A cobbler sees a stranger's feet before anything else, and Duarte Lameiro, who keeps a last-bench in the village of Larrinhal, saw the leprechaun's shoes before he saw the leprechaun. They sat on his back step one morning in March: a single left shoe, no bigger than a hen's egg cut lengthwise, stitched in a tight saddle pattern with thread he could not name. The leather was sound but the sole was worn through at the ball of the foot, the way a dancer's wears, or a man's who runs from something. Duarte turned it over twice, found the awl holes were square, not round, and set it on the sill.
By noon he was resoling a farmer's boots and listening to the farmer talk about missing eggs. The creature stands two and a half feet high, narrow in the shoulder and long in the arm, with a face like a dried apple and a rust-colored beard plaited into two braids. It wears a green coat the shade of wet moss, patched at both elbows with scraps of red felt. Duarte worked while the farmer complained, and neither of them looked at the sill. The shoe was gone when he turned, and in its place lay a coin of dull yellow metal, stamped with a mark that looked like a foot inside a circle. He did not touch it. Larrinhal keeps a habit for this: anything left on a sill by the hedge folk is covered with an upturned clay cup and a pinch of salt, and left until morning. In the morning the cup is empty, usually, and the salt is scattered in a neat line.
The leprechaun is a mender of shoes and a taker of small things, mostly eggs, thimbles and the odd spoon. It sleeps in hollow thorn roots along the old drove road between Larrinhal and Rioseca, where the ground stays soft. Its tracks are easy to read once you know them: a print with the heel missing, because it walks on the balls of its feet, and beside it a scatter of crushed snail shells. It is quick, mean when cornered and merry when it is not. Duarte says that a cobbler should never ask it for gold, only for stitching, and that it will answer the second request and ignore the first. This is the one thing in the village on which everyone agrees.
I could not confirm that the creature keeps any hoard. I dug beneath three of the thorn roots with permission and found only bent nails, a child's tooth, and the cut-off soles of a great many shoes, stacked flat like plates. Duarte kept the coin in the end, in a tin on his shelf, and it has not changed weight or color in six years. Nobody in Larrinhal can say whose feet the soles belonged to, or why a creature that mends shoes would be collecting the worn-out halves.
- Classification
- Fae cobbler and petty thief
- Habitat
- Thorn hedges and drove roads
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- 2.5 ft tall
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Hedge roads of the borderlands
- Binomial
- Cluricaunus calceator
- Diet
- Eggs, snails, honeyed bread
- Temperament
- Sly, quick, easily offended