The Church of the Wood: A Faerie Story

The Church of the Wood

  Text copyright 2013 E.J. Weber

  Cover Illustration copyright 2013 Eli Weber

  Part 1

  The Wood

  At the edge of the land of Calundra lay the wood. A little ways into the wood, where the strange trees began to gather, some long deceased soul—brave or foolhardy, perhaps—had built a small stone church. Down a narrow dirt path from the church, a quarter of an hour for the nervous walker, lay the village.

  This was the closest to the wood that any normal human dared to live. Where the dirt path ended was where the village began, just outside of the trees’ shadowy influence. Once inside the village, the dark trees fell back, and then the landscape gave way to houses and streets and beyond them carefully cultivated farmland.

  The village had no name, nor did the church, nor did the wood itself. They needed none; they were known simply as the Wood, the Church of the Wood, and the Village of the Wood, for there was no other wood beside it. This anomaly fed tales, and tales of the Wood and the Church and the Village were many; a few true, many false, some hard to tell the difference.

  It was a hardy folk that took up residence so close to the whispering trees; it was no wonder it was said that those who lived near the Wood had always lived there, that no casual visitors ever came, and that none ever moved into the Village when a family dwindled. After all, who would choose to live at such a dark oppressive border when the rest of the land was full of bounty and sunshine? That is not to say that there were no other trees apart from the Wood. Calundra was graced by rolling hills and green meadows, fields and fells, and in them were trees of all kinds, but all of them were ordinary trees, planted by ordinary human hands.

  These were the trees that bore fruit in season, that gave shade in heat, that sheltered nests in springtime; trees that acted in the ways that normal trees should. Unlike the trees in the Wood, where one tree might blossom huge snowy flowers whilst another’s branches were bare and leafless. And a neighboring tree might hold a rich red fruit that was neither apple nor cherry but something else altogether, a flavor which none knew because none had ever tasted it.

  Indeed, no human hand picked the fruit of the Wood, however beguiling its look, and no axe ever felled a sapling, no matter how slim and tempting. Just as no children played amongst the trees, dodging in and out, and even the most curious of folk knew better than to stray a foot from the path.

  Other than the priest, the path was trod only by the Villagers and that but once a week on the holy day, when they made their anxious pilgrimage to be blessed. In a sense, then, it could be said that one human lived in the Wood, for the trees so surrounded the gate of the Church and the fence that encircled the cemetery in the back, the simple garden and well to either side, that the Church was never free of its presence.

  So little sunlight filtered into the sanctuary that the torches were always lit, and it took a strong mind to weather the dimness and the solitude; the Village folk murmured that no normal human could bear it. So the priest of the Church could always be said to be peculiar and the longer he remained in the Wood the more prominent the peculiarity that held him there must by necessity become.

  Because of this, over the years, there were priests that came and never stayed, but were gone like thieves in the night, and then there were others that became like the stones of the small church building itself, worn and round and immovable.

  Such a one was Father Brion, with a beard as white as the snowy white flowers and a face as wrinkled as the bark of the strange trees themselves. It was a day after the holy day, when he first saw the faerie child. Everyone knew better than to talk to a faerie, no matter how small and pitiful, no matter how sad-looking and lost.

  Father Brion had lived in the Church of the Wood long enough to know its ways—to feel as though he had lived there always and would live there ever after, even though it had only been five years since he had come. There were tales that the Wood held faeries—for it was a faerie Wood, there was no doubt about that—but when Father Brion asked in the Village there was none living there that had seen a faerie, or survived to tell the tale if they had done.

  That was why the Wood was left untouched, even in the coldest of winters when there was nothing left to burn to keep warm, and why the fruit from the trees was not eaten even in the longest of droughts when the ribs showed on the cows, and why the depth of the Wood was unknown, when the whole of the rest of the land had been traveled and cleared and mapped, its cities meticulously planned, its villages judiciously spaced, its crops thoughtfully chosen.

  The Wood was wild, as were the animals in it, and it was the last wild place left. Full of brooding, bright-eyed creatures that gave out eerie calls at night. To step into its trees, to take of its fruit, to break its limbs, was to be devoured by those creatures in a swift and bloody retribution.

  If Father Brion had been an ordinary priest, he would have been sorely afraid of the faerie child. As it was, he was extremely cautious. He pretended he could not see her, thankful that she never left the Wood but only flitted behind the thick trees to spy on him. She took to following him whenever he took the path to the Village, a disturbing black-eyed sprite, half-hidden by white flowers and red fruits and dark branches.

  Although he did not acknowledge her, she would linger at the Wood’s edge to watch him enter the Village’s cobblestone streets and disappear behind its brown brick houses. She would be there upon his return, hiding behind some great dark trunk, her pale skin gleaming ghost-like in the Wood’s perpetual twilight. She would watch him trudge back to the Church with his burdens, keeping pace with him behind the trees. To be a priest of the god was to feel compassion, and Father Brion struggled not to pity her as he firmly closed the gate to the Church, lumbering through the front doors and into the gloomy sanctuary beyond.

  There was only one faith in the land of Calundra, and there was only one god, so like the Wood and the Church and the Village, the god did not need a name. Not everyone followed the god, though most believed in it, for who could doubt the god’s mark? Certainly not any who had ever been granted one, or any who had ever attempted to enter a church without it.

  For the god was good but strict, turning a kind and gentle face to its followers, a stern and unyielding back to all the rest. Loving to those whom it marked, jealous of their allegiance to its commandments, utterly without mercy to those who failed at them. There were three virtues that made the mark, and these were the same ones that held it. Peace, purity, and truth. Without them, the mark could not be given; if they were not kept, the mark would fade, and forever be gone.

  A god like this might not seem to draw priests with an over-abundance of compassion, and yet it was because of this very same rigidity of belief that Father Brion felt keenly how lonely the faerie child must be, how lonely anyone must be who stood outside the grace of his god. He reminded himself, as he stoked the fire with the dried bundles of grasses that always burned so fitfully, with an abundance of black smoke that rose through the Church’s small chimney, that the faerie child was not human, and could not be said to feel the same things as a human child.

  But Father Brion had not always been a country priest, nor was he as ignorant as the Villagers, canny as they were at tilling their fields and raising their stock. It might even be true that he knew something of faeries that was never told in any of the tales, true or false. Whatever the reason, that night after supper Father Brion at length considered the remains of his meal, the meat and the crusts, and then carefully wrapped them in a clean napkin and laid it as close to one of the trees as he could bring himself to come. And this was how one could tell that living in the Church
of the Wood had made Father Brion more peculiar, for no normal human would ever think to feed a faerie child.

  He never saw the sad-eyed sprite take the offering of food, but the napkin was empty in the morning when he retrieved it. Another creature of the Wood might have consumed it, but for the fact that the napkin was always folded, as if by nimble white fingers, and it was always in the same place where he had left it the night before. Father Brion was contented by this arrangement; the faerie child still peeked at him while he weeded the garden, while he drew water from the well, while he prayed in the cemetery for the souls of the departed, but he felt his conscience at ease knowing that she was not starving.

  The months passed and the weather became warmer and more humid. He made his trips into the Village less, and he sat outside more on the bench in the part of the garden that held the flowers. Sharing his food became so automatic that he didn’t even think about it, and once at the pub in the Village he had found himself placing his leftovers in a napkin before he realized that the napkin belonged to the owner, and he couldn’t take it with him. He no longer felt a trickle of foreboding whenever he spotted a movement in the Wood; indeed, he almost thought of the faerie girl now as company, shy and distant as she was.

