Queen Mab

Children born of fairy stock
Never need for shirt or frock,
Never want for food or fire,
Always get their hearts desire:
Jingle pockets full of gold,
Marry when they're seven years old.
Every fairy child may keep
Two strong ponies and ten sheep;
All have houses, each his own,
Built of brick or granite stone;
They live on cherries, they run wild
I'd love to be a fairy child.

--Robert Graves

Other people's children. Countless ones. I nearly always get away with it. People think they're kidnapped by Jews, Gypsies, bandits, pedophiles...killed by fever, consumption, cholera. Wild animals take them. They get lost in the woods. They run away. How easy it is to take something when you know the owner will blame anything and everything but you.

Sometimes the humans wise up. They start taking precautions after the fact, keep their children close, sing lullabies and sprinkle salt. It's always too late. Once I've got one, the others are in my hands.

They almost never take them back. Those occasions are so rare that there are songs about them, stories and poems and paintings. And I, too, remember each one.


I don't feel guilty. I don't feel anything.

My "muns" (which is to say, the grey and listless creature to which my moods and whims are bound, and the frowzy little know-it-all he insists upon being enamored with) have been taking a class in folklore from some scholar on the subject. Time-consuming, certainly, but enlightening in its own way--it's fascinating to hear the humans speculate and interpret as they do. They call what they're learning "history" or "superstition" or "mythology" or "religion." To me, it's memory. But it's good to know that the things I've lived through--the things I've created--won't be forgotten.

The scholar seems obsessed with death and rebirth, and with memory. If I were still Queen in my own realm, I would name him Knight, Fairy-Friend. He tells roomfuls of young men and women things their ancestors knew to be fact, and it comes as revelation to them. Their world holds little place for reverence, for remembrance, for fear and for the honor that comes with fear. For belief stronger than authority. I can feel their minds turning over the ancient things, feel old stories slip in between the cracks of their days. I feel a little stronger when I'm in that room.

And it's bringing up some memories I'd rather not remember. We are the repository of memory the humans now would rather forget, the urges and impulses and fears they codify, analyse, rationalize. The fears and hopes they turn into ritual, the rituals they turn into custom. We remember that we have a place and a reason, even if they don't believe we do.

I remember when we still lived in the barrows, in the dark and the cold, under the reign of the Iron Queen. She made us beautiful to amuse her, but we could give her no light, no warmth. We had been content before to wander in the fields under the earth, eating pale fruit and picking asphodel, but she made us want...

I don't like being in the world of the humans. I escaped into Arcadia when they were still in caves, and I've never wished to be back. Oh, I'll send my storms out into their fragile little world, but storms are nothing but air. I'll invade their dreams, but I can only be in one at a time, and it's the dreams of the world that matter.

Humanity is more powerful than my children know. They only see one human at a time; a powerful king who can be tempted with war, a brave warrior who can be tempted with songs in his memory, a gifted bard who can be tempted with power. Even when they see families, towns, kingdoms, all they can see is people, powerless and weak.

True, one human is weak, isolated. But put two together and they change; they can make each other stronger. Add a third, and they're bound together forever, by love or hate or both. Add a fourth, and you add more bonds, and more and more and more...

...add a million, and you get a single Dream, more powerful than anything. And they're Dreaming us. A million of them can change us just by wanting, and we can't change them back. We can't change what they want, what they fear; we can only fulfill it.

Humans go in cycles. Sometimes it's dark. They don't ask questions. They're scared, hungry, tired. And that's when the Unseelie can rule, when the world seems capricious and inexplainable, when the vast majority is subject to the whims of its few rulers.

Sometimes it's light. Sometimes they ask questions, too many questions. Sometimes they overthrow kings, organize themselves, build machines to make themselves comfortable and warm and well-fed. It doesn't take more than a single person to start it, and it doesn't even take true knowledge. What's important is that humans think they know what's out there, think they can control it. That they have a System. They aren't scared. They don't want what we can give them.

When that happens, we're useless.

It usually happens slowly, in cities of marble and stone. We fade, and the Seelie come in to protect their friends from the darkness, to teach them and keep them safe. We can wait it out.

But this time, it was so fast--only three centuries. The humans started drawing and writing and experimenting, and before we could blink, there were machines everywhere, great things of iron and shape. We couldn't live, and the Seelie came back.

It was only a matter of time before things fell apart, before the humans were outstripped by their machines. The falling-apart came with gas and guns, with millions lying dead in camps, in trenches, in the streets of the cities and the dusty fields. We thought we could come back.

But the humans had gone too fast and too far to regress. They came from the light into the darkness, and then they thought they understood the darkness. They played with destruction, with chaos, with meaninglessness. They proclaimed that there was never any darkness, that it was just a trick of the light.

I don't know if the Seelie are even still in Arcadia. I don't know if any of us can go back.

I've only been in the world of the humans for a few centuries at a time, and it's been a long time since the last. My children pop in and out; they know individual humans better than I do, they cultivate them like roses. I've left them to their own devices. I see them in suits on Wall Street, in robes in front of churches...I even made one specifically for the task of taking over the most powerful country this world thinks it has.

It's only a matter of time before they don't understand the darkness anymore. It's only a matter of time before there's light again, and then the light will fade. And we'll be back where we belong.

The Stolen Child

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scare could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.

--William Butler Yeats