Mama emerged from the shrubbery with a handful of berries which she thrust upon me, urging me to eat them all as quickly as possible. While I did so, she gathered others for herself. She chewed them as though famished, eyes rolled up, jaws working furiously. It was an astonishing sight which kept my eyes fixed on her for several minutes. When I looked at my surroundings again, I found myself in true Ylles. Parkland had replaced moorland; castles stood where the hovels had been, and over all stretched a sky of late-evening blue spangled with early stars. The grasses were also starred with tiny five-pointed flowers of silver, umbels of golden bloom, and tinkling sprays of bluebells. Though I saw it all quite clearly, Mama was not content until she had uprooted a small, hairy stemmed plant and rubbed the juice of its root into my eyes. It stung horribly for a time, but when the pain vanished, my eyesight was like that of a falcon.
“Elvenroot,” she explained. “It grows only in Faery, nowhere else. It enables one to see all our marvels.”
“Ylles is in Faery?” I asked stupidly, sniffing at an odor which had caught my nostrils, a familiar scent.
“A province,” she said, nodding. “One of many. It goes from those hills over there,” and she pointed, “to the ocean over there,” pointing once more. “I am the ruler of it, when I’m here. When I’m not here, another of the Theena Shee takes it over.”
I had not understood the word she used. She said it again, then smoothed a patch of ground and spelled it out with her finger, in Irish, evidently the only human language in which the word was written. “Daoine Sidhe,” she said. “Theena Shee. My people. The people of True Faery. One of whom takes over rulership of my province when I am away. Here, I’ll show you the boundaries.”
She turned me to face a direction I thought of as north, where loomed a range of shadowy mountains, their ridges making a jagged line against the stars. At the foot of the mountains lay dark folds of forest. Mama turned me widdershins from the forest to see the land sloping down to a starlit sea, the white combers rolling endlessly toward us. Widdershins from the sea was moorland, covered with low growth and extending as far as I could see. Widdershins from the moorland brought me facing uplands, where many fantastic and marvelous palaces stood, though none, to my surprise, as lovely as Westfaire. Whichever direction I turned, the familiar odor came past me on the wind, as though blown from every quarter.
“Oberon’s and Mab’s,” she said, pointing to the two closest palaces. “And mine, and a dozen more. It doesn’t really matter which part belongs to who. Oberon’s realm is next to mine, and he would look after it if I left.”
We stood beside a copse which was more or less at the center of all this: tall trees, lacy, silvery, softly susurant.
“Why would you ever leave it?” I asked, staring in wonder around myself. Truthfully, it was very lovely.
“Oh,” she said vaguely. “Sometimes one wants a change.”
Every view was one a painter would sell his brushes for. Every aspect thrilled. Every structure was perfect from every angle. The scent of the flowers alone was enough to make one drunk, though it did not mask that other scent.…
“Mama, what is that smell?” I asked.
“Smell?” She sniffed delicately. “The flowers?”
“No, the smell on the wind.”
She sniffed again, her ivory nostrils dilating to take in the breeze. “Not the sea? Not the pines of the forest?”
“No. The smell … the smell that’s everywhere.”
She laughed, liltingly. “The smell of Faery, silly child. The smell of magic!”
As I was about to pursue that matter, we were interrupted by the sound of horns, tiny horns pitched high as a wasp’s buzz. Mama gestured to one side, and I turned to see a troupe passing by, little men mounted on mice, butterfly-winged maidens riding hedgehogs saddled with roses. Elladine called and they answered, their voices like infant bells, waving tiny hands, calling a greeting but not turning aside from their processionary way.
“Trouping fairies,” she told me with an indulgent smile.
“Where are they going?”
“Nowhere. Everywhere. They simply go. They camp on the mosses and dance. Then they move on. They are not serious creatures. They have only small enchantments, small as themselves. Sometimes they are seen in the human world, sometimes they are heard. Sometimes their dance floors are seen.”
“Fairy rings?”
She nodded. “They are the only fairies with butterfly wings, the only fairies to inhabit human gardens. Once they were as large as we; once they were worshipped as gods and goddesses, long, oh long, long ago. They had mighty names then: Pomona. Naiad. Dryad. Aurora. Over time they have shrunk. They get smaller with every passing century. Eventually I believe they will vanish into the atmosphere, and we will hear them for a time, like midges, then they will be entirely gone.” There was something careless and remote in her voice, a tone I had noted before, a tone I had shuddered to hear.
“Won’t you miss them?” I asked, wanting her to say yes, yes, she would miss them because they were fanciful and marvelous.
She didn’t answer the question I had asked. “We Sidhe do not need wings, nor mice to serve as steeds. We have our own hunt, our own ways.” She sounded eager, almost voracious. There was something uncomfortable in her voice, something like an edge of grass, seeming so soft, cutting so deep, the life’s blood following it almost invisibly so that one does not know one is cut until one sees the red. I drew in my breath, waiting for the wound to gape, but she walked away over the verdant meadow, and I followed her, drawn like the tail of a kite, wondering what had happened to her. Even in Chinanga she had