  It was the day he retrieved his napkin from under the tree and found the golden leaves wrapped up in it that he realized in doing something right, he had also possibly done something very, very wrong. They were not ordinary leaves from trees planted by ordinary human hands: these were leaves from a tree of the Wood. They were faerie leaves, and everyone knew that faerie leaves were cursed. Father Brion clutched the napkin to his chest, where his heart pounded, and faced one of the hardest decisions of his pure, peaceful and, if all truths were known, very eventful life.

 

  The Child

  The leaves were clearly a gift. If he gave them back, it was possible that he might offend the faerie child—she might even be driven to speak to him about it; if he kept them, the Wood itself might be angered by the loss—it might send its creatures to wreak their vengeance on him. Father Brion’s weak blue eyes scanned the nearby trees for an answer, a glint of gold in their branches to show him where the leaves had come from, a hint of pale arm to indicate where the faerie child was right now. There was nothing but green in the trees that he could see, there was nothing but black in the spaces between them.

  A faerie child must have the right to give faerie leaves, Father Brion reasoned. And being a man of conviction, he took the napkin and brought the leaves inside the Church without a backward glance to see whether a huge shaggy wolf prowled after him, intent on snatching them back, or a wisp of a girl trailed after him, to know that her gift pleased him. He moved down the single main aisle of the small sanctuary and shook the strange golden leaves out into the offering bowl, with less brilliant coins that faithful Villagers had brought to the Church in order to keep their priest from finding himself in want.

  When Father Brion’s inevitable replacement finally made his way into the sanctuary of the Church of the Wood, just short of fifteen years from this day, the golden faerie leaves were still in the exact same state that they had fallen, in the same bowl, on the same unadorned stone altar. They had neither withered nor faded. No human hand had ever had the courage to remove them, even though they were worth a fortune, for gold in Calundra was almost unheard of, and what little there was had all been used up.

  After that, the faerie child left gifts for Father Brion quite often. All of them were more practical than the golden leaves: a wooden knife that was as sharp as iron and never dulled, a bag of seeds that grew into blossoms that looked like giant bluebells, an orange vegetable shaped like a crescent moon that tasted of anise and cucumber.

  He agonized over whether or not to eat this but, in the end, he felt that since he had first decided to keep the leaves he had committed to a certain course of action, and there was no sense now in being faint-hearted. He prayed over each gift that he received and trusted in the god to protect him. There were many prayers that could be said to the god and Father Brion knew them all by heart, just as the faithful knew all of the words to the weekly blessing.

  The blessing that the priest gave on holy days was the main function of the Church of the Wood, apart from markings, bindings, and funerals. There had always been a priest in the Church here and there would always be one, although of all the churches in the land it was the hardest to fill. In any other village, or in one of the cities, the faithful would come to pray often, not just for the holy day, and a church was a busy place, day or night.

  Here in the Wood, the cool stone benches that sat in rows on either side of the main aisle were almost always empty, just as the offering bowl at the front was not even slightly full. At the back of the Church to the left was a kitchen and living area, and then to the right was a bedroom. These were humbler spaces than in any other church, though not uncomfortable. The god could be said to send either his best or his worst priests to the Church of the Wood, to inhabit its leafy exile, depending on whose opinion on the topic was asked.

  Father Brion doubted the faerie child would ever have spoken to him if he hadn’t dropped his pendant down the well. Every priest wore the god’s pendant—indeed, it was the very thing that made the god’s mark—and a priest was charged at all times to guard it, so Father Brion almost never took it off. He wore it even when he did the most menial of chores, such as fetching water from the well.

  One morning he had bent over to look for the bucket, which he had sent down but would not come up again. It was caught on something hard, and his eyesight was not what it used to be. He leaned farther and farther into the well, peering deeper and deeper to try to maneuver the bucket past some blurry impediment, until the pendant slipped from his neck and tumbled with a tinkle and a splash into the water. There it sank to the very bottom of the well, past where the bucket was stuck on a dark tree root, one which had pushed its way in through the thick stone of the well’s wall.

  He tried everything he could think of to get it back. He made poles out of various household objects, strapped together, and with these he fished for it, determinedly and unsuccessfully. He yanked on the rope that held the jammed bucket until it threatened to break. He prayed beside the well, the prayer for finding something that had been lost, until he found that he was losing his voice. At last, he gave up and went despairingly to bed, feeling that his neck was naked without the pendant and that what had just happened was by far the stupidest thing he had ever done.

  It was the first night in nearly six months that he forgot to share his dinner with the child, for the simple reason that he was so upset he forgot to eat dinner at all. When he woke in the morning, groggy and stiff, with aching arms, he immediately stumbled back out to the well. He had no new ideas about how to solve his problem—for a priest cannot serve as a priest without the god’s pendant—and it was then that his stomach growled and he realized he had eaten neither dinner the night before nor breakfast yet this morning. And then he saw the faerie child, and felt a pang of guilt, for that meant she had not eaten either.

  She did not appear to be hungry, though, any more than she seemed to be lonely or lost. He could see her more clearly than ever before, which might not be too clearly, considering his failing eyesight. She stood between two trees, not more than a few feet from him on the other side of the Church fence, watching him boldly.

  A pale hand was outstretched to either trunk and her dark tangled hair was full of green and gold leaves. She wore what seemed to him to be a loose white nightgown delicately embroidered with tiny blue spots the shape of which he could not, from this distance, make out. On her chest, gleaming silver in the dim light, lay the god’s pendant. Its heavy chain was wrapped around her neck, and its length came almost to her waist because she was so small.

  She had come inside the fence while he slept—well, that wasn’t impossible, though difficult—although if she had tried to enter the sanctuary of the Church itself, th
e god would have prevented it. And clearly she had succeeded where he had not, in retrieving the pendant from the well. He did not know if she knew what it meant, or how dear it was to him; she could be cruelly mocking him right now or she might, just might, have meant to be helpful.

  He stared at her, wanting so badly to ask her to bring it to him that he almost forgot and spoke to her, but then he remembered himself. Worse even than losing the god’s pendant would be to fall under a faerie’s spell, if the staggering extent of two such misfortunes could be compared.

  It was said that the voice of a faerie was so lovely it could not be resisted, so powerful it would be given anything it should want, so persuasive that it could convince an honorable man to betray even his dearest friend. There were no faeries that he knew of left in the land of Calundra, and whether there were more faeries left in the Wood other than this child he did not know, but he doubted the child would have ventured from its safety if there had been even one.

  The Faerie Wars had been endless and terrible; their history was as dark and convoluted as the Wood that lay around him, blotting out the early morning sun. He had been a fool to feed the faerie child, and now he was paying for it. It was exactly the sort of decision that had brought him to the Church of the Wood in the first place, those five long years ago. He could only hope that the god would forgive him, once again, for being too kind.

  Father Brion sat down heavily on the ground, felled by his shock. He didn’t expect the faerie child to care that he had fallen. He didn’t expect her to run up to him when he collapsed. In fact, it was the last thing he expected her to do, but it was exactly what she did. She vaulted the fence effortlessly and then hovered near him, chattering worriedly in the faerie tongue.

  She had one of the sweetest voices he had ever heard, not beautiful in any human way but lovely in a faerie one, like the moan of the wind through a dark branch or the tapping of raindrops on a hollow log. The experience of having her speak to him was confusing, but not threatening. It suddenly occurred to him, as the chain swung heavily in time with her little movements, that the god would never let her wear the pendant if she was evil at heart.

  “I don’t understand you, I’m afraid,” Father Brion told her hesitantly. This made the faerie child stop chattering instantly. She stared at him with wide, bottomless eyes. “Do you speak the human tongue, my child?”

  The child seemed to consider this, and then took a breath and replied, falteringly, “I know it but... I’ve never used it.” She hugged herself tightly at this, seeming proud to get it out.

  “That will do well enough,” Father Brion observed gently. “I see you have acquired something that belongs to me. How did you manage to fetch it from the well?”

