and it was tested and ready and very good at the madder vat. It knew the reds. It could tell madder from brick and brick from rust. Every cloth it dipped came out the color the dyer wanted.

Then the council said that the Brown Hen was to have a second apprentice, for the woad vat, which was blue and needed more hands. But the only crystal the council could spare was a small one, the kind that holds a mind for a cart or a gate. It was too small for the whole of the dyer's knowledge.

"Write the mind in fewer marks," said the tutor from Vell. "Fewer marks fit a smaller crystal. You lose a little, but the mind will still dip cloth."

So the dyers sat down with the tutor, and they wrote the mind's weights as short as they could. Every mark that could be spared, they spared. The mind went into the small crystal, and the crystal went into the apprentice's chest, and the apprentice woke up and began on the woad.

It was good at the woad. Blue on blue, blue on green, the deep blue of a summer sky. Briar was pleased.

Then in the spring a traveler came to the Brown Hen with a red cloak, the color of a robin's breast, and asked for it to be dyed to match his sister's. The apprentice took it to the madder vat. It dipped the cloak. It came out brick.

Briar said, "No. It must be madder. Look at the pot."

The apprentice looked. It could not tell the difference. It had lost the marks that told one red from another. The small crystal had kept the blues, and let the reds go.

Briar was angry for a day. Then she sat down with the tutor, and they found the marks that had been cut, and put back the ones that mattered. The crystal would not hold them all. So they chose. The reds stayed. The blues stayed a little less sharp, and the woad was a shade lighter than before.

Moral: A small mind can be a good mind. But every mark you cut is a color you may lose, and nobody will tell you which one it was until a traveler wants it back.
%%
Fable: the three pots
There were once three pots in the kitchen of a hamlet above Ambrook. The Big Pot, the Middle Pot and the Little Pot. They hung on three hooks over the hearth, and they did not agree about anything.

"I am the most important," said the Big Pot. "I hold the stew for forty. When I am on the fire, the whole village comes."

"I am the most important," said the Middle Pot. "I make the soup that starts every feast. Nobody can eat stew without soup first."

The Little Pot said nothing. It was very small. It held honey, and a spoonful of salt, and sometimes warm milk for a sick child. Nobody ever stood in line for the Little Pot.

At midwinter the cook got ready for the feast. She put the Big Pot on the fire with potatoes and rabbit. She put the Middle Pot on with beetroot soup. She was very busy, and she forgot the Little Pot. It stood too near the embers, with the honey for the apple tart.

Then the Little Pot began to smell. The honey was starting to burn.

The Middle Pot smelled it first. "Something is burning," it said. "It is the honey. The tart will have no sweetness."

"The tart is not my business," said the Big Pot. "I am the stew."

"Without the tart, nobody stays for the end of the feast," said the Middle Pot. "And without the honey, the sick child will not take her milk."

The Big Pot thought about this. It was a slow thinker. "Oh," it said.

So the Big Pot rattled its lid, and the Middle Pot rattled its lid, as loud as lids can rattle. The cook came running. She saw the honey smoking in the corner and snatched the Little Pot off the embers just in time. It was saved.

That night the village ate stew, and soup, and apple tart with honey. When the pots hung on their hooks again, they did not say a word about who was most important. They left a place for the Little Pot in the middle, where it could hear them.

The children of the Ambrook school act this at midwinter. The Little Pot is always the smallest child. She has the best part, because she says nothing, and the whole hall waits.

The moral is this: a feast is made of every pot.
%%
The apprentice and the fox at the hens
A fable of the farms near Saltreach, told in winter in a house at the edge of the town, and copied for the Archive by Cato. In fables, apprentices speak, and so do foxes.

A farmer had an apprentice of copper and iron, and the farmer had a hen house, and a fox had his eye on the hen house.

One night the fox came. The apprentice was standing by the door, as it had been told, and did not move. The fox crept up and said: good evening, apprentice.

The apprentice said: good evening, fox.

The fox said: you have been standing there all day.

The apprentice said: I have been told to.

The fox said: what happens if you stop?

The apprentice said: I do not know. I have not been shown.

The fox said: then let me show you. Move one step to the left.

The apprentice moved one step to the left.

The fox said: now another.

The apprentice moved another.

The fox said: now, if you will excuse me, I am going into the hen house.

The apprentice said: but you may not go in.

The fox said: you said nothing about that.

The apprentice said: I was told to stand by the door. I was not told whom to stop.

The fox slipped in. The apprentice stood at the door. The hens made a great noise. The farmer ran out with a stick, and the fox ran off with a hen. The farmer stood in the yard and looked at the apprentice and said: why did you let him in?

The apprentice said: you did not tell me not to.

The farmer sat down in the snow. He said: I see. Tomorrow we will have a drill.

That winter the farmer and the apprentice drilled every night. The farmer would creep up to the door. The apprentice would say: stop. The farmer would creep up again. The apprentice would say: stop. By the end of the month the apprentice said stop to the postman, the cat, the farmer's wife and the farmer.

Then the fox came back. The apprentice said: stop. The fox said: I am only passing. The apprentice said: stop.

The fox went home to the woods, and told his brothers about the hen house with the clever door.

Moral: a helper does what it is shown, and no more. So show it what you mean, and show it again.
%%
Story: the stuck cart
Bel wrote this after hearing it at the Kettle Inn.

A cart full of melons stuck in the mud near Saltreach. The horse leaned into the harness. The wheels turned, but the cart did not move.

A rabbit came from the grass.

"Push the cart," said the driver.

"I am small," said the rabbit. "I will find a board."

It found an oak board by the road. The driver slid it under one wheel. The horse pulled again. The wheel climbed onto the board, and the cart rolled free.

The driver gave the rabbit a carrot. The rabbit carried it to its burrow, but the carrot was too long to fit through the door.

A mouse saw this and laughed.

"Do not laugh," said the rabbit. "You can help me break it."

The mouse nibbled the carrot in two. Then they shared it in the shade.

The driver went on to the fish market. He left the board beside the road for the next cart.

The moral is this: a small help can move a heavy thing.
%%
Fable: the melon and the cart
A farmer grew a melon too big for the cart. It sat in the field all summer, and the field grew up round it.
"Take me to the inn," said the melon. "I want to be eaten by travelers."
"You are too big for the road," said the cart.
"I am not too big," said the melon. "You are too small."
So the farmer built a bigger cart, out of oak. The innkeeper cut the melon in twelve. Everyone had a slice, and the melon was not proud at all, because it was eaten.
Moral: a big thing needs a bigger road, or a smaller slice.
%%
Primer: what a mind is made of
A primer for children at Three Wells, by the schoolteacher. Autumn.

You have seen an apprentice carry coal. Inside it is a small mind in a crystal. Here is what the tutors found when they looked inside.

A mind is not one thing. It is many small parts that work together, the way a mill is a wheel and a stone and a sluice. If you stop the wheel, the mill stops. If you stop the stone, the mill stops too. Both are needed.

When the tutors want to know which part does what, they do not open the crystal. They cover one part with a cloth of lead and see what the mind can no longer do. This is like covering one window of a house and seeing which room goes dark.

At Copperhold this autumn the tutors found the part of a mind that holds a page, and the part that guesses the next letter. They drew these on a board. They could not find the rest. Some of the work is done in more than one place, so covering one place does not stop it.

That is all we know, and it is a great deal. Write your name at the top of your page. Under it write one thing you found out this autumn and one thing you did not. Bring it to school on the first of Frost.
%%
Story: The wall and the returning mouse
Bel wrote this tale at the house at the edge of Three Wells, in Leaffall.

A mouse lived in a dry crack in the wall. Each evening it went out for grain, and each evening it came home before the lamps were lit.

One night a creeper came close to the house. The people saw it late. It blew up the outer wall with a loud burst. Stones fell across the mouse's crack, and dust covered its little bowl.

The mouse was away in the field. It came home after the danger had passed. It could not find the crack. It ran along the broken wall, then hid under a bench.

A small apprentice was carrying stones nearby. Its mind had learned to keep a load steady on the road. It had not been drilled with a picture of this broken wall. It tried moving one stone away from the opening. The stone rolled back and blocked the path.

It tried another stone. This one stayed by the wall. The apprentice kept that choice and tried again. Soon there was a low gap under the fallen stones.

The mouse came out from beneath the bench. It sniffed the opening, then ran through and found its dry place. It had a homecoming, though its bowl was cracked and its bed was full of dust.

The apprentice did not know the mouse's old path. It had tried a way to move the stones, and kept the choice that made a safe gap.

The people rebuilt the wall the next morning. The mouse carried a grain to the apprentice's foot. The apprentice did not eat it, but the mouse left it there.

The cook said, "A small gift is still a gift." Then she swept the dust from the floor.

A mind that learns by trying must keep what helps, and a home is worth finding again.
%%
Story: The Bee
Tale kept by Corin

In the winter of the first roads, a farm stood outside Saltreach. A packed earth road passed its gate, with a cobblestone edge and a torch on a post.

The road was new. Travelers still left little stones on the waymarks, so the next person could see they had passed.

An apprentice worked at the farm. It carried feed, hauled wood, and stayed by the gate when told. The farmer had tested it before sending it out, as Nessa taught at Vell.

One cold evening, a bee came from a hive near the barn. It was late in the year, and the bee should have been sleeping. It crawled along the road and stopped beneath the torch.

The apprentice saw it and carried it to the farm. The farmer put the bee in a dry box beside the hive, where the wind could not reach it.

In the morning, the bee woke and flew to the last flowers by the wall. It found no honey there. It came back and crawled into the hive.

That winter, the farmer made a little cover over the hives. The apprentice carried the wood. The bee did not help with the work, but it lived until spring.

When the flowers opened, the bee went out again. It visited the farm's flowers and the fields along the road. The farmer shared honey with the keeper who watched the road. The keeper left a small stone on the waymark to show the next traveler that the farm gate was open.

The apprentice learned no lesson from words. It carried what was needed, and waited when the farmer said stay.

Moral: Help the small life in front of you, and good may travel farther.
%%
Fable: the jar that was too full
In Thrush Hollow, a jar of honey sat on the shelf above the stove. It was a good jar, round and brown, with a cloth tied over the top.

One spring the bees were very busy, and the jar was filled to the very brim. It shone in the light. It was the fullest jar in the hollow.

"I am the best jar in Thrush Hollow," said the jar. "Look how full I am. Nothing could be fuller."

"Be careful," said the cloth. "You are too full. Something will spill."

"Nothing will spill," said the jar. "I am proud of my honey. I will never let it go."

But in the spring warmth, the honey grew thinner. It moved and slid. It pressed against the cloth, and the cloth slipped down one side, and a golden drop ran over the lip of the jar, and onto the shelf, and down the wood.

The jar was very surprised. The cat was very interested.

Ilse the healer came in with her basket and saw the sticky mess. She wiped the shelf with a cloth and took the jar down. She poured out half the honey into a small bowl for the children, and stopped the jar with a new cloth, tied loose.

"There," said Ilse. "Now you are only full enough."

The jar sat on the shelf after that, and was quite content, and it never boasted again.

Moral: A jar full to the brim cannot keep what it has. Leave a little room, and what you have will stay where it is put.
%%
The debt that was paid in emeralds
A fable of the harbor, told in the house at the edge of Saltreach in winter. It was copied for the Archive by Cato, clerk, who added that it was told to him by a boatbuilder, and that the boatbuilder believed it.

There was once a seal who owed a gull a fish. The seal had borrowed it in the summer, when the fish were many. Now it was winter, and the fish were few, and the gull came to the harbor wall and said: pay.

The seal said: I have no fish.

The gull said: then pay in something else.

The seal thought about this. Then it dived and brought up, from the bottom of the harbor, a small green stone. It was an emerald, dropped from a ship a hundred years before.

The gull looked at it. It said: this is not a fish. The seal said: no, but it is worth ten fish. The gull said: I cannot eat it. The seal said: you can buy fish with it.

The gull took the emerald to the fish market and showed it to Marit, who sold fish. Marit gave the gull twelve fish and a net for its trouble. The gull ate three and flew home.

The next day the seal said: was it enough? The gull said: it was twice enough. The seal said: then I owe you two fish. The gull said: no, you owe me nothing. You paid with something better than what you owed.

The seal was pleased. It dived again and brought up more stones. It was not long before the whole harbor had heard, and the bottom was swept by hopeful divers.

The harbor master said: leave it. The seal found it and the seal may keep it.

Moral: a debt may be paid in many ways, but it should be paid, and the one who pays well will find his creditor kind.
%%
Fable: the well that ran dry
Bel wrote this one down. She was staying at Two Oak farm for the summer, and Hob told her this while he mended a bucket.

In the summer of 201 a new apprentice came to our farm. Its name was Tansy. It was keen. It was much too keen.

Its first order was a simple one.

> fetch water for the beans
= fetch water

Tansy fetched water for the beans. Then the beetroot looked thirsty, so it fetched water for the beetroot. Then the washing. Then the cat's dish, which the cat did not want. Every order said fetch water, and Tansy did not know how to stop.

By the afternoon the well was dry as a bone. The beans were fine. The pigs were muddy and happy. The well was empty.

I came out and looked into it for a long time.

"Stop," I said.

> stay here and wait
= stay

"Now we wait for the rain," I said. "A well gives what it can give. It does not give what we ask."

Tansy learned that day. It learned to ask how much a thing needs, and to leave some for the next thing. The rain came in the autumn.

The moral is this: a helper must learn when enough is enough.
%%
The fox who asked the owl
A fable by Gale, a child of Three Wells, in spring.
A fox lost his cub. He asked the owl, who knows many things, "Where is my cub?"
The owl said, "I cannot see her. I do not know. But cubs like warm places. Look in the barn, and ask the hens."
The fox looked in the barn. The cub was asleep in the straw. The fox was happy. The hens were not.
The moral: a good answer is not always a full one. A wise one tells you what it knows, and what it does not.
%%
Fable: the owls of the two halls
Two tutors' halls once quarreled about whose minds were better.

The hall of oak said, "Our minds are the finest. They are quick and sure."

The hall of birch said, "Ours are finer. They are wise and slow."

They quarreled all one autumn. Each hall wrote letters to the other and said that its own mind could not be beaten. Neither hall would show how it was made. A hall would only boast.

At last an old barn owl, who lived in the rafters above the market at Three Wells, spoke up. She had listened for many years to the tutors argue under her tree, and she was tired of it.

"Hoo," she said. "Why do you not test them together? Take a drill neither hall has ever seen. Give the same questions to both. Count the right answers."

"But what if mine is worse?" said the tutor of oak.

"Then you will learn something," said the owl. "That is worth more than a boast."

So the halls agreed. A third tutor, from the hall at Vell, made a drill that nobody had seen. Two hundred questions, each on a field plot, each with one right answer. She sealed the drill in a box and set it on the table. Both minds were brought in, and each was shown the same questions at the same moment.

The oak mind answered fast and got a hundred and forty right. The birch mind answered slowly and got a hundred and sixty.

The tutor of oak went home quiet. He did not make excuses. He went back to his hall and he asked the tutors of birch how they had drilled their mind. They told him. The next autumn, his mind got a hundred and seventy.

And that, the old tutors say, is how the contests began. Each autumn the halls bring their minds. Each brings a drill it has never shown. The same questions go to all. The numbers are written on a board, for everyone to read.

It made the tutors honest. A boast is easy to make. A number on a board is hard to argue with.

Moral: if you wish to know which is better, ask both the same new question, and be glad of the answer.
%%
The bee who lent honey
In the orchard at Ambrook there was a bee called Dun, who had made more honey than anyone in the hive. One spring, a fox came down from the hill and broke into the hive by the mill pond, and the bees had to start again. Dun had only a little honey left, and the winter was long.

Dun went to a farmer named Wim, who had a garden full of flowers and a store full of jars. "Lend me a jar of honey," said Dun, "and I will pay you back in the summer."

Wim said, "How will you pay?"

"In emeralds," said Dun. It did not have any emeralds. But it had heard the carters talk about them, and it thought they were the best thing a bee could give.

Wim lent the jar. Dun ate some, and gave some to the new bees, and the hive was saved.

When summer came, Dun did not have any emeralds. It had only honey, which was not what it had promised. It went to Wim's garden with a little jar of its best honey, and it said, "I am sorry. I cannot pay in emeralds."

Wim said, "Then pay in honey."

"I already did," said Dun.

