The Truth of Things Unseen

The first time I saw Luck was the day my parents died.

We had taken the Telbridge road beneath the mountain. Our cart splashed through puddles. It had been raining all week, but now the sun was out, bright and hot. I nestled in among the bales of wool and cloth, half asleep in the warmth of the morning.

My mother and father sat together up front. He rested his hand on her knee. She laced her little finger between his and rubbed his palm. My father sang the Rose of Embers, and my mother picked up the harmony.

" Within an ember, rose and bright,
Carnation dragons, tumbling"

She stamped a tiny jig with her fingertips on the rail. I watched her fingers twirl and dance as the dappled light shimmered through the trees and imagined myself somewhere magical, a dance for a homecoming hero. When he got to the sad bit at the end, she leaned into his side and held him.

I was broken even then, a cursed boy. Crossed by a hare, the village women whispered. I licked at my teeth, feeling the lopsided place where the lip did not join properly — the little snag where one of the teeth poked sideways through the gap.

It had rained all last week, and now the day was crisp and bright. The sun marched along with us, humming along to Father's song. The trees stooped over the rattling cart, their leaves fat and full of water. The blue brightness of the sky showed between them. The light sailed through the gaps, tumbling in a flickering brilliance that formed and reformed on my face and my hands and dazzled me.

That was when I saw Luck.

He was crouching in the fork of a tree by the roadside. I could tell it was Luck by his cloak, a cloak woven from every other cloak. Gold and silk ruffles; sackcloth and ashes. Loops of pearls and garlands of birds eggs, laced with filigree and bound with mildewed onion rope. His face was painted in motley — black and white squares that covered every bit of skin, smeared a little around the temples and in the creases at the corners of the eyes.

He raised a finger to his lips.

"Shhhhhh."

High over the road, Luck crouched in the fork of a tree.

"Come out, little mouse,” he whispered. “I'll show you a monster."

A tatty grey mouse crawled out of a fold in his cloak. It stood as tall as a mouse can on his shoulder, paws tugging on imaginary lapels.

"Very appropriate," it said. Its voice was clipped and sharp, like a high-class gangster, not at all squeaky. "Monsters, eh? How very... you."

"Just one today, little mouse."

Luck extended a pale finger, pointing away down the road. A battered cart drawn by a single mare. A handsome young farmer and his tousle-headed wife, bales of wool, crates of vegetables, maybe a cheeky barrel of smokeroot stashed against the revenue.

The mouse squinted in the glare of the morning sun. "No monsters there, mate."

"Look in the back."

Tucked in, snug amongst the bales, a child was looking back at him.

"The kid? You're joking. We don't hurt kids."

Luck didn't reply.

"I say," said Mouse. "That's a lot of grubby-looking ruffians in the trees up ahead of that cart. I take it you're planning to do something about that?"

A little way off, a half-dozen men had taken up positions. They were armed with a selection of ugly weapons.

"Would you look at that?" said Mouse. "That one has attached spikes to his bow. How quaint. Time to swing into action maybe..?"

The cart rumbled closer to the men.

"Maybe now or soonish..? You are planning to do something, right? I say, are you crying?"

“I named him Monster,” Luck whispered, voice ragged as his cloak. "This is when it all began.” The paint had smudged a little in the corners of his eyes.

I heard my father shouting at something on the road. My mother had her back to me, very straight and upright. Then she did a strange thing. Without looking at me or moving any other part of her body, she reached behind her, into the cart, put one hand on my head and gently pressed me down, deeper between the bales. I pushed back, trying to see what father was shouting at, but she was stronger than me. I sank down into the soft place and rested there. I could not see her face, but she was no longer singing.

The cart slowed and bumped to a halt. Father jumped down. I heard his footsteps crunching on stones. I heard his voice, indistinct, muffled by the bales that surrounded me. I heard other voices, a discussion, a note of anger.

The cart was stationary on the road. Insects hummed in the trees. The sun beat on my head. I began to sweat.

Luck still crouched in the fork of the tree, I felt his eyes on me. I wanted to tell Mother, but she was staring straight ahead at what was happening on the road, not looking up at all, and she still had her hand on my head, pressing me down into the warm place between the bolts of wool.

And then, just like that, there was an arrow.

It thocked into the rail next to where Mother was sitting. It hummed. The little brown feathers on it vibrated.

Mother grabbed the reins and shook them hard. She stood at the rail, knees bent, laying into our old horse with the whip, and the cart rattled down the road, with the packages falling all over and me in the middle of them. I wriggled out from the place between the bales.

There were men on the road behind us. Angry-looking men with lean faces. There was something else there too, laying on the road behind them. A prone figure, wearing Father's hat and Father's shoes.

Mother screamed and spurred the horse again, but the cart was loaded, and our old mare was tired. The men began jogging along the road behind us, calling to Mother, words I couldn't understand then, and can't bear to recall now. They were not even hurrying. They laughed at her as though she were something small and funny, jogging along next to us, reaching up into the cart, brushing her dress with their fingers. Their smiles were unclean.

Mother had a knife in one hand and the whip in the other. She began striking at them. One of the men grabbed hold of the bridle. Another snatched Mother's whip and yanked it out of her hand. She stabbed at the fingers that reached for her and drew blood. The men stopped laughing at her; they had their own blades out now, but still, she stood atop the stationary cart, slashing at any of them who came near.

Luck was still there, crouching in the tree. His expression was unreadable, but the paint under the eyes had run a little.

"Why don't you do something?" I yelled at him, but still he sat, mute. His lips started working as though he were counting. I heard a rattle, like dice.

