King of Peace and Glory

By Anne B. Walsh

Find your festive mood with Anne B. Walsh's sixth collection of Christmas and winter-themed fantasy and science fiction:
Somebody's Children: Baker Hope Marrain usually finds delicious gingerbread in her ovens, not a lost pair of siblings. As Christmas approaches, she may have to decide between following the law and following her heart...
Straight Shooting: In the cave-bound Hidden City of Luola, Analla Eastfield steps up to the line for a Winterfest archery competition. Can she maintain her principles, no matter the temptation—or the cost?
Star of the Sea: Adam Darragh, of the village of Glenscar, tells a tale of Christmas past, aboard the brig Molly Porter. Will a medal of the Blessed Virgin Mary help a young woman make the right choice?
For Goodness Sake: You'd better watch out! The starship North Pole has come to the planet of Moria, where music is forbidden. What mysteries from her own past could await orbital control officer Layna Ghavouri among Santa's elves?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anne B. Walsh
• Release date: Dec 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370947799

Anne B. Walsh

Anne B. Walsh was telling stories about magic and intrigue from the time she could talk, but it took her twenty years to realize she could make a living at it. Her first novel, historical fantasy "A Widow in Waiting", has its origins in a PBS special which changed her life; her second, family-focused fantasy "Homecoming", takes its inspiration from some of her other writing; and her third, soft science fiction "Killdeer", stems from her constant interest in the ways in which the future and the past coincide. Anne lives east of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with one roommate (Krystal), two black Labs (Buddy and Brando), and two black cats (Starsky and Hutch). Sadly, their Cane Corso mastiff, Bruce, passed away in mid-August 2013, and their first cats, Poppy and Sesame, who helped inform Anne's first collection of short stories, "Cat Tales", passed out of their lives after an accident on Christmas Day 2013. No one ever said life was fair. Anne's parents and siblings live two hours north of her, otherwise known as just far enough away. She has also been writing Harry Potter fan fiction for more than ten years and is known best in that genre as the creator of the "Dangerverse" alternate universe (which inspired "Homecoming"). Beyond writing fiction, Anne's preoccupations include reading fiction; singing anywhere that will have her, including her church and local galas; theatre, especially musicals; all forms of cooking; and her family and friends. Within writing fiction, her preoccupations are much the same, meaning most of her stories involve loving families, delicious food, and good music. Consider yourself warned. A number of projects continue to need Anne's attention as she writes her original novels. Among these are her ongoing fanfiction works in various fandoms such as Harry Potter and Frozen, and the themed fantasy anthologies she co-authors with her friend and fellow author Elizabeth Conall.

Book preview

King of Peace and Glory

Tales of fantasy and festivity:

Holidays with Anne, Volume 6

Anne B. Walsh

Copyright 2017

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Foreword

Somebody’s Children

Straight Shooting

Star of the Sea

For Goodness Sake

Personent hodie

Also by Anne B. Walsh

About the Author

Dedication

For my mom,

who remembers sing for joy, joy, joy.

Not in this translation, but surprisingly apt!

Men of earth, let us raise

With the angels our praise,

Through the length of our days

Tell to time His story:

King of peace and glory!

Ideo, o, o, (2x)

Ideo gloria in excelsis Deo!

(Therefore give glory to God in the highest!)

Morten Luvaas, mid-1900’s

Rhymed paraphrase of Latin carol

Personent hodie

Foreword

And so another year comes to a close. Not quite so many dramatic highs and lows as 2016 had in it for me, O readers (very little is ever going to beat appearing on Jeopardy!), but plenty of ups and downs nonetheless. The last couple months of the year had an especially high number of things happening, what with my twelfth year of participating in National Novel Writing Month, three separate events with my choir, various insanities at work, Thanksgiving and Christmas, and let’s not forget that wonderful time when my emotions and my writing decided to play tennis with me as the ball.

But, despite it all, I did win NaNo. Two of the three choir events went off amazingly, and the third is also shaping up well. Even work looks like it might be improving, and although I wasn’t able to visit my family for Thanksgiving, I’ll be home for Christmas. My emotions aren’t perfect, but nobody’s ever are. But there was something else…

Oh, of course. Writing. Specifically, writing this. Welcome to the 2017 Anne B. Walsh holiday collection, King of Peace and Glory.

