Once upon a time, 2

Long ago, there was a baker in a small town. Each morning, he would add butter and sugar to flour and magicks, and hundreds of delicacies would line up in his window, light as air and as fragrant.

On the outskirts of the town was a painter. She lived in what had once been a stable made of stones. All day long she mixed colours and water and imaginings, and canvases gorgeous with sunshine and fields lined the walls.

In the afternoons, after the redemption of morning light and before the dappled forgiveness of later, she would remember that she was hungry. She put her brushes into pots and tuppence in her pocket and walked the old pebbly path to town.

Two cakes, or half a dozen biscuits. Perhaps a twist of sweet bread. Her hands were stained and striped with paint. Green-and-purple trelliswork decorated her fingers, her palms spotted with rose madder, carmine beneath her fingernails, her knuckles a sunset. The baker watched her hands and saw magicks, which he made into cakes as light and golden as the wheat at dawn.

Moral: One never really knows what one's handiwork is.