Harvest of Changelings

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

 

The prologue was first published, in a somewhat different version, as “Different Rooms,” in
Romance and Beyond
2.3 (Fall 1999).

 

 

 

 

 

 

Copyright © 2007 by Warren Rochelle

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Rochelle, Warren, 1954-

Harvest of changelings / Warren Rochelle—1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-1-930846-46-3 (alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-930846-46-0 (alk. paper)

1. Fairies—Fiction. I. Title.

 

PS3618.O34H37 2007
813'.6—dc22

2006038678

 

 

 

All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law. For information address Golden Gryphon Press, 3002 Perkins Road, Urbana, IL 61802.

 

First Softcover Edition 2008.

In memory of my mother,
Louise Glosson Rochelle, 1929–2006,
and for my father,
Charles E. Rochelle

In my Father's house there are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.

—John 14: 2,
King James
translation

 

To be what we are and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.

—Robert Louis Stevenson

 

Fairies, away!

A Midsummer's Night Dream,
II, i

Thanks to my family and friends; especially Mark Fleming, a careful, considerate, and tough reader and good friend; my brother, Barry, who answered (and still does) endless questions so I could get all kinds of details right; my brother, Greg, who kept asking me when the next book was coming out—here it is—; my brother, David; Ellen McQueen, the dearest of friends, for her good heart and good ear, as I read aloud many different versions; my colleagues at the University of Mary Washington, especially Chris Foss, for his helpful advice; Gary Nelson, for everything; for my great and good friend, Christine Sanderson who made sure the Catholic passages were done right; to the children at Powell and Bugg Elementary Schools, Raleigh, NC, 1982–89, who were the inspiration for the main characters, especially for Russell and Jeff; my editor, Gary Turner, at Golden Gryphon Press, who continues to make this process great fun, and Marty Halpern, GGP's other editor, who keeps Gary in line.

O
NCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A MAN WHO FELL in love with a fairy and took her for his wife.

That's how fairy tales are supposed to start and the story I am going to tell really is a fairy tale—although it is really a tale about fairies. I'm not a fairy, but I married one. My son is half-fairy and his friends are fairies in smaller fractions.

But they all come much later in this tale. I want to start at the very beginning, the root of the matter. I need to trace all that happened that brought me to
here,
this place with this open book and its broad, blank pages, and this bottle of ink. I have kept a journal since I was in high school; my art teacher required it. He wanted us to make the connection between seeing and thinking. But I was never consistent with it until after Malachi was born, so when I try to remember all that happened between Valeria and me, I find myself uncertain and wondering if I am really remembering or conjuring up the gaps between memories. I did jot down bits and pieces, images, but not enough. I never even took her picture. Now I want to remember and I can't—not all that I want to remember.

Some things I remember all too well.

My son has asked me to tell him this story of his mother and his father countless times—so much so that I feel I know all of it, every detail. I don't. But any story is an interpretation of a memory of an
experience. This story I tell my son is just that. Sometimes it is a revision, sometimes I remember something I have forgotten, or I forget what I thought I knew. He is only ten. I do not tell him the things a man and a woman can fight about. I do not tell him that his mother loved other humans before me, that she was a “human lover,” a scandalous thing in some fairy families. I do not tell him she could be patronizing of less-educated humans. After all, she was a fairy, not an angel. I do not tell him—or anyone—everything. There are parts I will not tell; there are parts I cannot tell. Instead, I would rather skim the waters of our lives for only some of the bright leaves of memory. I did not even begin telling him this story until he was ten.

So, let me begin again as I begin each night that I tell this story to Malachi: the story of a man and a woman, his father and his mother. It's a love story, I tell him: husband and wife, father and son, friend for friend, just love. I think there may not be any other kind of story.

 

Once upon a time there was a man who fell in love with a fairy and took her for his wife. The man, Ben, did not know Valeria was a fairy, a Daoine Sidhe from the Irish stories, the first time he saw her. He only knew her name by accident. The mail carrier had delivered 1411 Beichler Road's mail to his house, 1413. He had called to her from his porch the third afternoon after her arrival—in a taxi, laden with suitcases: Lana Carter? No, Valeria she had called back. Valeria what, he had wanted to ask her, Carter? But he hadn't. Her voice was beautiful, fair and sweet, and she was beautiful. Her hair was the color of light, a finely spun light of gold and white, a light that seemed to glow, as if her head was bathed in a living, non-burning fire. At first whenever Ben saw her, he thought of his dead first wife, Emma. Emma's hair was red and long and frothy and he would wrap it around his arms in bed. He felt guilty about Valeria at first: it had only been two years since Emma had died. It had been a hot June afternoon and he had been in the kitchen, his head in the refrigerator, rummaging for a beer. Emma had gone to get the mail. He heard her call out—but it was only a sound, not his name. Something fell. Ben ran, dropping the beer, and found Emma, crumpled on the flagstone walk, an odd dent in the side of her head. The doctors later told him it was a freak accident, she had fallen just so, cracked her skull, broken her neck. She had tripped on a loose flagstone. There was nothing he could have done.

