EPILOGUE
Down a path worn into the woods, past a stream and a hollowed-out log full of pill bugs and termites, is a glass coffin. It rests right on the ground, and in it sleeps an elf with a golden circlet on his head and ears as pointed as knives.
The townsfolk know there was once a different boy resting there. One with horns and brown curls, one whom they adored and whom they have begun to forget. What matters is that they have a new faerie, one who won’t wake up during the long summers when girls and boys stretch out the full length of the coffin, staring down through the panes and fogging them up with their breath. Who won’t wake when tourists come and gape or debunkers insist he isn’t real, but want to take photographs with him anyway. Who won’t open his poison-green eyes on autumn weekends while girls dance right on top of him, lifting bottles high over their heads, as if they’re saluting the whole haunted forest.
And elsewhere in the woods, there is another party, one taking place inside a hollow hill, full of night-blooming flowers. There, a pale boy plays a fiddle with newly mended fingers while his sister dances with his best friend. There, a monster whirls about, branches waving in time with the music. There, a prince of the Folk takes up the mantle of king, embracing a changeling like a brother, and, with a human boy at his side, names a girl his champion.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I started this book thinking that it was going to be about revisiting the faerie folklore I loved, but it turned out to be about a lot of other things, too. It was a tricksy book to write, constantly transforming itself and trying to slip through my fingers. I believe it was Gene Wolfe who said, “You never learn to write a novel, you just learn to write the novel that you’re writing.” Never was that more true for me than with this book.
I am indebted to the folklorists who’ve compiled the materials that have informed my understanding of faeries. In particular, for this book, I am indebted to W. Y. Evans-Wentz’s The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries; the chapter that concerns changeling stories in Yoruba-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa, by A. B. Ellis; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s poem “Der Erlk?nig”; Notes on the FolkLore of the North-East of Scotland, by Walter Gregor; “Kate Crackernuts,” from English Fairy Tales, by Joseph Jacobs; “The Farmer and the Boggart,” from County FolkLore Vol. V, collected by Mrs. Gutch and Mabel Peacock; and many bits of Folklore in the English and Scottish Ballads, by Lowry Charles Wimberly.
I also need to thank the many people who held my hand, provided suggestions and support, and suffered with me—especially those of you who suffered through multiple drafts.
Thank you to all those who were in Arizona on the writing retreat where I started the book, to everyone in San Miguel de Allende who helped me plot out an early and possibly unrecognizable draft, and to those who were with me in Cornwall to help me figure out what to do once I’d doubled back and changed a ton.
In particular, thank you to Delia Sherman, Gwenda Bond, and Christopher Rowe for your wise advice. Thank you to Steve Berman for guiding me toward a better understanding of Benjamin’s storyline. Thank you to Paolo Bacigalupi for checking in on me and commiserating on deadlines. Thank you to Cassandra Clare for continually reassuring me that the book would eventually be done and that despair was part of the process. Thank you to Sarah Rees Brennan for all your structural advice and for reading the book so many times. Thank you to Kelly Link for also reading the book so many times and thank you for telling me where to put the kissing. Thank you to Libba Bray for taking the bullet by turning in your draft, so I got another week of work on my own. Thank you to Robin Wasserman for sitting with me and a newborn baby in a Starbucks, listening to me cry about my plot while he cried for his bottle, and thank you for that brutal and necessary Christmas Eve edit. Thank you to Joshua Lewis for helping to figure out the endgame. Thank you to Leigh Bardugo for fighting to make my plot and conflict and pacing better—I appreciate it more than I can say and probably a lot more than it seemed. Thank you to Cindy Pon for talking through the story with me over delicious Russian food and spicy ginger beer. Thank you to Kami Garcia, who let me lounge around in her hotel room and eat all her gummy bears while we were both finishing drafts. Thank you to Ally Carter for talking me through the reveals and off the ledge.
I owe a special, huge, heartfelt thanks to everyone at Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, especially my fabulous editor, Alvina Ling, who believed in this manuscript even when it was very late and very messy. Thank you to Bethany Strout for being an amazing, generous reader, and to Amber Caraveo at Orion Books in the UK, for knowing what wasn’t working. Thank you to Lisa Moraleda, publicist extraordinaire, who always knows what we’re going to eat, and thank you to Nina Douglas, my publicist in the UK, who made travel fun. And, of course, thanks to Victoria Stapleton, for awesomeness and also booze.
Thank you to my agent, Barry Goldblatt, for support, advice, chasing down that epigraph, and believing I would actually ever finish this book.
Really, thank you, anyone who believed I would finish, because I wasn’t so sure I would.
Most of all, to my husband, Theo, and our son, Sebastian, who put up with all my absences and my long hours in front of the computer, and who listened as I read this whole book out loud to them (okay, Sebastian mostly slept through that part). Your vast patience and love is deeply appreciated.