The sprites matter most in the second week of haymaking, when the grass at Mowing Hollow stands cut and drying in rows and the little lights come out of the stubble. The valley folk have a name for the week that translates badly, "the week of borrowed shoes," from a misreading of an old word for windrows. Nobody has corrected it in two hundred years. I set down three accounts of the sprites here, side by side, because no two agree on what the creature is for. The first comes from Wendeline Cray, who rakes the lower fields. She says a sprite is a spark that has learned to be curious. They gather at the ends of the windrows and nudge single stalks into line, and she has found whole rows combed neat by morning. Her practice is to leave one row unraked through the first night and to set out a saucer of milk at the field's corner. By dawn it is dry and clean.
The second account is a drover's, given at the ale yard of Ashford Mistake, a hamlet whose name locals insist was once Ash-Ford-Mist-Ache, after a cough that went through it. He says sprites ride the backs of sheep, and that a ewe with a sprite aboard will not cross a stream until it climbs down. He has waited an hour at a ford for this. His method of tracking them is to look for flattened grass shaped like a thumbprint, about the width of a coin, with a ring of dew-free blades around it where the warmth has dried the wet.
The third account is mine. An adult sprite stands about five inches, slim as a thistle stem, with the clear wings of a dragonfly, veined in amber, folded flat down its back. The one I watched most carefully had a left wing torn along the lower edge in a clean notch, and it flew with a slight lean to make up for it. Its eyes are a bright, clear green, like a match just lit, and warm. It ate pollen from a sedge head, stripping it with both hands, then wiped them on its own legs and looked up at me, in no hurry at all.
On my first visit the hedge below Mowing Hollow was bare, and the sprites were a handful. Since then the hedge has been replanted with hawthorn and the count has doubled, perhaps tripled; I stopped numbering at forty. Wendeline thinks the new blossom is why. The drover thinks it is the sheep. What the three of us share is a single object. At the corner of her field, on a flat stone, Wendeline keeps the saucer, and on its rim, last week, lay one sedge head, bright with pollen, set there carefully, and notched along one edge.
- Classification
- Small meadow fae
- Habitat
- Hay fields, hedgerows, wet sedge
- Danger
- Minimal
- Size
- 5 inches tall
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Sylvan borderlands
- Binomial
- Lucella spinaria
- Diet
- Pollen, milk, dew
- Temperament
- Curious, quick, shy of iron