The Bell-Keeper's Curse
A Bittersweet Tale
A story written for week one of the lovely Luna Asli Kolcu’s Myths of Winter Challenge. I ended up choosing more than one prompt, but the central ones were: The Bell-Keeper and The Lantern Orchard. Check out the original prompt post for more details!
This story began with the full intention of being ominous, but it spiraled away from me, becoming romantic and bittersweet and a bit like a wintry fairytale. This is a very different story from the ones I usually write, but I had fun with it.
Enjoy <3
The bell wove its hollow, wooden melody through the strands of Yarrow’s thoughts.
Its song was that of a flute’s – sweet breath against the sculpted, oaken contours of a pipe – and it drifted through the seam of her window. She sat at the window’s edge, gazing through it. Not at the mountains, as she and the townspeople did every year, in wait of the Bell-Keeper, but at the snowy, wooden valley beside her mother’s cottage.
There was a soft knock on the bedroom door, and she turned to find her mother standing in the doorframe.
Her gray eyes, warm as breath, were clouded with worry. “Yarrow, sweet, the Bell-Keeper will be here today. Have you… well… ?”
Yarrow stitched a thin smile to her lips. “Yes, mama. Do not worry yourself. I am a grown woman, after all, and you have enough ailments to worry you for a lifetime. I will deal with the Bell-Keeper once he arrives.”
“Yes, of course, sweet, but…”. Her mother’s pruned hands twisted themselves together. “I went to Lantern Orchard last year, and you know what I saw, Yarrow. I thought it was a warning, even then, and now I know it must have been. That bell.” She shook her head, the sheen in her eyes silvering them. “It is a curse, sweet. And if the Bell-Keeper finds you, finds it, then I do not know what will become of you.”
Yarrow sighed, stood from the window’s edge, and crossed the bedroom. She folded her mother’s cold, crinkled hands in her own, and swallowed the knot that tangled in her own throat at the glimpse of her mother’s tears. “There are no such things as curses, mama. But I know what I must do. Please, you must trust me, and you must let me go.”
Her mother’s voice trembled, but she said, “Visit the Lantern Orchard, when you can, sweet. It is vital.”
Yarrow smiled, soft and sad, and knew she would not heed her mother’s words.
The morning was bright and cold. Yarrow’s boots crunched through soft, smudging snow. She could not help the glances she tossed over her shoulder, at the looming mountains, with their lantern-studded paths. The Bell-Keeper would be coming down one of them, soon. No one knew which one; every year was different.
She cast the Bell-Keeper from her thoughts, or tried to, as she walked on, past the cottages of the townspeople and down into the wooded valley.
The trees trembled with a breeze, and a light, shimmering mist of snow rose through the wood. Yarrow walked on, as the snow wept against her cheeks and kissed her hair. The cold was a bright warning, against the tears that needled at her eyes and stitched themselves into her throat. She would not succumb to them. Instead, she followed the graceful, bittersweet curves of the bell’s melody, as they threaded through threes, spurring her onwards through the valley.
As she walked, the Lantern Orchard rose alongside her, its fruit glinting, bright and glassy, in the sunlight. She did not look away from the path… yet her mother’s words lingered in her thoughts, and the lanterns winked at her. She knew what her mother had seen in the Lantern Orchard, a year past. She had seen it, too.
She swallowed, and shards of grief stuck in her throat.
Far behind, in the snowy town, dozens of bells sang in clarity and ceremony, and she knew that the Bell-Keeper had been glimpsed. Her steps grew hurried. The song of her own bell deepened and twisted through the thickening trees.
When she was a little girl, her mother – and her beloved papa – told her the story of the town and its bells. Once, many years before, there had been a prince. He was an outcast, wandering far from his kingdom, when he stumbled upon a town strung with bells. They hung everywhere – along window frames, in the nooks above doorways, in the dark green pines that hugged the paths. They sang, as he walked through them, enchanted. Some tales, her papa told her, said they sang his name. And he knew, then, why he had been outcast. He understood what his true destiny was.
