until I had left my father’s lands, unwittingly, whereupon she resumed her true shape and popped
me into a sack.”
“And you are her slave forever?”
“Not forever,” and at that the faerie girl smiled. “I gain my freedom on the day the moon loses
her daughter, if that occurs in a week when two Mondays come together. I await it with patience.
And in the meantime I do as I am bid, and also I dream. Will you buy a flower from me now, young
master?”
“My name is Dunstan.”
“And an honest name it is, too,” she said with a teasing grin. “Where are your pincers, Master
Dunstan? Will you catch the devil by the nose?”
“And what is your name?” asked Dunstan, blushing a deep red.
“I no longer have a name. I am a slave, and the name I had was taken from me. I answer to
‘hey, you!’ or to ‘girl!’ or to ‘foolish slattern!’ or to many another imprecation.”
Dunstan noticed how the silken fabric of her robe pressed itself against her body; he was aware
of elegant curves, and of her violet eyes upon him, and he swallowed.
Dunstan put his hand in his pocket and pulled out his kerchief. He could no longer look at the
woman. He tumbled out his money onto the counter. “Take enough for this,” he said, picking a
pure white snowdrop from the table.
“We do not take money at this stall.” She pushed the coins back toward him.
“No? What will you take?” For by now he was quite agitated, and his only mission was to obtain
a flower for... for Daisy, Daisy Hempstock ... to obtain his flower and to depart, for, truth to tell,
the young lady was making him exceedingly uncomfortable.
“I could take the color of your hair,” she said, “or all of your memories before you were three
years of age. I could take the hearing from your left ear—not all of it, just enough that you’d not
enjoy music or appreciate the running of a river or the soughing of the wind.”
Dunstan shook his head.
“Or a kiss from you. One kiss, here on my cheek.”
“That I’ll pay with goodwill!” said Dunstan, and with that he leaned across the stall, amid the
twinkling jingling of the crystal flowers, and planted a chaste kiss on her soft cheek. He smelled
the scent of her then, intoxicating, magical; it filled the front of his head and his chest and his
mind.
“There, now,” she said, and she passed him his snowdrop. He took it with hands that suddenly
seemed to him to be huge and clumsy and not at all small and in every way perfect like the hands
of the faerie girl. “And I’ll see you back here tonight, Dunstan Thorn, when the moon goes down.
Come here and hoot like a little owl. Can you do that?”
He nodded, and stumbled away from her; he did not need to ask how she knew his surname; she
had taken it from him along with certain other things, such as his heart, when he had kissed her.
The snowdrop chimed in his hand.
Why, Dunstan Thorn,” said Daisy Hemp-stock, when he encountered her by Mr. Bromios’s tent,
sitting with her family and Dunstan’s parents, eating great brown sausages and drinking porter,
“whatever is the matter?”
“I brought you a gift,” Dunstan muttered, and thrust the chiming snowdrop toward her; it
glinted in the afternoon sunlight. She took it from him, puzzled, with fingers still shiny with
sausage grease. Impulsively, Dunstan leaned forward and, in front of her mother and father and
sister, in front of Bridget Comfrey and Mr. Bromios and all, he kissed her on her fair cheek.
The outcry was predictable; but Mr. Hempstock, who had not lived on the border of Faerie and
the Lands Beyond for fifty-seven years for nothing, exclaimed, “Hush, now! Look at his eyes. Can’t
you see the poor boy’s dazed in his wits, dazed and confused? He’s bespelled, I’ll wager you. Hoy!
Tommy Forester! Come here; take young Dunstan Thorn back to the village and keep an eye on
him; let him sleep if he wishes, or talk if it’s talk he needs...”
Tommy walked Dunstan out of the market and back to the village of Wall.
“There, now, Daisy,” said her mother, stroking her hair, “he’s just a little elf-touched, that’s
all. No need to take on so.” And she pulled a lace kerchief from her capacious bosom, and dabbed
at her daughter’s cheeks, which had suddenly become covered with tears.
Daisy looked up at her, and seized the handkerchief, and blew her nose upon it, and sniffled
into it. And Mrs. Hemp-stock observed, with a certain perplexity, that Daisy appeared to be smiling
through her tears.
“But Mother, Dunstan kissed me” said Daisy Hempstock, and she fixed the crystal snowdrop at
the front of her bonnet, where it chimed and glistened.