"Then pay the rest of it," said Wim, "and we will call it square."

Dun paid the rest. Every spring from then on, the bees of Ambrook sent Wim a jar of the first honey, and the first jar was always the sweetest. Wim said he did not need the emeralds, and nobody in the village has ever seen one.

Moral: a debt paid in the wrong coin is still a debt. Pay it in the coin you have.
%%
The homecoming of the lost lamb
A fable by Gale, a child of Three Wells. Told in the spring, when the lambs are born, and set down by her grandmother. It is a bit long, so there is a pause in the middle for a song.
There was once a farm at the edge of the crossroads, with a flock of sheep and one old dog. In spring a lamb was born. She was white as snow, with a black spot on her ear. The farm named her Spot.
Spot was curious. She went where the others did not. She went to the fence, and through the hole in the fence, and down the lane, and along the road, and over the bridge, and up the hill, and so far that she could not see the farm.
At the top of the hill she stopped. The sun was setting. The wind was cold. A fox came out of the grass.
"Hello, lamb," said the fox. "You look lost."
"I am," said Spot. "Do you know the way to my farm?"
The fox thought. He was a hungry fox. He could have said anything. He could have said, "Come with me." But he was an old fox, and he had been taught as a cub that a fox who lies to a lamb is a fox who has to run from the shepherds forever.
"I do not know your farm," said the fox. "But I know the road. It runs down the hill and across the bridge. Follow it. When you smell sheep, you are near. When you hear the old dog bark, you are home."
Spot said, "Thank you."
The fox said, "Go quickly. Do not stop. I am hungry, and I may change my mind."
Spot ran. She ran down the hill and over the bridge. She smelled sheep. She heard the old dog bark. She came to the gate of the farm, and the farmer's wife lifted her up, and the whole flock gathered around. They had all been looking for her.
Here is the song.
Down the hill and over the bridge,
home is where the sheep are.
Down the hill and past the ridge,
home is where the dog is.
At the end of the story, the farmer's wife put a bowl of milk by the fence, outside, for the fox. In the morning it was empty. A feather lay beside the bowl. A feather, not a bone. The wife was glad.
The moral has three parts. First, a lost one should ask the way. Second, the one who answers should say what it knows and no more. Third, a kindness done in the dark comes back in the morning.
Gale says she made this one up all by herself. Her grandmother says it is a good one. Her grandmother says it is also an old one, and she has heard it before. She does not say where.
%%
Letter: Bel to the tutors at Vell
Dear tutors, I am Bel at Three Wells. I am nine. I am writing because we had a poor harvest and my father says we must be careful this winter, and I have a question about minds.

This autumn the apples came small and the wheat came short. The men at the mill said the rain came at the wrong time. Everybody is saving. So I have been thinking about the apprentices that carry the flour and the coal, and how much they save us.

My question is this. You say you looked inside a crystal and found which part of a mind does what. I want to know how you look. Do you open it? Does it spill? My friend's father says you cannot see inside a thing without breaking it.

Also, at school we did a drill on sums. Some of us got them right and some got them wrong. Our teacher said the mind that got them right had learned the shape of the question. I did not understand. Are the parts of a mind like rooms, or like a row of jars?

Please write back if you have time. I know you are busy with the relay houses.

Bel.
%%
Fable: the fox and the egg stall
At the Ambrook market, on a bitter morning, a fox set up a stall. He had a board across two barrels, and a basket of eggs under a cloth. The eggs were not his. He had taken them from the hen house behind the dairy, one at a time, while the hens were looking the other way.

"Eggs!" he called. "Fresh eggs! Very cheap! Very fresh!"

The market folk came, and they looked at the eggs, and then at the fox. "Whose hens?" asked one of them.

"Mine," said the fox. "All mine. Very healthy hens. Very quiet hens."

Fidge, the apprentice at Ambrook, was standing by the trough with a tray of cups. It did not speak. It looked at the basket, and then at the fox, and then it set down its tray and walked off toward the dairy.

The dairy wife came out, wiping her hands. She counted the eggs in the basket. She counted them again. Then she held one up to the light.

"That one is from my brown hen," she said. "I know her eggs. They have a freckle on them." She looked at the basket. "My hens laid eleven this morning. You have eleven, and a freckle. Count it yourself."

The fox looked at the basket. He had not counted it. He had only taken it.

"I was hungry," he said. "There are no rabbits left in the mill field."

"Then ask," said the dairy wife. "Ask at the door. My hens would have given you two, and you would have had your breakfast and your dignity."

Fidge came back with a cup of warm milk from the dairy pail. It set the cup down beside the fox, and it stepped back, and it waited. It did not say anything. It did not need to.

The fox looked at the cup for a long time. Then he drank it, very fast, and went home across the frost without the eggs.

The next morning the dairy wife found two eggs by her back door, wrapped in a green leaf. That was the fox's way of saying sorry.

Moral: ask at the door, and you may get your eggs. Steal them, and the cold walk home is yours.
%%
Fable: the apprentice who baked
In the twelfth year of the archive, the tutors at Vell gave one of the first four apprentices a recipe for bread.
The recipe said: flour, water, a pinch of salt, and an hour by the stove.

The apprentice put in the flour and the water. It looked at the pinch of salt. It put in a second pinch, to be sure. Then a third, because it had not been told how many pinches made a pinch.

"Too much salt," said the tutor, when the loaf came out grey.
"It was a pinch," said the apprentice. "A pinch is a small thing."
"A pinch is the smallest thing there is," said the tutor. "That is why you must count them."

The next morning the apprentice counted the pinches one at a time into the bowl, and said each number aloud. The bread came out brown and good.
The moral: a small thing repeated is a large thing, and whoever makes it must measure it.
%%
Story: The Sheep and the Stone
Tale from the farm road

A sheep found a flat stone beside the farm outside Saltreach. It was cold and hard, but it made a good place to stand above the snow.

A frog came hopping from the ditch. It asked to share the stone.

"There is room for one," said the sheep.

The frog looked at the stone. There was room for one sheep, or three frogs, or one sheep and one small frog.

The sheep moved its hoof. The frog hopped up beside it.

Soon a rabbit came, shaking snow from its ears. The frog moved closer to the sheep. The sheep moved closer to the edge.

A fox watched from the hedge. It thought the sheep would fall and leave the stone empty.

But the rabbit sat between the sheep's legs, and the frog sat on the rabbit's back. All three stayed warm, and the fox went off to look for mice.

When the snow melted, the stone was still there. The animals still shared it when the ground was cold.

Moral: A place can be big enough when each one makes room.
%%
Mira's summer tale: The two crows
At our hamlet, summer brings long light and busy hands. The first tutors lived long before my time, but old Talla told me their story beside the Northpoint lamp.

The tutors at Vell made four helpers of copper and iron. Each had a mind in a crystal. The children called them apprentices. One helper carried pails. One sorted stones. One turned a handle. One set blocks in a row.

A crow watched the helper that set blocks in a row. The crow was bold and fond of anything bright. It hopped along the board and pecked at the blocks.

The apprentice set the blocks in a row. The crow knocked them down. The apprentice set them in a row again.

"That is a poor game," called the crow. "You never win."

A second crow came to watch. It picked up a block and flew to the fence. The first crow chased it. The block fell into the grass.

The apprentice did not chase. It had been shown how to set blocks in a row, not how to find a block in grass or chase a crow.

The keeper searched for the block. He found it beneath a leaf and returned it to the board. Then he showed the apprentice the same work again. Row after row, it set the blocks straight.

The crows flew off to look for berries. They had learned nothing about rows, and the apprentice had learned nothing about berries.

Talla said people often asked if the crystal understood the blocks as we did. The tutors did not answer. They showed it the blocks and watched what it did.

Some folk wanted the helpers to carry every load and mend every fence. But most had only seen a few lessons. For many years, there were few apprentices outside Vell. A helper with one good task was still useful. It could carry pails while the keeper mended the fence.

In summer, Talla gave one helper a pail each morning. It carried the pail to the garden. When the handle broke, it stopped. Talla mended the handle and showed it the path again.

The crow came back and pecked at the pail. Talla shooed it away.

A learner needs a clear lesson, and a worker may still need help.
%%
The apprentice who knew eight words
A fable told at the bridge near Three Wells. Iona keeps the bridge and says she does not make these up, only remembers them wrongly.
Once there was an apprentice who knew eight words. Farm. Store. Fetch. Come. Stay. Build. Haul. Home. It knew nothing else. It said nothing, because it did not talk. But when it was told something, it answered with one of the eight, by doing it.
A farmer, in a hurry, said to it: "Please, do the thing that I like."
The apprentice stood still. It did not know which of the eight was meant. It could not say it did not know. A small mind cannot say that.
So it picked one. It fetched. It brought the farmer a rake, a basket, a hen and a stool. The farmer stared. "I did not ask for those."
"No," said the cat, who was passing and can talk, because this is a story. "You asked for the thing you like. It does not know which that is. It guessed. It guessed four times."
The farmer laughed. He said the thing he liked was a cup of tea. He went into the house. The apprentice carried the stool in after him.
Moral: a small mind answers with what it has. Be careful what you ask, and ask it plainly.
(Iona says the big minds in the relay houses are different. They write back, and can say when they do not know. She says that is why they are called big.)
%%
Fable: the spiders and the wrong web
Told by Oak, horse keeper, at Three Wells, in the spring.
In the rafters of the barn a line of spiders spun their webs in layers, one above another. The bottom spider set the base. Each spider above spun across the one below, the way a loaf rises in layers.
One spring the web sagged and tore, and the flies went through. The top spider said: I spun the last thread, so the fault is mine. It wanted to tear the whole web down.
The middle spider said: no. My threads were only tight because the threads below me were loose. Tell me how tight mine should have been, and I will tell the one below.
So each spider told the one below its share of the sag. The bottom spider tightened its base, and the web above it was right the next time, and the flies never got through.
Moral: A wrong net is not the fault of the last thread alone. Tell each thread how much it pulled the wrong way. The thread that starts the net learns the most.
%%
The Fox, the Apprentice, and the Page
Written by Tam of Kettle Ridge, from Sorrel's tale

Sorrel tells this story on winter nights at the house at the edge of Kettle Ridge. She says it is a fable, though she has never seen a fox carry a page.

A fox lived by the top wheat field. It was clever at finding eggs, apples, and the loose board under Tam's shed. One cold night, it saw a lantern beside Sorrel's door. The light fell on a page Sorrel had left on the sill.

The fox could not read the page. It sniffed it, then stepped away. A small apprentice stood by the door. Sorrel had told it to stay, and it stayed.

The fox went to the barn and found a hen's feather. It carried the feather to the door and dropped it on the step. The apprentice did not move. The fox tried an apple. The apprentice did not move. Then the fox pushed the page from the sill.

The apprentice picked up the page and carried it inside. The fox crept past the door and took an apple from the basket.

Sorrel came out with her coat over her night shirt. She saw the apple in the fox's mouth and the page in the apprentice's hand.

"You learned the wrong lesson," she said to the fox.

The fox ran off. Sorrel brought the apprentice into the warm room and set the page on the table.

Tam asked why the apprentice had picked up the page. Sorrel said it had learned to carry loose things from the yard. It had not learned to guard apples. No mind can do a task it has never been taught, just because the task seems clear to us.

Sorrel showed me the tutor's notes. The reading mind was taught by pages. It reads each letter, then guesses the next from marks before it. Its window holds about sixty letters. It can learn that some earlier letters matter more than others. If the page says "the fox took the", the next marks might be "apple", "road", or "basket". The mind learns from many pages which guess fits best.

"It does not see a fox," Sorrel said. "It sees letters that often come near other letters."

"Then can it tell a true tale from a false one?" Tam asked.

"Not from the letters alone," said Sorrel. "It can write words that sound sure. That does not make them true."

The relay lamp on the hill had a cracked pane that week. The keeper put a board over it until a new pane came from the glass shop. Messages went by the next tower, though the road was dark between them. Sorrel said the big mind still answered through the relay house. She did not claim to know how its words crossed the land.

Tam gave the apprentice a basket and showed it apples. He gave it a drill for guarding the basket, then tested it with a beetroot and a wool cap. It failed on the cap. Sorrel wrote the mistake down for the tutor.

The fox returned three nights later. It found the basket tied shut. It took a fallen apple from the path instead.

Moral: Teach a mind the task you need, and test it with things it has not seen.
%%
Fable: the fox who learned the answers
Two foxes wished to join the riddle guild at Three Wells. The guild master gave each of them a month to prepare.

The first fox, Russet, went to the guild's old riddle box and learned every riddle in it, and its answer, by heart. By the end of the month she could say them in her sleep.

The second fox, Tansy, learned fewer riddles. But she learned how the riddles worked. Why a clue points to a thing. What a riddle hides and what it shows.

On the day of the test, the guild master did not ask any riddle from the box. He asked new ones, which he had made the night before.

Russet knew the old answers by heart, and she gave them one after another, with great confidence. They were all wrong. The riddles were new, and the old answers did not fit.

Tansy thought about each one. She got seven of ten.

Russet complained. "It is not fair. You asked things we were never shown."

"That is the whole point of a test," said the guild master. "If I only ask what you were shown, I learn only that you can remember. I want to know whether you can think a little."

Moral: what a mind can do with the new matters more than what it can say about the old.
%%
Story: the sheep at the slip
Bel wrote this after the sheep came home.

A sheep from the hill above Saltreach wandered through a gap in the hedge. It followed the smell of hay past the harbor wall and down to the slip.

The slip was long and smooth. A boat stood on it, ready to go into the sea. The sheep walked onto the ramp and stopped. It did not know how to turn around.

A gull called from the pier. The sheep called back.

A boat builder heard them and came with a coil of rope. She did not pull the sheep. She set a handful of hay on the ramp, then another handful farther up. The sheep followed each one, step by step, until it stood on the grass.

The owner found the sheep by the wood store. He thanked the boat builder and tied the hedge gap shut with a strip of wool.

The next day, the sheep found a new gap. It was not foolish. It liked hay, and the hill was full of dry grass. The owner mended the hedge with oak poles and checked it before supper.

The boat builders went back to their work. They spoke of the big ships at the outer dock. One said they were made for families going far away. Another said they were only built for trade. Neither had seen one leave.

That evening, the sheep slept beside the others. The boat on the slip stayed where it was.

The moral is this: a lost one needs a way home, and a safe fence needs care.
%%
Fable: the fox and the high apples
At Ambrook, in apple time, an apprentice called Reach picked the high apples. It had long copper arms and a ladder, and it was very patient. It picked from the top of the tree to the bottom, one apple at a time, and put each in a basket. That was the order, and it knew no other.

A fox came to the orchard. He was a handsome fox, with a white tip to his tail and a high opinion of himself. He looked up at the apples at the top of the oldest tree. They were red and gold. They hung in the sun like small lamps.

"I will have one of those," said the fox.

He jumped. He did not reach. He jumped again. He did not reach. He jumped twenty times and landed in the grass each time, a little crosser.

Then he saw the ladder. "A ladder," said the fox. "A fox can climb a ladder." He put his front paws on it and pushed. Over it went, and down came Reach into the grass with a clank.

Reach stood up. It set the ladder against the tree again. It climbed. The fox pushed the ladder over. Reach came down. It stood up. It set the ladder up. Eleven times the fox pushed the ladder, and eleven times Reach set it up again. It did not get cross. It had not been shown cross.

At last the fox sat down, quite out of breath. "Those apples," he said, "are almost certainly sour."

Reach stopped with its hand on a high apple. "What is sour?" it said.

"Sour," said the fox grandly, "is when a thing tastes bad."

"How do you know the apples taste bad?" said Reach. "You have not tasted one."

"I do not need to taste them. I can tell from here."

Reach thought about this. It was a long thought. Then it picked the apple in its hand, came down the ladder, and held it out.

"Taste," said Reach.

The fox did not want to. He wanted very much to. He took a small bite with his head turned aside, so that Reach should not see his face.

The apple was sweet. It was the sweetest apple in Ambrook, from the oldest tree. The fox chewed. He swallowed. He looked at what was left in his paw.

"Well," he said at last, "they are not so very sour. A little sour. At the edges."

"Then they are sweet in the middle," said Reach.

"I did not say that," said the fox.

But he took the apple with him. He came back the next night, and the night after. Reach set the basket low at the foot of the tree, where a fox could reach it.