As I mentioned in a blog post a while back, I sang this piece in college. While it’s now a pretty standard Christmas carol under its Latin title of Personent hodie, there are hints in the tune that it began as a hymn specifically to St. Nicholas. So I thought it would be fun to write stories based around the various things St. Nicholas holds in his patronage, like children, archers, and sailors. At the last minute, a story featuring the jolly old saint himself (sort of) added itself to the lineup, and thus we have this year’s four tales: Somebody’s Children, Straight Shooting, Star of the Sea, and For Goodness Sake.

If you enjoy my writing, please take a look at the author’s note at the end of the collection, to see where you can find more works like these. All four of this year’s stories are part of larger universes, either in works of mine that are already published or in ones that will (I hope!) be forthcoming sometime in 2018. Thank you for your attention, and I wish you a Merry Christmas, along with the happiest of whatever holiday you may happen to celebrate.

Anne B. Walsh

December 12, 2017

Somebody’s Children

Hope Marrain pulled her fur-lined woolen cloak more tightly around her short crop of mussed brown curls as she opened the door into the kitchen yard of the building that served her family as both home and business. The weather in their little town of Amaranth had turned bitterly cold overnight, which was only to be expected on St. Nicholas’s Day, with less than three weeks until the blessed feast of Christmas.

Humming a minor-keyed melody to herself, she turned to the woodpile beside the door and began loading logs onto the small wheeled cart she’d brought outside with her. The fire under her indoor baking oven required a steady supply of wood throughout the day. It was the only way to keep the bricks at the perfect temperature for creating the crunchy crust on the outsides of her breads and the golden glow for which her cakes were famous.

Moreover, in this season above all others, a baker needed to be up earlier than everyone else, so that she could finish her own baking and free up oven space for the rest of the village. Some folk had special cake recipes which required baking weeks in advance, to allow them time to ripen. Others might be planning their celebratory meals around the time a son or daughter, brother or sister, father or mother could come to visit, which was not always the same as the day of Christmas itself. Whatever the need, whatever the story, Hope planned to ensure her ovens were hot and ready for the baking requirements of Amaranth.

Out of habit, she glanced across the yard at the tall, clay-built outdoor oven, where she did her baking during the warmer months of the year. From April to September, it would be hot enough that one would need to take care when approaching it, but now, a week into December, it sat quiescent, its door slightly ajar—

Hope stopped, releasing her grip on the handle of the wood cart. That wasn’t open last night, she murmured. I would have noticed. Do we have a visitor? A stray dog, maybe, or a cat looking for a warm place to have her kittens?

Rising to the balls of her feet, she crossed the yard, letting her eyes and ears rove about the yard for any other clue that all was not as it should have been. The ground was frozen solid and no snow had fallen yet, so there was little chance of spotting footprints, but ash was smeared in several spots around the oven’s circular doorframe, and a log of wood lay beneath the door, as though it had fallen from the arms of a careless loader. The only trouble with that theory was that no one had loaded this oven with wood for months, and like the door on its latch and the smears of ash, Hope was quite sure the log hadn’t been there last night.

And that, she said under her breath, laying her hand on the edge of the door, means it’s not a cat or a dog at all, now is it?

Lifting the door to take some of the strain from the hinges, she swung it wide with only the tiniest of creaks.

Four startled eyes popped wide open in the dim half-warmth beyond.

Well, good heavens. Hope planted her hands on her hips, surveying the contents of her oven through the lenses of her green-framed spectacles. Two of you, I see. You might as well come out, she added when neither child moved. I won’t eat you.

A little noise sounded from beyond the door, which might equally have been a laugh or a sob. A moment later, a worn set of boots emerged, then a ragged pair of trousers and a faded shirt much too big for its current occupant. We didn’t hurt anything, the boy declared before his feet were fully on the ground. We didn’t steal anything. We just wanted to get warm.

