The fae matter most in the second week of June, when the hay is cut and the swathes lie drying in the low fields. That is when the small folk of the Orchard Weights come out of the hedgerows to claim their share, and the farmers of the district leave it for them.
The earliest record is a margin note in a tithe roll from Oldchain, undated, which complains that "the little gentry have had four sheaves and a pail." A century later the notes grow more careful. A churchwarden at Furlong Cross lists what was left on the stile and what was gone by morning: a heel of rye bread, a thimble of cider, a spoonful of honey. The fae he describes are knee-high to a child, with skin the green-brown of a wet oak leaf, ears shaped like hazel catkins, and eyes that show a flat gold, like a coin held under water. They go barefoot. They carry nothing, though they take a great deal.
By the time farming moved to iron plows, the fae had changed their habits. They no longer touch the grain. They take the things people lose: single gloves, buttons, the pegs from clothes lines, the cap off a milk can. A heap of these turns up each autumn in the hollow of whatever pollard willow stands nearest a farm. Nell Ostrander, who keeps the dairy at Oldchain, says they have never once taken anything she missed, only things she had stopped looking for. Her household habit is to turn every shoe on the back step toe-outward before bed, so the fae cannot sleep in them. A fae that finds a shoe it can curl up in will not leave until the first snow, and it complains the whole time, in a voice like a kettle lid being tapped with a spoon.
They are petty about small matters. A fae will sulk for a week if a bowl of cream is left in a chipped dish, and will carry the chip back and set it on the doorstep as evidence. Tracking them is simple: look for rings of flattened grass no wider than a dinner plate, and for a faint sweet smell of crushed clover where there is none growing. At Furlong Cross the stile is still rubbed smooth on its left side, and a saucer of cider sits under it, new each evening, with a hazel twig laid across the rim.
- Classification
- Small sylvan fey
- Habitat
- Hedgerows, orchards, pollard willows
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- Knee-high to a child, about 2 ft
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Hedgerow borderlands
- Binomial
- Sylvanus lucidens
- Diet
- Honey, cider, bread crusts, clover
- Temperament
- Touchy, acquisitive, easily offended