“You mean if someone mortal gets elvenroot in her eyes, she can see Faery, but nothing else?” I asked in surprise.
“It’s only your fairy blood lets you see Faery and still see this world, Beauty, and your granddaughter hasn’t enough fairy blood ever to use it safely. If she goes there, she must stay forever. She’s only one-eighth, and that’s not enough to go back and forth. If you’re thinking of taking her to Faery, beware!”
I hadn’t been thinking of my granddaughter. I hadn’t been thinking of anyone, specially, though I suddenly thought of Jaybee, wondering what a view of Faery would do to him.
“So why do you want Oberon to fight the Dark Lord, Puck?”
“Because it would do what the Holy One asked of Faery in the first place! To help mankind! Help him instead of using him or ignoring him, which has been the usual pattern. Make common cause with him. Join with him.
“And it’s so logical,” he said. “Man is dying from being too many. Faery is dying from being too few. We need to mix more, to value our children more. Men have too many of them, they’re cheap. The Sidhe have too few, and they seek them like treasure. Man needs what Faery has to give. Fewer children. Longer lives. Less speed. More thought. Mystery and wonder and glamour built in, so to speak, through the slow creation of marvelous things. Less haste and destruction. More appreciation for what’s been given. Like man and Faery were two halves of one thing. If the Dark Lord were conquered, it could all come right!”
“Why won’t the Sidhe listen? They lust after humans enough.”
“Oh aye, they do. But it’s that pride again, Beauty. They said no to the Holy One; you think they’re going to say yes to a Bogle? And while a little fleshy stink is exciting to them, they won’t accept it as a daily thing. It’s common. It’s not how they see themselves.”
“So they won’t.”
“They won’t. Perhaps it’s the dwindle, the way our magic is leaking away. And our numbers are falling, too, one here, one there. A forest gets cut down, and the fairies who were born out of that forest are gone. At one time, the glamour would have been strong enough to protect the forest, but not anymore.”
“What’s causing it, Puck? Why do they dwindle?”
“There’s some say it’s the Dark Lord’s doing. Every time he makes a new horror, it takes hideous magic to do it, all tied up in that terror, like gold dug out of the earth and hid away. There’s some say it’s the human priests, sucking our magic away to use it in their religion, turning wine into blood and making spells to forgive sins. There’s some who say magic came from nature, and with man destroying nature right and left, there’s not enough of it left. Whatever the reason, we’ve been losing it for a few thousand years. The only ones who’re holding fast are us Bogles. We can tolerate mankind better than most, maybe because we never went in for glamour like the Sidhe. We can even live in wasteland, where those of Faery can’t. But it’s hard times for us, too. We watch things dwindle and dwindle, and Oberon forgets what he once knew, forgets his majesty and his dignity and ruts like a goat, laughing and pretending all is well. As though time were forever.”
“But you said they’re immortal.”
“All that means is they don’t die. It doesn’t mean they can’t fade away. They’re tied to the forests, Beauty. Tied to the moors. Tied to the seas and rivers. They were drawn from nature and will go when nature goes. They vanish if their forests vanish. Fade away. Like snow, melting.”
His face was drawn into a mask of tragedy, the corners of his mouth pulled down with woe. I took his hand in my own and stroked it.
“Right now,” he muttered, “if I went to Faery in this time, there’d be almost nothing there. It’s all shadows and ghosts. No palaces. No enchanted places. What’s left has been invaded by him. To reach the Faery you know, I have to go back and come in from hundreds of years ago.”
I nodded, sadly. “That’s what Bill and the crew were photographing when I met them. The end of Faery. The last enchantments. They were getting a picture of Westfaire with the roses growing up.”
He sighed. I tried to think of something comforting to say, but someone knocked on my door. I looked up, startled, looked back to find Puck gone.
“Yes?” I said.
Janice opened the door. “I’ve made some tea. I thought it might do us good.”
I nodded, trying to smile as I levered myself off the bed on aching old legs to go have tea, feeling less lonely but more lost than I had half an hour before. Grumpkin purred and stayed where he was. The end of the world does not impress cats.
Janice wiped her eyes and made small talk. She wondered how long I’d been back in the twentieth; she wondered how I’d been getting along, without a job.
“Oh, I had a job until just recently,” I said. “Caring for horses. Then, suddenly, I got old. Up until a year or two ago, I wasn’t … didn’t feel old at all.”
She sipped and nodded. “That’s the way it takes us all, I think. Suddenly, you’re not young anymore, and you don’t know where it went. And people tell us they don’t love us anymore because we’re too old. And some of us fight it, and some of us realize in time that it’s God’s will.” Her eyes blazed at me.
“So,” I