The men had noticed me now and were staring at me with the same hungry broken expressions. Mother stepped back into the cart and stood over me, gripping her knife, snarling like a cornered dog. An arrow zipped past me and thunked into the wood behind. The feathers were beautiful. The bright metal tip had little fingerprints on it. Another arrow sailed over me and thumped into something soft.

Mother let out a little sound. An arrow stuck out, stiff and bristly from her side as she turned to me. It was an alien thing. I expected her to laugh and brush it away like a splinter.

"Why don't you do something?" I said to Luck again, but my voice was tiny.

High above me, I saw Luck rattle his fist like a gambler at the table, a sound like dice. He took an apple from his pocket, his mouth moved quickly, as though he were sounding out the world, every drop of water, every needle on every branch. He took a single bite. His arm flicked out, and he flung the apple, high up the hill, high between the trees. I heard the rush of it as it fell.

It had been raining for days. The hillside was soaked earth held together by tree roots. I understand now that it only needed a little tap in exactly the wrong place, sometimes a nudge is all that's needed to change everything. I felt the earth shift, just a little.

The trees began rustling above us. There came a noise, like thunder, louder and closer, and between the trees, I glimpsed something like a brown wall, rushing down the slope towards us.

Death came, swift as a broom, a churn of mud and splintered boughs, boiling, breaking, turning, breaking again, turning and breaking and turning.

The men were washed away as if they had never been. A massive boulder sailed across the road and slammed into our old mare, and she was gone too. I sensed a sort of mist where she had been, the shadow of an outline.

The earth heaved like the press of a dance. The road rippled like a tablecloth laid for a feast. The cart waltzed and wallowed in the middle of it, a drunken revel of screaming wood and breaking stone.

The cart lifted, jerking up and up. My mother reaching for me. My mother falling away into the teeth of rock and broken cedars. My mother drowning in it, one hand raised towards me. My mother trying to climb from the flowing press of rock, the sound of her breaking. A bright cough of blood, and she was gone.

The earth was liquid. The whole earth was a tempest, and our cart was a ship drowning in it. The rail cracked, the cart came apart, and I fell, down and down into the mess. I fought with the mud. I jerked my head to one side and watched a whole tree trunk slide right past me, widening along its length, twigs slapping me again and again in the face. My head went under. I could not tell which way was up. Liquid soil forced itself up my nose and into my mouth. I thrashed and heaved myself free of it. The mountainside was a churning ruin of broken trees. I flailed around, half-blind, searching for something to cling to. My fingers found smooth wood, a cartwheel. I hauled myself up onto it and clung to it like a sailor adrift in a storm.

But Death did not say my name that day.

When all was still again, I felt a red warmth on my eyelids and a pain that grew sharp. I opened my eyes. The sun had broken through the clouds, and shafts of light were running up and down the slope.

The land was unrecognisable. The green trees had gone. The road had gone. My parents...

I tried to sit up, but my hand was caught beneath the wheel. I tugged it free and felt a sharp agony that shot up my arm into my shoulder. My hand was no longer my own. Three of the fingers were torn away. The thumb was bent in the middle like an old twig. The wounds were ragged, packed with earth and decorated with splinters and hanging flaps of skin. I stared at it as though it were something else, a half-killed animal I had found by the road.

There were crows walking across the hillside, picking at things they found here and there. I joined them, a broken little crow hopping across the hillside, all alone, finding a scrap of cloth here, a piece of Mother's dress there.

In the distance, in the fork of a tree, Luck watched me, a silent figure in motley. His cloak flapped about his thin shoulders like a banner over a battlefield. I saw him whisper a word, then he was gone.

I once heard a story about a man walking with his dogs in the hills. A rock fell and crushed that man completely, smashed him right down into meat. Do you know what his dogs did? They wandered around confused for a while, and then they began to eat the meat, because they were hungry and they didn't understand what had happened.

It was something like that for me, alone on that rubbed-out hillside. It was impossible that they were gone. Here was a fragment of cloth from my mother's patterned dress. I put it in my pocket, meaning to give it to her when I saw her. Here was my father's leather bag with a roll of good wool in it. I slung it over my shoulder and kept it safe for the market.

There was blood leaking from me, down my arms, dripping off my fingertips. I did not dare touch my face. One of my eyes had swollen shut. There were twigs and white stones glued into the missing pieces of my hand. My thumb stuck out stiff and purple like a blood sausage.

The day grew cold and I longed to wrap my father's wool cloth around myself, but I did not. It was pure and clean, and I was a dirty little crow.

This was a lifetime ago, before I knew even a single word of power, when I still wore my own face.

Words beget ideas, and ideas beget stories, and stories are the hidden frame over which the world drapes itself like a garment. This is the very essence of magic, and yet I had no true name and no stories for what had happened to me, and so I wandered, lost and storyless over the slopes.

The broken trees stood up like spider legs, cobwebbed with blackened branches, and the stars came out above them. The world grew cold.

I dug in the bag and found a tinder box. Father would appreciate the fire. My hand shook. It was cold, Lord's Bones, it was cold, and I could barely strike the flint. My hand was useless. I gripped the steel between my feet and struck sparks into the tinder, but it was wet and would not kindle. I pulled a tiny piece of wool from Father's satchel and struck the sparks again. A little blaze worked its way into life in the middle of the wool. I piled up leaves and little sticks. I've always been good at fires.

There was no pain in my hand anymore. I felt nothing, not even the cold. I stared into the heart of the flame, and for a moment, I thought I saw something moving in there.

But then there came a crashing in the trees at the edge of the rubbed-out place. White shapes burst from the shadows, small white shapes that ran at me. Before I could stand, they were around me, a dozen white goats fleeing from something. They passed to the right and to the left, swift, silent. Hurried little stars across the bleak and the dark.

