“I’ll bring you an apple,” he said, and he turned and disappeared into the shadows. “The first apple of the autumn.” And he was gone. I had not said farewell, and he was gone.

A tale can start in many ways. Thus, it is many tales, and at the same time each of these is but one way of telling the same story. There were once two brothers. This is the tale of the elder brother, a man who had everything. He was good, strong, wise, and wealthy. He was a man who always made the right choices. He was a man contented with what he had; more than contented, for he was bound by both love and duty to nurture his inheritance. Until, one day, he realized it was not enough. There were once two brothers. This is the tale of the younger brother, who was clever and skillful and wild, a man with curling hair the color of summer sun on a barley field. There were people that loved him, but he didn’t see this. There was a place for him, but he never felt welcome there. Always, he saw himself as second best. His brother would inherit the estate; he, a little parcel of land nobody wanted. His brother would marry well, to safeguard the estate and consolidate his power; but who would want a younger son, with no future? His brother always got things right. He, on occasion, made mistakes of epic proportions. This is also the tale of a young woman. Who she was, nobody was quite sure, except that she had strange green eyes and hair like midnight, and she came from over the water. In a moment of uncharacteristic folly, the elder brother took her for his wife. Then he disappeared, just as the younger had; and all they left in their place was the witch girl, spinning and weaving and sewing her strange cloth of spindlebush, and not a word out of her, not a single sound. They said she wouldn’t speak, not even when the rocks fell right by her, and a man lay dying. They said she was a woman with no human feelings, a sorceress, and that when she snatched Lord Hugh from right under the nose of his betrothed, with never a by-your-leave, she tore the heart right out of the valley. That was what they said.