Every horse in the village of Cray has its mane plaited by morning, and every stable hand knows the plaits by name. The pixie does them: stirrup loops, usually, three or four to a mane, each drawn so snug that a comb will not undo it before the hair gives. Nobody in Cray considers this a nuisance. It is a Tuesday.
The animal itself stands about nine inches tall and weighs less than a hen's egg. The body is slim, the hands long-fingered and nimble, and the ears are leaf-shaped and swivel independently. The skin is the brown-green of a wet walnut husk, and the eyes are a clear, bright amber with no white in them, quick and kind. A pixie wears whatever it can find that is small and woven: a sock cuff, the heel of a glove, a mitten thumb. It prefers wool. The one watched at Ashe Down wore a baby's knitted bootee for a hat and adjusted it constantly, and it had a notch bitten from one ear that it did not seem to mind.
The diet is blackberries, the soft ends of grass stems, and the sugar crust that forms on the rim of a cider jug left out overnight. It leaves behind small, tidy piles of berry seeds on fence rails, always in a row of five or six, and the pale hairs it takes from mane and tail, wound into balls the size of a hazelnut. Farmers collect these. A pixie ball dropped into a feed bin, they say, keeps the stable's plaits tidy all week. Whether this is so or the pixie simply enjoys a well-kept larder, the habit persists, and so does the hairball trade.
The trade has a name: the unpicker. Fenna Rudd works the lanes between Cray and Ashe Down with a roll of bone needles and a tin of beeswax, and for a loaf of bread she takes the plaits out of a full stable before the horse fair, since the judges want the manes loose. She has never been refused. Her fingers are the thinnest in the parish, which is the only qualification anyone checks. She says the plaits are not a nuisance but a signature, and that no two are tied the same way twice. She has also noticed that pixies are shy of being thanked aloud, and so the stable hands of both villages mutter their gratitude into the hay. On Fenna's kitchen windowsill sits a thimble full of blackberry seeds, sorted by size.
- Classification
- Small fae, knot-making trickster
- Habitat
- Hedgerows, stables, orchard walls
- Danger
- Minimal
- Size
- 9 inches tall, lighter than an egg
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Hedgerow country and farmyards
- Binomial
- Nanosylpha vagabunda
- Diet
- Blackberries, grass tips, cider sugar
- Temperament
- Quick, tidy-minded, shy of thanks