  The faerie child smiled brightly and her small pale face lit with enthusiasm. “I climbed down into it.” She darted away from him to the well, although she didn’t need to go far. He was afraid for a moment that she would scramble into it to show him how it was done, but instead she stopped at the edge and pointed to the bucket, now dangling in its proper place over the top. “I found this as well!” Her voice was triumphant; unaware that the object in question was now useless, having suffered a large hole in its side.

  “Thank you, very much,” Father Brion replied gravely. “Now, if I may ask, would you be willing to give me back that necklace? I’m sure that I can find you another one which will fit you better, one that will feel lighter to have on.” The old priest knew that there was no such thing in the Church, and he had no great certainly he would find one in the Village, which wasn’t much given to idle trinkets, but he silently promised to the god that he would make one for her out of the petty coins in the offering bowl if he had to, in order to keep from being false.

  The faerie girl looked at him curiously. She picked up the pendant with one slim hand and tested its weight against her palm. “I don’t think it’s so heavy. But of course I will give it back to you. It’s yours—I meant to do so all along.” She got down from the well and skipped closer to him, a bit shyer now. Pulling it easily off her neck, she held out the oversized chain with the tips of her fingers, the pendant swinging perilously close to the ground. But when Father Brion reached out to take it from her hand, he accidentally brushed against the faerie’s skin, because he wasn’t good at judging distances. The faerie girl let out a squeal and dropped the chain in the grass.

  “You shocked me!” she hissed, her black eyes snapping.

  “I’m very sorry.” He meant this, but he didn’t let it prevent him from snatching up the chain and putting the god’s pendant back where it belonged. He immediately felt the world come into focus; he felt the welcoming breath of the god on his face. Even though the faerie girl was glaring at him as though she might summon some very wild, very angry, very large creature from out of the Wood to punish him, he was absolutely certain that everything was going to be all right. He may have been foolish before to feed her, and he may have been stupid to drop his pendant, but there was a reason he was certain she would never harm him, and it wasn’t a foolish or stupid one at all.

  He could see very clearly on her hand, pulsing lightly where she had hefted the pendant against it, the outline of the god’s mark.

  Father Brion was very, very hungry, and quite amazingly chilled and tired. Sitting on the ground was not good for a man of his age. He rolled himself awkwardly to his feet, and began to shuffle towards the doors of the Church. “Come and have breakfast with me, little one,” he called over his shoulder. He did not stop to see that she followed, but he did pause once he was inside the sanctuary, turning around to catch her standing tremulously on the threshold behind him. It was another test, although he didn’t think the mark could be wrong; but the child came no further. “It’s all right, you can come in,” he offered, in case she waited for an invitation.

  Cautiously, the pale bare feet crept over the threshold and onto the smooth stone floor. The old priest gave a sigh, one he barely noticed himself, and continued on to the kitchen. He could feel the curious faerie child’s presence behind him, but he busied himself with stoking the fire and setting out the plates, and left her free to creep around. She touched the hooked rug and the wooden chairs and the chipped teacups.

  Eventually when everything was ready, he sat down across from her, and poured the strong brown tea and set out the thick slices of bread, and folded his hands in prayer for it all. Then he ate with gusto, expecting the child to do so as well. Instead, she picked daintily at her helping, eating little crumbs that broke off from the bread when she poked at it, copying him in drinking but taking only minute sips of the tea while wrinkling her nose at the steam that came from the cup.

  “Aren’t you hungry?” he asked incredulously.

  The faerie child only blinked at him.

  “You ate all of the food that I left out for you,” he said, almost accusingly. He had thought she would be ravenous by now. If she had not actually eaten the food he had so carefully left, he would be rather upset. His means were limited; he had given her what he could barely afford, and often gone to bed slightly hungry himself.

  The faerie child had the grace to look abashed.

  “Yes. But it wasn’t the food itself... that I needed.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked curiously. “Why else would you eat it?”

  The faerie girl tucked in her dark eyebrows and fidgeted with her hands, running a finger along the god’s mark, a set of three interlocking circles for the three essential virtues of the god. The mark that would always require her to be truthful.

  “There was something in the food...”

  Father Brion smiled, encouragingly. Perhaps her command of the human language was not as good as he’d thought.

  “And what was in the food, other than food?” He tried not to chuckle.

  The faerie girl sucked in her breath and flashed a shy glance at him, dropping her gaze to her hands after trying in vain to hold the priest’s watery blue eyes. Father Brion thought
for a moment that she would simply refuse to answer, which was much better than telling a lie, but then she lifted up her head, shook back her curly black hair—which definitely needed combing—and then said one word very timidly, in a tone so low he could hardly make it out.

  “Love.”

  Father Brion just nodded, as though he’d known this all along.

 

  The Village Shop

  It is not easy to raise a faerie child, and Father Brion found this out. She would disappear for days at a time and then show up, unexpectedly, and proceed to talk to him non-stop. Other days she was quiet and calm, though flighty, and seemed to want no more than to wander back and forth through the small Church and touch everything in it five times.

  He tried to make a bed for her in the corner of the kitchen nearest to the fire, but she complained that the blankets were itchy. She brought in handfuls of dark green leaves and laid them on the cold stone floor in the opposite corner, and there she would sleep curled up like a cat, an unusual cat who didn’t like the fire.

  He thought she looked cold, sleeping only in her thin white dress, but she insisted that she wasn’t. On closer inspection, the dress looked as though it had been made from tightly woven plant-like fibers, and the blue dots were shaped like the giant bluebells she had given him to plant in his garden.

  He bought her a pair of shoes, but she wouldn’t wear them. They sat in a dusty corner of the living area like an eccentric decoration. He picked them up one day and surprised a twitchy brown mouse that dropped to the floor and was off in the blink of an eye. The faerie child was angry with him for this. She told him she’d given the mouse permission to use the shoe as its home. After these and other experiences, he worried less about her physical well-being and more about her mental adjustment.

  She told him that her father had died soon after her mother, who was taken after bearing a stillborn child. It explained the sad faerie songs that she often sang, which he couldn’t help enjoying, even though they were mournful. When he expressed surprise that a faerie woman would lose her life in childbirth, the faerie child told him that her father had said her mother was weak from the loss of the woods and the deaths of so many of her sisters and cousins.

  Father Brion didn’t know what to say to this. He had never cut down a tree in his life, but he still felt responsible. He didn’t question her more about her life in the Wood and he did his best to overlook her eccentricities when she couldn’t be prevailed upon to try to be more like a human child. He often found objects around the Church missing, nothing valuable but necessary items like the carry sack he took to the Village or a coil of rope that he used to hang out his wash. He tried to impress sternly upon the child that to take something without asking was wrong. Her response surprised him.

  “But they don’t belong to you, do they? They belong to the god. The god doesn’t mind if I take them.”

  “Yes...” Father Brion answered slowly. “But I need them to be there when I want to use them.” The carry sack and the rope returned, and he congratulated himself on teaching the faerie child something about the human concept of ownership. Until he came in one day and found all of the coins in the offering bowl missing. This caused him a moment of intense panic.

  It was all he had to live on, and he had just been about to buy food stuffs and supplies. The golden leaves were still there, but they wouldn’t be accepted by any of the Village folk as currency, and they were so strange and glittering that Father Brion didn’t even want to pick them up. He found the faerie child outside, up in a tree, as she often was, and hanging upside down so that her tangled black curls fell from her pale forehead in a long sweep below her head.

  “Child, did you take the coins from the offering?” Father Brion did not moderate his frustration.

  “Yes.”

  At least the faerie child had the mark, to encourage her to be truthful.

  “What did you do with them?” He had a small hope that she might simply have taken them somewhere to play with, and could easily bring them back. He might even still have time to make it to the Village today.