A woman followed close behind. I could hear the ragged sound of her breathing, the crunching sound of her feet as she zig-zagged towards my fire.

And there was something following her. It was tall and it billowed. It had no shape of its own. It moved like a cat, like a wolf, like a mare, rearing up. Black tendrils burst from the middle of it, reaching blind for the woman, snagging at her feet. I could hear her grunting as she kicked at it in the darkness.

I grabbed a fire branch and ran at the thing, screaming. It fell back before the flame, wailing like a newborn. I hurled my branch into the midst of it. The fire was swallowed up in a knot of shadows, then it shrank back away into the trees and was gone, though I could still hear it wailing across the hillside.

The woman was kneeling in amongst the broken branches, coughing. I knelt by her. I took the bolt of carded wool from Father's bag, unrolled and wrapped it around her. It was the right thing to do.

I got my shoulder under her arm and tried to help her walk to the fire. I had barely any strength in me, and my knees shook, and I could not keep them still. She staggered towards my small blaze, sat there, knees pulled up, shoulders hunched, staring into the depths of it. There was a big tear in her trousers and blood welled from a scratch. She rubbed at it.

"Goats," she said at last.

I didn't know how to reply, so I said nothing.

"Can you speak, boy? Did you see my goats? Some motley boy opened the pen."

A motley boy. Scaring goats. And my parents…

"Aye," I said. Something more seemed to be expected. "They came by here."

"Ha. You're a funny little one, aren't you?"

Again, I had no words for her. There had been a shadow and she was asking about goats, and there was a gash in her leg, and my parents were...

The mundanity of lost goats on a hillside. It was so normal, but...

I dragged another branch onto the fire. It crackled, and smoke churned as the water boiled out of it, then flared up as the resin caught. The light of it fell across my face. She gasped. Her hand went to her mouth.

"Lord's Bones, what happened to you, boy?"

I didn't have any words, so I let her draw me in. Let her smooth my hair. I let her fold me up and carry me over her shoulders like a sick lamb, though the blood and tears mingled with the mud that caked me and stained her cloak, down off the mountain to the river and the Sister Villages.

Her name was Hettie. Her back was warm and solid. Warm and solid until the day she died.

Luck was nowhere to be seen, though I felt his eyes on me in the darkness and hated him.

The first time I saw the fae girl was the night Aunt Hettie died.

It had been thirteen years since Hettie had come a-calling for her goats and found me instead, broken on the wheel amidst shattered pines, a little monster even then, clothes stuck with blood, face slashed open by the flints. I wiggled the stumps on my left hand and touched my ear self-consciously. Time hadn't improved my looks.

She had cared for me after a fashion, I hadn't died anyway. The scratch left on her leg by the shadow had never healed right. She had stomped on, tending her goats, complaining about the price of apples. I ran errands for her, and she fed me whatever food she had spare.

The undertakers laid her body out on the table in the parlour, wrists and ankles bound with white cords against the rising. I didn't think Hettie was going to be rising, she looked frail and crisp as pastry. The scratch on her leg was livid purple, like it had sucked the juice out of her.

Black-clad mourners flapped like storm crows. They nattered about the price of fish and the unseasonal weather. They sprawled on her chairs and drank her barley wine. They eyed up her furniture and slipped her silver teaspoons into their pockets.

None of them met my eyes. I was bad luck.

A prim old woman with tight, white curls leaned into her neighbour. "Touched by a shadow," I heard her whisper through a mouth full of fruitcake.

"No wonder," replied her neighbour. "Boy like that in the house."

"Folks should know better, dragging monsters down out of the hills."

The mourners glared at me and I stared at the rug, waiting for them to look away. No point arguing with folk.

A priest stooped over the corpse like a buzzard at the carrion and sprinkled an economical measure of holy oil from a greasy vial. The oil smelt of mould and spread into round yellow stains on Hettie's tablecloth. Hettie would have hated it. She always liked a tidy table.

"Out now," muttered the rector, shooing the mourners out the front door, into the garden. I hung back in the frame, unwilling to leave her. "Fine then, stay if you want," he snapped at me, "but don't let it touch you."

The priest took a thin silver knife and dragged it across her throat. There was no blood, but a little whisp of black smoke rose from the wound. He cut again, deeper. Something went out of her, like a breath, and she sagged in the middle. He cut once again. The thing coiled in the air above her then faded in the evening sunlight. He covered the wound with a cloth.

"Done?" asked the rector.

The priest nodded and wiped his knife, then mopped his brow on a cloth.

The front door stood ajar. The evening air was fresh on my face. I walked right out of the cottage, slipped between the mourners on the front steps, and nobody noticed at all.

The cool evening sky had faded into a hushed shade of blue-green, not yet brightened by the rosy blush of sunset. The cows in the fields above were lowing for the milking. The bats were darting in and out amongst the eves hunting for insects. I watched them fly. Little lives, little deaths. No one mourns the bugs.

Behind the cottage, where Hettie's cornflowers swayed in her garden, trees grew up the bank, leading into the forest beyond. Here was the barn and the hayloft where I slept. Even though she cared for me, Hettie had never gone so far as to allow me to sleep inside. She had never been one to tempt fate.

There were feelings banked up behind a door somewhere in my chest, and some desperate part of me was leaning up against that door, holding it shut while the cold fingers, scritch scratched on the other side. I could feel the emotions there. I didn’t understand them, and I feared that maybe they were stronger than me. If I let them out, perhaps I would never put them away again.

