PROLOGUE
THE LAST mortal kingdom before the unmeasured sweep of Faerieland begins has at best held an uneasy truce with its unpredictable neighbor. There is nothing to show a boundary, at least on the mortal side of it; and if any ordinary human creature ever saw a faerie—or at any rate recognized one—it was never mentioned; but the existence of the boundary and of faeries beyond it is never in doubt either.
The people who live in those last lands are a little special themselves, and either they breed true or the children grow up and leave for less suspenseful countryside. Those who do leave are rarely heard from again, and then only in stiff or hasty letters written to assure friends and family of their well-being; they never return in person. But some of those who leave remember what they have left; and the memories are not all taken up with things that go bump in the night (which are never faeries, who know better than to make noise) or the feeling of being watched while standing at the center of a wide, sunny, sweet-smelling meadow and spinning helplessly in your tracks seeking for the shadow that is always behind you. For much of that watchfulness is friendly: if you lie down by the side of a brook and fall asleep, the murmuring water sends pleasant dreams of love and courage; and if a child loses its way in a forest, it finds its way out again before it is anything more than tired and scratched and cross and hungry.
And there are years when no babies at all are stolen from their cradles, and new mothers laugh, and grandparents gloat, and new fathers spin fabulous dreams of future greatness and trip over their own feet. But there are also years when expectant mothers go about with white faces and dread the arrival of what they most want, and the fathers listen anxiously for a child’s first cry, but are not soothed when finally they hear it. And the father’s first question, as is the way of fathers everywhere, is “A boy or a girl?” But his reasons, in this last country, are a little different. The faeries always choose boy babies.
The story is still told that once, perhaps a century ago, or perhaps two, a five-weeks girl was snatched away through a window her parents knew only too well that they had bolted carefully from the inside. But after two days—or rather, nights, for all immortal thievery occurs in the dark hours—the baby was returned.
There was never any question of a changeling. The whole silly idea of changelings was invented by lazy parents too far inland for any faintest whiff of faerie shores to have reached them; parents who cannot think of any other reason why their youngest, or middle, or eldest, or next-to-somethingest child should be so regrettable; they know they aren’t to blame.
So there was no shadow in these parents’ overjoyed minds. But they were good people, and thoughtful, and after telling everyone they knew just once about the miraculous return, they never mentioned it again. Except once to the girl herself when she was almost grown; and she nodded, and looked thoughtful, but said nothing; and the uneasy dreams she had had for as long as she could remember, about impossible things that insisted that they were to be believed, stopped abruptly. She never mentioned the dreams to anyone either. Loose talk about faeries, dreams, and impossible things was not encouraged. It might be dangerous.
Six weeks after the little girl’s marvelous adventure a family that lived only two streets over from her family lost its baby—a boy. He was the third child: he had two older sisters. He was not returned; nothing was ever heard of him again.
That was always the way of it. Nothing was ever again heard of the lost children; that was what, in the end, made it so terrible. The little girl who was returned seemed none the worse for wear; but then she had only been gone two days, and since she had been brought back she must have been a mistake. There was some thought, rarely mentioned aloud, that the fact that the faeries treated their mistakes kindly, or at least had been generous enough to bring this particular one back, was a good omen for the treatment of those they kept. It was this idea, persisting in the backs of people’s minds, that made the retelling of the story of the baby that was returned so common. It was all the comfort they had. What happened to all the other ones, the ones that disappeared forever?
But the parents of girls are not to be envied either. A boy, if he survives his first year, is safe. It is the girls who at last have the harder time of it, because it is when they reach their early blush of womanly beauty, between the ages, say, of sixteen and nineteen—it is then that they are in danger. And as it is the strong, handsome, happy boys that are taken, so it is the wisest and most beautiful girls—the girls who come home early from the parties they most enjoy, and leave their friends desolate behind them, because they know their parents are worrying at their being out so late; the same girls who never themselves think about being stolen because they have far too much else to do with their time and talents.
If a girl reaches twenty, she may breathe easier and think about marrying. But she has arrived safely at the cost of the cheerful carelessness of her youth; and it is too late for her to regain it now.
But the land was a good land, and its true people could not desert it, for they loved it; and it seemed that the land loved them in return; even if there were those who found the land’s curious awareness of the people who stood or walked upon it disquieting. And sometimes even those who had been born and raised there left to find some country that would not keep them awake at night with its silence. Perhaps, bordering Faerieland, as it did, the touch of immortality made this land richer, more beautiful even than it might otherwise have been; and perhaps that touch lay gently on the people themselves. But for whatever reason, the land had been lived in for hundreds of years, and the people built their houses and barns and shops, and tilled their fields, and worked at their crafts, and married and … had children.
There was some commerce between them and less enchanted countries, and it was often observed that if you dared buy anything from that land, it lasted longer or tasted better or was more beautiful than its like from other origins; but the market for these things was limited because the commoner sort of mortal often found that things from that last land were a little hard to live with. They preyed on your mind; you had the feeling that they were breathing if you turned your back on them. Even a loaf of bread from that strange wheat could give you uncanny dreams—or insights into your neighbor all the more unnerving because they were accurate.
But its true people didn’t care; and as some left it, others came, having tasted its wine, perhaps, or worn a cloak woven from its flax, and felt themselves somehow transformed, if only a little bit—just enough to make them restless, enough to make them come and see the strange living land themselves. And some of these looked long, and settled; and it, whatever it was, crept into the eyes of those who stayed, and into their blood, so they could not bear the thought of leaving, whatever dooms might hang over them if they remained.