Dragonfield (28 page)

Needle and scissors,

Scissors and pins,

Where one life ends

Another begins.

She said the words aloud and, as she spoke, puffs of smoke appeared above the embroidered chimney in the hut. It reminded her that it was time to eat.

Stretching, she stood and went into the little house. The bread was gone. She searched the cupboards and could find no more, but there was flour and salt and so she made herself some flat cakes which she baked in an oven that was set into the stone of the fireplace. She knew that the smoke from her baking was sending soft clouds above the hut.

While the bread baked and the sweet smell embroidered the air, the princess went back outside. She unraveled more threads from her mother’s image: the nose, the mouth, the startled eyes. And with that thread she traced a winding path from the crimson castle with the fluttering banners to the crimson hut with the crown of smoke.

As she sewed, it seemed to her that she could hear the sound of birds: the rapid flutings of a thrush and the jug-jug-jug of a nightingale, and they came not from the real forest around her but from the cloak. Then she heard, from the very heart of her lapwork, the deep brassy voice of a hunting horn summoning her home. Looking up from her work, she saw that the brambles around the hut were beginning to part and there was a path heading north towards the castle.

She jumped up, tumbling needle and scissors and pin to the ground, and took a step towards the beckoning path. Then she stopped. The smell of the fresh bread stayed her. The embroidery was not yet done. She knew that she had to sew her own portrait onto the white laced panel of the cloak: a girl with crimson cheeks and hair tumbled to her shoulders, walking the path alone. She had to use up the rest of her mother’s thread before she was free.

Turning back towards the hut, she saw three old women standing in the doorway, their faces familiar. They smiled and nodded to her, holding out their hands.

The first old woman had the needle and pin nestled in her palm. The second held the scissors by the blades, handles offered. The third old woman shook out the cloak and, as she did so, a breeze stirred the trees in the clearing.

The princess smiled back at them. She held out her hands to receive their gifts. When she was done with the embroidery, though it would be hard to part with, she would give them the cloak. She knew that once it was given, she could go.

I
NTRODUCTION COPYRIGHT © 1984 BY
Charles de Lint. First appeared in the World Fantasy Convention 1984 program (Triskell Press, Ottawa, Canada).

“Angelica” from
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Copyright © 1979 by Jane Yolen. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

“The Bull
&
the Crowth” from
The Whitehorn Wood and other Magicks
(Triskell Press). Copyright © 1984 by Jane Yolen. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

“Caliban” from
The Grecourt Review.
Copyright © 1960 by Jane Yolen. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Corridors of the Sea” from
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Also appeared in
Neptune Rising
(Philomel Books). Text copyright © 1981, 1982 by Jane Yolen. Reprinted by permission of G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

“Dragonfield” copyright © 1985 by Jane Yolen. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

Dream Weaver
Copyright © 1979 by Jane Yolen. (William Collins Publishers, Inc.). Reprinted by permission of the author, “Brother Hart,” “The Tree’s Wife,” “The Pot Child” first printed in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Copyright © 1978, 1979.

“Dryad’s Lament” from
Fantasy and Terror.
Copyright © 1984 by Jane Yolen. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Face in the Cloth” from
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Copyright © 1985. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

“The Fates” from
Star Line,
The Newsletter of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. Copyright © 1982 by Jane Yolen. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Five Points of Roguery” from
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Copyright © 1984 by Jane Yolen. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

“The Girl Who Cried Flowers” from
The Girl Who Cried Flowers and Other Stories
(Thomas Y. Crowell). Text copyright © 1974 by Jane Yolen. Reprinted by permission of Harper
&
Row, Publishers, Inc.

“Happy Dens, or A Day in the Old Wolves Home” from
Elsewhere Vol. III
(Ace Fantasy Books). Copyright © 1984 by Jane Yolen. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

“The Hundredth Dove” from
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Also appeared in
The Hundredth Dove and Other Tales
(Thomas Y. Crowell). Copyright © 1977. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.

“The Inn of the Demon Camel” from
Liavek
(Ace Fantasy Books). Copyright © 1985 by Jane Yolen. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

“Into the Wood” from
Issac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.
Copyright © 1985 by Jane Yolen. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

“The Lady and the Merman” from
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Copyright © 1976 by Jane Yolen. Also appeared in
The Hundredth Dove and Other Tales
(Thomas Y. Crowell). Copyright © 1976, 1977 by Jane Yolen. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.

“The Malaysian Mer” from
Neptune Rising
(Philomel Books). Text copyright © 1981, 1982 by Jane Yolen. Reprinted by permission of G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

“Once A Good Man” from
The Hundredth Dove and Other Tales
(Thomas Y. Crowell). Copyright © 1976, 1977 by Jane Yolen. Reprinted by permission of Harper
&
Row, Publishers, Inc.