I rubbed at the broken places on my face. The only person in the world who cared for me was gone, and who would feed me now? How would I live? Where would I sleep?

Friendly shouts came from the direction of the alehouse. I had coins in my pocket. A glass of mead, maybe another. I could forget it all. I could keep drinking until the feelings were all washed back down.

I felt eyes on me. I glanced up at the roof. Luck was crouching there, with his ragged cloak flapping out behind him, face painted in black and white squares, stupid scraggy clothes made from stitched together pieces of other clothes, rags and tassels and cloth of gold. He raised one finger and pointed North, out into the trees.

I picked up a rock and hurled it at him, but slipped in mud and hurt my arm. I chucked another but flubbed the release like a turd-eating simpleton and smashed a chimney pot instead. No point trying to hit Luck with a rock.

I rubbed my arm and yelled at him instead.

"You did this!" I knew he could hear me from the way he tilted his head, but he didn't reply. He never said anything, not to me anyhow. "You leave me alone, I ain't done nothing to you!"

Luck shook his fist; a rattle of dice. The shouts from the alehouse grew louder and I heard the beginnings of a fight. Once again he pointed north, into the trees.

"I ain't going in the woods. I'm going to drink until I'm drunk. You try and stop me."

He didn't move, just stared down at me with his every colour eyes. I felt the weight of them on me. The sounds from the alehouse were no longer friendly. I could hear things breaking.

"Fine then," I muttered. T’aint no use arguing with a curse. I clambered over the back fence and scrambled up the bank, up to the place where the village stopped and the wildwood began. I placed my feet and gripped the tree branches like ropes, leaning back and hauling myself, hand over hand, higher and further away from the lights of the houses.

I crested the hill, emerging from the trees, onto the chalk downland. To the west, beyond the Telbridge and the river, the last dregs of the blood-red evening pooled on the edge of the horizon and a narrow moon set sail amongst the clouds, swift and sharp as the keel of a trading ship. Rabbits grazed by the first moonlight. Chalk and flint lay scattered, glowing like knucklebones, half buried beneath the close-cropped grass and the wild, uncaring stars.

It was better than the alehouse, Luck was right. It was fresh and free. It made me think of bigger places.

The walking was easier here. I strode out quickly, swinging my legs and arms to get the blood into them. The rabbits scattered before me, low bodies pressed flat to the ground. I had no bow or I might have shot one. No knife for the guts or flint for the fire neither; my pockets were bare.

Far below in the valley, Telbridge Hearth nestled safe around the river, a bead on a bright thread. There were lights in the harbour and more lights on the coloured boats that drifted slowly up and down, from Teleth Kier, through the Sister Villages up to the Netherby Stacks, hauling skins and kegs and cloth and vegetables and all the other inconsequentialities of village life.

Smoke rose from the storied chimneys of the ale house. The fight had quietened down. Life continued, but not for Hettie.

Further down along the river, the smoke towers of the Firepot flickered and flared, and in the far distance, between the hills, beyond the Barrowlands, the metallic sheen of the ocean gleamed bright as legend beneath the journeying moon.

Still I wandered on, down the slope on the far side of the bluff, down into the Western valley. The trees were different here. The air was damp and moss hung from the branches like beards. Little rivers flowed amongst the saplings, and I scrambled across them, finding steppingstones, careful not to get my feet wet.

You will have heard the tales of the Western Valley. Tales whispered in the alehouse around the guttering fire. Tales of folks disappearing as though taken by the vapours, then reappearing in the village months or years later gibbering and swaying like Lennel men. Tales of a green witch who squats in a Fae ring, who can burn a man black with her eyes. I headed West towards the tales, trusting the thin moon to light my way. I don't know why, I think I was looking for something different, something that wouldn't remind me of her. Perhaps the vapours would take me too. Perhaps I might lose myself and never have to think again.

Dark pools of water lay down in the scooped out hollow of the valley, the pressed down shadows of things that were no longer there. Old thistle heads snatched at my trousers in the dark. The saturated moss squelched beneath my boots.

There are sucking things that crouch in marshes. Lights that bob across the water. Cold hands that curl up from the silent pools, waiting. A hundred years they wait, crowding and crushing together like vegetables planted too close, waiting for an unwary traveller. They snatch an ankle, silently forcing their way into boots and mouths, slowly claiming the eye sockets and the navel until a person is choked or drowned or quietly rent open down the middle like bread dough.

I hurried onwards, avoiding the water and began climbing up the next bank. The air here was warmer. It was as though I had travelled south towards the Summer Lands, though I had barely been walking a thrice-hour, and by my reckoning, I was still going West.

I kept climbing, on and up, until at last I found what I had only half admitted to myself that I had been seeking.

"Grendlewald," I whispered to myself, the wall of monsters, and the name sent chills creeping down my spine.

The wall was made of huge old broken stones, piled higgledy-piggledy one on top of another, completely smothered in vines and creepers. It was entirely derelict, more of a piled-up ridge than a wall, though the carvings on the ancient stones told me that they had once been something more.

One day I will tell you the tales of the Aden and the old kings, buried but never forgotten. Tales of armoured witches and Ragwraiths, black and massive, blotting out the stars. Tales of Night Crawlers and Corpse Nests and the raggedy wolves with the hands and faces of children. When they eat you they hold you still and take little bites. I will tell you these tales, but not today.

This was a Fae place, a place no sane man would willingly walk. It was not a place for telling tales, it was a place where a person might disappear.

Unwilling to stop moving, I turned left and followed the curve of the wall, careful not to touch the ancient stones. The Grendlewald came around in a great sweep, heaped with ivy and climbing plants, a ring that circumscribed the whole hilltop.