After some time spent searching for it, Mr. Hempstock and Dunstan’s father found the stall
where the crystal flowers were being sold; but the stall was being run by an elderly woman,
accompanied by an exotic and very beautiful bird, which was chained to its perch by a thin silver
chain. There was no reasoning with the old woman, for when they tried to question her about what
had happened to Dunstan, all her talk was of one of the prizes of her collection, given away by a
good-for-nothing, and that was what came of ingratitude, and of these sad modern times, and of
today’s servants.
In the empty village (for who’d be in the village during the Faerie Market?), Dunstan was taken
into the Seventh Magpie, and given a wooden settle on which to sit. He rested his forehead on his
hand, and stared off into no-one-knows-where and, from time to time, sighed huge sighs, like the
wind.
Tommy Forester tried to talk to him, saying “Now then, old fellow, buck up, that’s the ticket,
let’s see a smile, eh? How’s about something to eat then? Or something to drink? No? My word, you
do look queer, Dunstan, old fellow...” but gaining no response of any kind, Tommy began to pine
after the market himself, where even now (he rubbed his tender jaw) the lovely Bridget was
undoubtedly being escorted by some huge and imposing gentleman with exotic clothes and a little
monkey that chattered. And, having assured himself that his friend would be safe in the empty inn,
Tommy walked back through the village to the gap in the wall.
As Tommy reentered the market, he observed that the place was a hubbub: a wild place of
puppet shows, of jugglers and dancing animals, of horses for auction and all kinds of things for sale
or barter.
Later, at twilight, a different kind of people came out. There was a crier, who cried news as a
modern newspaper prints headlines—”The Master of Stormhold Suffers a Mysterious Malady!”,
“The Hill of Fire Has Moved to the Fastness of Dene!”, “The Squire of Garamond’s Only Heir is
Transformed into a Grunting Pig-wiggin!”—and would for a coin expand further on these stories.
The sun set, and a huge spring moon appeared, high already in the heavens. A chill breeze
blew. Now the traders retreated into their tents, and the visitors to the market found themselves
whispered at, invited to partake of numerous wonders, each available for a price.
And as the moon came low on the horizon Dunstan Thorn walked quietly down the cobbled
streets of the village of Wall. He passed many a merry-maker—visitor or foreigner—although few
enough of them observed him as he walked.
He slipped through the gap in the wall—thick it was, the wall—and Dunstan found himself
wondering, as his father had before him, what would happen were he to walk along the top of it.
Through the gap and into the meadow, and that night, for the first time in his life, Dunstan
entertained thoughts of continuing on through the meadow, of crossing the stream and vanishing
into the trees on its far side. He entertained these thoughts awkwardly, as a man entertains
unexpected guests. Then, as he reached his objective, he pushed these thoughts away, as a man
apologizes to his guests, and leaves them, muttering something about a prior engagement.
The moon was setting.
Dunstan raised his hands to his mouth and hooted. There was no response; the sky above was a
deep color—blue perhaps, or purple, not black—sprinkled with more stars than the mind could hold.
He hooted once more.
“That,” she said severely in his ear, “is nothing like a little owl. A snowy owl it could be, a barn
owl, even. If my ears were stopped up with twigs perhaps I’d imagine it an eagle-owl. But it’s not a
little owl.”
Dunstan shrugged, and grinned, a little foolishly. The faerie woman sat down beside him. She
intoxicated him: he was breathing her, sensing her through the pores of his skin. She leaned close
to him.
“Do you think you are under a spell, pretty Dunstan?”
“I do not know.”
She laughed, and the sound was a clear rill bubbling over rocks and stones.
“You are under no spell, pretty boy, pretty boy.” She lay back in the grass and stared up at the
sky. “Your stars,” she asked. “What are they like?” Dunstan lay beside her in the cool grass, and
stared up at the night sky. There was certainly something odd about the stars: perhaps there was
more color in them, for they glittered like tiny gems; perhaps there was something about the
number of tiny stars, the constellations; something was strange and wonderful about the stars. But
then...
They lay back to back, staring up at the sky.
“What do you want from life?” asked the faerie lass.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “You, I think.”
“I want my freedom,” she said.