The tale was foggy, smudged with candlelight and the flurry of snow and the rich, sweet scent of molten chocolate that accompanied it each year, but she remembered the gist of it, as her parents had told it. The outcast prince had become the Bell-Keeper, destined to collect all the bells in the town during the winter months, to allow a peaceful solitude to settle over the land along with the snow, and to bring them back with the dawning of spring. He built his home in the mountains, at the mouth of a lantern-limned path, and he threaded the bells through the forest that hung from the mountains. His coming was a celebration of peace, in the winter, and a rejoicing of warmth and sweetness, in the spring.
Yarrow had believed the tales for many years. Until, upon entering maidenhood, she had visited the Lantern Orchard for the first time, as was the custom.
The bell’s melody danced along her cheeks, drawing her near. She was deep within the forest, now, where the sunlight was a golden memory spilling over the roots of dark, needle-bound trees. The needles whisked against her skin. She ducked below branches and wove through mossy stones and waxy ferns. The bell guided her. Now, she thought she heard it calling her name, soft and gentle as a whispered prayer.
The first time she had seen the Bell-Keeper had been as a little girl. She remembered his coming and going with a youthful, glowing reverence. His dark, gentle eyes settled on each townsperson, as they handed him their bells, and his oaken skin shone in the sunlight. It was his horns, of course, that caught her gaze. Black and twisting, like a dark crown. She wondered how such kind eyes could be crowned by such devilish horns. When it was her turn to hand over her bell – a small, wooden thing that her papa had crafted her, painted the bright red of forest berries – she looked into the Bell-Keeper’s eyes, and was struck by the deep, buried sadness within them.
That night, she asked her papa why the Bell-Keeper was so sad.
Her papa laughed, loud, yet gentle. “Sad, Yarrow? What makes you say that?”
“I saw it,” she said. “I saw it in his eyes.”
“Perhaps you were dreaming, little one,” her papa said, brushing a finger along her cheek. “Why would he be sad? He is the town’s prince! The prince he never was, as an outcast.”
But, even as a little girl, Yarrow thought that sounded terribly lonely.
Yarrow brushed away a snow-heavy branch, and found herself in a dim, lonesome clearing, where the trees’ branches hung low to the ground, and the snow lay thick against their roots.
She crossed to the center of the clearing, knelt in the snow, and from the hollowed ground, she fished out her buried, red-as-berries bell.
The melody breathed into her cupped palms, as she held it close. Her eyes drifted shut. And, through the strands of the bell’s song, she saw the remnants of her time spent with the Bell-Keeper, who she had met first through story, then through the prophecy of the Lantern Orchard, then on the lantern-limned path into the mountains.
Her first visit to the Lantern Orchard shone with awe, even in her memories.
It had been dusk, and the sky hung low and close, the dark violet of bruised fruit. The lanterns were burning; not with flames, but with prophecies, that set the tangled thickets of trees aglow.
She walked amongst the snow-dusted paths, searching for the lantern that caught her eye, and made her heart fill her throat.
She found it because of the bells.
The Lantern Orchard was heavy with a deep, reverent silence, and she wondered if she was only imagining the dark, wooden melody sewn through it, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. She recognized the song of the bells immediately; it was a song she had heard all her life, when the Bell-Keeper returned to his home in the mountains, having collected every bell in the town. She followed it like a scent. It led her through the trees, into the thickest cluster near the center of the orchard, where the lanterns hung, dim and sparse, amongst the branches. The bells’ song came from one of these lanterns, and she cupped it in her hands and found that it was warm against her cold skin.
Within the lantern’s glass, she saw the Bell-Keeper, descending from the mountains.
She soaked the scene in – prophecy, warning, whatever it may have been – with the flaming curiosity of the little girl she had once been. She had never seen the Bell-Keeper make his full descent. None of the townspeople had.
In the glassy glow of the lantern, he looked more sad than she had ever seen him.
She drew nearer to the lantern, despite herself, her fingers pressed against the glass. The Bell-Keeper had slowed his descent, tilting his horned head, as though he had seen something. And, as she gazed on, she saw another figure on the path, one that was impossibly familiar, one that was impossible.
In the lantern, her gaze locked with the Bell-Keeper’s and held.
When she blinked, the bell’s enchanted song faded away, and the clearing was dusky with the falling night. Yarrow was still kneeling in the clearing, her skirts damp with the snow, her fingers frigid around the bell’s curves. Behind her, she heard footsteps, and she knew it would be him, even before she turned her head, and met his eyes.
Dark, gentle, sad as the lonely night.