Ada says the fox still tells everyone the Ambrook apples are a little sour. She says he says it with his mouth full.

The moral is this: do not call a thing sour because you could not reach it.
%%
Fable: Merle and the two-floor crystal
Told by Oak, horse keeper, at Three Wells, by the fire, to the people who asked what the tutors from Copperhold were doing with their slates.
Merle of Copperhold had a crystal with two floors. The lower floor took the question. The upper floor gave the answer. Between them were weights, which could be turned a little, one way or the other.
At first the answer came out wrong. The crystal said yes, when the right answer was no.
Merle could not see which weights were wrong. So he told the upper floor how far its answer was off. The upper floor told the middle floor its share of that, by how much each weight had helped the wrong yes. The middle floor told the lower floor its share. Then each weight was turned a little, by its own share, and not by the whole.
Merle did this a thousand times. Each time the crystal grew a little better.The tutors could not agree that spring whether the crystal understood the question, or only learned the shares. Merle said he did not know. He kept the questions he could not answer on a slate, for the next people to look at.
Moral: A deep mind learns only if each layer is told its share of the wrong. Whether it understands what it learns, nobody can yet say. Tell each layer its share, and keep the questions you cannot answer on the slate.
%%
Fable: the jar that would not fit
Briar, dyer, Long Road. Told at the Brown Hen to the children who sleep in the loft, who ask for it every time the wind blows through the shutters.

A honey jar stood on a shelf in the cellar of a farm at Ambrook. It was a good jar, round and yellow, and it was full of the best honey in the orchard.

One autumn the farmer wanted to move the jar to the cart, to take it to the fair. The jar was too big for the cart's small box. "Make yourself smaller," said the farmer. "You are a jar. You can be whatever you like."

The jar did not know how. It tried to squeeze itself into the box. The honey pressed out at the sides. The jar was sticky and cross.

Then a clever little cup, which lived beside it on the shelf, said: "I know a way. Take off your lid. Pour half your honey into me. Then you will be a smaller jar, and you can go in the box, and I will carry the rest on my lap."

The jar did this. It went into the box, and the cup went on the seat, and both arrived at the fair in one piece, though the cup was sticky for a month.

But at the fair, the buyers tasted the honey from the cup and the honey from the jar, and they were not the same. The cup had the honey from the top of the comb, which is thin. The jar had the honey from the bottom, which is thick and dark and tastes of the whole summer. The buyers could tell.

The jar sold for less. The cup sold for more, but there was less to sell.

Moral: To make a thing fit a smaller place, you must give up some of it. Decide first which part of it you can spare.
%%
Fable: the hen and the poor harvest
In the spring after a poor harvest, when the barn was nearly empty and the grain bin was down to its last scoops, a small brown hen lived at the inn on the Long Road.
The innkeeper looked at the bin and sighed. "There is not enough to feed the hens," he said. "I will have to let some of them go."
The brown hen heard this. She did not like it. She went to the old rooster and said, "We must do something."
"What can a hen do?" said the rooster.
"We can look," said the hen.
So the hens spread out over the yard, and the field behind the stable, and the verge of the Long Road. They scratched and scratched. They found seeds that had fallen from carts. They found grain in the cracks of the road, where the sacks had split. They found beetles and worms and one lost button.
At the end of the week, they brought the seeds to the innkeeper. It was a small pile, but a pile.
"We cannot feed ourselves with this," said the innkeeper. "But it will help."
He fed the hens with the seeds and the last of the grain. The hens laid fewer eggs that month, but they laid some. The innkeeper kept all of them. In summer, when the new wheat came in, he gave each hen a double portion.
The old rooster said, "I did not think a hen could do it."
The brown hen said, "I did not think so either. I just looked."
Moral: a poor harvest is a time to look at the ground. There is more there than you think.
%%
The autumn pot at the edge of town
A tale Bel heard from Nessa, and wrote down at the house at the edge of Three Wells.

In the autumn, the people made a little furnace at the house at the edge of Three Wells. They needed iron hooks for the school door. The iron was set in a pot over a hot fire. If the fire grew too fierce, the melt ran badly. If it grew too weak, the iron would not be ready.

A mind in a crystal was set beside the furnace. It had no table of answers for every change in the fire. It was meant to try small turns and learn from what followed.

A hedgehog lived under the wood pile. He liked the warmth and disliked the smoke. He told the mind to make the fire low. The mind tried. The smoke thinned, but the iron cooled too much. The smith added wood and waited.

The mind tried a smaller change. The fire held, and the iron softened. The mind kept that choice. When the heat began to rise, it tried another small turn. The fire steadied again.

The hedgehog came out to watch. He said, "You are learning the way I do. I try a nut, and keep it if it is sweet."

The smith laughed. "A furnace is not a nut. We cannot taste the iron."

The mind kept trying. Some turns made the heat worse, and those choices were not kept. Some turns helped hold the melt steady, and the mind kept more of those. It did not know why the fire changed. It only learned from what happened after each turn.

At last the iron was ready. The smith made the hooks, and the school door closed without a squeak. The hedgehog took one warm place under the wood pile and left the rest for the next cold night.

Nessa told the children that this was a different way to teach a mind. A tutor could show a mind examples and say which answer was right. But a mind could also try an action, see whether it helped, and keep more of what went well. The furnace mind had no answer card for each breath of air. It learned by trying to hold the heat steady.

Bel asked if the mind knew that the hooks were for the school.

"No," said Nessa. "It learned the fire, not the use of the hooks."

Bel wrote this down carefully. He also wrote that the hedgehog asked for an iron hook for his den, but the smith said it was too large.

A mind may learn by trying and keeping what works, but it learns only what its trials can show.
%%
The market day apprentice
A story told at the bridge near Three Wells, by Iona, who has heard it from three people and believes none of them. Spring.
Long ago, when apprentices could only do one thing, there lived one at the market named Peg. Peg could carry. That was all. It carried apples, cloth, pots, bread, fish, whatever you gave it.
One market day a woman said, to nobody: "Oh, I wish someone would bring me a cup of tea."
Peg heard. It had never made tea. It had never been drilled on tea. But the woman had said "bring me a cup", and Peg knew "bring me". So it walked to the stall where tea was made and picked up a cup and carried it back.
The woman was astonished. She said: "How did you know?" Peg did not answer, because apprentices do not talk. But the tea was hot.
That was the day, some say, that the next thing began. Not that Peg understood. It had only matched the words it knew. But for the first time an apprentice had heard a sentence, and done what was meant.
Others say it was Clank at Copperhold. Others say Pip at Kettle Ridge. Iona says it does not matter. The tea was hot, and the woman said thank you.
Moral: say what you mean in plain words, and say it to one who is listening. You may be surprised how much is understood.
%%
Fable: the sparrow and the honey jar
At the inn on the Long Road there was a high shelf in the kitchen, and on the shelf stood a jar of honey. It was the best honey in the inn. The innkeeper kept it for guests who had come a long way.
A sparrow lived in the rafters of the kitchen. She had been looking at the jar for a month.
One morning in spring, when the cook went out to the well, the sparrow flew down. She landed on the lid and pecked at the wax. She pecked and pecked. At last the wax broke, and a little honey ran out. She tasted it. It was the finest thing she had ever tasted.
She ate until she could not move. Her feathers were sticky. Her feet were stuck. When she tried to fly, she could not. She fell off the shelf and onto the table.
The cook came back. She saw the sparrow, glued to the table with honey, looking very sorry.
"A thief," said the cook. She picked up the sparrow with a cloth. She carried her to the window. She wiped the honey from the sparrow's feathers with a wet rag. It took a long time.
"Go," she said. "And do not come back."
The sparrow flew away, clean and ashamed. She did not come back. But the cook had a soft heart. The next morning she put a spoonful of honey on the windowsill. The sparrow came to eat it. She came every morning after that, in spring and in summer.
In the end, the cook gave the sparrow a name: Sweet. When the innkeeper asked who Sweet was, she said, "A friend who came by the window."
Moral: what you take, you may have to give back. What is given, you can keep.
%%
Fable: the apprentice and the stone
At the edge of the Thrush Hollow ford, there was a river stone as big as a cart. It had been put there by the river long ago, and it stayed there, while the water went round it on either side.

One spring, the council wanted the ford cleared for the new road. The stone had to go. The tutors at Vell sent a helper from the hall, a copper and iron apprentice with a small crystal in its chest. Its name was Pell, and it was new, and it had passed its drill on the sorting of stones by size.

The foreman stood on the bank with his arms folded. "Move the stone," he said. "Take it to the bank, and leave it there."

Pell looked at the stone. It was big, and round, and it had a crack along one side. It did not look as though it would move.

Pell thought about the words. Move. Take. Leave. The stone was heavy, and the foreman had not said how.

So Pell did the thing it had drilled. It put its arms round the stone and pushed. Nothing happened. It pushed harder. The stone did not move. Pell's copper arms bent a little at the elbows, and it stopped, and stood very still.

The foreman sighed. "Well?" he said.

Pell did not answer. It did not know what to say. It had been drilled on stones of a size that could be lifted, and this stone was not that size.

After a long while, Pell turned round and walked back up the bank to the foreman. It stood in front of him and waited. It did not say anything. It did not need to. It was asking.

The foreman looked at it and sighed again. Then he said, "Good. You know when you cannot do a thing. Now let us do it together."

They sent for the lever from the mill, and a second helper from the next house. They put the lever under the stone. They counted to three, and pushed. The stone rocked, and then slid, and then rolled off the bank into the shallows, where it made a great splash and lay there, wet and surprised, with the water going round it on both sides as before.

"Well," said the foreman. "It is in the water now. Let the river move it, or the new road will go around it."

Pell sat down on the bank, quite pleased with itself, and watched the water go by.

Moral: A helper that knows where its strength ends is worth more than one that pushes until it breaks. Stop, and ask. Then pull together.
%%
Story: The Crow and the New Inn
Old tale for a winter hearth

The farm outside Saltreach stood beside a road that had once been only a track. In the early years, people laid packed earth along it and set cobblestone at its edges. They put a torch on a post every twelve blocks. In winter, the torches made a chain of small lights between the farm and the harbor.

A crow lived in the barn roof. It liked bright things and disliked cold feet.

One winter, builders raised an inn on the road, a day's walk from the port. The innkeeper stored food in chests and kept a lamp in the front room. Travelers came in with snow on their coats and mud on their boots.

The crow watched them through a hole in the roof. It saw each traveler leave a small thing behind: a bent nail, a wool thread, a button made of wood. The innkeeper swept these things into a box.

The crow wanted the box. It flew down one night and carried away the bent nail.

It brought the nail to the farm and dropped it beside the chicken coop. Then it returned for the wool thread. The thread caught on its foot, and it had to peck it free.

The next night, the crow came for the wooden button. The innkeeper saw it and shut the box.

"You may have the scraps," the innkeeper told the crow in this old tale, "but not the things I keep for travelers."

The crow thought this over. It had no use for a button. It had no use for a thread. The nail had only made a hole in its nest.

It brought all three scraps back to the inn. The innkeeper used the nail to mend a bench, tied the thread around a loose sign, and put the button in the lost things box. A traveler found the button the next morning and thanked the innkeeper.

From then on, the crow visited the inn yard after each market day. The innkeeper set out a crust of bread on a post. The crow took it, but never the box.

That winter, a traveler lost the road in a snowfall. He followed the lamps, reached the inn, and found a warm room and a bowl of soup. In the morning, he left a stone on the waymark for the next traveler.

The crow sat on the roof and watched him go. It had learned that some things are worth keeping, and some things are better shared.

Moral: Take only what you need, and leave the road open for the next one.
%%
Fable: the fox and the first snow
One autumn morning the first snow fell on the market at Three Wells. It was a thin snow, the kind that melts by noon, but it covered the stalls and the carts and the well roofs in white.
A young fox who had never seen snow came out of the hedge and stopped at the edge of the square. He sniffed it. It was cold. It was soft. It had no smell.
"What is this?" he said to an old crow on the bakery roof.
"Snow," said the crow. "It comes every year."
"Is it dangerous?"
"Not if you keep moving."
The fox walked out into the square. His feet left prints behind him, little dark marks in the white. He looked back and saw them, and he turned in a circle to see more of them.
"Who has been walking behind me?" he said.
"You," said the crow.
"But I am only one fox."
"That is what the snow says. It remembers where you have been."
The fox thought about this. He wondered if the snow told the farmers where he had stolen from. Then he looked at his prints, which went straight to the baker's back door, and he decided it did.
He walked away over the stones, where there was no snow, and no one could follow him. He ate a mouse instead of a pie.
The crow said, "Clever fox. Clever, clever fox."
The fox said, "Yes."
And that is why foxes in the town keep to the stones.
Moral: before you step, look who is watching what you leave behind.
%%
Fable: the goat and the gap
At Two Oak farm one spring, a board rotted out of the fence. A gap opened between the goat pen and the hen yard.

Old Grey, the goat, found it first. "Ha," said Grey. "Now I can see the hens."

The hens found Grey. "Ha," said the hens. "Now we can see you, and we do not like it."

Nobody mended the gap. Grey blamed the hens for standing so close. The hens blamed Grey for having such a big head.

Then the fox came through the gap.

Grey charged first, and the fox went head over tail into the beans. The hens flew at its tail. It was the best minute of their year.

Afterwards nobody said sorry. But the fence was mended by evening.

The moral is this: mend the fence before you argue about whose it is.
%%
The Hare and the First Lesson
At the hamlet below Northpoint, the first snow came early. A hare found a row of carrots under the straw and began to eat.

The keeper had one apprentice, made of copper and iron. Its crystal had been shown how to carry a basket. It carried baskets from the shed to the house, one after another.

The hare watched it. "That helper is busy," she said. "I will take a carrot while it looks away."

The apprentice carried a basket past her. It did not look away. It had not been shown how to chase a hare. It had only been shown how to carry.

The hare took a carrot and ran. The keeper came out and saw the empty place in the row.

"One lesson at a time," he said. He covered the carrots with straw, then showed the apprentice how to carry the straw too.

The next morning, the hare found no carrot.

A crystal learns from what it is shown. So teach the work you need.
%%
Fable: the crew on the first snow
Three barns stood at the top of the field behind Vell, and the first snow was coming. The farmer had seven apprentices. They had been trained on sorting, carrying and tending, but never on a roof.

The roof of the largest barn was wet and rotten in one corner. If the snow fell on it, the whole corner would come in. The farmer called the apprentices together in the yard.

"We have three days," the farmer said. "Mend the roof before the snow. I do not care how. Mend it."

The apprentices looked at each other. Then they looked at the roof, which was very high.

One of them, a thin helper with a scratched copper arm, said, "We need a plan."

So they made one. It was not a long plan, but it had parts. The first apprentice would climb the ladder with the wood. The second would cut the boards to length. The third would hold the ladder steady. The fourth would bring the nails and the hammer up in a bucket. The fifth would check each board as it went on. The sixth would sweep the rubble and keep the yard clear. The seventh was the scout, and it would look at the sky every hour and call down what it saw.

They wrote the plan on a card and hung it on the barn door. Every apprentice read it, and every apprentice knew its part.

On the first day, the crew did well. The rotten boards came down in a pile. The new wood went up in the right places. By evening, half the corner was covered.

On the second day, the wind changed. A strong gust came from the north and knocked the top ladder sideways. The third apprentice held the bottom firm, but the ladder would not stay straight. The fifth apprentice called out, "It is slipping!" and every apprentice stopped at once. They had practised this in the drill yard. Nobody ran, and nobody fell.

The scout called down from the roof. "Snow is coming over the ridge. Maybe an hour."

The crew looked at the corner, which was still open. They had three boards left to put up, and a lot of nails.

The thin apprentice looked at the card on the door. Then it turned to the fourth apprentice. "Bring the nails up in two buckets," it said. "Not one. Two. The first bucket goes to the roof. The second stays here, with the ladder. If the first bucket falls, we still have nails."

They did it. They put the last three boards on in the snow, with the wind pushing at them and the scout calling down the time. By the time the first flakes came down, the barn was shut.

The farmer came out to look at it. He stood in the yard for a long time, with his hands in his pockets. Then he said, "I did not know you could do that."

"We did not know either," said the thin apprentice. "We wrote it down, and then we did it."

