The Tale of the Luthier and the Hound
Published on brynnhendricks.com, July 2025.
Before she died, my Nona stitched me a quilt.
“A catching quilt,” she announced when it was done. “Make sure ye mend it wherever it rips.” She fixed me with sort of warning look that only a Cyran grandmother can bestow. “Otherwise.”
The quilt was nothing grand. It looked a lot like Nona was trying to use what she could before she had to pass it all to me. The colors were pretty, though: deep fireglow orange and spring-sky blue and all the greens of the meadow. She snugged them together with bright lilac thread, the scraps overlapping in wild disarray like sunset trapped in a pool.
Alas, I’ve never been deft with a needle. The stitches gradually weakened. For a long time I didn’t know what “otherwise” meant, but this morning I found out: there is a ghost-dog trapped inside my quilt. It’s been clawing an escape hole, and now it’s on the brink of breaking free.
***
“Here we go again,” mutters Shadwick. “Fourth time charmed, ye think?”
“No.” I down more ale. “One of his strings is flat.”
I should have anticipated this. “The Ballad of the Lost Huntsman” is the most famous bardsong in Cyra, the first tune I learned to coax from a lute and the one I’ll bet money on hearing whenever someone wants to test out an instrument I’ve built. But it’s ill luck to sing it under a waning moon, so, of course, with both moons currently swelling, tonight’s open stage is full of it.
The present performer is a bearded man who looks as though he makes his real coin splitting wood, but he turns out to be eerily good. He’s using a lot of alternate fingerings, being really deliberate about when he plucks that wrong string. The effect is creepy.
Once upon a time, a huntsman went a-foxing.
Seventeen fine hounds he had,
One steed in silver bridle clad,
And on his fist one peregrine for hawksing.
A creature out of legend, his quarry on that ride:
A fox with sunshine-golden pelt,
Of purer hue than man could smelt.
More legend, he, if he should claim her hide.
A wild wood they breached, black trees that knew no axe.
With throated cries and mud a-flung,
’Cross creeks and thickets hound-paws sprung.
Hard the huntsman followed at their backs.
Ignorant of stag, spurning boar and partridge flushed,
Disdainful, too, of snaring thread,
Yon pack met magic wove in red:
By twilight all the baying tongues had hushed.
Then, lo! The brave mare shied, flung man and hawk from quivering flank!
Alone, aground, with naught to show,
In riverbed with hawk and bow,
The lost man marked a steady glow:
Silver arrow nocked, the huntsman climbed the bank.
Betwixt the trees, not fire but fate awaited golden-gowned:
Nimble-fingered sorceress
With burning eyes and sunshine tress
Holding skeins of silken red to snare a hound.
“Loose the hawk,” said she, “else death is nigh assured.”
His hands must free its hooding sack—
A trap, to make his bowstring slack?
From the huntsman flew the arrow, not the bird.
Once upon a midnight, a lonely horse clopped up the lane,
Last of what had been a score,
Returned from chasing fox of lore,
One golden arrow braided through her mane.
Ever after, none has found where secreted the seventeen.
Their master’s said to nightly stalk
His missing hounds with ghostly hawk.
Harken after darkness: some moonless nights they keen.
There’s a moment of absolute stillness while the final, off-tuned chord reverberates, and then the place erupts. People whoop and applaud. Shadwick shrills a loud whistle. I give a perfunctory clap and look around, trying to work out how soon I can leave. I count at least nine musicians lined up, but no doubt more will arrive. Spit and ashes. As the primary sponsor for this event, I really shouldn’t disappear. Still, I don’t see the other two donors. I can go if I come up with an excuse.
I have an excuse, just not one I want to make public. In my satchel is a work order for the Patrol:
Suspected Ghost Activity
Location: Luthiery
Description of ghost: Dog
Did you know this individual in life? No
Description of encounter: Ghost has materialized inside bedroom. Has not attempted to attack.
Will someone be present to admit the patroller? Yes
Name of reporting individual: Tenlin Luthier
I haven’t had the heart to turn it in. The ghost has a snuffling nose that keeps probing at the holes. It whines a little, like it’s looking for assistance. But assistance with what? The human ghosts all want to go to the ocean, where salt water will dissolve them and their souls can find peace. The Patrollers are supposed to assist them getting there, but I don’t know what they would do with a dog. Dogs are taboo in modern-day Cyra, believed to attract the huntsman’s ghost.
“You ever see a dog around here?” I ask, once the bearded man has taken his bow and is busy accepting free drinks.
Shadwick looks at me like I’ve sprouted antlers.
“A livin’ dog?”
“Any dog.”
His gaze goes vague like he’s remembering something.
“I heard ’em, once. The hounds.”
“Apart from the hounds.” I’ve heard that story and don’t have the patience to hear it again. I offer a prompt. “I met one once. I had to take a lute across the border.”
