Harvest of Changelings Read Free

that, of the human lovers she had had in the past and in another land. Loving humans had caused no end of grief with her parents. And he would learn her past was a lot farther away than his.
    They learned from each other, at that dinner, in a coffeehouse after a movie another night, on walks around the neighborhood, sitting on each other’ porches . . . Ben learned the Daoine Sidhe had few machines and a longstanding misunderstanding with the Catholic Church over what was a good and a bad fairy. The Daoine Sidhe had visited the human universe often—before the war. They had come to teach. What? Oh, all sorts of things. They were the First-born in their world; dwarves, swimmers, and the wood-folk were the Second- and Third-born ...
    Ben, when pressed by Jack years later, could not say exactly when he fell in love with her or when he knew she was in love with him. He tried to remember when he fell in love with Emma and he couldn’t. Love came slowly for Ben—no magic glances across the room, no bolts of lightning—but rather like a glass beneath a dripping faucet, filling one drop at a time. There was no one movie or dinner or late-night swim, but at some time during that summer the drop fell that over-flowed the glass and they were in love. Everyone else knew before Ben did: Jack, Mrs. Carmichael, the head librarian, even the volunteers who came in to shelf books.

    Jack wanted to know what it was like to sleep with a woman who could do a little magic—not that she ever did much; the wards, lights, teleporting hither and yon, small stuff. All that I told him and all that I am going to tell here is that it happened inside a white flame that rippled around, between, and through us. The flame changed colors, becoming a living kaleidoscope. And that when I woke, later, the lights still lingered in her, rippling across her back like moonlight through a venetian blind someone was opening and closing. I walked around her house, in its warm and close dark, just to touch her things, straighten the magazines she had brought back from her jaunts around the Earth. I walked in her kitchen, a somewhat bare room, as she tended to short out small appliances and when we ate at home, I cooked, in my kitchen. I walked back to her bedroom and straightened the things on her dresser: a brush, a comb, a tiny bottle of perfume. I looked at the perfume for the longest time, trying to read the fine, italic words on the label, but they were in a language and an alphabet I didn’t recognize. Then I lay back down in her warmth and went to sleep.
    I told Jack nothing else. I have told Malachi nothing at all of that night. And this is all I will tell you of it.
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    Ben and Valeria went to Ocracoke the first of August, for two weeks. There they stayed in the Crews Inn, tucked away on Back Road, and every day they rented bicycles and rode up NC 12 to the beach. The sea reminded Valeria of home and as they walked on the white sand she told him about the sea that had been in front of the house in which she had grown up, a multi-colored sea: gold, silver, green, white, blue, and grey. Dolphins and whales, along with the merfolk, the swimmers, lived in her ocean, and, yes, of course, dolphins and whales were intelligent and could speak—or rather were telepathic. Ben remembered thinking then that all the fairy tales he had ever read or ever heard: good fairies and bad fairies, talking animals, and mermaids, and all the rest, were true. All the stories were true.
    Two nights before they were to go back home, as they had lain in bed together, Ben braiding her long, golden hair through his fingers, Valeria told him she was expecting, gravid, in the family way—
    â€œPregnant?” he had said and she had said yes, and told him other things he needed to know.
    She was fifteen days pregnant and a Daoine Sidhe pregnancy was eight months long. In two-and-a-half months Valeria wouldn’t be able to teleport anywhere, as the