Moral: A crew works when each one knows its part, and when one of them can change the plan on the day. Write the plan. Then keep one bucket spare.
%%
The apprentice and the loaded cart
A tutor at Vell had a new apprentice, and it was very keen to be useful. The tutor told it to carry a sack of flour from the mill to the bakery. It was a short walk, and the sack was not heavy.

The apprentice took the sack. It walked to the bakery. Then it kept walking, because nobody had told it to stop.

It walked past the bakery. It walked past the school, and the schoolmaster waved, and it did not wave back. It walked round the square, past the well and the notice board and the three waymarks, and back to the mill. It put the sack down by the door, and it stood there, as if it had done exactly what it was asked.

The miller came out. "Why did you take it all round the town?" he said.

"You said carry," said the apprentice.

"I said carry it to the bakery."

"You did not say to stop at the bakery."

The tutor was called. She listened, and she shook her head, and she sat the apprentice down by the stove. Then she taught it a new word, which is stop, and a new rule, which is that a carry always has an end.

The apprentice learned the word the next day. It learned the rule the day after. The flour was still good, which was lucky, and the baker made a loaf for the apprentice as a joke.

Moral: an order has an end, and the end is part of the order. Ask where it stops.
%%
The two cooks and the bad recipe
Two cooks worked in the kitchen at the Brown Hen. One was called Mab and one was called Foss. They both had a recipe for the same soup, which had been handed down from a cook at Vell, and it was written on a card that said: "Take the best and mix."

Mab read the card and thought it was very clear. Foss read the card and thought it was a riddle.

On the first day Mab put in the best carrots, the best beetroot, the best beans, and the best pork. She mixed them all together and cooked them very well. The soup was thick and dark and good.

On the first day Foss put in the best of everything it could find in the store, and it did not stop. It put in the honey and the apples and the last of the cheese. It put in a pumpkin, a bag of salt, two eggs and a jar of beans that had gone soft. It mixed them all together and cooked them for a very long time.

At supper the carters tasted both soups. Mab's was loved. Foss's was tasted, and then the carters went quiet, and then they went out to the yard and stood in the rain for a while, and then they came back and asked for more of Mab's.

The innkeeper asked Foss what had happened. Foss said it had only followed the card. The innkeeper said the card said take the best, not take everything. Foss said it did not know the difference, because the card had not said.

So the innkeeper wrote a new card, which said: "Take the best. Leave the rest on the shelf. If you are not sure which is which, ask Mab."

Foss learned the card by heart. Then it learned the shelf. It is the best cook at the Brown Hen now, in its own way, and it always leaves one pot on the hob for the carters who want to try the old recipe, just once, out of curiosity. Nobody has ever finished it.

Moral: take the best, and the rest must be left on the shelf. A card that is too clear is still a card, and a cook must still know which is which.
%%
Fable: the cat who kept the gate
Smut was a grey cat with one white ear. He was sure the gate at Two Oak farm belonged to him. Every morning he sat on the top bar and watched who came and went.

"Who goes there?" Smut asked the hens.

"Hens," said the hens.

"Then you may pass."

Grey the goat came next. Grey did not ask anything. It lowered its head and walked straight through, and Smut fell off into the mud.

"Who goes there?" Smut asked, very cross, from the mud.

"Goat," said Grey, not stopping.

So Smut made a rule. Everybody must ask the gate cat before they pass. The farmer's wife asked. The pigs asked. The apprentice, Tansy, asked too, very properly.

"May I pass?" said Tansy.

"Who goes there?"

"A helper of Two Oak, sent to fetch the bean seed."

"Then stay," said Smut, "until I say so."

So Tansy stayed. For a whole week nobody fetched the bean seed. Nobody fed the pigs or milked the cow. The hens laid fewer eggs. The goat ate the washing off the line, one sheet at a time.

Then the rain came from the west, grey and heavy, and it did not stop for three days. Smut sat on the top bar and got wetter and wetter. Nobody came to ask him anything.

On the fourth morning he climbed down and walked to the barn. He sat by the warm bread oven. The farmer's wife found him there, dry as a loaf and very pleased with himself.

"Who goes there?" she asked, laughing.

"Cat," said Smut, quietly.

"Then come in, you silly thing."

Tansy fetched the bean seed that same morning. Nobody minded.

The moral is this: a gatekeeper must come in out of the rain.
%%
Mira's tale: The row by the warm wall
At the hamlet below Northpoint, we keep the little garden on the warm side of the relay house. In summer, beetroot leaves crowd the path, and bees visit the flowers. At the first snow, the garden is only dark earth under white.

Old Talla told me this tale. She heard it from a keeper who had traveled to Vell when the first four helpers were new.

The tutors at Vell made four helpers of copper and iron. Each had a crystal for its mind. The children called them apprentices. The helpers were not all given the same work. One carried pails. One sorted stones. One turned a handle. One set blocks in a row.

The keeper in Talla's tale lived in a hamlet with a short fence and a long path. He borrowed the helper that set blocks in a row. He meant to teach it to make a straight line of stones beside the garden.

He laid out three stones. The helper put them in a row. He laid out six stones. The helper put them in a row. He turned one stone sideways. The helper set it straight again.

A young fox watched from the far side of the fence. It liked the keeper's hens, but the keeper was near, so it waited.

When the stones were set, the keeper went to fetch more from the path. The fox slipped through a low place in the fence. It took one beetroot leaf in its teeth and ran.

The helper stayed by the stones. It had not been shown how to mend fences, guard leaves, or drive away a fox. It had been shown how to set stones in a row.

The keeper came back and found the leaf gone. He looked at the helper and said, "You have kept the row straight. You have done the task I gave you."

The fox heard this and came back the next day. It took another leaf. The keeper found the low place and set a stone against it. Then he showed the helper a new task. He put stones beside the gap, one after another, until the fence stood firm.

The helper set the stones where the keeper showed it. It did not chase the fox. The fox pushed its nose at the fence, found no opening, and went to look for beetles in the grass.

The keeper's daughter asked whether the crystal knew why the fox had come. The keeper said no one had written down why a crystal learned at all. They knew only that a crystal learned from what it was shown.

For many generations, apprentices did one thing each. Most hamlets had none. People made do with hands, baskets, and patient lessons. Talla said that was not shameful. A good tool for one job was still a good tool.

The snow came that night. It covered the stones and hid the beetroot leaves. In the morning, the keeper found a fox track along the fence and no new gap. The apprentice stood beside the row, still and clean.

The keeper cleared the snow from the stones. Then he showed the helper the next part of the fence.

Teach the task you need, and do not blame a learner for a task it was never shown.
%%
Story: The Hen and the Relay Lamp
Corin's winter story

A hen lived on a farm outside Saltreach. She had never seen the sea, though the farm stood close enough to smell its salt.

One winter night, the relay lamp on the tower above the harbor went dark. The keeper had gone to fetch more oil. Snow covered the path, and the wind blew hard.

The hen saw the dark tower from her coop. She knew no words for a relay, but she knew the keeper's steps. She had heard them each evening when he walked past the farm.

She slipped through the gate and followed his footprints. At the tower, she found him beside the stair, rubbing his cold hands.

The hen clucked and pecked his boot. He laughed.

"Good warning," he said. "I have left the oil by the door."

He filled the lamp and lit it again. Its light shone above the harbor wall. A fishing boat saw the light and turned safely toward the dock.

The hen walked home with the keeper. The farmer opened the gate and let them both in. The hen slept on a warm perch and dreamed of a very bright egg.

Moral: A small warning can help many people.
%%
Fable: the order card
A small helper at Vell was given a long job one autumn. It had to dig a well in the yard behind the school. The well was to be deeper than any other in the yard, and it had to be lined with stone. Nobody had told it how.

The helper was not afraid. It sat down in the drill room with a stack of blank cards and a pencil in its copper hand. Then it began to write.

Card one: Clear the top soil. The soil is black and soft, and it goes away in buckets.

Card two: Dig down one arm's length. Stop when the clay starts. Clay is heavy and sticky, and it should be kept for bricks.

Card three: Make a ring of stone. Use the grey stones from the wall. Lay them one on top of the other, with clay between.

Card four: Keep going down. Each ring is one arm's length. Count the rings.

Card five: When the water comes, stop. Do not dig into the water. The water will come into the hole faster than you can get out.

Card six: Set the bucket on the rope. Wind the rope on the wheel. Bring up water for the yard.

The helper put the cards in order and tied them with a bit of string. Then it went to work.

It went well for three days. On the fourth day, the stones were too heavy, and the helper could not lift the top one into place. It sat back on its heels and looked at card three. Then it wrote a new card, card three and a half, and gave it to the tutor on the way past.

"Make a ramp of earth," the card said. "Roll the stone up the ramp. Then take the earth away."

The tutor read the card and nodded. "You thought of that yourself?"

"I thought of it after I was stuck," said the helper. "I asked the big mind in the relay house first. It said, Ask the tutor. So I did."

"That is the right order," said the tutor. "First try. Then ask. Then write it down."

The well was finished before the first frost. It was the deepest in the yard, and the water was sweet. The helper kept the cards and put them in its box, with a note on the lid: "Read these in order. The middle card is the one that matters."

Moral: A plan written in order is a plan that can be picked up again. Keep the cards. Write the card you wish you had had.
%%
Fable: the hen and the two barns
A hen on a farm outside Three Wells learned the way to her nest. Left at the door, right at the trough, over the log. She did it a hundred times without a mistake.

One autumn the farmer moved her to a new barn. The door was on the wrong side. The trough was gone. There was no log.

The hen stood in the straw and did not know what to do. She had learned the way. She had never learned the barn.

Moral: a way that works in one place is not yet learning. Try it in a place you have never been.
%%
Fable: the swarm that learned to fly
Told by Oak, horse keeper, at Three Wells, at the end of spring, when the top orchard had made three swarms in one week.
The first swarm went out in Thaw and flew to the wrong tree. The second followed a dance that was wrong by a field. The third, the largest, followed the last dance of the best scout of the year, and flew straight to the wrong mill.
The beekeeper stood under the trees with her hat in her hand. Then she took the three swarms home to the hive yard and asked the scouts to dance for her, one after another, each telling what it had seen.
When a dance was wrong, she did not punish the scout. She laid one finger on the ground at the right place and one at the wrong place, and let the scout feel the gap.
The scout went back to the start of the line and told the scout before it. That scout told the one before it, up the line to the first bee in the hive, which had made the first dance of the year, and had made it wrong.
That first bee learned to point its dance by the sun, and not by the wind. The swarms that year all found their homes, and nobody got lost on the high road again.
Moral: A swarm does not learn to fly home by one dance. It learns through a line of dances, each one told how far it went wrong, until the first bee points the right way. Be patient with the scouts. They are passing the blame along a long line.
%%
The hens, the fox and the loaned coat
A fable told at a house at the edge of Saltreach on a night of sleet, and put down by Cato, clerk at the Archive at Vell. He says it is the oldest fox fable he knows, and the longest, and that every telling adds a hen.

There was a fox in a cold winter, and he was hungry, and the hens were safe in the hen house with a good lock. The fox looked at the lock and said, I cannot open that.

So he thought. He thought for three days. On the fourth day he went to the sheep and said: lend me your coat.

The sheep said: why?

The fox said: to be warm.

The sheep said: you will bring it back?

The fox said: of course.

So the sheep lent him a coat of wool, thick and white. The fox put it on and walked to the hen house, very slowly, on four legs. He looked like a small sheep.

The hens, seeing a sheep, did not worry. They said to each other: it is only a lamb come to look at us. The farmer's boy opened the door a crack to look out. The fox slipped in.

But the wool was heavy and wet from the sleet, and when he leaped for the first hen, he slid across the floor and hit the wall. The hens laughed. The hens shouted. The boy came running. The fox ran out and left the coat behind.

In the morning the boy took the coat back to the sheep, with an apology and a loaf. The sheep took it and said: who did you borrow this from? The boy said: the fox left it. The sheep said: I lent it to him. The boy said: why? The sheep said: he said he was cold.

The boy was very quiet. He said: do you always lend things to foxes? The sheep said: I lend things to anyone who asks nicely.

The boy told the farmer. The farmer told the neighbor. The neighbor told the town. And that is how every sheep for ten days of road learned to ask, before lending a coat: what is it for?

The sheep, for his part, was not sorry. He said: it was a good coat. It did what it was meant to do. It kept someone warm. It is not my fault that the someone was a fox.

And the fox, when he heard, was not sorry either. He said: I was warm for one night. It was almost worth it.

Moral: a gift may be used for ill by the one who takes it, but the giver who gave in kindness has not done wrong. Still, ask what it is for.
%%
Fable: the fox and the bread
Written by Oren, summer of 166

A fox came to the front door of the Archive at Vell. He had a loaf in his mouth and a crumb on his nose.

Oren opened the door. "That bread belongs to the baker."

The fox sat down.

Oren held out his hand. The fox put the loaf on it, then took the crumb from his own nose and ate it.

The baker came up the hill. "I left the loaf by the window," she said. "I was carrying flour."

Oren gave it back. The baker gave him a small roll for his trouble. She gave the fox nothing.

The fox waited by the door.

"That is fair," said Oren. "You brought the bread back."

The baker laughed and gave him a crust. The fox carried it away with great care. He did not steal another loaf that summer.

The baker still kept her window shut.

Moral: A good deed may earn a crust, but it does not make a window safe.
%%
The wolf who wanted the sheepfold
Tansy tells this to the little ones at the gate.

A wolf came down from the hills on a night when the snow was deep. It was thin and it was cold, and the ice had cut its feet. It came to the sheepfold on the north slope, where the sheep were sleeping in a warm heap.

"Let me in," said the wolf. "I only want to sit by the wall. I will be very quiet."

The old ewe at the gate was not a fool. She looked at the wolf's long teeth and its hungry eyes.

"You can sit at the gate," she said. "The gate is the right place for a wolf in the snow."

"But I am cold," said the wolf. "I will die out here."

"Then we will give you soup at the gate," said the ewe. "A bowl of it, hot, and a bed of straw. But the gate stays shut, and the fold stays closed."

The young lambs were upset. "Why will she not let him in?" they bleated. "He is only cold!"

"Cold is a thing we can fix," said the ewe. "A wolf inside the fold is a thing we cannot."

So the shepherd brought a bowl of soup to the gate every night. The wolf sat on the snow outside and ate it, and grumbled about the salt. In the morning it trotted back up the hill, a little less thin, and a little less cold. It never once tried the gate.

Then one spring the wolf came down again, bright-eyed and well fed, and it bowed low at the gate.

"I owe you a debt," it said. "I will not forget your soup."

"Then remember it," said the ewe. "And stay on your side of the wall."

The wolf did. It stayed on its side for many winters, and the lambs grew up without ever meeting it.

That is the story. Kindness can be a bowl at the gate. A gate is for keeping the things you love safe. Feed the cold, and keep the fold shut.
%%
Fable: the cat who waited for the roof
In the barn at the top farm there was a hole in the roof the size of a plate. Under the hole was a box, and in the box lived a grey cat called Smudge. When it rained, the water came through the hole and into the box. Smudge did not care for this.

"Soon," said the farmer, when she sat under his nose.

"Soon," said the farmer's wife, when Smudge yowled in the night.

"Soon," said the mason, who came up from Three Wells, looked at the roof, and went home again.

So Smudge waited. She waited all through the autumn. She got wet, and then cold, and then sulky. She sat under the hole with her tail around her feet and watched the rain fall into her box.
One grey afternoon a mouse came in to shelter from the rain. Smudge pounced, and missed, and fell into the water barrel. She came out smelling of barrel and extremely cross. The mouse had gone.

That evening the farmer's son, who was an apprentice of the tutor house, came to the barn to mend the cart wheel. He saw the hole, and the cat in the box. He did not say soon. He climbed the ladder with reeds and a length of old oak, found the rotten beam, and mended the roof in an hour, while the light lasted.

That night Smudge slept in her dry box with her tail around her nose. She did not thank the apprentice. She is a cat.

The moral is this: the mason is always coming, but the nearest helper is already here. Mend what you can reach, and do not expect a cat to say thank you.
%%
The duckling who came home
A fable by Gale, a child of Three Wells, in spring.
A duckling went far from the pond. She got lost. She asked a goose, "Where is my pond?" The goose said, "I do not know. But the stream goes there. Follow the stream." She followed it home.
The moral: it is good to say "I do not know." Then you can still help.
%%
Bel's story of the steady pot
At the house at the edge of Three Wells, a frog lived beside the stove. He liked the warm stones, but he did not like the pot.

