Hats come home from Rudge Wood with acorn caps packed into the crown, and nobody is surprised. Walkers who skirt the big beech at the bend are the usual recipients. The alseid lives inside that tree's shade and regards a detour as a missed greeting. She shakes a low branch from behind the trunk, and the caps rattle down in a neat shower. Afterward she stacks the leftovers on the hat itself, always in sevens, so the hat cannot be lifted without toppling something, and the walker must stop and say good afternoon.
She is easy to mistake for a sapling until she moves. She stands five and a half feet tall, slender and long-legged as a reed, with narrow shoulders and a mane of dry sedge hair that fans out behind her like a haystack. When she leans from behind a trunk the hair appears a full second before her face does. Her skin is the gray-green of lichen on slate, and her forearms carry faint swirls like the rings in a cut stump.
Her feeding grounds are easy to find. Around each tree she claims, the beech mast lies in a ring, and at the roots sits a heap of split nutshells, cracked cleanly along the seam. She eats beechnuts, wild garlic from the damp hollows, and sap, which she taps with a thumbnail. Wherever garlic has been nipped back to bare stems, she has been through at dusk. Her eyes are large, round and amber-gold, and in the half dark they hold light like a cat's. She wears a tunic of overlapping beech leaves stitched together with root fibers as fine as hair, and a moss skirt to the knee. A tooth-sized notch is missing from her left ear. Nobody in Cant remembers how she lost it, and nobody asks.
The people around Rudge Wood treat her as a neighbor with firm manners. Every house in Cant keeps a jar of split beechnuts by the door, and a pinch goes on the roots of the first beech past the last fence. Hats are worn with a sprig of wild garlic tucked in the band, which she respects. Marta Pyle, who has walked the Rudge path to market for forty years, says the alseid counts everything and has never once gotten it wrong. She is slow to anger and quick to be friendly, and the caps are the whole of her mischief. On the path below the bend a brimmed hat lies where its owner left it. Seven acorn caps sit on the crown, and beside it a small jar of split beechnuts has been set down, in thanks.
- Classification
- Grove nymph, tree-bound fae
- Habitat
- Old beech and hornbeam groves
- Danger
- Minimal
- Size
- 5.5 ft tall, narrow-framed
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Fae and Sylvan Folk
- Binomial
- Nympha lucorum
- Diet
- Beechnuts, wild garlic, tree sap
- Temperament
- Watchful, gracious, slow to anger