That dog was a friendly, floppy thing with a lively tail and padded feet. Nona had just died, leaving me with an empty house on the edge of a haunted wood. The dog seemed like it might be good company. Though it did have very large teeth.
Shadwick ignores my prompt. The next performance begins, and our conversation wilts away.
***
At the set break, the bearded bard lays his lute on our table.
“They says you can fix a busted peg.”
I take the instrument into my hands and examine the damage. It’s the string he tuned too low. A simple fix, but my peg blanks are all at my shop.
It’s odd that that one should break. A flat tuning means the string lacks tension, so it shouldn’t have been tight enough to snap a wooden peg. The string is odd, too; it’s a handspan too short. The end not wrapped around the peg has been crudely tied to a length of green yarn so it can reach the holes at the bridge.
With that setup, flat tuning isn’t a problem, it’s a miracle. The string shouldn’t have been working at all.
“Looks like you need a new string while you’re at it.”
His mouth turns up, but it isn’t really a smile. Spit and ashes. I was trying to be friendly; he’s exactly the caliber of musician I want playing on my lutes. I make another attempt.
“How far away is your next town?”
“Whistlin’ Kettle.”
I nearly whistle, myself. It’s all the way on the coast.
“Come by the shop in the morning, I’ll set you right. Anyone can point you there.”
He nods, but I doubt I’ll be selling any lutes.
***
I get home late. The dog is waiting in front of my door. It’s a lot bigger than I expected, almost the size of Nona’s old sewing trunk. It wags its tail as I approach; maybe it knows my scent from the quilt. No sooner has the thought crossed my mind than the creature shakes itself all over, as if to shed the memory of being trapped.
I really can’t risk it attracting the huntsman. This close to the Blackforest, that ghost is very much a presence: sightings are rare, but not unheard of. He isn’t reputed to be friendly.
I let us in through my workshop and perform my usual check of the room: there are my chisels, my handsaws, my files. Coils of gut-string, fat pots of varnish and glue. Lutes large and small, displayed on stands or upturned on my workbench. The dog makes a silent lap of the space, sniffing. It’s strange to have company again after dark.
I know of only three ways to deal with a ghost: dissolve it in salt water, strike it with lightning, snare it with magical thread. None of which I’m capable of doing. What I do know how to do is string a lute, and as my eyes rove the room I’m struck by an idea. That string tonight shouldn’t have snapped at the peg. Surely its weak point was the yarn? Unless the yarn itself was special.
Nona used to make it sound as though magic was like hickory nuts, lying around for the taking if you knew where to look. I didn’t buy it. I may have rolled my eyes while she sewed sigils into quilts and blushed as she lectured shepherds about the dyes they used on their wool, but secretly I knew: Nona was special. She knew more than the rest of us mortals.
I thought she might even live forever.
When it became clear that she wouldn’t, I should have known that she would go to the coast. Places like Whistling Kettle make their fortune from people like Nona, people who can afford to uproot for the last handful of their days so that their souls go straight into the sea.
I told her she was selfish and a coward, choosing to die in a place she’d never been. Denying me her final hours after we’d leaned on one another so long.
The truth is, I’d been counting on having her ghost. On her sticking around until I was ready to let go.
It takes a while to inventory the contents of Nona’s sewing chest, but eventually I’m certain: I don’t have red thread, like in the song, and I also don’t have any lilac, like my quilt. What I do have is a bird’s nest in a dozen different shades and no way to tell if it is magical or not.
I pick up the quilt, fingering the hole, and the solution comes clear. I look from the dog to the quilt, and then I take it to my workroom and use my smallest chisel to pick out the stitches.
***
When the bearded bard arrives at my door that next morning, he finds my workshop locked and shuttered. He goes back to town to double check the address, and the Patrollers, sensing trouble, accompany him back to my home. Once they’ve picked my locks, they find my workshop messy with cloth: deep fireglow orange and spring-sky blue and all the greens of the meadow. On the workbench lies an unfiled report, Suspected Ghost Activity. They all pause for a moment of silence. Then the Patrollers send the bard on his way with a few spare pegs and a lute for his trouble. He’s enough of a musician to choose the best of the lutes.
The first time I hear this story from a stage, I go home to Catch and laugh until I cry. My ghost-dog spins a few anxious circles before leaping back into his lute, melting into shadow behind the lilac strings. It’s an old habit. When we first left Cyra, I used to play him back in whenever anything upset me, afraid that if my tears fell on his fur he might dissolve.
“No, no.” I tell him. “Come out. It’s one of your nights; we’re taking a walk.”
The tide is low enough to walk along the beach. The night I chose not to hand Catch to the Patrollers, I promised instead to bring him to the sea. But he never goes into the waves.
I sing him our song, as much as I can remember. He can hear the rest in the morning; the bard who sang it is coming to try out a lute. Catch rolls in the sand and shakes out his fur. Then he takes off at a gallop, sand a-flinging, howling for joy beneath the moonless sky.