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laughed and cheered, and now a hush came upon the Pickled Rat as he began, “Hear now the tale of Impossible Paal.” He’d learned it from a pamphlet come lately out of Ostoland, called simply Eventyr , or fairy tales, compiled by two women combing the villages for stories. He’d loved them at once.
    He told how lazy Paal tricked a king into thinking Paal’s kettle could boil by itself, leading the king to embarrassment; and how Paal tempted him into thinking Paal’s flute could restore the dead to life, leading the king to murder; and how Paal fooled him into thinking Paal had leapt off a cliff into an undersea paradise, leading the king to death—and Paal’s claiming all his lands. As the poor fishermen laughed at the pranking and slaughtering of the mighty, the priestess stood and walked closer to the table, and so he launched into another story, of how the North Wind scattered the flour a poor boy was carrying, and how the boy marched right up to the North Wind’s home to demand restitution. And so it went, as tale after tale, plucky ordinary folk got the better of the wise, the mighty, and the supernatural.
    At last he ran out of such fare and, racking his brains, spun a chilling account of a man who raced an evil sea-spirit, a Draug, across the stormy ocean in a confrontation that could only end with shipwreck and death. He’d heard this story only once, and he embellished it by letting the man escape with the help of a merciful water-dragon.
    “I’ve never heard it like that,” said a man doubtfully.
    “I think I did hear it told that way,” the boy replied. “Once. In eastern parts.”
    “Dragons don’t live in the sea,” another man objected.
    “They can if they want to,” said the Swan priestess, drawing stares. “You’ve lived in places where that’s true, haven’t you, lad?”
    “Tell us!” a fisherman said.
    “Yeah, Askelad,” said another. “We never hear tell about yourself.”
    There was general agreement, amid some knocking of mugs upon tables. Someone passed him an ale, which made self-confession more reasonable. Wiping foam from his lips, he began.

    THE TALE OF THE BOY, THE SCROLL,
AND THE MAGIC CARPET
    East of the sunrise, far beyond the Eldshore and the Wheelgreen and the Ruby Waste, there was a land of wisdom and grace, where sages fashioned works of wonder. One such was a scroll-painting of strange peaks, ones even more jagged and spindly than those of Fiskegard, wreathed in forest and wrapped in cloud.
    Had the painting only been beautiful, it would have been enough. But it was also a thing of magic. Gaze upon the mountains, or clutch the scroll, and you might find yourself drawn into another world, where the timeless mountains speared an infinite sky. A great wizard-king made the scroll to be a haven, and it had yet another peculiar property. Time flowed differently within the scroll than within our world. The relationship was a fluid thing, but time inside the scroll always flowed faster, so that hours outside might be days inside.
    Once a boy and a girl were abandoned within the scroll. Their parents did something foolish—bringing a male Western dragon to an island that was really a sleeping, female Eastern dragon. The dragons’ mutual desire destroyed that island with fire and earthquake, and the kids could only survive inside the scroll. The parents were supposed to come back. They never did.
    I’ll translate the kids’ names as Innocence and A-Girl-Is-A-Joy. In some ways they were very different. The boy’s parents came from the West of the world, the girl’s from the East. He liked battling; she liked exploring. He was quick with the spoken word, she with the calligrapher’s brush. But after their parents disappeared, they were inseparable. Their only other companions were monkish sorts full of lofty thoughts. So they chased each other around the monastery and up and down the rainy mountain. They discovered and built up and destroyed enough kingdoms to fill