After a quarter of a mile, the path dipped into a hollow. A cliff rose to my right and I walked at the base of it. The wall balanced on the brink of the rise, fifty feet over my head. I lost sight of it for a few minutes behind thick trees and undergrowth, but I followed the base of the cliff until I found a way back up and soon reached the wall once more.

I trudged on. By my reckoning, over a mile of stones had now passed to my right. The trees did not grow right up to the wall. None brushed against it and no branches overhung it. It was as though the natural forest wanted no part of whatever lay beyond. The silent moon followed me as I walked, watching over my shoulder.

See a hill with stones a-crowned,
There the fairy queen’s a weeping.
Walk the ring of stones around,
Can you catch her while she’s sleeping?
Beware the things beneath the mound,
Beware the eyes that come a-peeping.

The old words came into my mind unbidden and the hairs rose on the back of my neck as I walked the ring. I don't know why I did it, perhaps I was hoping the queen would come out and take me.

Instead, I found something else, something I should never have found at all.

I saw it first as a dim glow, like a fire, but white, somewhere between the trees, up over the rise. The grasses danced merry black shadows, and the thin twigs reached long shadows back between the trees, cast from one world into another.

As I came closer a gathering brightness lit the woods, shimmering across the underside of each leaf, each one turned to swaying silver, and a sudden breeze rushed through them, setting them all a-swish and a-shiver.

I thought there must be a fire, but the light was cool and steady, silvery as a second moon, shining upwards from below like a mirror’s reflection, white fire on water, coming up from beneath.

I dropped into a crouch and stalked the brightness, hunting it as I would hunt a rabbit, placing each footstep deliberately, ball to heel, step-stepping between fallen leaves and brush, I know how to move quietly in the forest, how to stalk a deer, how to lift each foot, careful for the drop of a pebble or the crunch of a snailshell, one foot then the next, toe to heel, feet like knives between the forest litter.

The brightness grew and swelled as I moved closer until I reached the top of the rise, and there she was, bright as the morning, and her radiance hurt my eyes, and I was blinded by her.

Her name was Fentallion, Miradel of Erin, and she shone, brighter than all the stars, and I did not know it then, but from that moment forth, she was mine, and I was hers, and that was the way it would always be.

The girl was about my age. She was sitting with her back to the Grendlewald, legs out straight in front of her, as though it were the most natural place in the world. Her hair was silvery white, and it floated around her head and shoulders. She wore velvet slippers beneath a blue-grey dress, and though it was cold, she did not shiver.

Her skin shone with a pale, steady light. Her face was so bright I could hardly make out the features, a hint of blue eyes, very wide-set, the suggestion of a nose. Her light cast deep shadows among the ancient carvings that moved as she tilted her head.

Catch a Fae and make a wish. Bind it with salt and seal it with silver. Everyone knows how it works. Some small part of me thought maybe I could wish for Hettie to come alive again. I could bind the Fae girl until she did as I asked, then keep her by me until she showed me where her treasure was hidden. Come down the hill triumphant with a horde of Fae gold, back to the warm house where Hettie would be waiting.

The girl was playing with some sort of golden ball. It hovered around her fingers, spluttering small sparks out onto the forest floor. Gobbets of fire fell on her dress, but they did not burn. With a tiny pop, the orb poofed out of existence. She made an irritated sound and rubbed her hands together.

There was an archway in the rock wall a little way off to the side, barely wide enough for a person. Climbing flowers leaned in towards her like little ghosts.

I crouched in the shadows beyond her circle of radiance, not daring to breathe in case she might hear me and startle. It was undoubtedly a Fae, but it was a girl too, not terrible or fierce, just a girl about my age, sitting by herself, playing with a ball.

I shifted my weight slightly. My foot made the tiniest crunching sound.

She froze, staring out into the darkness, then slowly got to her feet. The golden orb popped into the space between her hands and hovered there. She spoke, a short, bright stream of alien words like metal striking on glass. The light that shone from her face and hands brightened, still steady.

The moment was slipping away. Any minute she would bolt through the arch in the wall and that would be the end of it. Moving as softly as I could, I stepped out into her circle of brightness. She glared at me and hissed, glanced to the side.

I was nearer to her little archway than she was, to reach it, she would have to come towards me, it would be a race, and I was closer. She hissed again, half crouching. I felt the heat of her globe of fire, but it sputtered and went out. She spoke again, another stream of alien syllables. Her stare was from another world.

"I ain’t wanting to catch you," I said. "I’m sorry. You can go if you want. I’ll not stop you."

I moved further away from the door, leaving a way for her. She flashed me a mistrustful look, and there was fire in the depths of her pupils. She took a step towards the door but she did not run.

"Why are you here?" She spoke Mercian now, like me. Her accent was complex and lisping. "Are you not frightened of me?"

"I, I’m sorry," I stammered, but why was I here? How could I fit words around the feeling?

Hettie was dead, and I had no one left to go home to, and it was all my fault, and I had come up here in the darkness seeking something, anything different from the world of black flapping mourners and Hettie's paper-thin hands folded over a still and silent chest, following some vague sense that the world might be bigger than death, that there might be more somewhere, over the next hill, and the next.

Now here was this Fae girl. Something different. Something wild.

I fought the tears that started in my eyes. I struggled against the hot pressure of them in my cheeks. Was I not a man? How shameful that she should see me cry. I covered my face with my sleeve to protect her from my feelings.

"I ain’t crying." I hated the catch in my voice. I wanted to run from her and hide in the darkness, but at the same time, I needed her.

She came closer. Her brightness dazzled me. She rested one hand on my elbow and her touch felt normal and human, just like a regular girl.