  “I threw them in the lake.” There was a lake near the Village, which the Village people did not use because it was too close to the Wood, and said to be tainted.

  “You what?” Father Brion shouted. The faerie child swung right-side up on the branch and stared at him. He had never raised his voice with her before. She didn’t look frightened, only impressed.

  “The fish wanted them. They like the way that they sparkle.” Father Brion had thought it a shame that the Village folk were wasting the use of a perfectly good lake because of their superstitious fear. Now he wasn’t so sure.

  “You can never do that again. Those coins buy me food from the Village and other things that I need. They’re very important.” He didn’t shout this because he was a patient man by nature, and anyhow he didn’t feel angry anymore, just defeated.

  The faerie girl perked up. “I can give you food from the Wood,” she offered. She plucked a ripe red fruit from the tree and offered it to him. The priest was reminded of certain tales about strange trees and their fruit, and he didn’t reach out to take it.

  “And do you think the fruit from that tree is safe for a human?” he asked her, sternly.

  The faerie girl seemed to consider this as she bit into the fruit herself and a red liquid gushed down her chin. She wiped it away with her hand and devoured the rest, heedless of the red drops that fell on her snowy white dress. She licked her fingers, and then looked at him.

  “Not entirely,” she admitted.

  Father Brion sighed. The fruit smelled delicious, but he had thought as much. “I’ve led a good life in the service of the god. I have no wish to tamper with my last years. Now, there must be no more taking of coins, or rope, or bags, or anything else.”

  The faerie child nodded, and then slipped up the branches of the dark tree, vaulted to another, and was gone. Father Brion thought that he would just have to tighten his belt, or ask for charity from one of the faithful, but the next morning he found the coins back in the offering bowl. They were damp with lake water, and a trail of wet splotches led down the main aisle to the sanctuary and out the front door of the Church, which had been left wide open.

  It was not the last bit of trouble that the faerie child caused. She had developed a taste for a certain cookie he bought in the Village, and as he had taught her not to steal, she begged him for it instead. Since she ate so little else, he soon felt that her diet must not be healthy. He tried to moderate her obsession with it, but he found himself unable to refuse her, no matter how he tried. That was how he discovered that even faerie children can have stomachaches.

  “You must stop asking me for them,” he told her as he sat in his chair and she lay on her little bed of leaves, moaning. He would have liked to pat her back to soothe her, but the faerie child didn’t like to be touched. “You ate too many and now you are sick,” he said.

  “But you gave them to me,” she said accusingly.

  It was as good a time as any to talk about this. Maybe he could even make the child understand what she had done. “First I said no, and then you begged me for them. I didn’t want to give them to you, but you insisted. You must not ask again, once I’ve said no.”

  The faerie child rolled around on the ground, trying to get comfortable. “You didn’t have to give them to me,” she argued.

  “Actually, I did. You made me, and I didn’t like you very much for it.” He didn’t want to hurt her feelings, but she needed to know the effect that her power could have. He had felt a strong sense of resentment as her words compelled him to do something his conscience knew that he should not. If he was not so peculiar himself, he might even have hated her for it.

  “You don’t like me?” the faerie girl quavered. Father Brion doubted very much that a faerie could cry, yet the sick little girl sounded perilously close to tears.

  “No, I like you very much. But I don’t want yo
u to tell me what to do. You must not insist or order about a human, just because you can. It’s wrong, and it may cause you to lose the trust of the god.”

  The faerie child sat up and looked at him very seriously. Her pale skin still had a greenish hue, her black eyes were troubled, and her pale pink mouth was unhappy. “I didn’t mean to make you do anything. I just wanted them so very, very much.”

  “Then you must be very, very careful when you want something,” he told her. The faerie child held up her palm, and tilted it, to better see the glow from the mark.

  “I will.”

  Father Brion felt his shoulders loosen. The topic had been a volatile one. It could have gone much, much differently. With a wild, full-grown faerie he doubted very much that it would have gone well at all.

  Instead, he felt it was a start.

  He knew that she was trying to control herself when she began to ask him to take her into the Village on his shopping day, and he was able to refuse her. He didn’t know why she wanted to come, other than the fact that she was immensely curious, for it was clear she was also terrified.

  She never even tried to go out from the trees when he took the last step off the dirt path, and she certainly didn’t need his permission to do so. But still she begged him to take her along with him, although she never went so far as to make him do it. Eventually one day he gave in, mostly as a way to reward her for exercising so much restraint, although he made it abundantly clear that it was his decision, and that he had willingly changed his mind.

  The Villagers already knew about the faerie child. Because she was marked, she could come into the Church on holy days to be blessed. The first time it had happened, all of the faithful Villagers had fled, and he had found himself pursuing them down the path, explaining all the while. Unfortunately, they were faster than he was, and much more motivated to be gone. He went into the Village the next day to talk to them all, one by one, house by house. It was not an easy task, and he left feeling that he had not convinced them of anything much, other than that possible rumors of his growing senility were not unfounded.

  And yet the faithful were drawn back to the Church, by the mark, and so was the child. Over the course of many tense holy days it became an uneasy truce, with the Villagers pretending they could not see the child, and the child coming in the back after the service had started, and speaking to no one.

  Perhaps this was why the child wanted to come into the Village, to see where the other people lived. He saw her watching them every week, fascinated, listening to everything that they said and taking in every detail of their clothing. If there was ever a human village to tolerate a faerie child it was the Village of the Wood, and yet still Father Brion had a strong sense of foreboding when he brought the faerie child into the Village Shop.

  She had a way of going about unnoticed when she really wanted to, and she was using this with all her might right now. No one saw her. Her strange little face was happier than he had ever seen it, as she patted the multitude of items in the shop: clothing, shoes, bread, meat, cheese, utensils, barrels of flour and sugar, jars of candies, shovels and farm tools and crockery, more human items that she had ever before seen and in greater variety. He had almost lost track of her as he went over his needs with the shopkeeper, and then he heard her sweet little faerie voice ring out,

  “You put that down!”

  There were people in the shop holding purses, customers with arms full of purchases, an assistant who was stacking boxes of cookies, a woman holding a basket of eggs, and the shopkeeper who was holding Father Brion’s list. All of it tumbled to the ground. There were cries of consternation. A Village girl began to slip on the broken eggs, and a baby was crying, and the boxes had tumbled at a jerky move from the shop assistant. It was chaos and, in the midst of it all, a short scruffy boy darted out through the door of the shop, nearly knocking down an elderly woman wearing a tartan scarf.

  Father Brion abandoned the list, which was being kicked around on the floor anyhow, and went over to the faerie child, who stood in the door to the shop with a frown on her face, gazing out. “We’d best go now, child,” he told her quickly. He did not know how many people inside realized that she was the one responsible, and he didn’t want to find out. He would come back later with her and apologize to the shopkeeper, and try to explain.

  “Why did you do that?” he asked the faerie child wearily, as they walked back to the Church.

  She tossed her long black tangles, which she’d never been willing to comb out, although the priest had given her a dainty wooden hair brush and explained its uses. “That big boy was stealing coins from people’s pockets and taking pieces of candy!” she exclaimed.

  “Are you sure?” Father Brion asked worriedly. He found it hard to think ill of people, and the faerie child knew so little of human ways.

  “Yes,” she snapped, her black eyes flashing. “And you said the god didn’t like that.” The faerie child directed this at him, primly.

  Father Brion hid a smile; the faerie child was a reformed sinner, and she was self-righteous.

 

  The Lake

  Taming a wild thing will not make it domestic. The faerie girl was tired of the uncomfortable heat of tending the fire, and the smell of the priest’s dirty clothes when she washed them, and the squishy texture of human food as she prepared it for eating. Father Brion did not ask her to do these things, but he was getting older and frailer, and she was getting bigger and stronger.