“The River Maid” from
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Copyright © 1981 by Jane Yolen. Also published in
Neptune Rising
(Philomel Books). Text copyright © 1981, 1982 by Jane Yolen. Reprinted by permission of G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

“Salvage” from
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.
Copyright © 1984 by Jane Yolen. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

“The Storyteller” from
National Storytelling Journal.
Copyright © 1984 by Jane Yolen. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

“The Thirteenth Fey” from
Faery!
(Ace Fantasy Books). Copyright © 1985 by Jane Yolen. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

“The Tower Bird” from
Ariel Four
(Ariel Books/Ballentine Books). Copyright © 1978 by Jane Yolen. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

“The Undine” and “Undine” from
Neptune Rising
(Philomel Books). Text copyright © 1981, 1982 by Jane Yolen. Reprinted by permission of G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

“The White Seal Maid” from
Parabola: Myth and the Quest for Meaning.
Also appeared in
The Hundredth Dove and Other Tales
(Thomas Y. Crowell). Copyright © 1977 by Jane Yolen. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.

“The Wild Child” from
Parabola: Myth and the Quest for Meaning.
Copyright © 1977. Reprinted by permission of the author.

I
CONSIDER MYSELF
a short form writer—short stories, picture books, poetry—who, somehow, occasionally falls into novels. This was my second collection of short fiction, many of the pieces originally published in magazines and anthologies, like the
Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
. When I had accumulated enough stories for a collection of my own, they were put together in
Tales of Wonder
, and then
Dragonfield and Other Stories
. But there are new stories here as well—or they
were
new, way back when the collection was first published.

All my short work is read aloud in the revision and polishing stage. I write a lot of so-called performance poems and also books for children. Reading my work aloud is a habit I fell into early on in my writing career. Also, I have become a polished oral storyteller over the years, so I feel that my stories have to please the ear as well as the eye. Or, as I’ve said somewhere, “The Eye and the Ear are different listeners.”

Interestingly enough, the title story in this collection, “Dragonfield,” was eventually turned into a graphic novel called
The Last Dragon
, with sensational art by illustrator Rebecca Guay. As in any transformation, something is gained and something is lost in the graphic novel iteration. The basic plot remained the same, but a novel—graphic or otherwise—has to invent more and deepen the characters. A graphic novel also relies heavily on pictures (rather than words) to tell its tale.

Jane Yolen

I was born in New York City on February 11, 1939. Because February 11 is also Thomas Edison’s birthday, my parents used to say I brought light into their world. But my parents were both writers and prone to exaggeration. My father was a journalist; my mother wrote short stories and created crossword puzzles and double acrostics. My younger brother, Steve, eventually became a newspaperman. We were a family of an awful lot of words!

We lived in the city for most of my childhood, with two brief moves: to California for a year while my father worked as a publicity agent for Warner Bros. films, and then to Newport News, Virginia, during the World War II years, when my mother moved my baby brother and me in with her parents while my father was stationed in London running the Army’s secret radio.

When I was thirteen, we moved to Connecticut. After college I worked in book publishing in New York for five years, married, and after a year traveling around Europe and the Middle East with my husband in a Volkswagen camper, returned to the States. We bought a house in Massachusetts, where we lived almost happily ever after, raising three wonderful children.

I say “almost,” because in 2006, my wonderful husband of forty-four years—Professor David Stemple, the original Pa in my Caldecott Award–winning picture book,
Owl Moon
—died. I still live in the same house in Massachusetts.

And I am still writing.

I have often been called the “Hans Christian Andersen of America,” something first noted in
Newsweek
close to forty years ago because I was writing a lot of my own fairy tales at the time.

The sum of my books—including some eighty-five fairy tales in a variety of collections and anthologies—is now well over 335. Probably the most famous are
Owl Moon
,
The Devil’s Arithmetic
, and
How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight?
My work ranges from rhymed picture books and baby board books, through middle grade fiction, poetry collections, and nonfiction, to novels and story collections for young adults and adults. I’ve also written lyrics for folk and rock groups, scripted several animated shorts, and done voiceover work for animated short movies. And I do a monthly radio show called
Once Upon a Time
.

These days, my work includes writing books with each of my three children, now grown up and with families of their own. With Heidi, I have written mostly picture books, including
Not All Princesses Dress in Pink
and the nonfiction series Unsolved Mysteries from History. With my son Adam, I have written a series of Rock and Roll Fairy Tales for middle grades, among other fantasy novels. With my son Jason, who is an award-winning nature photographer, I have written poems to accompany his photographs for books like
Wild Wings
and
Color Me a Rhyme.

And I am still writing.

Oh—along the way, I have won a lot of awards: two Nebula Awards, a World Fantasy Award, a Caldecott Medal, the Golden Kite Award, three Mythopoeic Awards, two Christopher Awards, the Jewish Book Award, and a nomination for the National Book Award, among many accolades. I have also won (for my full body of work) the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Grand Master Award, the Catholic Library Association’s Regina Medal, the University of Minnesota’s Kerlan Award, the University of Southern Mississippi and de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection’s Southern Miss Medallion, and the Smith College Medal. Six colleges and universities have given me honorary doctorate degrees. One of my awards, the Skylark, given by the New England Science Fiction Association, set my good coat on fire when the top part of it (a large magnifying glass) caught the sunlight. So I always give this warning: Be careful with awards and put them where the sun don’t shine!

Also of note—in case you find yourself in a children’s book trivia contest—I lost my fencing foil in Grand Central Station during a date, fell overboard while whitewater rafting in the Colorado River, and rode in a dog sled in Alaska one March day.

And yes—I am still writing.

At a Yolen cousins reunion as a child, holding up a photograph of myself. In the photo, I am about one year old, maybe two.