“Something sad?” she said, and her voice was music.

"It were Hettie, she were my Aunt, she cared for me. She caught the darkening, and now I ain’t got no one to go home to and no place to be. It were my fault. I’m bad luck, see? I ain't got nothing and I ain’t got no one and it’s all my fault..."

The words jammed in my throat. The door inside me swung open and the pain and the loss rushed up out of me, into my face and my chest, and I could do nothing but crouch on the floor and wail silently, arms wrapped around my head. The pressure of it welled up in great hot waves that hurt with the weight of them, and she was there, kneeling beside me patting me on the shoulder, making little shhhh shhhh noises.

After a while, the pain became less urgent. It settled in my throat as a lump, still there, hard up behind every breath, but it was not my master.

"Are you thirsty?" she asked in her curious accent. It was so matter-of-fact, as though watching me cry had been an everyday event, as though tears were something normal. She pulled an earthenware bottle from her dress and popped off the stopper.

Everyone knows the stories about Fae food, but the tears had dried me out, and more than that, I just didn’t care. She nudged me in the ribs and I took it. It was water with something sweet in it, like honey or nectar. I didn’t want to stop gulping it down. The first swallow caught in my throat and smoothed away the pain. I drank, deep as oceans.

"Thanking you, M'am."

"You’re welcome."

When she said "You’re welcome" it sounded like "sure vilcomb", a hissing between the teeth, with plummy extended vowels that fell over one other on the way out of her mouth.

"What are you?" I asked, feeling foolish as soon as I had said it. What a stupid thing to say, anyone could see what she was, shining by the Grendlewald with the light of the moon in her hair.

"I am a girl of course."

I felt my cheeks reddening and I was glad of the pale light, but still her eyes were heavy on me, and I clenched my fists, willing the embarrassment to fade.

Then she laughed. "I’m sorry, I don’t have many people to talk to. You’re asking me where I have come from?"

I nodded. "You’re from in there right?"

"I am from across the wall."

"Inside the ring of stones?"

"It’s not really an inside. It’s a different sort of inside, if you see what I mean. Like a broken piece of outside on the inside. An outside-inside.”

She paused, watching me warily. I scowled, remembering my own ugly face. She was bright, and I was not. I must look like a monster next to her.

"What are you?" she asked.

I touched my fingers to my cheek. I felt the scars that the wheel had carved on me. The long crease that ran from my lip to my nose, the teeth poking through the hole, the ear that was mostly missing, the ridge that rippled across my cheek. I brushed my face with the hand that was missing the fingers.

"I was in an accident," I said, "when I was young. Luck cursed me, see? We fell, and my parents died, then my Aunt died. Now I'm here. You should probably go before something happens to you too."

"May I touch it?"

I tried not to flinch as she reached out and pressed the place below my nose, feeling my teeth through the gap in my upper lip. Her hand was bright but not blinding. Her fingertips were cold.

"If this happened to one of my brothers, we would hide it with a glamouring."

I looked at her, but her fingers were still pressed to my mouth, so I didn’t reply.

"Like a seeming," she went on. "We’d cover it up, but it would still be there, underneath, and there would be a cost."

"What cost?" I spoke over her fingers, voice muffly, and she laughed and withdrew her hand.

"A very bad cost. Imagine all the happiness you would feel, now turn that around and think of the opposite. Magic isn’t free."

“I saw you making a fire.”

“That wasn’t a real fire. If it turned into a real fire, I would burn too. I couldn't mend your face either, not without breaking something else even worse. You can't make something without breaking something.”

"I don’t think I would like that."

"Don’t worry, I couldn’t do it anyway. It’s quite difficult."

"Thanks anyway."

"You’re welcome." Sure vilcomb.

She was bright and I was broken. I was a fool and I had no words to say to her, nothing interesting at all. My mind was blank, I started to panic. She would go, and I would be alone in the dark, and there was a high cliff over there, and what was there left for me but the alehouse?

"Are you really cursed by Luck?" she said, not seeming to notice my expression.

"Everyone in the village says I am. I make the crops fail and the cows die. Sometimes it rains too much and sometimes it doesn’t rain enough."

"Hmmm," she took my chin between her thumb and forefinger and turned my head from side to side. "You don’t look like bad luck to me. Maybe the cows would have died anyway?”

“I saw Luck on the hill when my parents died.”

“Maybe he kept you safe.”

Ha, safe. My right hand went instinctively to the left, where the fingers had been carved away in the rock slide that had taken my parents and left me alone all those years ago.

“It would have been better had I died. Maybe they wouldn't have died.”

"Sometimes things aren’t what they seem." She frowned at me, "Not what they seem at all."

"Like you?" I said.

She laughed, a beautiful tinkling sound, followed by a kind of a snort that ruined the effect somewhat. "No, I’m just me, very ordinary."

"You’re not ordinary."

"Well, neither are you."

I noticed once again the flowers that covered the wall.

"The flowers are out. Flowers don’t usually bloom in the night time."

"Don’t they? I didn’t know. They’re always there for me." She reached up and cupped a blossom in one hand, but she didn’t pluck it. She let it rest back against the old stones.

I stepped closer to look, but she stiffened and glared at me, no longer smiling.

"Don’t come close to the wall, don’t touch it."

I froze, sensing the change in her. "I ain’t gonna touch it."

"It’s dangerous for you. This is not your place. You’ve heard stories?"

"Aye, I’ve heard stories."

"Good. It’s good that you’ve heard stories. You people should be afraid of us and not come near. The wall will bite you if you touch it. If you climb it, you'll die. If you follow me, you'll die, do you understand?"

