THE GIFT SWAPPER

Hi, all!

As some of you know, I recently finished a first draft of a YA Science Fiction novel. As I wait for it to percolate (as author protocol demands), I am revisiting my middle-grade novel concept. In it, of course there’s a library full of myths and legends. Here is the legend that draws the children’s interest…and might just keep them together.

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THE GIFT SWAPPER

An Excerpt from “Legends for a New World” by Mathilde Columbe

Deep in the forests of Elkiray, under a willow curled over and knotted after years and years of weeping, lives an ancient woman. Many years ago, she took the Truth Test and was discovered to possess all three gifts:

As a Truth Perceiver, she could determine truths from lies.

As a Truth Teller, she could only speak the truth.

And finally, as a Truth Spinner, she could create truths from lies and alter reality.

Treacherous people tried capture her and use her for their own advantage, some of them even her own family. 

Her older brother told her their family cow had taken a tumble and everyone was outside helping get the cow out of a ditch. They needed her help too. But, because the woman could tell truth from lies, she knew the cow was safe in her barn, munching on hay.

What was in the ditch were 30 townspeople, ready to chain her up and haul her away. 

She ran and she ran and she ran, away from the lies, to the truth.

Two towns over, she finally found respite in a crumbling inn. It wasn’t pretty, but its innkeeper was an honest and true man. The woman stayed there for two years, befriending the innkeeper. They both grew in mutual respect for each others’ truthful nature, and over time they fell in love. 

“Will you love me forever?” Asked the innkeeper.

The woman, who could not lie, told him: “Only until you leave me for the saloon owner after we have our first child.”

The innkeeper threw her out of the inn, and again the woman found herself alone and running.

She ran and she ran and she ran, away from the lies, to the truth.

She found herself swallowed up in a forest. The trees were the only thing that couldn’t lie to her . . . at least she had thought. But was refusing to speak also a manifestation of lies? She didn’t know which way was east or west, north or south. She fell to the ground, exhausted and terrified. All she knew was she could never believe another human again. 

For all a human could be honest about was their lies.

She opened her eyes for only a moment, knowing what she must do. She hated her third power: the ability to create truth. And yet she needed something to pull her from the overwhelming, drowning darkness. 

Even if, in the end, it was only a lie.

So, as she looked up at the sky, she said: “I live in a castle in the middle of the forest. No one can reach me here. No one can hurt me here.”

In the next moment, the gentle sky with its scrolling clouds was replaced by the smooth, gray stone of a castle ceiling.

There she lived, and there she lives to this day, safe from the treachery of humans, lost in her own version of the truth. But sometimes, at night when she stands out on the balcony, she senses the castle shifting in the light as if it were not quite of this world. 

For a moment, she is just a barefoot unloved orphan standing in the middle of a forgotten forest. And through the trees, someone cries out for her. Someone she can trust. 

She only receives visitors on the occasional spring day, when the snow has melted away and the trees are heavy with green as they point your way to her dwelling place. If a lucky traveler stumbles upon her, she often bestows one of the Truth Gifts upon them. She can even change the Truth Gift of people, if they are loyal and true and have good enough reason.

THE END

The above excerpt is from “The Slightly Truthful Tales of the Siblings Wilder,” a middle-grade novel currently in the works.