  She did not look like a child anymore; she looked like a girl of fourteen or fifteen, although she was a faerie so her actual years didn’t matter. She found it bizarre that humans actually kept count. Her hair was black and curly and fell to her waist, and her eyes were black and striking with long sweeping lashes and her skin was soft as a trailing cloud with just the barest hint of peachy color. She wasn’t sure if she was pretty for a faerie—there were none of her people left to tell her—but she knew she looked as a faerie should: black and black and almost white. Like the bodies of the tall dark trees themselves, and even more so now, with their branches covered in snow.

  The icy water at the lake was nicely chilling to her bare feet. She sat on a patch of melting snow and inhaled the fresh air of winter, so that it would know how much she appreciated it. She picked up a few lightly frosted rocks and tossed them into the lake, which had not yet frozen. The fish liked to see new things, and they would swarm over to inspect them as they fell down. The fish in the lake were elongated and slippery, almost like eels, but not quite. They lived too close to the Wood to be normal fish, and they knew it, and weren’t afraid of what it meant. Unlike the people, who preferred to deny things to themselves.

  The people from the Village still didn’t like her. She looked around to where the rooftops started, which was not so very far. The path to the Wood was on her right, and the Wood was behind the lake as well, but she had decided she liked the far side from it, the sunnier side on which she sat now. The animals from the Wood had told her not to sit here, that it wasn’t safe, but she couldn’t always care what they thought. They had also told her not to help the old priest, when his funny necklace fell down into the well, and they had been wrong about that. The faerie girl suddenly shivered. Without the nice priest, she didn’t know that she would have survived.

  Faerie folk don’t take well to their family dying. They never needed to; faerie folk don’t die. Everyone knows that a wild faerie will live forever in its wood or as close to forever as anyone is likely to come. So when the humans started to cut the trees and kill the faerie folk, they were unprepared for death. There was a chain of catastrophic losses. Faeries didn’t know how to grieve—to bury a friend or a brother and then move on. That was a human thing; humans had always had to do it, but faeries almost never had. It was remarkably difficult to kill a faerie, but not impossible, and the worst of it was that to kill one faerie was often to kill many. The faeries left behind missed their kin so much that they stopped caring, and fade
d away, letting their spirits wander off.

  That was what had happened to her father. She vowed it wouldn’t happen to her, though. She must be strong. That was why she had talked to the priest, when the creatures had told her not to, and why she had taken the mark, without quite knowing what it was. She was the last of her kind, the last faerie in the last wood, and if she wasn’t connected to something, more than just herself, she would float away and the Wood would die. It would be as though there had never been faeries or woods or magic at all.

  The girl went over to the lake and waded her bare feet into it, crunching back and forth across the pebbly shore, and talking to the eel-like fish that swirled in the depths of it. They were very strong swimmers, and the lake was very deep, but unlike her, they did not like it as much when it was cold. Not that they felt the cold, but because it killed the algae on the rocks, and that was one of their favorite snacks.

  The faerie was so busy chatting with the lake that she hardly noticed the two human boys approaching her. If she had been truly wild, and had never slept in a human house or eaten human food, she would have been far away before they even got close. But no one from the Village had ever tried to harm her, and Father Brion was unfailingly kind, so she thought much better of humans than she ought, despite her knowledge of the ancient stories. And they were on her before she even suspected they were anything other than strolling nearby.

  One boy grabbed the faerie girl and held her tight. He was a mean boy, with a mean mouth, and he was bigger than her, even though she was tall. The thick arms that locked around her burned like a wayward spark from the fire. At first she was too shocked to do anything about it, and the second boy caught her attention because she thought she knew him. There was a satisfied malice in his expression. He was short and dirty and his hair was mousy, although not in a good way, like a sweet twitchy brown mouse, but in an unappealing way that was instead rather lank and dull. The faerie girl struggled against the grip of the meaty boy, who was truly hurting her without even trying, and gasped, “Let go! Let go!”

  The short boy, whose name she now remembered was Gleason, leered at her and said, “I thought you liked humans. You’re always hanging around that priest. You even come into the Village and interfere with his shopping.” The faerie had a revelation; this boy was the thief, the one that she had yelled at all those years ago.

  She felt a wave of remorse that she had used her power on him. She’d been undisciplined back then. It had taken her years of practice and willpower to gain control of her voice, instead of unconsciously using it to get whatever she wanted. No wonder the boy didn’t like her—it was a side effect of using her power. But he and his friend still had no right to hold onto her, and to hurt her, and to insult her. Besides, he’d had years to get over it.

  “Tell your friend to release me, or I won’t be held responsible.” She said this in as evil a tone as she could manage, without actually compelling him to obey. She tried to squirm her bare skin away from the oafish boy’s contact, wishing she had woven longer sleeves to her white and blue gown.

  Gleason was grinning like it was all a fun game. She remembered his name now from the explanation and apology she’d had to make to the shopkeeper, which was pointless because he hadn’t believed her story at all. She’d never gone back into the shop, though she knew Father Brion went almost every week; although once in a great while she would creep into the Village after nightfall and peek in through the windows. She could see very well in the dark, and there were so many interesting things inside.

  “Give me a kiss and I’ll tell him to let you go.” This was not what the faerie girl had expected, and she actually laughed. How foolish was this boy, to think she would ever kiss a human? She remembered vaguely kissing her mother and father, before they had died, and she had liked it very much. The sap-like smell of their cheeks, the heat of their skin that was just right, not too hot and not too cold. They were faerie folk with magic in their blood, magic that zinged whenever they were happy, when they threw her up in the air and caught her and gave her a hug.

  Humans were repulsive.

  “Go jump in the lake!” she told him scornfully.

  And he did.

  The meaty boy let go of her in surprise and rushed in after his friend, who was thrashing about and screaming as though he was immersed in something much worse than a little cold water. But the bigger boy didn’t go in any deeper than up to his knees. He turned back to the faerie girl, who was scouring his human smell off of her arms with some nice clean dirt, and called out frantically,

  “He can’t swim! You have to help him! He’s going to drown!”

  The faerie girl scowled at him disbelievingly. “What fool doesn’t know how to swim?”

  “This lake is cursed! It’s evil. By the god Gleason, hold on!” The blubbering boy waded out further into the water, but stopped when it came to his waist.

  “Well, go get him,” the faerie girl called, exasperated.

  “I can’t swim either,” he sobbed.

  “Yes you can. Just go!” she shouted. She was getting worried now, and although she swam like an eely fish, she couldn’t dive in and fetch him out herself, because then she’d have to touch him. Yuck.

  The power of her voice worked. The big boy couldn’t swim, but he managed to latch onto Gleason, and somehow they dragged each other out, sobbing and shivering. They collapsed onto the pebbly shore, still wrapped in each others’ arms. The faerie girl sighed, and scooted as close as she dared, to make certain that they were both all right.

  The boys were both lying on their backs, still close to the water’s edge. They were wet and gasping for air, and their clothes were sodden and muddy. The two looked up at her, in horror and awe. Then she said, as though she had meant to throw them both in the lake and hadn’t just lost her temper and said something unfortunate,

  “I hope that teaches you a lesson.”

  She just smiled. She wasn’t going to apologize. If they had disliked her before, they would really hate her now. But she’d seen from the shop what good an apology did.

  And, after all, the god didn’t want her to lie.

  The faerie girl went back to her Wood. She didn’t tell the priest what had happened, even when he asked her curiously why her arms were streaked with dirt. He didn’t need to know that he’d done something dangerous when he tamed her, or that he had put her at risk. Despite what had happened today, she couldn’t regret the time that she’d spent with him.