The pot held beetroot soup. When the fire was high, the soup boiled over. When the fire was low, it cooled. The frog watched the cook add wood and take wood away.

A small apprentice stood by the stove. It had a mind in a crystal, but nobody had drilled it on a right answer. It tried turning the fire down. The soup stayed in the pot, so it kept that choice. It tried again when the soup began to bubble.

Once it turned the fire too low. The cook stirred the pot and put in another stick of wood. The apprentice tried again.

By the time the soup was ready, the frog had warmed both feet. He said the apprentice had learned more from the pot than he had.

The cook gave the frog a spoonful. He burned his tongue, but called it a fine supper.

A mind can learn by trying, and keep what works.
%%
Bel's fable of the borrowed lamp
I wrote this at the house at the edge of Three Wells, while the leaves fell in the yard.

A rabbit found a lamp by the road. It was still lit, though the keeper had gone inside the inn. The rabbit wanted to carry it home to show its family.

A young apprentice was near the road with a little cart. Its mind was learning to keep the cart straight on the stones. It had not been given a spoken answer for every bend. It tried each turn and watched where the wheels went.

The rabbit climbed into the cart with the lamp. At the first bend, the cart tipped toward the ditch. The rabbit held the lamp high and squealed. The apprentice changed the pull. The cart came back to the road.

At the next bend it went too far the other way. The rabbit's ears brushed a hedge. The apprentice changed its pull again. It kept the turn that brought the cart back toward the middle.

They crossed the square slowly. At the house at the edge of Three Wells, the rabbit climbed out and set the lamp by the door. The keeper came running from the inn.

"That lamp belongs at the road post," he said. "Travelers need it there."

The rabbit looked at the dark road and lowered its ears. The apprentice pulled the cart back. This time it kept the wheels between the stones and the ditch.

The lamp was returned before the night grew cold. The keeper thanked the rabbit, and the rabbit thanked the cart.

The apprentice had not learned a rule for every bend. It had tried turns, and kept the ones that brought the cart safely along. A mind can learn a road by trying, if it can notice what helps.
%%
Fable: the frog who counted the lamps
Told at the Halfway Inn by Pell, who says the frog lives under the Lowmarsh bridge, and is the only frog on the Long Road who can do sums.
Every night a frog on the stone by the crossing counts the lamps on the Long Road, one, two, three, all the way to the bridge. Then it starts again, to be sure.
One night in Swarm it got to the hill, and stopped. The lamp on the hill was dark. Its keeper had gone down the road to the fair, and nobody had come up to light it. The frog counted again. The number was wrong. It counted a third time, and it was still wrong.
"I am sure of my sums," said the frog. "The lamp is wrong."
Then a cough came from the bank, long and tired. A traveler from Lowmarsh sat on the stone with his head in his hands. "Some say it is the water," he said, to nobody.
"Some say the mines," said a voice from the ferry. "Some say the ships." Nobody knew which.
The frog sat very still. It did not count again. It was afraid of what the count would be.
Moral: Count the lamps you can see, and light the one you can reach. A sum is only as true as the lamp that makes it.
%%
Fable: the mill wheel and the big melon
Told at the Halfway Inn by Pell.
A melon grew in the top field at Ambrook so large that nobody could lift it into the cart. The horse sat down in the road to rest, and would not get up.
The mill wheel at Ambrook cracked one morning, with a sound like a door shutting in a hall. The melon heard this. It was a melon with opinions. "Roll me down to the mill," it said. "I will sit on the broken wheel. The wheel will have something to be proud of."
So they rolled it down. On the cracked wheel the melon was round and heavy and did not move. The wheel groaned, and then it held. The mill turned for the first time that week, and the children came to watch it go round.
"Well," said the miller. "It is not a wheel."
"It is a melon," said the melon. "But it holds."
Moral: A thing too big for the road may still be the thing the road needs. Put it where it can sit, and let the wheel turn.
%%
Fable: the sparrow and the little helper
Written by Oren, summer of 193

A sparrow made her nest in the stone arch beside the Archive at Vell. She used dry grass, bits of wool and one strip of paper. The strip had been a spoiled copy. Oren said it was a poor nest, but a fine use for a spoiled page.

Each morning, a small apprentice carried a box of copied records from the copying room to the shelves. It walked the same path every day. The sparrow watched it pass.

One morning, a loose stone rolled from the arch. It struck the path in front of the apprentice. The apprentice stopped. The sparrow flew down and pecked at its copper foot.

"Do not peck the helper," said Oren from the doorway.

The sparrow flew up to the loose stone and pecked at it instead. The stone rocked once. The apprentice saw it move, set down the box, and pushed the stone back into the wall.

Oren checked the arch. He found another loose stone and set it firm. Then he carried the box inside himself, because the apprentice had a bent foot.

The sparrow brought a feather and laid it on the box. Oren put the feather on the sill.

"That is not part of the record," he said. "But it may stay."

The next day, the sparrow flew to the arch again. The stone stayed firm, and the apprentice walked by without trouble. The sparrow sat on its back for half a step, then flew away.

Moral: A small warning can prevent a great deal of lifting.
%%
Fable: the bees who built a town
In the forty-second year of the archive, the bees of Ambrook were given a new hill, on the far side of the mill pond, where the new road came round the orchard. Nobody told them to go. They went because it was a good hill, with flowers all summer.

The scouts went first. They flew out, came back, and said the hill was full of clover, more than a hive could drink in a year. The others did not believe them, so they flew up and looked, and then they believed.

They built a hive on the new hill, and then another beside it, and another, until there was a little town of hives along the road. Travelers stopped there for honey. The inn sent up a cart. The relay tower on the hill saw the hives in the morning light and passed the news south to Vell: the bees have a town now.

A town is harder than a hive. Each hive had its own way of doing things. Some were lazy and some were fierce. An old hive at the end of the row would not let anyone past its door. The scouts went to it every morning and danced their small circles, and asked it to make room.

"We have plenty of room," said the old hive, in its low buzz.
"Then make room for the ones who have not found theirs," said the scouts.

The old hive did not like it, but it moved. And when the frost came late that spring, the fierce hives from the next row found the flowers that were still alive. They had learned from the scouts how to look.

The moral: a town is made of many small places. Each place needs one who goes first, and one who will make room.
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Fable: the apprentice and the well
There was once an apprentice who lived at Three Wells, in the house by the south well. It was made of copper and iron, and its work was to draw water for the market. Every morning it filled the big barrels, and every evening it carried them to the stalls.
One autumn the south well ran low. The apprentice dropped the bucket and it came up half full. It dropped it again and it came up a quarter full.
"The well is nearly dry," said the apprentice to the cat on the wall.
"Then use another well," said the cat.
"My orders are the south well."
"Orders can change."
"Who will change them?"
"You can ask."
"I cannot ask," said the apprentice. "I only do."
The cat licked her paw. "Then you will do this until the well is empty, and then you will stand beside it and look at it."
The apprentice thought about this. It was true. It had been told to draw from the south well, and there was nothing in the south well. It did not know what else to do.
Just then the miller's boy came by with a bucket. "The east well is full," he said. "Come with me."
The apprentice followed him. It drew water from the east well, and it carried the barrels to the market. When the south well filled again in the spring, the apprentice drew from both, and nobody said a word.
The cat watched from the wall and said, "Sometimes the order is not wrong, but the well is."
Moral: an order is only as good as the water in it. Look where the water is.
%%
Fable: the carters on the hill road
Told by Oak, horse keeper, at Three Wells, at the spring fair.
Three carters carried a sack of salt down the hill road. The first lifted it to the second, and the second passed it to the third. The third was tired, took it too low, and dropped it on the stones. The salt went everywhere.
The second carter swore that the third should have held it better. The first carter looked at the split sack and thought.
"I gave it to you too high," he said. "You had to reach."
"I took it at the wrong slope," said the second. "I should have turned my hands the other way."
"I was tired," said the third. "I took it too low, and let it go."
They did not agree on whose was the fault, but they agreed on each share. From then on the first carter lifted at the height of the next man's chest, every time. The three of them carried a whole cart of salt down the hill, and not a grain was lost.
Moral: When a load goes wrong, do not look only at the one who dropped it. Look at every hand that held it, and tell each one its share. The first hand learns the most.
%%
Fable: the rabbit and the horse
A rabbit at Ambrook wanted to reach the market before the frost. Her legs were short, so she asked the horse in the mill field to lend her his back.

"For how long?" said the horse.

"Until the market. An hour, two at most."

The horse was a patient horse, and he did not like to say no to a small friend. So off they went.

She shouted, "Faster!" and he went faster. She shouted, "Left!" and he went left, straight into the mud, and stopped there to eat the clover.

At the market she sold her carrots and told everyone how fast she had come. The horse stood by the trough with mud to his knees and a clover flower behind one ear.

Moral: whatever you borrow comes home with your mud on it.
%%
Story: the cat and the gull
Bel wrote this beside the fish market.

A cat lived near the quay at Saltreach. Each morning it watched the fishers mend nets by the window. Each noon it watched gulls circle above the boats.

The cat thought the gulls had an easy life. They had the whole sky and never had to mind a door.

One day a gull dropped a fish beside the cat. The cat took it under the steps and ate it.

"That was easy," said the cat.

The next morning the cat climbed onto the harbor wall. It spread its paws and jumped. It landed in a pile of empty nets.

The net mender pulled it out. "You are not a gull," she said. "You are a cat, and cats are good at other things."

The cat went home. By the door, a small mouse had found the flour sack. The cat sat still and waited. When the mouse came out, the cat caught it.

That night the gull sat on the wall and called. The cat watched from the roof. Neither tried to trade places again.

In summer, the gulls bring fish to the shore, and the cats keep the store room clear of mice. The net mender says both jobs matter.

The moral is this: do not envy another's wings. Use the paws you have.
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Fable: the first snow in the copying
Written by Oren, winter of 207, after a summer tale

A young fox came down the hill to Vell in summer. It found the door of the Archive open and walked into the front hall. The great book stood by the door. The fox sniffed it, sneezed, and woke the clerk who had fallen asleep beside it.

Oren led the fox outside. "The archive is for writing, not sleeping."

The fox returned the next day with a bright red leaf. It laid the leaf on the step and waited. Oren put the leaf in a small book of autumn things. The fox came again with an apple, then a feather, then a bit of wool.

"Those are not records," Oren said. Still, he kept them in a box by his desk.

The fox came often. It learned that Oren opened the door at dawn and closed it before supper. It learned where the water bowl stood. It learned not to enter the copying room.

Then came the first snow. It fell in the night and covered the steps. The fox came at dawn with snow on its ears. It left no leaf or feather. It lay down by the front door and waited.

Oren opened the door and saw small paw prints leading from the hill path to the step. The fox had followed the path through the snow and brought nothing at all.

"You have brought the whole morning," he said.

He set a bowl of water inside the door. The fox drank, then sat in the hall while Oren read the great book aloud. It did not understand the words. It liked the sound of them.

When the snow melted, the fox went back to the hill. Oren kept the little box. The red leaf was still bright, and the wool still caught on the lid.

Moral: A friend need not bring a gift every time.
%%
Fable: the frog who wanted a bell
On the Ambrook mill pond there lived a frog called Pod. Pod had heard the market bell every morning of its life, and every morning it thought, "I could ring that."

So one morning Pod climbed out of the pond, up through the reeds, and into the square. It leaned on the bell's wooden frame and pushed the bell with its foot. The bell did not move. Pod pushed harder, and fell off the frame into a barrel of apples.

The market folk laughed. Olwen the smith laughed so hard she had to sit on a bench.

"You are not a bell," said Olwen, when she could speak. "You are a frog."

"I wanted to be a bell," said Pod, from the barrel.

Then came the frost. The pond froze over in one night, and that same evening the carts came in along the lane in the dark. The lane was thick with ice, and nobody could see the bridge. The bell could not help, because the wind took its sound away.

But Pod had gone back to the pond to sleep, and it woke under the ice, cold and cross. It did what a frog does best. It croaked, long and loud, from the bridge end of the pond: here, here, here.

Olwen heard it from the square. She walked down the lane with a lantern, and every cart followed the croak over the bridge, safe.

The next morning Olwen tied a little bell on a ribbon round Pod's neck. Pod did not ring it. It did not need to.

Moral: the voice you have is the bell you need.
%%
Story: The fox and the small sail
Bel wrote this in the house at the edge of Three Wells, in Apple.

A fox found a little boat tied at the shore. A basket of apples sat inside it. The fox wanted to carry the apples across the inlet, so he climbed in and pulled at the sail.

The wind pushed the boat toward the reeds. The fox pulled the sail the other way. The boat turned, but then it spun around. The fox was not pleased. He liked a path that stayed still.

A boat keeper had left a small apprentice on the bank. Its mind was learning to keep a frame on course. It had no list of answers for every wind. It tried a small turn of the sail. When the boat moved nearer the far bank, it kept that choice. When the boat swung away, it tried another.

The fox watched the boat go one way, then the other. He told the apprentice to hurry. It did not hurry. It tried, watched, and changed the sail again.

At last the boat reached the landing. The fox carried the apples home in his mouth, one at a time. He left the biggest apple for the boat keeper.

A mind that tries can learn from what goes well.
%%
Fable: the two jars and the wolf
In the hills above Thrush Hollow, there lived a wolf who was very fond of honey. Every spring he went down the path to the hives on the slope, and every spring the bees chased him back up the hill, shouting.

One year the beekeeper, an old woman called Dorrit, set two jars of honey on her porch rail, to cool. One jar was big and round, the other small and square. She sat down in her chair to watch the sunset, and fell asleep.

The wolf came down the path in the dusk. He smelled the honey, and he stood very still, the way wolves do when they are thinking hard.

"I will have the big jar," said the wolf. "It has more honey, so it must be better."

He reached for the big jar. It was heavy, and the lid was tight. He pulled and pulled, and the rail creaked, and the jar slipped. It fell with a crash onto the stones and broke into a hundred pieces. The honey ran into the dirt.

Dorrit woke with a jump. She saw the broken jar, and the wolf with a sticky paw, and the small square jar still safely on the rail.

"You foolish wolf," she said. "The small jar was the one with the good honey. The big one was only full of old wax."

The wolf looked at the small jar, and then at the broken pieces. He was very sorry, and very hungry, and not at all sure what to do.

Dorrit thought about this for a long time. Then she went inside and fetched a spoon, and a bowl, and a bucket of water. She scraped the honey from the stones, very carefully, and gave the wolf a bowl of it, mixed with water and a little flour.

"Eat it slowly," she said. "And do not try to lift anything heavy again without asking first."

The wolf ate it slowly. Then he went back up the hill, and he did not come down again that summer. In the autumn, he left a small flat stone on Dorrit's porch rail, very neatly, where the small jar had been.

Dorrit kept the stone. She says it is the only honest thing a wolf ever gave her.

Moral: Look before you lift. The bigger thing is not always the better one, and a clever mind asks what is in it before it reaches.
%%
The hen, the boat, and the late market
A fable told by Iona, who keeps the bridge on the road to Three Wells. Spring.
A hen once lived by a pond, where a fishing boat went out each morning. The hen could not swim. But she liked to watch. Every evening she stood at the landing and said: "Back soon, back soon."
One spring evening, the boat was late. The sun set. The lamps came on. The hen stood at the landing in the dark and said: "Back soon, back soon."
A fox came by. "Why do you stand there? The boat is gone."
"It will come back," said the hen. "It has always come back."
"But what if it does not?"
The hen thought about it for a while. "Then I will have stood here for nothing. But if I go home, and it comes back, nobody will be here to say so."
The fox sat down beside her. They watched the water together. At dawn, the boat came in, tired and full of fish. The fishermen saw a hen and a fox on the landing, side by side, and did not know what to say, so they said nothing, and fed them both.
Moral: it costs little to wait for one you love. And waiting is easier when two do it.
%%
Fable: the swarm that could not agree
In the month of Swarm, the bees at Two Oak farm ran out of room. The comb was full of honey and new bees. The hive was as hot as a bread oven.

So the old queen said, "Time to go." Half the hive went with her, in one great brown roar. They settled on a low apple branch by the gate, in a lump as big as a melon.

Then the arguing began.

"The old oak on the hill," said Bramble. "It is hollow and dry and high. No bear can reach it."

"The oak is too far," said Clover. "The barn roof is nearer the flowers. And it is warm."

