The Beaver King, Cautionary Tales of Medieval Dysfunction

Nanwen of Mills Creek had never liked being told what she could and could not be part of. In life, she ignored it politely.

In death, she ignored it completely.

When This Minstrelle began singing about her, Nanwen stepped closer to listen. It had been a long time since anyone had spoken of her with uncomplicated kindness, and she found she preferred it.

Little Lord Bucker, upon hearing the songs drifting through Beaverton, reacted exactly as Nanwen expected. Badly.

Not wounded. Not thoughtful. Simply offended in the vague way of someone who cannot control a situation and has no other tools.

His pleas followed quickly.

First to Baylor the Brave, long appeals that the stories should not have been told at all. Then to This Minstrelle, insisting the songs were improper, exaggerated, unfair. When those attempts failed, the explanation shifted. Baylor, he claimed, had been manipulated. This Minstrelle had pried the tales from him, coaxed them out with sympathy, perhaps even plied him with wine.

Nanwen rolled her eyes.

The accusation was so transparently ignorant that neither Baylor nor This Minstrelle took it seriously. His outbursts, dramatic as he believed them to be, landed with all the force of a child slamming a door and expecting the house to collapse in response.

They were not angered. They were amused.

Baylor listened patiently once, politely a second time, and thereafter with the calm detachment of someone who understood that reasoning with immaturity only prolonged it. ThIs Minstrelle found the performance faintly ridiculous, an attempt at authority so poorly constructed it bordered on parody.

Nanwen approved of this entirely.

Baylor the Brave had needed no encouragement to speak. The truth had been waiting for years. Wine had nothing to do with it. Neither did persuasion.

The Turning had not been engineered by outsiders or sung into existence. The Beaver Clan had accomplished it themselves with the quiet decisiveness of people who had simply stopped tolerating what could no longer be endured.

Nanwen of Mills Creek had watched from the Quiet Meadow and approved.

Bucker’s version, that a Minstrelle had orchestrated the unraveling, struck her as childish. It required believing that grown men had been tricked into telling their own stories, as though accountability were a spell cast by someone else.

He had always preferred explanations that left him blameless.

Nanwen did not go to him. She did not need to.

Each time her name was sung, she stood beside This Minstrelle and her Dane instead, calm and unmistakably present, the way a person stands beside a witness to confirm the record.

If Bucker found this infuriating, that was incidental. He had always been most upset by things that proceeded when he pouted, NO.

Nanwen, having endured far worse men than him, saw no reason to start accommodating now. “Honestly,” she muttered once, shaking her head as another chorus carried across the valley. “He is exhausting.”

But even that irritation softened as she listened to Baylor and the Minstrelle carry on, undisturbed and quietly entertained by his attempts to control what no longer belonged to him.

Their amusement pleased her more than any confrontation could have. Then she settled in to listen again.

The melodies were gentle. The words careful. Nothing grand. Nothing theatrical. Just the quiet recognition of a life that had held things together for others without asking to be noticed.

At least someone, she thought, had remembered her properly. And that, at last, was enough.