Yarrow exhaled, her breath cold against her lips, and said, “Prince.”
The Bell-Keeper smiled – a cold, fading twist of lips, the memory of joy. “Yarrow, my love. You kept the bell.”
Her fingers curled around it; instinctive, protective. “How could I not?”
The Bell-Keeper took another step towards her, and she stood on legs that trembled with both the cold and with the exhilaration of facing him once more. But she kept the bell caged in her hands. And his eyes were drawn to it, again and again, brightened by a dark, glossy sheen.
His voice was made of quiet and breath. “You know I must take it to the mountains. It cannot stay here for the winter. That is this town’s curse. That is my curse. I’ve told you.”
Yarrow’s throat was tight, tangled with tears. “Curses can be broken,” she said, and felt as though she were hearing a glimpse of the little girl she had once been, the one who believed in enchantment and beauty in everything. The one untouched by sadness and heartbreak. The one who had yet to meet Prince, the cursed Bell-Keeper, whose true story was nothing like the one her parents and the townspeople believed.
The Bell-Keeper closed his eyes.
Then, he was standing before her, his hands tangling with hers, and she gasped as fresh memories wove across them both, and she stood, once more, on the side of the mountain, facing him for what felt like the first time.
She had kept the Lantern Orchard’s prophecy secret, hidden away in her heart, yet she had searched for the mountain path every winter since she had seen it; searched for the path that he would descend by that year. And, years later, she had finally found it.
Her heart trembled in her chest. His eyes met hers, a new, welling curiosity masking the sadness in them.
“You’re from the town,” he said, and she nodded, clasping her hands before her to hide their shaking. His eyes dipped to them… a slow, strange smile touched his lips, as though he hadn’t smiled in a very long time. “No townsperson has ever visited me before. What brings you here?”
A prophecy, Yarrow thought, but she said, “I was curious. You come to our town every year, yet we never go to you.”
His smile blossomed, bright and dark at once, and Yarrow’s heart thudded against her ribs.
Yarrow gasped, resurfacing from the memory to find the Bell-Keeper still standing before her, his eyes closed, his hands threaded through hers. Deep in memory, his features were peaceful. She wondered what he was remembering. A bittersweet smile flitted to her own lips, then vanished.
I’ll run, she thought, desperately. I’ll run where he can never find the bell. Where he can never destroy it.
But she stood where she was, her eyes sketching the features she had dreamt about every night since they had met on that mountain path, since he had left her, in this very clearing.
“The bells are a curse,” he had told her, his eyes wet and shining. “I am tied to them. They are my fate, and nothing else can take their place. Not even you, my love. Not even you.”
But her bell held the remnants of their love, the memories of their time spent together, and she hardly thought that to be a curse. He had not known it, at the time, but though he left, she kept the bell full of memories clutched to her breast and knew she would never let him collect it, not when it would return in the spring, empty of what had once been. Instead, she buried it where he would not find it, because it was the one place he would not think to look.
Or, perhaps, she had been hoping that he would find it. Would find her.
And he has, she thought, just as he opened his eyes.
Yarrow had visited the Lantern Orchard one last time before the Bell-Keeper left her, choosing his curse over their love.
She had seen it all, as it would happen, in the glassy orb. Her mother had seen it, too.
Yet now, as he left her once more in that nightly clearing, her cheeks wet with tears, her throat full of the words left unsaid between them, she felt her heart splinter.
He kissed her forehead, once, tenderly, before he left. He touched the bell, a soft, fond smile gracing his lips. And he left them, both, to hold the memories of their time together.
He thought he was cursed. She thought he convinced himself he was cursed.
He thought the curse could not be broken. She thought he would not let it be.
But she did not fight him when, with a final, longing glance, he left her and the bell in the clearing. She did not fight him, because the Lantern Orchard had warned her; because it was not her fight, but his. And she knew she would wait each year in that clearing, for him to renounce his own curse, to let himself love and be loved, to bind himself to something other than his duty to the bells.
So, a small smile touching her salted lips, she buried the bell once more and, with it, her longing. She left the clearing, weaving her way to her mother’s house to tell her all was well.
And she waited for the coming year, for the hope that would fill her heart as the bell’s bittersweet melody called her to the wooded valley, and the Bell-Keeper returned to her, drawn by a love more powerful than his curse.