Dunstan reached down to the silver chain that ran from her wrist to her ankle, and off away in
the grass. He tugged on it. It was stronger than it looked.
“It was fashioned of cat’s breath and fish-scales and moonlight mixed in with the silver,” she
told him. “Unbreakable until the terms of the spell are concluded.”
“Oh.” He moved back onto the grass.
“I should not mind it, for it is a long, long chain; but the knowledge of it irks me, and I miss my
father’s land. And the witch-woman is not the best of mistresses...”
And she was quiet. Dunstan leaned over toward her, reached a hand up to her face, felt
something wet and hot splash against his hand.
“Why, you are crying.”
She said nothing. Dunstan pulled her toward him, wiping ineffectually at her face with his big
hand; and then he leaned into her sobbing face and, tentatively, uncertain of whether or not he
was doing the correct thing given the circumstances, he kissed her, full upon her burning lips.
There was a moment of hesitation, and then her mouth opened against his, and her tongue slid
into his mouth, and he was, under the strange stars, utterly, irrevocably, lost.
He had kissed before, with the girls of the village, but he had gone no further.
His hand felt her small breasts through the silk of her dress, touched the hard nubs of her
nipples. She clung to him, hard, as if she were drowning, fumbling with his shirt, with his britches.
She was so small; he was scared he would hurt her and break her. He did not. She wriggled and
writhed beneath him, gasping and kicking, and guiding him with her hand.
She placed a hundred burning kisses on his face and chest, and then she was above him,
straddling him, gasping and laughing, sweating and slippery as a minnow, and he was arching and
pushing and exulting, his head full of her and only her, and had he known her name he would have
called it out aloud.
At the end, he would have pulled out, but she held him inside her, wrapped her legs around
him, pushed against him so hard that he felt that the two of them occupied the same place in the
universe. As if, for one powerful, engulfing moment, they were the same person, giving and
receiving, as the stars faded into the predawn sky.
They lay together, side by side.
The faerie woman adjusted her silk robe and was once more decorously covered. Dunstan pulled
his britches back up, with regret. He squeezed her small hand in his.
The sweat dried on his skin, and he felt chilled and lonely.
He could see her now, as the sky lightened into a dawn grey. Around them animals were
stirring: horses stamped, birds began, waking, to sing the dawn in, and here and there across the
market meadow, those in the tents were beginning to rise and move. “Now, get along with you,”
she said softly, and looked at him, half regretfully, with eyes as violet as the cirrus clouds, high in
the dawn sky. And she kissed him, gently, on the mouth, with lips that tasted of crushed
blackberries, then she stood up and walked back into the gypsy caravan behind the stall.
Dazed and alone, Dunstan walked through the market, feeling a great deal older than his
eighteen years.
He returned to the cow byre, took off his boots, and slept until he woke, when the sun was high
in the sky.
On the following day the market finished, although Dunstan did not return to it, and the
foreigners left the village and life in Wall returned to normal, which was perhaps slightly less
normal than life in most villages (particularly when the wind was in the wrong direction) but was,
all things considered, normal enough.
Two weeks after the market, Tommy Forester proposed marriage to Bridget Comfrey, and she
accepted. And the week after that, Mrs. Hempstock came to visit Mrs. Thorn of a morning. They
took tea in the parlor.
“It is a blessing about the Forester boy,” said Mrs. Hemp-stock.
“That it is,” said Mrs. Thorn. “Have another scone, my dear. I expect your Daisy shall be a
bridesmaid.”
“I trust she shall,” said Mrs. Hempstock, “if she. should live so long.”
Mrs. Thorn looked up, alarmed. “Why, she is not ill, Mrs. Hempstock? Say it is not so.”
“She does not eat, Mrs. Thorn. She wastes away. She drinks a little water from time to time.”
“Oh, my!”
Mrs. Hempstock went on,”Last night I finally discovered the cause. It is your Dunstan.”
“Dunstan? He has not...” Mrs. Thorn raised one hand to her mouth.
“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Hempstock, hastily shaking her head and pursing her lips, “nothing like that.
He has ignored her. She has not seen him for days and days. She has taken it into her head that he
no longer cares for her, and all she does is hold the snowdrop he gave her, and she sobs.”
Mrs. Thorn measured out more tea from the jar into the pot, added hot water.”Truth to tell,”