She looked up. The moon was dipping low in the sky. "I have to go," she said. "Don’t follow me. Don’t touch the stones or you’ll be blasted to bits." She prowled towards the little archway with a thoughtless grace. Inside was perfectly black.

"Wait," I called after her. "Will I see you again?"

She hesitated by the archway. "No," she said. "You'll never see me again." She started to walk again, but then she paused, just inside the arch. I could see her frowning. "Wait here for me," she said. "I’ll try and come again, when the moon is narrow, but I might not be able to get away. Make sure you’re here, I’ll not come twice."

“Wait,” I yelled, as the door started to close. I wanted to thank her for being something new and different, but I was not clever with words back then and the gate was already almost closed.

Her light filled up the cracks for a moment and then was hidden. I blinked in the sudden darkness and when I could see again, the archway was no longer there. The wall was broken stone once more. Only the blossoms told me that she had been there at all.

Had I known then that I would one day fight her, with knives and shadows and dragonfire, perhaps I would not have waited, but I was a fool back then, with a fool’s heart, and everything I did was folly.

The second time I saw the fae girl was the night I first walked the ways.

I had decided to live in the forest until the month turned and the moon was narrow again.

The first night, I snuck down into the village. I collected my bow, my snares and my quiver of arrows from the hayloft behind Hettie’s house. On impulse, I stole a knife from a table outside the alehouse, a good iron one with a bone handle and a leather sheath. The owner was lying asleep nearby with his face in a puddle of ale. There was an oilcloth and some rope strapped over the log pile behind the alehouse, so I liberated those too, and also a couple of pies that had been left unattended. Also, half a candle, a tinderbox, some good glass bottles with lids, and a small bag of buttons that caught my eye. Several hours of careful larceny later, I had accumulated everything I needed for my camp, plus some buttons, so I made my way back up the ridge, over the down, and back into the western valley.

I found a likely spot, close to a stream but not so close that it might attract attention. I strung the rope between two trees, then slung my oilcloth over it, weighing down the corners with rocks. I chucked a couple of branches over the top of it for camouflage and dug out a fire pit with the flat edge of the knife.

When it was done, I stood back to survey my work. It was hardly palatial, but it was sound enough for a month of summer nights. I ate my pies and filled my bottles with water, then slept peacefully under my cloak.

The next day I set about laying my snares. There were plenty of rabbit tracks and I caught a couple in the evening. I snapped the little necks, held them until they stopped trembling, then stuck them and hung them up to bleed out.

I won’t bother you with all the mundanities of living in the woods. It all passed uneventfully, save one night when the heavens opened up and I huddled under my cloak, while my oilcloth whipped and thrashed around me, and the trees hissed like monsters.

After a fortnight, I had half-convinced myself that the whole thing had been a dream. Sometimes, I would walk to the ring, tracing the ancient carvings with a long stick. The longer I studied them, the more I realised that the pieces were meant to fit together another way. It had been something else once; I became sure of it. Some even more ancient structure which had been smashed so completely that not a single stone had remained unbroken.

It was like the pieces of a story, half-remembered. Like a grand and glorious dream that slides away with the sunrise. A memory of something else, pieced together to create a great broken ring that circumscribed the whole hilltop.

Bathed in the cold light of the moon, the shadows and the pieces seemed to fit in a way I could not describe, and as the month rolled around it was as though the pieces began aligning, like the patient mechanism of a clock, some grand, inevitable conjunction that would lead to a door, that would lead to a light, that would lead to her.

And so, like a story, the month folded back on itself and came back around to where it had first begun, and I sat, watching the moon rising thin and sharp above the valley, etching an intricate moving tapestry of shadows onto the forest floor, shimmering the dark pools into silver, ghosting the thin clouds on which it sailed like a galleon, sails straining and swollen with summers hopes and promises, the memory of her bright face, etched across the sky and in my mind and in all the world as far as I could fathom, and as the thin moon lit up the place where the door was hidden and the archway brightened, I struggled to rise from where I had been sitting and I stumbled because my legs were chilled, and when, silent as the dawn, she emerged into the real world and the world was made magical by her presence, she found me laying on my face, covered in leaves, clutching my shin and cursing like a fucking soldier.

She flashed me a smile. "You’re here!"

I smiled back, trying to ignore the stabbing pain that was climbing up my leg, into my groin. "Course I’m here. You asked me to be here."

"Gosh, you look awful. You’ve got sticks in your hair, did you know? Why are you on the floor?"

I struggled to my feet and sat on a fallen log, rubbing the bruised place. "I been waiting for you," I said. "I’ve been waiting this past month."

"Her eyes widened, and I saw they were pale blue. Ghost blue. "Has it really been that long?" She asked. "Time is different across the wall. It was wrong of me to tell you to wait."

I shook my head slightly, "I didn’t mind it. I ate rabbits and made a camp. I’d wait again any day."

She sat beside me and nudged me in the ribs. "I’m glad you waited really. It would have been awfully sad to come out and not find you here. Come, will you gather sticks with me please?"

The forest never really sleeps, and as I walked behind her, I was aware of a thousand small lives carrying on around me. Spiders were busily weaving. Moths flapped into her circle of light and spiralled around like crazed little machinata. Bats swooped above us on ragged wings. Small rustles in the underbrush might have been mice or badgers or weasels. I was aware of a thousand pairs of eyes on us, but foolishly I paid them no heed.

We walked between the trees while she inspected fallen branches. She was very particular about the ones she chose, nothing rotten, nothing with greenery still attached. Nothing with too many bugs. Nothing dirty. She had a ball of white twine, and each time she found one she liked, I helped her tie it onto the others until we had a good clean bundle.

