“Are you not
scared to die like them?” the stranger asked her.
She smiled,
soft and sad. “This is not when I die,” she replied.
“It is if I
say so,” the stranger said, his dagger at her throat.
She did not
move. “Even you cannot ignore someone’s destiny. This is not when I will die.”
Curious now,
the stranger lowered his blade. Around them were her traveling companions,
slain and dead for their food and supplies. The stranger had crept among the
four of them during the night, killed her brother who was on watch, and then the
elderly couple they had been traveling with. She had awoken to the elderly
woman dying, and stood up to face the stranger, fearless. “How do you know such
a thing?” he asked of her now.
“I dreamed as
a girl that I would not die until I was old and in love, with children grown
and left,” she answered him.
“And how do
you know that this dream was true?” he demanded, scornful. “It was just some
little girl’s fancy.”
“No,” she
replied. “I have dreamed when all those in my family would die.” She pointed to
her brother, slumped over near the still-crackling fire. “I dreamed long ago
that he would die tonight, and said good-bye to him before I lay down to sleep.
I knew that my mother would die of sickness, and my father of bandits years
before her.”
“Truly?” the
stranger asked, intrigued now. She saw a flash of greed in his eyes then, and
knew what he would ask. After all, the man who knew how he would die was
forewarned, and mayhap could cheat his death when the time came. He raised his
dagger once more. “Tell me, witch, how will I die?”
“I am no
witch,” she replied, “only a simple maid, now traveling alone.”
“Tell me,” he
said, ignoring the rest.
She shook her
head. “I cannot. I can only dream the deaths of those who have a place in my
heart. Why should I care when you, a stranger to me, will die?”
He considered
this for a moment, and then sheathed his dagger. “Then, you shall come back
home with me, and be my wife, and when you come to love me you will dream of my
death.”
“Yes, I will,”
she agreed.
And so the
stranger took her home, and made her his wife. He gave up thievery to farm some
small land now that he had a wife to care for. The two of them lived many years
together, and she gave him two sons and two daughters, and they were very happy.
Still, once a
year, on the anniversary of the day that they’d met, the stranger would ask
her, “Have you dreamed of my death yet?”
“No,” she
would reply. “I have dreamed the deaths of our children, but of yours I have
seen nothing.”
And so the
years passed, and eventually even their children grew up and moved out, to
pursue their own lives and loves. She grew old, and the stranger older, and yet
her answer never changed.
The stranger
grew sad, for he had come to love his wife for bearing his children and filling
his life with laughter and joy. After a few more years, though, the stranger’s
sadness grew to anger. Another year passed, and still her answer was the same.
“Why will you
not dream of my death?” he asked her, and in his fury that she would not love
him back, the stranger grabbed his dagger and stabbed her through the heart.
She smiled at
him, soft and sad. “I dreamed of your death years before we ever met, the same
night that I dreamed of mine, old and in love and with children grown. This is
when we both die.” And closing her
eyes, she fell to the floor and died.
The stranger
realized what he had done, that she had loved him always, and in his grief and
sorrow he removed the blade from her breast, the same dagger that he had kept
all these years, and stabbed himself through the heart. Closing his eyes, he
fell to the floor and died.
