For Gabriela Romero, whose kindness and generosity know no bounds. Without you, this story would've probably been left to sit in the corners of my mind gathering cobwebs and dust forever. Thank you.
Update (7/22/2012): Thanks to the amazing and talented Gabriela, I now have a cover picture for my little fanfic! Yes, the cover image you see next to the title was drawn specifically for the story by Gabriela, and although it was not technically meant to be a cover illustration, I got her permission to use it for just that, and I am just all kinds of thrilled and excited and awed that I have such an unbelievably gorgeous picture representing my story (I wonder if this is how real authors feel the very first time they see the illustrations someone else created for their soon-to-be-published book?). Please visit her dA for a good look at it in its untouched, much better quality size to appreciate the true beauty of the picture: gavryll. deviant art art/ Cloris-A-Wild-Heart-316209676 (take out the spaces!). And have a look around at her other work while you're at it. She is truly one gifted artist. Thank you, Gabriela!
~A Wild Heart~
Chapter One
~~~ooooo~~~
The heart has its reasons,
whereof reason knows nothing.
—Pascal
In a land far away, where low-rising hills stretched as far as the eye could see, a man could set out on foot in almost any direction and journey for weeks and see nothing else but the hills and valleys until he came at last to where the land met the sea. To the north, the hills were ranged by great black forests, and farther out west within walking distance of a cold, clear stream a small number of farms had cropped up across the countryside in view of the woods that some believed to be as old as the hills themselves. In this part of the world, stories of beings with unearthly talents were alive and well, and the children who grew up there were brought up on such tales, learning them before they could walk and talk.
In one of the farms lived two girls and a boy. The girls had been taken in and raised alongside the boy by his elderly parents when the fever had struck the land, wiping out nearly a third of the small population, including both of the girls' fathers and mothers. When the old man and woman passed on, the three children, having already had the running of the farm turned over to them soon after the girls' arrival, opted to stay together and continue to eke out a living on the farm as they had been taught. In this way they lived in relative happiness for several years and were coming of age.
One of the girls was named Aeris and she had the responsibility of caring for the sheep and taking them out to pasture each day. Of her companions, the other girl was the one who saw to the main chores around the farm while the boy had recently joined in the labor of the men hard at work digging wells on neighboring farms, a task that had been on the rise in the last couple of years.
On a warm spring day, Aeris had taken the sheep far out to a field near the old homestead that had belonged to another family before they'd packed up and left for a city on the south coast, and keeping within sight of the flock and Daisy and Lucy, the farm's sheepdogs, was foraging for edible roots and plants that grew out in the wild herself. She'd managed to gather enough turnips to make a salad and found a potato plant from the Thompson family garden when a white four-legged animal came up beside her and made its presence known by bleating loudly right in her ear.
Aeris glanced up from where she was kneeling in the grass and weeds, digging out a nice fat potato with her trowel. To the west, the sun was sinking behind the hills.
"Okay, why not?" she smiled ruefully at the young sheep. Dropping the trowel and last potato into her basket, she brushed the dirt from her dress and shook it out before grabbing her staff and basket, and rose to her feet. "Let's get you to the stream and head on home."
She looked around, spotted the two brown and scarlet forms amid the mass of white, and slipping her fingers between her lips, blew a sharp whistle. Lucy and Daisy got up immediately and began rounding up the sheep.
~~~ooooo~~~
On the way home, something strange happened that gave Aeris a reason to believe her life was about to take an unexpected turn. She and the dogs had guided the flock back up north over the hills and onto the familiar dirt road at sundown when she saw a stooped figure struggling with the rope at the old well of an abandoned farm up ahead, a little ways from where the stream burst forth from the woods and went southward, winding and curving with the valleys. The animals needed no further assistance and went straight to the various man-made holes and narrow canals that were found along the stream as she rushed forward to lend a hand.
"Here, ma'am, let me help you with that." Setting her shepherd's crook and basket down by her feet, Aeris grabbed the rope and hauled the pail up.
A shaking hand shot through with veins and wrinkles dipped a tin cup into the bucket and brought it up to an equally wrinkled mouth. The woman drank, three cups full before letting out a sigh of repletion and packed her cup away in a knapsack tied at her waist.
"Ah, that was lovely." She set the end of her walking stick down on the ground and turned her face up, and Aeris saw eyes like violets that looked oddly young and sharp for such a wizened face. "Thank you, dear. Not many young people would go out of their way to help the elderly these days."
She smiled warmly at the gray-haired woman. "You're welcome. But it wasn't out of the way at all. We were just stopping by the stream on our way home."
The woman looked at the sheep lined along the pockets of water diverted from the stream by farmers and shepherds for watering livestock and other animals. "You have a good-looking herd here. Their fleece look healthy and plentiful. I see the dry weather hasn't been too hard on them?"
Aeris shook her head. "It hasn't been so dry that much of the grass has died. As long as the grass is growing and there's the stream, they're fine. They have the whole of the land as their dinner and all we have to do is keep moving along and finding good fields for them to graze in."
"Your herd must be the biggest one I've seen out here. What is your secret or do you get a lot of young ones during lambing season?"
Her bluntness made Aeris laugh. "No secret. We raise them mainly for wool so some of our sheep are quite old." There was also the fact that Aeris had brought her family's dozen or so sheep with her when she and Tifa first came to live on the farm, but Tifa swore that it was Aeris' handling of them that caused them to thrive so well—she knew the land like the back of her hand and took the herd to all the best meadows with the plants that the sheep were particularly fond of.
"A young girl out on the range with the sheep the whole day," the old woman said, turning back around to face Aeris. "You don't know what you might meet up with out here all by yourself."
