Sublime

Human meant cruelty as well as love, human was protecting one’s own at the expense of others. Human also meant having the capacity to change.

“Change is just change, Sara. Not all good, not all bad. Just different.”

“And these places you go, the people you find, do you come to care for them? Or do you only study them, like strange shells you might find on the beach?”

In the months that follow, word spreads among the new-made steadings: the fey are abroad, invisible, of course, as told in the stories, but also nothing like the stories, for they seek bright iron. She listens to them, unseen, and smiles to herself as they whisper that no man may leave an awl or a chisel for a moment unwatched, or it will vanish; n

These folk are not like her and not like her mother; some are differently shaped, their voices rough and deep as a lowing cow. She stalks two as they walk beyond their thorn hedge to a stand of alders by the stream near their house. They are noisy; their untidy feet snap twigs and kick stones without heed for what might hear. They talk but the thin

gracile.

sybarite.