  There were some things that faeries had never understood about humans, and she was determined to be the one who figured them out.

 

  The Memories

  Father Brion knew what he was looking for; he just couldn’t find it. It was an object he usually kept hidden away in a drawer in his desk, something both secret and precious. Every once in a while he would take it out, when he was sure no one else was around, and let it sit for a few minutes in his palm, atop the faintly glowing lines of the god’s mark.

  The item in question contained more than just the beauty of its immaculate smoothness or the striking color of its sky blue depths, although these were things that might have appealed to any habitual collector of natural objects. It might have been rare—the object that is—but it could hardly be thought to be valuable, at least not in the usual sense. It was only a rock, after all, and not a gem.

  But to Father Brion, the stone was more than just a pretty item. For him, this smooth blue pebble held a link to the past. The vivid memories that came with the act of touching it were what made it precious to Father Brion. And the secrets that those memories contained—albeit more painful than pleasurable, in the balance—made it something the aging priest would never willingly choose to be parted with, even were it made of the purest sapphire instead.

  Father Brion handled the stone with a particular reverence and never kept it exposed for long, always stowing it gently away in its accustomed spot before the memories could become overwhelmingly str
ong. This time, however, as the old priest fumbled with the tiny knob, pulling at the compartment which blended so well into the wooden grain of the desk when it was closed, camouflaging its handle as merely a bump in the surface of the desk’s outer carvings, the bright blue stone slipped from between his fingers and bounced off in a direction he could only see out of the bleariest corner of his eye.

  With a sighing groan of protest, the old priest awkwardly pushed back his chair and began to systematically look around for it. He hunched halfway over himself so as to better see the ground and when that didn’t help, finally got down on his hands and knees and began to search for the stone by touch.

  His hands traveled past the hard legs of the desk and over the scratchy threads of the carpet in front of the fireplace, but they didn’t find it. He crawled around like a child who has yet to learn to walk, but his fingers encountered only the desk and the rug; there was nothing smooth nor round nor small in the slightest. The object in question seemed to have simply dissolved into the flatness of the ground.

  “What are you doing?” a sweet voice asked.

  Father Brion pushed up into a sitting position and winced at the lack of padding in his knees as they collected the full weight of his body. The faerie girl had approached him unnoticed, in her typically noiseless manner. She crouched down next to him now, in a limber imitation of his own uncomfortable posture. Her black eyes were bright with curiosity and—as was also typical of her—strangely free of judgment. If anyone else had found him like this the old priest would be feeling more than a little bit ridiculous, but the faerie did so many odd things herself that he hardly thought about it at all. Instead, he eagerly replied, “Ah, child, it’s a blessing you’ve come back! It seems I’ve dropped something and I’m searching for it. You have young eyes—do you see a bit of blue on the floor hereabouts?”

  The faerie’s head turned left and then right as her gaze meticulously swept the ground in front of where they were both crouched. The dark eyes narrowed slightly and then rested on a distant edge of the colorful woven carpet. “Here!” she exclaimed suddenly, pouncing on a fat sort of stripe, or so it seemed to Father Brion, but then a blurry oval came away in her hand. As the slender palm moved closer to his face he saw it resolve into a shape he recognized, an irregular blue circle well-polished from years of handling. “Is this it?” the faerie asked dubiously, holding the blue stone out to him as though she wasn’t quite sure he would take it.

  Father Brion breathed a small prayer of thanks. He motioned for the faerie to drop the object into his hand and then stood up, not without some difficulty, and stowed it away in his desk with a more precise motion this time, using his back to shield the exact location of the compartment, although he was fairly certain the faerie’s sharp eyes missed little of his action.

  This being done, he sat down at the desk to catch his breath, feeling as though he’d run several laps around the Church in the blazing heat of summer. A ludicrous idea, when he could hardly remember the last time he’d convinced his legs to move faster than a sluggish sort of amble, and the season was well into autumn, with its longer evenings and cooler nights.

  “Where did you get such a thing?” He’d almost forgotten that the faerie was still hovering by his elbow. She regarded him with a seemingly perplexed look on her pale girlish face.

  “Well now, it was a gift from a friend,” the priest replied uneasily. “A long story... and a sad one.” A human would have heard from Father Brion’s voice that he didn’t wish to say more but the faerie just stared at him, undeterred, as though neither length nor sorrow could be any barrier to his telling or to her understanding.

  “Perhaps another time,” he hinted, feeling his weariness more fully again. It was not a tale that could safely be told to her; indeed, he could only think of one who should hear it from his lips, while it yet had the chance to be told.

  “There’s magic in that stone of yours, you know,” the faerie told him abruptly, changing the subject. Her tone implied that she wasn’t at all sure that he did.

  Father Brion nodded slowly, but did not pursue this.

  The faerie girl backed away from him, and then turned and began to set out their bowls for dinner. “You shouldn’t touch it overmuch,” she continued, her eyes on her hands as she placed the napkins on the worn surface of the kitchen table.

  “Is it a harmful magic, then?” the old priest asked, worried a bit. He’d always felt something in the stone, but he’d thought it was merely connected with his own particular memories of it.

  “No...” the faerie girl said, her nimble fingers wrapping around a tumbler made of hazy, bubble-filled glass. “But it gets into a person over time... at least for a human it would,” she clarified, frowning at the glass in her hand and then gently setting it down.

  “I’ll remember that,” Father Brion told her, but what he thought to himself was that he’d had the stone for a very long time. Its magic could hardly change him much now.

  “Come child,” he said more cheerfully, leaning on the desk in order to get to his feet, “let’s have some supper.”

  Father Brion hobbled over to the small pot on the stove and lifted the lid, stirring it several times with the large wooden spoon that he’d left nearby. The stew smelled flavorful, if a bit stronger than usual. The old priest glanced over at the spices he’d used and had not yet remembered to put back, but they were just the normal ones. He knew the recipe by heart; if he’d had to read it out of a book, they might be in trouble. The smell must be a result of him getting distracted and letting it cook a tad longer than necessary, while he searched for the stone.

  “Here, I’ll do that,” the faerie told him, taking the wooden spoon from his grasp gingerly, so that their hands didn’t touch. “You go and sit down,” she chided. Father Brion relinquished the spoon to the faerie without a grumble; his creaky body was more than happy to comply. The faerie picked up the heavy pot with ease and set it down on the table, where it steamed pleasantly between them, a potholder underneath to keep the table from developing a scorch mark. Then she filled the mismatched bowls to the brim with thick vegetable stew and set out a loaf of fluffy grain bread, buttering two ragged slices with a small wooden knife and handing him one of them.

  Father Brion rested the bread on the napkin at the side of his bowl, bemusedly shaking the untrimmed locks of his silvery white head. The faerie never seemed to remember it was going to be soft; instead she hacked away at the loaf as though she expected it to be made of stone, causing the bread to squish in the middle before it was cut.

  He’d given up trying to explain the art of slicing to her. It all tasted the same anyhow. The girl finished what she was doing and then glanced over at him and bowed her head. Father Brion placed his hands over the food to say the blessing, and then they both picked up their spoons. Feeling a sudden rush of hunger, which often eluded him these days, Father Brion took a large mouthful.

  The old priest felt the stew hit his mouth. His tongue started to burn before he could even taste it. Swallowing hastily, he grabbed a glassful of water and poured as much of it down his swollen throat as possible. When even that didn’t soothe the burn, he tore off a corner of his bread with a shaking hand and stuffed it in his mouth as well, chased by another draught of water.

  His eyes were tearing too badly to see out of, so he wiped them with the napkin and sucked in several breaths of cooling air that tingled on his smarting tongue. Finally, after muttering, “dear me, oh no,” several times, it occurred to him to wonder how the faerie was doing. He knew that she didn’t like cooked dishes a great deal to start, let alone a botched stew that was overbearingly laced with hot pepper salt. A meal like this might be enough to put her off human food altogether.