"You mean a squirrel or a rabbit?" Aeris chuckled. Like their father, the farm's former sheepdog, Daisy and Lucy were not only fiercely protective of the sheep, but aggressive to the point of being suicidal so that only the leanest and meanest hungry wolves dared come within range of the herd.
"What happened to the handsome young man who used to watch the sheep with you?"
"Zack?" Aeris asked in surprise. The last time she and Zack had taken the sheep out together had been when both his father and mother were still alive.
"Yes, I believe that was the lad's name."
"He's out with the other men, helping to dig a new well on one of the other farms." She waved a hand vaguely at the bridge over the stream and the farmhouses on the other side. "It's been tough trying to reach any water in this drought, though."
The woman nodded wisely. "It's everywhere around you. If they would but look with their hearts and not their eyes. You would follow your heart..." Her eyes slid back to Aeris, a speculative gleam in their depths. "Aeris, isn't it?"
Aeris glanced uneasily at the elderly woman. "Forgive me, but I don't recall your name…" Since the days when caravans had paved the trail, travelers seldom passed through the region anymore and Aeris was quite certain this woman was a stranger to her.
"We've met a few times but you wouldn't remember it," the woman replied. "I've known you since you were a mere thought in your mother's mind and have visited you a time or two."
"My apologies," she said, confused. "I usually don't forget faces…"
A sly look crossed the wizened face. "You will soon be able to remember mine."
Aeris blinked. "I beg your pardon?"
"Your destiny, lass," said the woman. "It is written in the stars."
She decided the sun and thirst must have addled the poor woman's wits, and she was probably in need of some rest and food as well. "You're a long way from the nearest town. May I ask where you're going?"
"Here and there. Everywhere."
The reply was as cryptic as could be but Aeris refrained from probing further. "Well, we have little in the way of amenities to offer but what we do have, we will gladly share with you. If you need a place to stay for a few nights, we have an empty cot—"
"Your sheep's wandering from the stream, dear."
Aeris spun around. "Oh no!"
Daisy and Lucy were already on the escaping sheep, growling and driving them back toward the herd but Aeris sprang forward to give chase to a tiny lamb bouncing happily down the path toward them. She headed it off and caught it quickly, and was halfway back to the well with the sheep in her arms when she chanced to look up and was brought to a stop. The well stood empty but for her staff and basket, everything she'd spilled tucked neatly back inside.
~~~ooooo~~~
"Look, there ain't nothin' down there," the burly, red-bearded farmer, Ivan, grumbled. "It's time we pack that hole back up an' call it a day."
And start looking around for a new spot to dig again tomorrow, Zack thought wearily. He glanced down at his friend, Hans, who was lying on his back in the grass with his hat over his face. "The sun's gone down." It hadn't completely; they could still see it, a blazing red-yellow sphere hanging low in the sky, part of it hidden behind the horizon, but they had little daylight left.
The three men were sitting under a tree, supposedly polishing off the last of the food they'd brought with them. Facing them at a slight incline were mounds of dirt and rock that surrounded the hole they'd made of the earth—a hole big enough to fit two grown men in, digging back to back. A few yards away, two other farmers were sitting with their backs against a slab of rock that jutted out from the ground, sharing a jug of ale. Somewhere on another farm there was probably another shaft identical to the one they were looking at, with no sign of moisture to be found, another family in need of a water well.
For all the green grass growing nearly year-round wherever a patch of grass was to be found, the ground below seemed drier than the desert at high noon. There was water, Zack knew, but it was too far down, and once past the first couple of feet of soft damp earth, the earth quickly became hard as rock until it was like hacking through crumbly marble around the fifteen feet mark, and there was a serious risk of the sides caving in the deeper they went. They would have to try their luck elsewhere on the farm to see if they couldn't hit water sooner or go through less rocky dirt. The other man was right but he did not look forward to the process of starting all over again.
"I don't see no other choice but to tell the womenfolk we will most likely be followin' the old wagon trail ourselves in a couple of years if things don't start lookin' up," Ivan said.
Zack's shoulders slumped. "I don't know how I'm going to tell the girls." He stared at the hunk of goat cheese still wrapped in a white cloth that Tifa had gotten from one of the other farms and the loaf of bread sitting in his lunchbox, only half eaten. He never had much of an appetite anymore. "They love this place. It's our home, where we were raised together, and became a family. All of our parents are buried here, Father and Mother, our dog…" Well, Cait Sith had really been his dog whom he'd raised from a pup, but Aeris and Tifa had loved the sheepdog just as much and spoiled the old boy rotten.
"I have no idea how I'm gonna break it to my folks either." Hans's voice came out from under his hat, surly, tired. "Martha won't want to hear it for sure." Martha was Hans' younger sister. Besides Martha and Hans, there was also Henry, their eldest brother who'd taken a wife last fall.
"If I didn't know better, I'd say the fairies have a hand in this," Ivan muttered. "They should use their powers for good once in a blue moon and help us poor folk out some." The farmer's face turned thoughtful. "Maybe we can all put our heads together and think of something to catch one and force it to give us a wish."
"I don't know." Zack smiled half-heartedly. "There's probably one somewhere hereabouts listening to us even as we speak. It'd be kind of hard to spring a trap on them when they already know everything we're planning."
"Humph," the older man said in a tone of disgruntlement. "It can't be any harder settin' a trap for a fairy than it is to find water around here anymore."
"Maybe we'll have more rainfall this year," Zack said without any real hope. "It can't be like this forever, can it?"
Hans sat up. "Let's pack it up and go home."
Zack let out a deep sigh and began putting away his leftover food.