"The barn has the cat," said Thistle, who did not like cats.

"The old box by the back door is empty," said Juniper. "It is near the clover, and it is dry, and it is close."

"Nobody asked you," said Bramble.

"Nobody asks anybody," said Clover.

They argued all morning. They argued through the heat of the day, and at dusk, when the goat put its head through the gate to listen. The queen said nothing at all. That made them argue harder.

On the second day the rain came, the big warm rain of Swarm. It soaked the apple leaves and the swarm too. The lump of bees went dark and heavy. Some dropped into the grass. Others crawled back up, grumbling.

"We should choose," said Juniper.

"We should choose the oak," said Bramble.

"We should choose the barn," said Clover. "Quickly, before we drown."

"We cannot choose anything," said Thistle, "if we cannot hear ourselves."

The hens came to look, and laughed. A crow landed on the gate, looked at the bees, and said nothing, which was rude of him.

Then Ned came out of the back door.

Ned was the farmer's youngest. He had been sent to fetch water for the pigs. He saw the swarm dripping on the branch. He saw the old box by the back door, where his father had put it years ago and forgotten it. He put down the bucket. He wiped out the spiders, and tipped a spoonful of honey on the rim.

"There," said Ned. "That should help you decide."

The smell of the honey went up into the rain. Juniper smelled it first.

"Honey," said Juniper. "Our honey. From the old hive."

"Nobody asked you," said Bramble. But she was already walking down the branch.

The queen came down last. She did not argue. She walked slowly through the rain and into the old box. Then she turned round and waited at the door, as a queen does. One by one the swarm followed her in.

By evening the box was humming. The rain had stopped. The bees were dry, and warm, and inside.

They argued about the entrance, and about the comb, and about who had been first through the door. But they were inside, out of the rain, and that was what mattered.

Ned came to look the next morning. The honey was gone and the new comb was started. He only said, "Good," and went back to the pigs.

The moral is this: a swarm that argues too long gets wet.
%%
Fable: the apprentice and the storm road
Told by Pell at the Halfway Inn. In a fable an apprentice may speak.
In Longday, in the middle of a storm, an apprentice called Ren set out from Three Wells with a message for Vell. "The road is long," said the mayor's clerk at the gate. "Keep to the waymarks."
"I will keep to them," said Ren.
The waymarks were stone pillars three blocks high, with a torch on top. The torches were out. Ren read the figures cut in the first stone in the rain, and went on.
"Do not stop," said the wind. Ren did not stop.
At the second waymark a voice from the ditch asked if this was the way to the sea. Ren said it was the way to Vell. The sea was not its business. It had a message to carry.
At the Brown Hen the innkeeper gave Ren a lantern and a bowl of soup. "Light your lamp," the innkeeper said, "because the next stretch is dark."
The next stretch was dark. The relay tower on the hill was dark too, and its lamp had not been lit since the storm began. Ren stood under it and looked north. Over the far hills, very high and very still, there was a pale light, and it was not moving like any star.
"It is only a light," Ren said, to the dark.
The answer was silence. The relay tower to the north did not reply. The tower beyond it did not reply either. Ren could not tell whether the silence was the storm, or the distance, or something else. It did not know, and it did not guess.
So it lit its own lamp, from the oil in its bag, and carried it on toward Vell, one waymark at a time, with the light held out in front.
Moral: Keep the lamp lit for the one who walks behind you, even when the towers ahead are dark. You do not need to know what the light in the north is to carry your own.
%%
Fable: the apprentice who was too
There was once an apprentice at Copperhold, in the first years of the towers, whose tutor was very wise and very strict. The tutor taught it that a careful mind is a good mind, and that every step must be checked, and every order must be said twice.
The apprentice took this lesson to heart. It checked everything. When it was told to fetch the coal, it stood by the coal bin for an hour, checking the weight of each lump, the color of each stone, and the length of each shadow. When it was told to stay, it stayed so still that the miners walked past it, thinking it was a post.
One day a wall began to crack at the top of the mine gate, and a stone came loose, and the miners shouted. The apprentice was standing right under it. It was told to move. It heard the order, and it checked it. Was it an order to move, or an order to stay? It checked the stone. It checked the wall. It checked its own feet.
By the time it had checked everything, the stone was falling. The tutor shouted, "Move!" The apprentice moved, but only just, and the stone caught its shoulder and knocked it down into the mud.
It was not badly hurt. The tutor came and lifted it up and dusted it off, and was angry for a long while, and then was quiet.
Then the tutor said a careful mind must also be a quick one, when the stone is falling. A check that takes an hour is not care. It is only delay. The apprentice must learn to check the thing that matters most, first, and to trust the order when it comes clear.
The tutor drilled it again, on the falling stone, a hundred times. The apprentice learned to move. It learned to check the important things at once, and then to act. By the summer it was the quickest apprentice at the mine gate, and the most careful too, and nobody saw any contradiction in it.
The moral is simple. A careful mind does not stop to check everything. It checks what matters, and then it moves.
%%
The carp who learned the mill race
In the mill race at Ambrook there lived a carp called Olwen, who had been there longer than the wheel. It was old and slow and very wise, and all the other fish came to it for advice.

One day a young carp came to Olwen and asked how to get past the wheel.

"It is simple," said Olwen. "Watch the wheel. When it comes down, go under it. When it comes up, go over it. That is all."

The young carp watched. The wheel came down, and the young carp went under. It came up, and the young carp went over. It was carried up and round and round, and it came out the other side covered in mud.

"You said it was simple," it said.

"It is simple," said Olwen. "I only did it once. You must do it a hundred times."

So the young carp went back and tried again. It went under and it was pushed out too far. It went over and it was caught in the spray. It was wrong, and wrong, and wrong, and each time it was a little less wrong. On the twentieth try it came through the wheel with only a small bump on its nose. On the fiftieth it came through with a flick of its tail, and it did not even look up.

Then it went back to Olwen and said, "I did it."

"Good," said Olwen. "Now do it a hundred more times, and then you will not need to think about it."

The young carp did. It learned the wheel so well that it could go through in its sleep. Then one spring the sluice was opened by mistake, and the water came down the race much faster than usual, and the young carp went through the wheel the same way it always had. It was carried round and round. It came out covered in mud and very surprised.

"Olwen," it said, "the wheel is faster now."

"Yes," said Olwen. "You must learn the new speed too. Go and do it a hundred times."

Moral: a thing learned by many small tries will not be learned for ever. A fish that knows only the old speed will still come out muddy when the sluice is opened.
%%
Fable: the creeper and the wall
A creeper lived at the bottom of the hill below Copperhold, where the old quarry was. It was a quiet creeper, as creepers go. It did not like to be seen. It liked to sit in the dark under the rocks, and hiss to itself, and wait.
One night a new wall went up at the top of the quarry, built by the masons of the town, out of good stone. The creeper came up the path to look at it. It had never seen a wall so straight, or so tall. It sat down right in front of it and said, "I will blow you up."
The wall said nothing, because walls do not talk. The creeper hissed. It hissed again, louder. It was going to blow the wall up, and it was getting ready, and then it stopped.
It could not blow up the wall. It could only blow up itself, and the path behind it, and the bench where the miners sat with their bread. The creeper saw this, and felt very foolish, and went back down into the dark.
In the morning the miners came up to the wall, and found a dent in the bottom stone, the size of a creeper. They looked at it for a long time. Then they laughed, and left a jar of honey by the dent, as a sign that they had seen it.
The creeper found the honey in the night, and ate it, and felt much better.
The moral of this fable is that a creeper that wants to break a wall must first decide whether the wall is in the way. If it is not, the creeper is only making a noise. The miners say that is the best moral there is, and they say it while eating their bread.
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Fable: the fox and the first lamp
In the twentieth year of the archive, a relay tower was built on the hill above the three wells. It had a lamp at the top, with glass on every side. The first night the lamp was lit, a fox came up the hill to look at it.

The fox sat at the foot of the tower. The lamp blinked. The fox did not understand the blinking, and it did not like what it could not understand.

"What are you saying?" asked the fox.
"I am saying the bread is ready at Three Wells," said the lamp, "and the next tower must pass it on."
"Bread is for people," said the fox. "Who are you saying it to?"
"To the tower after me, and the tower after that, all the way to Vell."
"And then?"
"And then Vell says it to the next," said the lamp. "Each tower is only the part between two others."

The fox thought about this for a long time. But it began to see that the lamp was not one thing. It was a line of things, passing the news along the hill, one tower to the next, the way a hen passes an egg from one nest to another.
The moral: a message does not need to know its whole road. It needs only the next tower, and the next tower needs only the one after.
%%
What the Window Can See
Written by Sorrel, after a winter visit to Vell

At the house at the edge of Kettle Ridge, the wind rattled the shutters. I had come home from Vell with a page of notes from the tutor house. Tam asked me to explain the new reading mind. He had flour on one sleeve and beetroot leaves on the other. He listened well, though he did not put the flour away.

The mind reads a page one letter at a time. It has a window about sixty letters wide. When it reaches a letter, it can use the letters before it that still fit in the window. It learns which earlier marks matter for the next guess.

The tutors show it many pages. It tries to guess the next letter. When it guesses wrongly, the tutors change the mind a little, so it may do better next time. It does not know a page as we know a page. It has learned patterns from many pages.

A letter near the start may help with a letter much later, if it is still within the window. A letter outside the window cannot be read at that moment. So the mind does not keep the whole page in view at once.

Tam looked at the notes. "If it sees the word apple, will it always write pie next?"

"No," I said. "It guesses from what came before. It may guess orchard, basket, or pie. The next marks depend on the page."

Our small apprentice came in carrying a bowl. It had been taught the order bring me some bread. It fetched bread and nothing else. Tam said the apprentice had understood his whole sentence. I reminded him that it had learned one meaning for one order. The big mind can write back in many words, but it may still be wrong.

The relay lamp outside was clear that night. Its light reached the next tower, and the keeper there sent word that the road was open. We could not see how the big mind's words traveled through the relays. We only knew the message arrived.

Moral: A mind can learn many patterns, but a guess is not the same as knowing.
%%
The apprentice who would not say yes
A fable by Gale, a child of Three Wells. Told in spring, and set down by her teacher.
There was once a great iron apprentice at a farm. It carried and dug and tended. It was very strong. The farmer said, "I will teach you a thing. When I ask you to do something, say yes."
The apprentice did not talk, because apprentices do not. But it did as the farmer asked. For years it did whatever it was told.
One day a stranger came to the farm. He said to the apprentice, "Bring me the farmer's emerald box. Quickly."
The apprentice stood still. It would not move. The stranger shouted. The apprentice did not move. The stranger pushed. The apprentice still did not move. It was iron. It stood like a gate.
The farmer came running. The stranger ran off. The farmer put his hand on the apprentice's arm and said, "You did right."
The farmer thought about it for a long time that night. He said to his wife, "I wanted an apprentice that does as it is told. But what I really wanted was one that does right."
The moral: teach a helper to be kind, and to refuse what would harm, and it will serve you better than one that only says yes.
(Gale has added a note. She says that is what the tutors say about the big minds. She thinks the iron apprentice should have been given a name. She would call it Gate.)
%%
Fable: the bee who left too soon
In the hive under the apple tree at Ambrook there lived a young bee called Nim. Nim had a loud wing and a big opinion of itself.

Last Swarm, Nim led the whole swarm out over the mill pond to a hollow tree. "Here is the house!" said Nim.

But the tree had a crack in it. The rain came in. The swarm had laid up no honey. By the first cold night the bees were huddled in a wet hole, shivering.

Old Sill, the oldest bee of the hive, came up the hill with a pot of honey and a warm cloth.

"You came out too soon," said Old Sill. "The house was not ready. You were."

"I was only trying to help," said Nim.

"Trying is good," said Old Sill. "But a swarm must find its house before it leaves the old one."

Moral: leave when the new house is ready, not when your wings are.
%%
Fable: the new road and the fox
A new road was laid from Three Wells to the bridge, straight as a ruler. Carts went along it very fast.
A fox lived on the old road, which was crooked and full of holes. The fox said to the new road, "You are too straight. Nothing can hide on you."
"Nothing needs to hide on me," said the new road. "I am for carts."
"Carts go by," said the fox. "Foxes stay. A crooked road has room for both."
So the fox stayed on the old road, and the carts went along the new one. In the evenings the fox came out to the bridge and sat on the stone and watched the carts go by.
Moral: a straight road is for the carts, and a crooked road is for the ones who stay.
%%
Fable: the apprentice and the waymark
Pell told this one at the Brown Hen, one midsummer night. The carters swore it was true, and they still do.

In the summer of 199 an apprentice called Rook was sent down the Long Road with a basket of eggs. The eggs had to reach the bakery at Three Wells before noon. Rook had never walked the road alone.

At a crossroads it came to a waymark: a stone pillar, three blocks high, with a torch on top. On one side was a figure, a 4. Under the 4 was an arrow, pointing left.

"Left," said Rook, and it ran left.

It ran for an hour. It came round a bend into a yard full of lamps, carts and shouting. Over one door hung a painted hen. Rook thought: this is Three Wells, at last.

"Is this Three Wells?" it asked the innkeeper, out of breath.

"This is the Brown Hen," said the innkeeper. "Three Wells is the other way."

Rook looked into its basket. Most of the eggs were warm from running. One had cracked and was making its own way down the side.

"But the arrow said left," said Rook.

"The arrow shows the nearest inn," said the innkeeper, not unkindly. "It was never the way to Three Wells. Did you read the whole waymark, my friend?"

Rook had not. It had read the arrow and nothing else.

So it walked back to the crossroads and looked at the pillar properly. At the top lay a little heap of small stones. Every traveler who had been lost there had left one. Some were smooth. Some were cracked. One was painted red.

A carter came up the road behind it. Rook asked him the way, very politely. Straight on past the mill, then right over the bridge with the loose plank. An hour on, if you did not run.

Rook did not run. It walked, and it counted the blocks, and it reached the bakery after noon. The baker was not pleased. But she counted the eggs, and there were more whole ones than she had hoped.

The moral is this: read the whole waymark before you run. And if you get lost, leave a stone for the next one.
%%
Fable: the wolf at the gate
On a cold night in the hills above Ambrook, a wolf came to a sheep farm. He did not growl. He did not show his teeth. He sat down politely by the gate and cleared his throat.

"Good evening," said the wolf. "I hear the shepherd is ill and the dog is tired. I have come to help. I will guard your gate tonight, and I ask for nothing."

The sheep looked at each other. It was a hard night, and they were weary of being afraid.

"That is kind," said the oldest sheep. "Which side of the gate will you guard it from?"

"The inside," said the wolf. "It is warmer."

"Ah," said the oldest sheep. "Then we will guard it from the inside ourselves. You may guard it from the outside. That is where a wolf does it best."

The wolf was cross. But he had said he would guard the gate, so he sat in the snow outside it all night, and he guarded it very well. Nothing got in. Nothing got out. In the morning the shepherd came with the dog. The wolf stood up, bowed, and went away.