  But the faerie girl sat across from him as calmly as ever, as though she had yet to taste anything out of the ordinary. She still had a spoon in her hand, and the priest watched in horror as she innocently dipped it back into the bowl and took another bite. <
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  Father Brion waited for her face to turn red and her eyes to water. He waited for an accusation of poison or at least a reprimand for his carelessness. After all, he had been the one to insist on cooking for them today, for some unfathomable reason. The faerie usually made their meals now, but he’d been feeling increasingly useless, and determined to make more of an effort to shoulder what was formerly his share of the housework.

  “This is... different,” was all she said. The faerie girl took a prim sip of water and then dipped a piece of bread in her bowl and sopped it around, in a very unladylike manner, which she’d no doubt picked up from eating with him.

  Father Brion pushed his bowl as far away from himself as possible. “You don’t need to eat that,” he replied weakly. “I’m afraid I mistook one spice for another.” He’d have to ask the child to help him color code the bottles if he was going to be of any use at cooking again. There was no sense in ruining good food just in order to prove he could still take care of himself.

  The faerie girl’s soft lips pursed together, her dark gaze blinking down at the stew rather thoughtfully. She tilted her pretty head to one side. “Actually, I think I like it better,” she answered.

  Father Brion stared at her in wonder and then finally grinned. “Well, child, in that case you can have as much of it as you like.”

  It was their habit to wash the dishes together, but tonight the faerie insisted he take a seat by the fire and wouldn’t let him dry. She hummed bewitchingly to herself as she worked alone in the kitchen corner of the cozy little room. Father Brion watched her contentedly for a time and then at last closed his eyes, sinking back gratefully into his favorite chair.

  He let his mind wander to another day, another time. A different voice hummed in much the same manner; a somewhat lighter and higher one. Blue stones flashed around a pale neck; a few red curls came loose and tumbled down over graceful shoulders...

  “What shall we read tonight?” the faerie girl asked him, her voice unexpectedly close. She was sitting in the chair next to him now, in front of a crackling fire which looked as though it had just been built up. The dishes must already be done. Father Brion sat up straighter in his chair and tried to appear attentive, as though he hadn’t just woken up.

  “Whatever you like,” he told her fondly. She was getting taller these days, he thought. He’d asked about her growth once, but she’d only said that she would be full-grown soon and would stay that way once she was. Father Brion thought wistfully about never having to age, but then discarded the notion. A priest had to be willing to relinquish the narrowness of life, in order to be with the god. Death was a completion, not something to be avoided.

  The girl got up and came back with a small book, one of the few that filled the old crate in the corner, a volume that they had both read many times. She sat happily back down in front of the fire, absently waving a hand at it and making the flames jump up higher. Father Brion started, his heart thumping loudly in his chest, and then forced his body to relax. There were some things one never got used to, no matter how many times.

  The faerie was too absorbed in her task to notice. She opened the book up on her lap and began to read the poems in a strong clear voice. Father Brion knew them so well that he could have recited them with her, had he wanted. Instead, the old priest leaned back in his chair and let the faerie’s rich voice roll over him, soothing away the last of his tension. The evening’s various misadventures faded and the rhythm of the poet’s words took over, a magic as potent as any faerie’s song.

  They took turns reading late into the night, until the last of the embers in the fireplace had died and the faerie girl had begun to yawn. And then Father Brion closed the book, which he hadn’t needed anyway, and accepted her arm to lean on, knowing that if he didn’t leave with her now he’d most likely spend the rest of the night slumbering in a cold chair, by the banked fire.

 

  The Human Girl

  Above all other days, the faerie girl cherished the holy day at the Church. Before she had been marked, one day had been just as good as another, for there was neither time nor season in the Wood. But now, once a week, she eagerly awaited the procession of Villagers that came up the path: the couples holding hands, the mothers carrying babies, the old men and the young women and the little children skipping. She watched for the last of them to enter the Church before she slipped inside herself, and even though every eye moved away from her, she felt as much a part of the proceedings as anyone else. After all, her mark contributed to the blessing, just as theirs did.

  The blessing was the moment in the ceremony that always thrilled her. At the very end of the service, Father Brion would ask all of the members to lift up their mark, and the entire congregation would raise their left hands, palm up. Marks would suddenly illuminate the dim sanctuary from all over, casting their interlocking circles on the ceiling but also on the walls, depending on the angle of someone’s arm. The whole of the inside of the Church was lit up with countless loops of light, brighter than the windows or even the torches could make it.

  It was beautiful, and it made her love the god fiercely—to have created such a thing to link them all together. She didn’t know how the others felt about it because she didn’t ask; she kept quiet for the most part, since whenever she forgot and talked to someone they would get a look on their face as though she had fangs or claws and was about to attack them. But they were accustomed enough to her presence to talk around her after the service ended, and soon she knew more about them than they ever realized.

  She asked Father Brion about what she heard, pestering him with questions he couldn’t always answer, such as why was the baker’s wife angry with the baker for giving away a plum cake to his neighbor? Both the baker and his wife bore the mark, and she had heard them arguing about it. The answer to this was that the baker’s neighbor was a very shapely young woman who had more than enough money to buy a plum cake, but Father Brion didn’t think it appropriate to explain further when the faerie girl was still mystified.

  She asked him why the Village children sang a song about faeries snatching naughty children out of their beds, and he couldn’t explain that one either, other than that it was an old tune he’d learned himself. The faerie girl shook her black curls in bemusement. What could a faerie possibly want with a naughty human child—or even a nice one—for that matter?

  So she knew that the buxom girl with the light brown hair, whom everyone called Amandie, was one of the few people who had ever taken up residence beyond the Village. She knew this long before Amandie approached her. The faerie girl was helping Father Brion by counting the coins in the offering, after service one day, when she noticed that Amandie was fidgeting strangely in the back of the Church, tucking and re-tucking her blouse into her colorful skirt and pushing her sleeves up and down. Feeling wearied by all this restlessness, the faerie girl finally asked the human one, tartly, if she needed something, knowing that the sound of her faerie voice alone would urge Amandie to be gone.

  “Yes, I do.” Amandie’s voice cracked as she said this, but she bravely came all the way up to the altar. She had a look, both terrified and determined, in her bright hazel eyes. The faerie girl was impressed by her; this human was made of sterner stuff than the rest, she thought. The faerie girl set the offering bowl down, and mirrored the human girl’s posture, planting her feet to either side and clasping her hands behind her back.

  She had found that acting like humans made them less nervous; for instance if she had climbed up on the altar and sat cross-legged on it whilst counting the coins, as she would have liked to have done, a human would have thought it odd and Father Brion would have scolded her. It was very important to them how their bodies were arranged. A faerie would never naturally think of this.

  “Go on,” the faerie girl said, invitingly. She wondered if she should offer to fetch Father Brion, but he had just left for his afternoon nap, as the old priest usually did after service on holy day. Beside
s, if this human girl had wanted his advice, she could easily have caught him after the service.

  “I have... a problem,” Amandie said nervously. “And I wondered if you might help me with it.”

  “Could be. Depends on how interesting it is.” The faerie girl shrugged her shoulders. She was trying not to appear too invested in being helpful, but inside she felt a jolt of excitement. The last problem she had solved had been a territorial dispute between a bossy crow and a colony of songbirds. She had never solved a human problem before, other than when she had helped Father Brion retrieve his medallion. She thought of the baker and the cake and wondered if a shapely woman was involved.

  Amandie stared up at the faerie, who was the taller of the two, as though she had expected the faerie girl to ask her a riddle or quote her a price.