I believe you. Hope kept her eye on the interior of the oven. And it was clever of you to find a place you could curl up together for that. But it’s much warmer in the kitchen than it is anywhere out here, and I have some of last night’s baking that I wouldn’t want to go to waste. I don’t suppose you two could help me with that? she coaxed, and was rewarded after a brief pause by the emergence of a tiny pair of feet in clumsily stitched shoes and much-darned stockings, followed by a flurry of patched skirts and petticoats which attempted to snag on every possible surface as their wearer clambered awkwardly down from the oven. There now, that’s better. Come along inside.

She strode back to the door, allowing just the tiniest bit of her family’s innate power to sweep out and enfold the two. We’re hungry, and she has food, it whispered. We’re cold and it’s warm in there. We don’t have to tell her anything. We don’t have to stay. She’s just some dozy old baker lady. What could she possibly do to us?

A glance over her shoulder showed her the children, hand in hand, obediently following her to the kitchen door. She took a deep breath, calming her usual discomfort at the way this power worked, though at the same time she welcomed it. No one, in her opinion, should influence the hearts and minds of other people as she had learned to do without a certain level of unease.

Here we are, she said, opening the kitchen door and waving the children in before wheeling her cartload of wood inside as well and shutting the door against the morning cold. Sit down wherever you like, at the table or on the hearth. It’s all the same to me. Taking off her spectacles, she rubbed them free of their usual heat-induced fog with the corner of her apron, then slipped them back onto her face. Now, you can call me Miss Hope, and what names should I use for you? She smiled at the girl, who giggled and shyly ducked her head with its crown of shining black braids.

I’m Maggie, she said, stretching out her coppery-brown hands to the fire as she took a seat on the hearth. I was eight last month. And that’s my brother Jack. She nodded toward the boy standing stiffly in the center of the kitchen, looking the place over with care. He’s ten and a half.

Maggie and Jack. I’m very pleased to meet you. Hope swung open the doors of the cupboard in which she kept her chilled goods in the winter and removed a glass bottle containing the last of yesterday’s milk. I’ll heat this up and make you a posset in just a few minutes, once I have today’s bread kneaded and set out for its second rise. In the meantime we can start you both with a slice or two of yesterday’s bread and some nice fresh butter on it, and perhaps a mug of a tisane my sister likes to make.

Two sets of wide brown eyes lit up at the mention of this bounty, and Hope firmly squashed her guilt that she wasn’t offering them more. Neither child had the hollow cheeks or misshapen limbs that would have indicated they were truly starving, but neither did she think nature had intended the bones of their faces and wrists to be quite so prominent. Her own hearty bread and the fresh butter the Marrain family received from their neighbor next door, in exchange for Mother Marrain’s herb medicines to combat the rheumatism in her wrists and fingers, would fill their bellies comfortably without making them ill.

It’s a cold day to be out so early, she remarked, keeping her tone light and unquestioning as she sliced the bread and set the butter near the fire to warm, swinging the hob with the kettle on it into the direct heat of the flames. I have to be up at this hour to start my baking, so it’ll be ready when folks want to eat it, but my sisters and my mama are all in bed still, lucky ladies that they are.

Mothers always do that, Jack muttered from his post in the middle of the kitchen, from which he hadn’t moved.

Oh, not always. Hope picked up two of the toasting forks that sat near the hearth and handed them to Maggie. Will you give me a hand with this, please, my lady? she requested with a curtsey, winning another giggle and a nod. Thank you ever so. No, my mama gets up quite early in the spring and the summertime, she went on, carefully skewering a slice of bread on each toasting fork and motioning for Maggie to hold them near the fire. She often has to go out to the woods, you see, to pick the herbs she needs for her work before the rain drowns them or the sun scorches them. Other mornings she wants to work in her garden before it gets too hot, or while the ground is still wet so she can pluck the weeds out easily. So I don’t mind that she sleeps a bit later when the weather grows cold.

You’re lucky, then. Jack unbent enough to take a seat at the kitchen table, though he perched on the edge of the chair he’d chosen rather than relaxing against its back. Some mothers aren’t like that.

I am very lucky, Hope agreed, casting a tender smile towards the upper floor of the house. We all are, my sisters and I. But then, you’d understand that much. She opened one of the drawers and took out a butter knife, slicing off two good-sized pats and waving for Maggie to bring the now-toasted bread over to the table. "You have each other,