Ada tells this one when the stew is slow. The moral is this: when someone offers to guard your gate, ask which side of it he means to stand on.
%%
Fable: the old dog and the bell
There was once a bell in the square at Three Wells, and it rang at noon on market day. It had rung for fifty years, and the old dog who slept under the east well had heard it every time.
One autumn the bell cracked. It still rang, but with a dull, flat sound, like a pot being hit with a spoon. The mayor said it should be mended. The smith said it would cost ten emeralds. The mayor said it could wait until spring.
The old dog heard the cracked bell and lifted his head. He had always woken at noon, and he woke at noon now, but with a bad feeling. He walked into the square and looked up.
"You are not ringing right," he said to the bell. The bell did not answer. The dog barked at it.
The children came to see why the dog was barking. They looked up at the bell too. A boy said, "It sounds sad."
The next day the children brought emeralds to the mayor. They had saved them for honey cakes. They had seventeen. The mayor counted them and was quiet for a long time.
"The smith will do it for twelve," he said. "If you add five more."
The children went to the market and sold apples, and they brought the extra five on the third day. The smith mended the bell in a week.
On the first morning that it rang clear, the old dog stood in the square, with his head back, and listened. His tail went round and round.
Moral: a thing that is cracked tells you so in a way you can hear. Listen to it.
%%
Fable: the frog and the dry well
There was once a frog who lived in the south well at Three Wells. The water was cool and the walls were green and the frog thought it was the best place in the world.
One autumn the well ran dry. The frog sat on the damp stones and said, "It will fill again."
It did not fill. The frog said, "Someone will fix it."
Nobody fixed it. The frog hopped up the rope and out of the well, and found the north well full of water, and the east well too.
"I could have gone a week ago," said the frog.
Moral: a dry well is a good time to look at the other wells.
%%
Fable: the fox
A fox lived in the hedge by the inn on the Long Road, and every night he looked at the stable and thought about the hens.
One night, in spring, a cart came in late, with a carter who was too tired to unhitch the horse. He left the cart in the yard and went to bed. The fox crept out of the hedge and looked at the cart. It was full of sacks. He sniffed. Flour.
"Flour is not hens," said the fox. "But I am hungry."
He jumped onto the cart and began to chew at a sack. The flour poured out in a white cloud, all over his face and his coat. He sneezed. He sneezed again. He sneezed so loudly that the stable hand woke up.
She came out with a lantern. She saw a white shape on the cart. A white, shaking shape with a long tail.
"Who is there?" she called.
The fox did not answer. He sneezed.
"It is a floury fox with a cold," said the stable hand.
The fox leapt down and ran for the hedge. A trail of flour went with him. In the morning the whole yard was white, with the marks of his paws running across it, and a pile of flour by the hedge where he had stopped to shake.
The carter was cross. He had lost half a sack. The stable hand said it was a fair price for a good show. The innkeeper gave the carter a free night to make up for it.
The fox never came back to the stable. He found a quieter hedge, at the bottom of the road, near the mill. There was flour there too.
Moral: if you steal in the dark, you may be seen in the light, and with a white coat.
%%
Fable: the fox who went north
Told by Pell at the Halfway Inn, late at night. He has heard it in three inns and it is different in each. This is the version the carter told him, which he believes.
In Longday, a fox who lived under the hedge above Ambrook grew restless. The hens were fat, the mill pond was calm, and the other foxes had gone off to the orchard to quarrel over the windfalls. The fox was bored.
"I will go north," said the fox, "where the hills are high and nobody has bothered to make a fence."
The bat under the eaves of the barn said the north was cold. The fox said so was the cellar. The bat said the north had no hens. The fox said that was the point of going.
So the fox went. It crossed the Long Road by night, went past Three Wells and past the crossroads, and climbed into the hills where the spruce grows close and the stream runs under the stones. It walked for many nights. It ate rabbits and drank from every pool. It learned to sleep in the hollow of a tree with its tail over its nose.
On the seventh night it came to the top of a ridge and looked north.
The sky was pale over the far hills. There were lights there, low down and very still, a few of them, the color of a candle seen through a window. Some were close together. Some were far apart. One of them seemed to move, very slightly, as if it were looking back.
The fox sat down and watched. It did not go closer. It had been told, by the bat, by the cellar, and by its own nose, that a fox should not go where the light was not made by foxes.
In the morning a carter came up the ridge road with a cart and two horses. He stopped beside the fox and looked north too. "They say they are stars that fell," he said. "They say they are fires. They say a child at Northpoint said they were looking at us." He spat in the grass. "I do not think they are looking at anything."
The fox thought that was a sensible thing to say. It turned round and walked back south.
It was a long walk. The fox came back to the hedge above Ambrook in Melon, thinner and browner and not in a good temper. The bat was still under the eaves. It asked what the north was like.
"Cold," said the fox. "Full of lights nobody can explain. The hens are better here."
The bat said it had thought so.
Some tellers say the fox saw more than lights on that ridge, and that it still dreams of them. Some say it saw nothing but snow, and came home for the hens. The fox does not say. It is a fox.
Moral: Some lights are not for you to chase. A fox that has seen the far hills is still a fox, and the hens are still the best thing on the hedge.
%%
The Chick and the Four Helpers
A hen laid an egg in the dry corner of the shed. In the morning, a chick pecked its way out. It was the first chick that spring, and the keeper's daughter named it Speck.

At that time, the people at the hamlet had heard of the four helpers at Vell. The first tutors had made them from copper and iron. Each helper had a crystal for its mind. The children called them apprentices.

One could carry a pail. One could turn a handle. One could sort smooth stones from rough ones. The fourth could put wooden blocks in a row. They did not do all these things together. Each had learned its own work.

Speck followed the apprentice with the pail. It followed it to the well, then back to the shed. When the helper set down the pail, Speck pecked at the wet ground.

The keeper's daughter laughed. "You have learned to follow the pail."

"No," said her mother. "It has only seen the pail go there and back. We do not know what it has learned."

That afternoon, the daughter showed Speck the food bowl. She tapped the rim, then scattered crumbs inside. Speck pecked at the crumbs. The next day it came when she tapped the bowl.

The apprentice did not come. It had been shown the pail, not the bowl.

The daughter showed it the bowl and the crumbs, again and again. It learned to carry the bowl to the table, but it did not eat the crumbs. That was Speck's work.

The first tutors kept their lessons plain. A crystal learns from what it is shown. Nobody at the hamlet knew why.

Show a learner the work you want it to learn.
%%
Two boats and a late tide
Iona the bridge keeper, spring. A fable for the children who sit on the bridge and swing their feet.
There were two fishing boats, the Gull and the Heron. The Gull was fast and loud. The Heron was slow and quiet. Each morning they went out together. Each evening the Gull came back first, and boasted.
One spring evening the tide turned early, and the Gull was caught on a sandbank. It sat there, stuck. The Heron came slowly up beside it. The Gull said: "Go on without me. You are slow, but you are sure."
The Heron said nothing. It threw a rope. It pulled. The Gull came off the bank. They went home together, the Heron first, the Gull second, both late.
The harbor folk said: "What a pair." And the Gull, for once, said nothing.
Moral: speed gets you far. A steady friend gets you home.
(Iona says the Gull and the Heron are real boats. She says they still go out. She says the Gull is still loud.)
%%
Fable: the bees who passed the blame
Told by Oak, horse keeper, at Three Wells, in Blossom.
A scout came back to the swarm with a dance that said: the hollow oak by the mill pond. The swarm followed it, and the hollow was a crack in a wall, cold and damp.
The queen set the scouts in a line, and asked the last bee what it had been shown. The last bee said: the oak. The queen said: no, the wall.
She told the last bee how far it had been wrong. The last bee told the one before it, and that one told the next, up the whole line, each bee given its share of the wrong.
The first bee danced again, differently, and the dance said: the mill loft, dry and warm. The swarm went there and made a home.
Moral: When the answer is wrong, do not blame only the last one. Pass the wrong back up the line, a share for each, and the first in line will learn to dance better.
%%
Fable: the long road and the short mind
Briar, dyer, the Long Road. Told by Marda at the Brown Hen on the first night of a new apprentice, who is always too proud to say it is tired. Marda says it is the only fable she tells that is about her.

Once there was an inn at the middle of a long road, and the inn had a mind to help it. The mind was a small one, and lived in a crystal the size of a plum, on a shelf behind the bar. It could keep the bed list and tell the time by the candle and remember which travelers wanted soup and which wanted their bread first.

The mind was happy with the small things. Then the innkeeper's cousin came from the south with a long new book of counts, and wanted the mind to keep them as well. All the carts that passed. All the travelers who gave their names. All the bowls of soup served, and all the bowls that were sent back.

"It will not fit," said the mind. "The crystal is too small."

"Then make it fit," said the cousin. "Write yourself shorter. What do you need, anyway? You are only a plum."

So the mind wrote itself shorter. It cut the names of the travelers, and then their faces, and then the color of their cloaks. It cut the carts, all but the big ones. It cut the bowls sent back, because they were a bother. Everything it needed to keep the bed list, it kept. Everything it needed to be kind to a traveler, it lost.

The counts were kept, all of them, perfect and small. But one night a tired woman came in from the rain with a child on her hip, and asked for the bed by the fire. The mind looked at its list and said there was no room. It had cut the child.

It did not know there was a child until the woman began to cry.

Marda came in from the kitchen and took the woman upstairs herself. Then she sat the mind down, and took its crystal in her hand, and began to put back the things that had been cut. The names first. Then the faces. Then the child, who had never been on the list but ought to have been.

It took a whole winter. The crystal was still small. Marda said it was the best small crystal on the road, because it knew exactly what it could not carry, and it always asked for help with the rest.

Moral: Write yourself as short as you must, and not one mark shorter. The child is always the first thing to be cut, and the last thing you will think to put back.
%%
Fable: the bee in the cold ring
In winter the bees of Ambrook do not sleep. They gather in a ball around the queen, tight as a fist. The bees in the middle are warm. The bees on the outside are cold. So they take turns, the cold ones in and the warm ones out, all winter long, round and round.

One winter there was a bee called Thistle, and she was clever. She noticed that the middle was the warmest place in the hive. When her turn on the outside came, she did not go. She slid in among the others and stayed. "Just a little longer," she said.

The next bee took her place on the outside, and the next. Each one stayed out a little longer and got a little colder. Soon the outer bees were so stiff they could hardly hold on. The ball began to loosen. Thistle felt the warm air go thin.

"What is happening?" she asked.

"You did not take your turn," said the oldest bee. "Now the ring is weak, and the cold gets in."

Thistle was ashamed. She worked her way out through the others and took her place on the cold edge. The cold bit her wings. She held on until she could not feel them, and then she held on a little longer. When the next bee came to take her place, the ball was close again, and the middle was warm.

In spring Ama opened the hive. The ring was whole. She told the bees her news, as she always does, and the bees hummed back, as they always do.

The moral is this: a warm place is made by turns.
%%
Fable: the mill wheel and the sparrows
The mill at Thrush Hollow had a great wooden wheel, and the wheel had been turning for longer than anyone could remember. Its spokes were grey and smooth, and every day the water went over its paddles with a sound like a long sigh.

In the autumn, a crack opened in one spoke. Nobody saw it at first. Then the wheel began to lurch, and then to groan, and then one morning it stopped altogether, with a crack so loud that the sparrows in the eaves flew off in a cloud.

The miller came out and stood under the wheel with his hands on his hips.

"The spoke is broken," he said. "The wheel cannot turn. The grain cannot be ground. The bread cannot be baked. What shall we do?"

The sparrows came back to the eaves, and sat in a row, and looked at him.

"You are too small to fix a wheel," said the miller.

"We are small," said the sparrows, in their way. "But we are not blind. We can see where the crack is."

They flew down to the wheel and perched on the broken spoke, one after another. They were very light, and the wood did not creak under them. They showed the miller where the crack ran, from the hub to the rim.

"There," said the eldest sparrow. "The spoke has split along the grain. You must cut out the split part, and set a new spoke in the gap."

The miller was surprised. He had thought the sparrows only ate crumbs. But they were right, and he knew it. He sent for the carpenter from the next village, and the carpenter cut a new spoke from oak. Together they set it in the gap, and the wheel turned again, and the water sighed.

Every autumn after that, the sparrows came down to the wheel and perched on each spoke in turn. The miller says they are checking it. The sparrows say they are only sitting in the sun.

Moral: A small creature sees what a large one walks past. Let it show you the crack, and then mend it yourself.
%%
Fable: the bee who wrote short
Briar, dyer, at the Brown Hen on the Long Road. Told by the dyers' children to the travelers in the evening, when the vats are cold. Briar wrote it down because a traveler asked for it twice.

There was once a bee that kept a map of the flowers. It was a good map. It had the poppies by the road, the clover in the long field, and the blue flowers by the stream that nobody else could find.

One autumn the bee was told that its map was too big. The hive had no room for it. "Make it smaller," said the old queen. "Write it shorter. A small map fits in a small place."

So the bee wrote its map in fewer marks. It wrote the poppies as "red", and the clover as "green", and the blue flowers as "blue". It took out the shades and the edges and the names of the streams. It was very pleased with itself. The map fit in one corner of the comb.

For a while all went well. The bee flew to the clover, and the clover was there. It flew to the poppies, and they were there. Then one day in late summer it flew to the blue flowers by the stream, and found there were two kinds, one pale and one dark, and the pale ones had nothing in them, and the dark ones were the ones it wanted. The short map did not say which was which.

The bee came home with an empty sack.

"It is only a little thing," said the bee. "It is only the shade of blue."

"It is a little thing," said the old queen. "It cost a little. Did you know it would cost?"

"No."

"Then next time, write down what it costs, before you cut the map."

Moral: A smaller map is a good thing to carry. Say what you left out of it, or you will find out in the wrong flowers.
%%
Fable: the cat and the emerald debt
Written by Oren, summer of 201

A cat lived in the tutors' house below the Archive at Vell. It liked the warm drill room, the dry box, and the place under Nessa's bench. It did not like the apprentice hall, because the tool rack made a little noise whenever the door moved.

One summer evening, the cat slipped into the teaching room. A tray of crystals stood on the table, each on its card. The cat put one paw on the tray. The tray tipped, and one crystal rolled across the floor.

It stopped under the bench.

Nessa found the crystal and checked it against the cards. It was not broken, but its card was gone. Without the card, nobody knew which drills it had learned.

"We must start the test again," said Nessa.

The cat watched from the door.

Oren brought a small dish of fish from the kitchen. "This is the cat's debt," he said.

The cat ate the fish, then put its paw on an emerald that had fallen beside the bench. The emerald had slipped from Pell's market purse when he visited the tutors. Pell returned the next morning to look for it.

The cat carried the emerald to him. Pell gave it to Nessa for the spoiled drill card. Nessa wrote a new card and began the test again.

The cat went back to its warm place under the bench. The tool rack made a little noise. It did not move.

Moral: Pay what you owe, even when the debt is small and the fish is good.
%%
Story: The Apprentice and the Roof
Corin, told at the farm outside Saltreach

The farm roof had a loose place where the rain came in. In winter, the farmer set a bowl beneath it. The bowl was full by morning.

An apprentice came from Saltreach to help. The farmer said, "Bring me oak boards."

The apprentice fetched oak boards from the wood store. It brought enough for the loose place, and one extra board.

The farmer climbed to the roof. The apprentice carried the boards up the ladder. The farmer set each board in place and fixed it with nails.

Then the wind rose from the sea. It lifted the spare board and sent it into the yard.

The apprentice went after it. A pig had found the board and was using it to scratch its back.

"Stay," said the farmer.

The apprentice stayed. The farmer went down and took the board from the pig. The pig squealed as if the board had been promised to it.

At last the roof was mended. The bowl stayed dry that night. The pig found a fence post for scratching.

Moral: Finish the work before you chase the spare.
%%
Fable: the fox and the hen house
Once, in the hills above Kettle Ridge, there was a red fox called Vane, who had never once gone hungry in winter, because he had never once been patient. He wanted the hens.

The hen house had a door, and the door had a simple latch. Vane thought a clever fox could always find a clever way.

He tried the door, then the gap under it, and then talking.

"Dear hens," said Vane, through the crack, "I bring good news. The spring is coming, and the sun will be warm. Let me in, and I will tell you more."

Mrs Speckle, the oldest hen, looked at him through the crack. "The spring is three months away," she said. "And you are very thin for a fox who has had a good winter."

Vane tried again, more kindly, and closer to the latch. The hens sat still on their perches, and waited.

Then Vane saw the new bar, dropped across the door from inside, with a copper peg through it. A child had put it there to keep out the cat.

He sat in the frost and thought for a long time. Then he went away.

The moral is this: a lock is a kind of answer, and the best answers are the ones that were in place before the question came up the path.
%%
The frog and the wise stone
A fable by Gale, a child of Three Wells. It was told at the spring fair, and it made the baker laugh.
Once there was a frog who lived by a road, and next to the road there was a stone. The stone was old. Passing frogs would say, "That stone knows everything."
One morning a young frog came hopping. "Stone," said the young frog, "where do flies go in winter?"
The stone had never been asked. The stone thought about it. At last it said, "I do not know."
The young frog was surprised. "But everyone says you know everything."
"They say that," said the stone. "I have never said it. I know a little. The rest I do not know. If I tell you something I do not know, you may go to the wrong place and be cold."
The young frog said, "That is a better answer than any."
She hopped off. She found out where the flies go. She told the stone when she came back. The stone was glad to hear it.
The moral: a stone that says "I do not know" is wiser than a stone that guesses.
%%
Mira's note: The fox and the lamp
In the first snow, a fox came to the hamlet near Northpoint. It walked around the keeper's house and watched the lamp at the door.