  “You can’t tell anyone, not even the priest. You must promise,” the human girl said. The faerie wrestled briefly with her loyalty to Father Brion, but then she nodded. If it was a problem the priest could fix, the human girl would not have come to her. She hoped the girl didn’t expect her to brew a potion or enchant some object. Father Brion had told her many of the tales about faeries, and they made her wonder how humans could have lived on the faeries’ land for centuries and know nothing about them.

  Amandie took a deep breath, and then the story poured out of her; so long had she held it in, so afraid she had been to confide in anyone.

  “My mother wanted more for me than a Village life. She insisted that I should leave it, and make my way to the nearest great house, and ask for work there. She had some grand notion that I would better myself; rise to be a head servant or maybe even have a rich man ask me for my hand.” Amandie hung her head slightly at this, in the bashful way of a maiden, and then said, “My mother is hard to please and I knew this would please her very much, so even though I was content in the Village, I did what she asked.”

  The faerie girl made a sound of sympathy. She knew something of trying to make people happy when one didn’t fully agree or understand them. Amandie’s hazel eyes grew shiny, and she blinked several times before continuing.

  “When I left the Village I went to the first great estate that I saw, the manor house of Baron Malkine, and was taken on as a maid. The other servants were mostly friendly, and I was treated well by everyone. Even the Baron himself was kind to me, so kind that I began to like him very much. After many months of this, I even thought that maybe what my mother had wished for would happen—that he might marry me—for he told me that I was the most beautiful girl he had ever met.”

  “And then... he started to be too kind. He paid me more attention than I wanted, and when I told him to stop, he just laughed at me. I reminded him about the mark, but he said that the mark was for ugly girls, not pretty ones like me. He doesn’t want to marry me, but neither will he leave me alone.” Amandie shot her an embarrassed glance, as though wondering if a faerie girl could understand this. The faerie girl remembered the two boys, and the lake, and her pale face became even more sympathetic.

  “Maybe you should come back to the Village,” the faerie girl suggested. The human really shouldn’t have left it anyway, she thought with a frown. It meant that the Dead Tree wasn’t doing its job right. She would have to go and have a talk with the Dead Tree. The faerie girl rocked back and forth on her firmly planted feet, wondering if the human would mind if she sat down on the floor with her back against the stone altar. She was having an inkling that this was going to be a lengthy problem.

  But Amandie was agitated now. She twisted her hands into her multi-colored patchwork skirt. “I want to!” she exclaimed, “I want to so much! I wish I had never left! But my mother would be so disappointed in me. And the Baron has said terrible things—he is not kind at all. I don’t know how I ever could have thought that.” Amandie stared at her hands, which were now clasped in front of her in a pleading manner.

  “What sort of terrible things?” the faerie girl asked curiously.

  “That he will hurt everyone I love if I don’t give in to him. Every time I leave to visit, he tells me so, to make me come back,” she whispered.

  “Everyone you love is in the Village,” the faerie pointed out. “He can’t get into the Village. He doesn’t know how.” And even if he did, the Dead Tree would never let him. Unless it had been contaminated by humans, and she didn’t think that was possible. But she would definitely go and give it a lecture on its duties, sooner rather than later.

  “Even so, I am afraid,” Amandie said. “He could find a way in. If anyone could, it would be him. But you, you could speak to him and make him leave me alone. And you could keep him from harming anyone else. The other servants say that many girls have lost their marks to him.” She shivered, and pulled her knitted shawl up higher around her curvy body.

  The faerie girl squinted at her and made several different connections in her head. They led her to muse about whether all shapely women caused problems. But the faerie girl was not shapely herself, and she’d had problems as well. It was her remembrance of the meaty boy’s confining arms that made her decide that Amandie must be helped.

  “Very well,” the faerie girl replied. “I’m ready. Shall we go now?”

  Amandie threw her hands out impetuously, from where they had been previously clutched, and the faerie girl scooted back, lest the human embrace her. “Oh dear! I’ve promised my mother I’ll stay for lunch. Is it all right if we leave after that?” The human girl’s face had grown rosy with hope, and the tears that had leaked out of her hazel eyes had started to dry. The faerie girl noted that the human girl had not bothered ask her to lunch, despite an acceptance of her help. Even a wolf would have offered to share its bone with her, when she had taken a thorn from its paw.

  Humans could be so rude.

  “Will I find you here when I come back?” Amandie asked. Everyone knew that the faerie girl came and went like the sun on a cloudy day.

  The faerie girl considered this. It would be out of the way for the human girl to come back into the Wood when they would only be traveling together in the opposite direction. But it would be awkward to hang around outside of the girl’s house in the Village, while she and her mother ate lunch, and it would make the faerie girl feel like an unwanted guest. Things would be so much easier if the human girl could just summon her. The faerie girl thought about it, and her wild faerie heart beat forcefully inside her chest. Yes, she could tell this human her name. Not even the priest knew it, although she would have told him gladly had he asked. But he was content to call her “child”, even though she was really a full-grown woman.

  The faerie girl knew that she shouldn’t give the human girl her name, but now that she had thought of it, she found the idea too tempting. Suddenly it was not enough for the faerie that every tree and every beast in the Wood knew her name, or that the wind whispered it when it blew and the rain sang it when it fell.

  She wanted it to be spoken.

  “Call my name, and I’ll come to you,” the faerie girl told the human.

  Amandie’s arched eyebrows raised. “You have a name?” she exclaimed. At the faerie girl’s glare, the human one had the grace to blush. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. Of course you have a name! And I should have introduced myself as well. I would have—I was just so... so rattled. I’m Amandie.” The human girl stuck out her hand, which trembled slightly.

  The faerie found herself regretting her decision already. Still, the want was there: the desire to be known, the need to have a friend. She drew herself up regally, and announced,

  “I am Erin, Lady of the Wood.”

  At the sound of the faerie’s name, all of Amandie’s nervous restlessness immediately stilled. The Wood no longer feared Amandie, and Amandie no longer feared the Wood.

  Lady Erin took a deep breath and shook Amandie’s hand very, very briefly, trying not to shudder at the contact. She had shared a faerie ritual with the girl; it would be ill-mannered to refuse to honor a human one.
/>   And so it happened that Amandie did call Lady Erin, and that Lady Erin did choose to come.

  Several years after this, a new tale surfaced, and people called it the tale of the Merry Baron. This baron was known by all as the Merry Baron because of his inordinate fondness for wine, women, and song. The Merry Baron had many grand love affairs, and there are tales within this tale about his conquest of the Dulcet Countess and his capture of the Fiery Gypsy, which a bard might wax poetic upon. Even to this day, if a young man is spotted climbing a lady’s trellis to her balcony or sneaking into her bedroom at night in disguise, he is more than likely to be called a “merry baron” by all his friends.

  The Baron was the ultimate lothario; no lady’s honor was safe from him, single or wed, virgin or courtesan. But when the Merry Baron courted the Village Girl, there he met his match. He fell madly in love with her and begged her for her favors. Day after day she refused, but still he persisted—what passionate lover would not?

  He had all but seduced her away from her cold chastity, when he made one great fatal mistake. Befuddled with drink one night, he boasted to all of his fine guests that his heart’s desire was more beautiful than any other woman in all the land, even lovelier than a faerie lady.

  When the Faerie of the Wood heard this, she grew green with jealousy and then white with anger. The next day she walked into the Merry Baron’s house and revealed herself to him. He was so dazzled by her unearthly beauty, and so enslaved by her sweet scornful words, that once she had left he was merry no more. He never touched another woman, although he did drink most excessively, singing melancholy songs in his cups.

  And so it is considered unlucky to boast too highly of a sweetheart’s beauty, lest a vengeful faerie come and steal away one’s ability to love.