My most recent travels in Ireland left me with one conclusion: the Fae do not choose their victims at random, and the Dark Fae are even more particular.
While traveling to Derry, I made a brief stopover at the Crosskeys Inn, and met there a young woman, perhaps only fifteen years of age, begging outside in the cold rain. I invited her in to dine with me, to her great surprise, but by and by she joined me, eating what can only be described as a remarkable amount of chicken liver pie. Over this harrowing feast and several pints of good stout ale, I invited her to tell me how she came to be a beggar in these parts. She reacted with hesitation at first, and that is perhaps my own fault; all this while I had been studying her closely, for the woman—we may call her Edna—possessed all the markers one expected from a Dark Fae descendant.
The very black hair and similarly black eyes, the paleness, the thin stature and sunken cheeks . . . All of these features I had sketched before when encountering what the Irish merely dubbed “Changelings.”
“My mother, she had me young and without a man” was Edna’s explanation.
“You mean unwed,” I replied.
“If you like,” she said, visibly uncomfortable.
“You will have no judgment from me,” I told her.
Edna nodded, and continued, saying, “The family liked to tell it that mother was never the same after she came in from washing at the river one day. That’s the river Bann, I mean to say, and her cousins said she was gone for two whole days just to do a bit of rinsing. Two whole days! It couldn’t be true! But all present swore to it, and for a long while Mother thought they were just having her on. She started to believe a wee bit more when the babe—I—came along.”
And here she stopped, for she had become suddenly emotional. Some men in the inn looked at us with more than polite curiosity. More proof for my solidifying theory.
“She was taken,” I said to her, calm. “This is not the first I’ve heard of such a thing.”
Her eyes grew enormous and she nodded, reaching for my hand and squeezing it, in relief, I warrant, or gratitude. As with all descendants of the Dark Fae, I battled a disquieting feeling in my chest. Those unaccustomed to mythic and magicked creatures do not understand that they are experiencing the body’s natural ability to detect Unworldly or “Dark” elements. This is almost always chalked up to “instinct” or “gut feeling” that leads to instant repulsion, but one can learn to control this response.
I did not flinch away from her, and Edna noticed this.
“You’re different,” she told me. “You believe me.”
“Yes, and yes, but I must ask you to remove your hand, madam, as we are drawing a number of unsavory glances.”
Edna complied, but her excitement was not diminished. “Changeling whore,” she whispered, “that’s what they call me. That’s why I’ve no family, no man of my own. Folk ’round here just know it, can sense it. They know something is wrong with me, but that isn’t fair-like, is it? I didn’t do nothing to get this way, and my poor mother . . .”
“The grim reality we must all face is that the dark and different and strange among us face a kind of exile. Man desires comfort above all else. Comfort, security . . . You were born of an unworldly creature and a hapless mortal, and if an innocent washerwoman could be stolen away to the heart of the forest and made to be a Fae bride, then no one is really comfortable and no one is truly secure. Then that bump in the night could come for them or their sister or their son, too, and that is chaos. That is ruin. You are ruin and chaos to them, but you are lovely to my eye.”
“You’re brave or daft, then,” she said, quite rightly. “Chaos and ruin. Where does that leave me, then?”
“In the in-between, my dear, where all things magic go to wait.”
I put several coins down on the table to cover our meal, then handed Edna what money I could spare. She grasped my hand again, trying to pull me back down to my chair.
“Wait?” she asked. “Wait for what?”
I did not answer her then and still cannot. Long have I suspected that the growing number of so-called Changelings among us is a sign of acceleration. We are moving quickly toward a reformation of the world, I think; the widespread proliferation of Unworldly and magicked creatures does not so much hint at this but points and stamps its feet and shouts: What has been made in darkness to serve the dark will rise at last, at last!
It is the deep, trembling drum that beats faster, ushering in an age we humble explorers and historians can only imagine. Apocalypse, cry some, but I disagree. Some of my less compassionate colleagues use their studies as a means to an end, that end being eradication. This is foolhardy in the extreme. These creatures, these people, are not weeds to be pulled out and flung aside. They have been hunted and burned and driven out for millennia, and who are we to deny them their ascension?
Does Edna not deserve a home and family of her own? Must she beg until death at the doors of those who would shun and hate her and keep her forever scrabbling in the mud, all for the sake of their comfort?
Esteemed men and women of this most curious profession, I call on you in this first chapter and in all those that follow to hear this, the closest I will come to a thesis, to see these creatures—these Changelings and priests of shadow and Wailers and all else—not as curiosities to be studied but as people to be understood.
My mind rebelled, filled with churning, burning, horrible questions, and yet I slept. I had never begun to dream as quickly as I did that night in the barn, finding myself at once immersed in a vivid memory of my birth town.
Waterford was a place of wonder to me, of magic, of cracked, crumbling keeps and brightly painted houses lining a serpentine river. Beautiful houses filled with Waterford glint glass, homes like princesses would live in, homes that I would never have. Our house was just a shack on the edge of all this singularly Irish beauty. In my dream it was night, and I could see from our perch on a dusty berm the boats moving downriver.
I was tiny again, no more than five, dressed in the thin dress my mother had patched beyond recognition. It could have been a rag for scrubbing dishes with all the holes and tears and dodgy seams. In one hand I held my favorite dolly, a crude thing like an effigy, just sticks and straw wrapped in scraps of potato sack. In the other hand was a cast-off piece of wood from the butcher down the lane. Only it wasn’t a nasty old stick to me, it was a sword and I was fighting pirates.