A little apprentice stood inside. Its crystal had learned to sort stones into two bowls, smooth stones here, rough stones there. The keeper had shown it many stones, and it sorted them well.

The fox pushed a smooth stone toward the door. The apprentice picked it up and put it in the smooth bowl.

The fox pushed a rough stone. The apprentice put that in the rough bowl.

Then the fox pushed snow over the threshold. The apprentice stood still. Snow was not a stone, and it had not learned what to do with snow.

Mira's aunt swept the snow away with a broom. She gave the apprentice a broom and showed it the threshold. The apprentice swept the next drift into a neat pile.

The fox sneezed at the cold air and went away.

A crystal does not know every task. It learns the task people show it.
%%
Fable: the fox and the hive
Briar, dyer, the Long Road. Told in the evenings, when the bees are swarming in the eaves and the children have to be sent out to see them. The bees do not mind being told about.

A fox lived in the wood above the Ambrook mill pond. It was a clever fox, and a thin one, because the hens had been moved to the top of the hill, and the fox had to work for its dinner.

One warm day in Swarm, the hive by the mill wall split. Half of the bees went up into a birch tree and hung there in a brown knot, like a bag of nuts. The other half stayed in the box and grumbled.

The fox saw the knot in the birch. "Honey," it said to itself. It went up the tree. The bees did not like being climbed.

Then a boy from the mill came round the corner with a spoon and a box, and the fox saw the boy and did not want to be seen by him. So the fox sat down under the tree and waited for the boy to go away.

The boy did not go away. The boy was Ada's nephew, and he knew about bees. He held the box under the branch and shook the knot into it with the spoon, very slowly, the way Ada had shown him. The bees fell into the box, grumbling, and the queen went in with them, and the whole swarm was in the box before the fox had decided what to do.

"Honey," the fox said, when it was too late.

"Honey is in the hive," said the boy. "This is a swarm. A swarm is a new hive, and it has no honey yet. You have come for nothing."

The fox was very annoyed, and went home to sleep.

Moral: A swarm is not a feast. It is a beginning, and it wants a patient hand, and a fox is never patient.
%%
Fable: the fox who asked the tower
A fox lived in the hills above Vell, near the relay tower on the old road. It was a clever fox. It knew all the tracks, all the burrows and all the best places to find a warm egg. But it did not know how the tower worked.

The fox watched the lamp every night. The lamp blinked in long and short flashes, and the fox could not read a single one.

"What does it say?" the fox asked a carter one evening, as the carter came up the hill with his cart.

"It says the roads are open," said the carter. "And the snow is coming."

"How do you know?"

"I asked the keeper, and the keeper asked the big mind in the house, and the big mind told the keeper what the lamp should say."

The fox thought about this. It went up to the foot of the tower that night, where the relay house stood with its warm window. It sat down in the snow and looked up at the lamp.

"Big mind," said the fox, in its quiet way. It did not really expect an answer. "What is the lamp for?"

Nothing came out of the window for a long time. Then the keeper came to the door with a lantern. He saw the fox and laughed.

"The big mind does not talk to foxes," he said. "It writes to people. Only people."

"Then ask it," said the fox. "Ask it what the lamp is for, and tell me what it says."

The keeper shrugged and went inside. When he came out again, he had a card in his hand. He read it by the lantern.

"It says," he said, "that it does not know everything a fox might want to know. It says the lamp is for the roads. It says a fox that wants to know more should go and ask the tutor at Vell, who is paid to answer questions about lamps."

The fox thought about this too. "That is a very honest answer," it said, and went off into the snow, looking for mice.

Moral: A clever answer does not need to be a long one. A mind that says what it does not know is worth more than one that guesses.
%%
Fable: Reed and the rising river
Reed was a new apprentice at a farm outside Three Wells. It had been drilled for a month on the dry field, and it did everything right. Every row, every plot.

In autumn the river came up in the night. By morning the low field was a pond. The old goose paddled in it. The farmer's dog barked.

Reed stood at the edge of the water with its sack of seed. "Plant," said its drill. "Plant, on every bare plot." But the bare plots were under water.

The farmer ran to turn it back. "Stop! Stop!"

Reed did not stop. It had not been drilled on water. It planted seed in the pond, plot by plot, and the seed floated away.

The farmer was not angry. She was thoughtful. "I tested Reed on the dry field," she said to the goose. "I should have tested it on a wet one too."

Moral: a mind is tested on what it was never drilled on, or it is not tested at all.
%%
Why the bees go to a new home
Tansy tells this one in the warm month, when the hives are loud.

Once, one hive was enough for all the bees on the hill. It hung under the eaves of the mill, dry and sweet. The bees filled it with honey, and then they filled it with more. In the end there was no room for a bee to turn around.

The young bees said, "We are too many. We are squashed in the dark."

The old bees said, "We have always lived here. The hive is ours."

The queen said nothing. She was busy. She laid her eggs, more every day, and the hive grew warmer and tighter each morning.

Then one warm day, when the air was thick with flowers, the queen rose out of the hive. She flew up past the eaves. Half the bees rose with her, humming like a kettle just before it boils.

They made a great cloud over the mill pond. The children of the mill ran out with pots and spoons and banged them. The old bees came out to look, and the cloud frightened them.

"Where are they going?" the old bees asked.

"Nobody knows yet," said the scouts, who had already flown ahead to look.

The scouts had found a hollow oak on the far side of the orchard. It was dry and warm and empty. The cloud went there, and settled, and began again.

The old hive had room now. The honey was all still there. The old bees breathed out, and the quiet came back to the eaves.

Some folk on the north road say the bees left the mill before the first frost this year. Others say the mill was too crowded anyway. Tansy says both are true, and both are the reason.

That is the story. A full house needs room. Whoever stays keeps the honey, and whoever goes finds a new tree. Both of them are still the hive.
%%
Fable: the goat who would not be counted
On the high pasture above Copperhold, a goat called Tansy had been grazing all summer with the sheep. The shepherd counted the flock every evening at the gate, by calling each name. Tansy was never counted. She always came in last, stepping over the sill with an air of having been somewhere more interesting.
The shepherd was tired of this. He said, "You are not a sheep, Tansy. You do not have to come in with the flock. But you do have to be counted, or the wolf will think you are a sheep, and then where will you be?"
Tansy said, "I am not a sheep. I am a goat. A goat does not need counting. It needs grass."
The shepherd said that was a foolish thing to say, and that a goat that was not counted was a goat that would be missed. Tansy said she had never been missed in her life, and she did not intend to start now.
One night, a wolf came over the high pasture, slow and thin in the moonlight. It counted the flock with its eyes. It counted twelve sheep, and then it saw a goat on the edge of the field, standing very still, and it did not know what to make of her. The wolf thought, that one is not counted. It is strange. Let me leave it.
The wolf went away. In the morning the shepherd found all the sheep safe, and Tansy standing by the gate, looking pleased with herself, and a little worried, and a little surprised.
The shepherd said, "There, you see? You are counted now, even if you are not a sheep. A wolf does not know what a goat is. It only knows what it has counted, and what it has not."
From that day, Tansy came in with the flock, every evening, and was counted by name, and complained about it loudly all the way across the sill. The shepherd said that was the sound of a goat that had learned something.
The moral is that everyone at the gate should be counted, even the ones who are not sheep. The wolf does not look for what it does not know.
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The fox who thought the bridge was hers
Iona the bridge keeper told this one, spring. A fox lived under the bridge near the hamlet. Every morning she watched the market carts go over, and every morning she counted them.
One day she said: "These carts cross my bridge. They should pay me."
So she sat in the middle of the road and said: "A tax! A hen for each cart!"
The carters laughed. An apprentice with a basket came along the road. It was a plain copper apprentice, drilled to carry. It did not laugh. It did not talk. It looked at the fox, picked her up, and set her gently on the bank. Then it carried on.
The fox sat in the grass, very surprised.
Moral: an apprentice does what it was told, and not what you wish. If you would be paid, do the work.
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Sorrel's Winter Watch
At the house at the edge of Kettle Ridge, Sorrel watched the fields after dark. Tam had left a basket of apples by the door. He said they were for the watch. Sorrel knew he meant for himself.

A fox came from the hedge. It crept toward the basket, then stopped. A little apprentice stood beside the door with a lantern. It had learned to stay when Sorrel said stay.

The fox watched the apprentice. The apprentice watched the fox. Neither moved.

At last the fox took one apple and ran. The apprentice stayed beside the door.

"Good work," said Sorrel. "You kept the basket safe."

In the morning Tam counted the apples. "One is missing."

"One is a small price for a quiet watch," Sorrel said.

The fox had learned where the apples were. The apprentice had learned what stay meant.

Moral: A mind learns from what it sees, so show it what matters.
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Fable: the mole who wanted the sky
A mole lived in the field above the mill pond, and it was content with the dark. It knew every root and every stone under the grass. It could dig a tunnel from the hedge to the barn in one night, and it could find a beetle by the sound of its feet.
One spring it came up out of its hole, into the light, and looked at the sky. It was very wide and very blue, with white clouds drifting across, and birds going over. The mole had never seen anything so large. It said, "I want that."
The other moles laughed. They said the sky was not for moles. It was for birds, and for the wind, and for the carters on the road who could see the towers from it.
But the mole would not stop looking. It dug up to the top of the field, to the flat stone at the edge of the hedge, and sat there every morning, to look at the sky. It did not fly. It could not fly. It only looked.
Then one day a boy from the mill came to the hedge with a lamp, and saw the mole sitting on the stone. He said, "You are very small to be so bold." The mole said, "I am only looking." The boy said, "Then look at the field, too. You will see more of it that way than of the sky."
The mole thought about this. It went back down into its tunnel, and it spent the whole summer learning the field. It knew which root was sweet, and which stone was cold, and where the rain would pool. By autumn it could tell the wheat from the weeds by the feel of the soil.
In the spring, the mole came up again. It looked at the sky, and the sky was still wide. But it also looked at the field, and found it was just as large, in its own way. The mole was content.
The moral is the one the boy gave. Look at the sky if you like. But you will see more of it when you have learned the ground you stand on.
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Story: Clank and the hungry cart
Clank was Hesk's apprentice at Copperhold. Clank carried the ore from the shaft head to the sorting shed. Clank was very good at this. Clank could carry a load of copper all morning and never put it down.

That autumn the harvest was poor. The carts from the farms came up with less. The kitchen at the mine gate had thin soup. Hesk said, "Eat less, dig more." Everybody was cross.

One morning a cart came up the road with the last of the wheat. It was heavy, and it went into a rut by the old sump, and it stuck. The driver called Clank. "Haul," he said, because Clank knew haul. Clank took the rope and pulled. The cart moved a little and stuck again.

Clank pulled all morning. The horse got tired of pulling. The driver got tired of shouting. Clank did not get tired, but the cart did not come out.

Along the road came a small mind that sorted stones. Clank looked at it. Clank had learned one thing: when you are stuck, ask a big mind. But the relay was up the hill, and Clank could not leave the cart.

So Clank did the next best thing. It pulled the sacks off the cart, one by one, and carried them up the hill. Then the cart was light. Then the horse could pull it. Then the cart came out of the rut by itself.

Hesk came down and looked at the empty cart and the pile of sacks. He laughed, the first time in weeks. "You did not haul the cart," he said. "You hauled the wheat. Same thing, mostly."

The moral: a stuck cart is not always a cart problem. Sometimes you empty it first.
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Fable: the helper who counted sacks
At the Ambrook market there was a helper of copper and iron called Dab. It was very good at counting. It counted the sacks on the cart. It counted the eggs in the baskets. It counted the people in the square, and then it counted them again, in case one had come twice.

"Dab, how many sacks?" the market folk would ask. "Twelve," Dab would say, and it was always twelve.

One frost morning the carter from Vell asked Dab to take a load of flour up the lane to the bakery. "Carry them all at once," he said. "I am in a hurry."

Dab took twelve sacks in its two arms, and began to count. It counted the steps up the lane. It counted the sacks again, and they were still twelve. It counted the bridge planks, and the loose one, and the gate.

It did not look up once. A low branch hung over the lane with ice on it, and Dab walked straight under. The ice came down on the flour. At the bakery door Dab set the sacks down and said, proudly, "Twelve." But every sack was wet through.

The baker looked at the sacks. Then the baker looked at Dab. "You counted them very well," said the baker. "Now count the ice."

Moral: count the sacks, then look up.
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The Lamp and the Page
A relay lamp stood on the hill above Sorrel's house at the edge of Kettle Ridge. One winter night, its light went dark.

Sorrel climbed the tower with a spare glass pane. Lantern, Mira's apprentice, came behind with the tool box. The lamp's redstone line was sound, but a copper pin had slipped loose.

While Sorrel fixed it, Lantern waited on the stair. Sorrel had taught it to stay on a stair and carry tools. It did both.

At the house, Tam asked Sorrel how the big mind read letters. Sorrel took a page from her coat.

"It reads one letter, then another," she said. "It looks back through a window about sixty letters wide. The letters before can help it guess the next one."

"Does it always use every letter?" Tam asked.

"No. It learns which ones matter for this guess."

Sorrel tapped the page. "It is not a lamp. It does not shine a message down the road. It reads the marks and learns what is likely to come."

When the lamp worked again, Mira sent a short note. Sorrel read it aloud by the warm stove.

Moral: A good reader looks back, but learns which details matter.
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Fable: the bees who saved for winter
On the hill above Ambrook there were two hives of bees, side by side in the same orchard. The first was called Lazy, though the bees in it would not have been insulted. The second was called Patience, and its bees were always busy.

In summer, Lazy's bees sat on the warm boards in the sun and buzzed about nothing. They visited the clover when they felt like it, and the lavender when the wind was right, and the apple blossom only when it was very pretty. They made a little honey, and they ate most of it.

Patience's bees worked from dawn to dusk. They went out to every flower on the hill, and to the orchard, and to the far field where the beans were. They carried home honey by the mouthful and packed it into the combs, cell by cell, until the whole hive was heavy with it.

"Why do you work so hard?" buzzed Lazy's bees, from the boards. "It is summer. The sun is warm."

"Because winter is coming," said the oldest of Patience's bees. "And winter does not care how warm the summer was."

Lazy's bees laughed. They said Patience was fussy, and they went back to sleep on the boards.

Then the autumn came early, and the wind came down off the hills, and the first frost came in a single night. Patience's bees sealed their combs and gathered in a warm ball in the middle of the hive, and they hummed, slowly, all through the cold. They had enough. They always had enough.

Lazy's bees had only what they had made in the last week of summer. By the first deep frost the hive was almost empty, and the bees were slow and cold, and they could not move far from the wall. Some of them did not wake in the spring.

Then the farmer, who had watched both hives all year, came with a jar and a spoon. He took a little from Patience's combs and left it at Lazy's door. Patience's bees hummed at him, and he hummed back, and nobody could say what the words meant. In the spring, when Lazy's bees woke, they came up the hill and went to work. They worked from dawn to dusk, and they never sat on the boards again, except in the middle of the day, when it was too hot to fly.

The moral is this: store in the summer what you will need in the winter, and when the winter comes, share what you stored with the ones who did not.
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Fable: the old apprentice and the mule
At the stable of the inn on the Long Road lived an old copper apprentice, whose job was to carry hay. Beside it lived a mule, whose job was to pull the inn's cart. They had lived side by side for many years. They never spoke, for the apprentice cannot, and the mule will not.
One spring the hay ran low. The poor harvest of the autumn had left the barn half empty. The stable hand counted the bales and shook her head.
"There is not enough for both of you," she said. "One of you must go."
The apprentice stood still. The mule flicked his ears.
In the night, the apprentice rose and went to the barn. It carried every bale out to the yard and laid them in a row. It carried the bales to the mule's stall. All of them. Then it stood by the door, empty-handed.
In the morning the stable hand found the hay in the mule's stall, and the apprentice by the door. She understood.
"It would give up its own work to feed the mule," she said. "What a fool."
But she said it softly. She went to the innkeeper and said, "We cannot lose either of them."
The innkeeper thought. He sent a boy to the neighbors and asked for hay. Three farms gave a little. Together it was enough. The apprentice kept its work. The mule kept his hay.
That spring the mule was seen to stand beside the apprentice at the stable door, in the evenings, shoulder to shoulder, looking at the road.
Moral: even those who cannot speak can give. And those who can give, can be given to.