"Will you tell me your name?" I said, asking the question that had been burning in my heart ever since I last saw her.

"You can call me Fen," she called back." It’s short for Fentallion. I’m named after my aunt you know, but I’m not much like her. She had a stilled heart of armour and smoke black daggers that could cut the moonlight. Anyway, she’s dead now. She could walk as tall as trees, but they cut her heart out and buried it under the city wall.”

Again the small frown, the passing of a shadow.

"I’m sorry," I said.

"Don’t be," said Fen a little too brightly. "It was a long time ago, and I’m sure I never met her."

"My name is Tam", I said.

I wanted some words to make her understand that I had thought of her every day, that I was glad she came back. I wanted to thank her for being kind last time we had met, and that somehow just being listened to had made me feel better, but I was not clever with words, so I just repeated my own name like a turd encrusted simpleton.

"Tam," I intoned, "I don’t think it’s short for nothing."

Once again the small frown crossed her brow, a flash of sorrow that was hidden almost as soon as it appeared. I wanted to ask her about it, but I was afraid of what she would say, so I changed the subject.

"I’ve been thinking about you," I said. "I think I know what you are."

"Do you?"

"You’re an Aden ain’t you, one of the Old Kings that left the world before the Breaking."

"You think I’m an Old King?" She was smiling at me now, teasing. I liked it.

"No, well maybe you’re an Old Princess."

"An Old Princess?"

"Yes, well... Maybe not so old, but from the old days, the time before the books were written."

"I’m just me, Tam."

Again the look of sadness, and I cast around desperately for something to say, to delay the moment that I knew would come, the moment that always came when my Luck ran out, but my mind was blank, and she spoke first.

"I came to say goodbye," she said.

And there, it was done, but there was a heat in my heart that wouldn’t let go, and the words came back to me.

"Why must you go?"

"It’s hard to explain. I’m not really safe to be around. There are deeper shadows, even in the darkness."

"I ain’t afraid of no shadows, Fen."

"Well, you should be. There are some things you can fight, and some things where you just have to keep very still and hope they don't notice you."

"I can fight. I’ve got a knife, see." I unclasped the good iron I had stolen from the drunk in the tavern and held it up for her to inspect. The blade was dented and there were spots of rust where the storm had got to it. "I’d fight the Shadow Lord himself to keep you safe."

She laughed at me, "I do believe you would. There’s a realness about you when you talk. It’s like you’re made out of solid stuff. Cows and summers and bags of oats. I sometimes feel like I’m made of moonlight and dandelion fluff, there’s nothing to me, I could just float up into the sky and really, no one would miss me. I think I’ll miss not seeing you though."

"If you are going away, you have to tell me why."

"I don’t have to tell you anything. I'm in charge. I can do what I like."

"Then I’ll wait, right here by the stones, even till I’m old and grey."

She laughed again, the beautiful tinkling sound, followed by the snort that both spoiled the effect and completed it.

"I mean it," I said. "You’ll come through that gate in fifty years and find me waiting for you with a long white beard, surrounded by all the animals I’ve tamed."

"You plan to tame animals?"

"I’ll have to do something with my time. I’ll tame foxes and badgers and teach them tricks."

"I do believe you’re toying with me."

"Don’t go. At least tell me why."

We had a good bundle now, we were coming back around towards the wall. I could sense the moment slipping away. I wondered what I would do, after she had gone. What possible meaning my life could have, but in my heart I knew where I would go, back to the village, working small jobs, into the alehouse each night until I gradually disappeared.

The gate was open and I handed her the perfect bundle of sticks, wound and knotted with white twine. I noticed there were buds already starting to form on the tips of them.

"Go home Tam," she said.

"I ain't got no home."

"Then do something good. Go travel."

I nodded, though I knew I wouldn't. She went to the doorway and passed through it. Her light brightened, then the door closed behind her, and the world became dark.

A badger shuffled into the clearing, snuffled around, then toddled off back into the bushes without even looking at me.

Then there came a brightening once more. A small crack around the edge of the doorway. I sat up straighter, and there she was again. Her face was a second moon. Her hair was a net full of stars.

"Oh do come on then," she said. "Just for a little while. You have to be gone before anyone notices or something completely awful will happen. I'm not sure what, but it’ll be perfectly dreadful for everybody."

I leapt to my feet and crossed the space between us in two strides.

"Don't touch the sides when you come through," she said. "You'll make a mess if you do. The rain doesn't get under here and I don't want to have to clean your blood off the arch."

I made myself as narrow as I could. There was moss hanging down, and the roof was dripping with moisture. Bright points of rippling light reflected on the glistening rocks. The arch turned into a tunnel, and as I moved further, it became narrower. She was a distant star, skipping away far in front of me. I sensed the disapproving weight of the rocks. The tunnel grew narrower still, and I had to stoop to avoid brushing the ceiling. The earth shook, and I almost fell. I flattened myself to the ground, gripping the wet soil until the movement ceased. Then, at the far end of the tunnel, I saw a new light, brightening.

I scrambled towards it. It swelled and bloomed and filled my head with colour. I pulled myself free, shoulders and arms. My legs and feet slipped out quickly as though the tunnel were vomiting them into the light. The warm heat of the sun greeted me.

I was in a meadow full of flowers, bordered by fruit trees. Fen was standing there with her bundle. Her grey summer dress fluttered around her legs.

"You made it," she said. She sounded surprised.

I took a deep breath. Behind me, the tunnel was black as a cavity.

"Do we need to close the door?" I asked.

“Oh, don't worry about that,” she replied. “There are all kinds of doors.”