The doctor, Ben knew, was wrong. He could have fixed that flagstone. Emma had asked and asked and he had put it off. His laziness had killed Emma.

Ben had sat there by her, waiting for the ambulance, fanning her; June gets so hot in North Carolina. While his guilt still lingered, now he could remember it all, and not cry, and his heart no longer ached as it had and the woman next door was so very beautiful and her hair glowed and when she looked at him, he could see her eyes were an intense deep green, viridian, emerald, jade, spring light in the forest after a sudden storm. And his body had ached when it remembered.

So Ben watched her, casually at first—he didn't want her to think he was stalking her. Besides, he saw very little of her, as she was rarely up or out when he went to work at the library in Garner, North Carolina, the little town where he lived, just south of a bigger city, Raleigh. He began to think he would never do more than that, until one afternoon three weeks after the golden-haired woman had become his neighbor. Ben had left the library, hurrying to miss the rain. The sky was dark and heavy with clouds. As he walked home, across the field, across the parking lot, past the shopping center, lightning crackled across the sky and the wind began to rise, the leaves turning over, as the trees' whispering grew louder and louder. The rain got him as he crossed the road between the shopping center and his street: hard, quick rain. He ran to his house, and as he fumbled for his key on his front porch, he glanced over at the house of the golden-haired woman. And he saw her: not in the yard, or getting in or out of her car, but in the sky, flying on the winds of the thunderstorm.

Ben stared. He slapped his cheek, rubbed his eyes, felt his forehead, glad of the porch and its box of dryness. He kept looking: yes, it was she, the golden-haired woman, flying in the storm.

By the next morning, Ben had, however, managed to convince himself he had been imagining things. What he had seen was not possible. People did not fly. They didn't disappear, either, he told himself after breakfast as he started his walk to work. There she was, in her backyard, her hair shining in the early morning sun, and then, a sudden flicker of light and she wasn't there.

The next afternoon, late, at twilight, Ben was in his own backyard, ostensibly to pick up branches knocked off by the storm from his willow oaks and pines. He made sure he picked up each branch one at a time, and he kept watching her house. A half-hour after Ben started his cleanup, there was another flicker of light, and she was there, standing where no one had been standing before.

Ben knew he wasn't crazy. He remembered, from years ago, when he read
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,
what the professor had told Susan and Peter when they asked him if Lucy was crazy for telling them she had gone through the wardrobe into Namia and insisting her story true. Either Lucy was mad or lying or telling the
truth, the professor said. One only has to look at her and see she is not mad and they knew she was not a liar, so she had to be telling the truth. I am not mad, Ben told himself, nor am I sick, with some sort of fever and delirium. Someone at work would have told me. So what he had seen had to be real. The golden-haired woman was magic—a magical being, a witch, or a fairy.

Ben didn't know what to do, so he did what he knew how to do. He collected books from all over the library: Celtic and Irish mythology and folklore, Irish fairy tales of the Daoine Sidhe, Scottish tales, The
Blue Fairy Book,
and the red, the yellow, the green. Anthropology, psychology. He scribbled notes on a yellow legal pad, tucked leftover catalog cards in book after book, and again he felt guilty because of Emma and he kept telling himself: she is two years dead. But, if Valeria is a real fairy—well, they were dangerous, weren't they?

Ben read and read.

He might have read for a lot longer if Jack hadn't caught him at it.

Jack Ruggles was a writer and an English professor at NC State University and Ben's friend. His dark brown hair seemed to have never known a comb and stuck up in odd tufts all over Jack's head. He then lived across the street from the Garner Public Library and he haunted the place, taking home stacks of novels, browsing through the magazines, and asking Ben endless reference questions. For his novel, he told Ben; he had to get the facts straight. Fiction had to make sense; real life didn't.

Jack's real life sure didn't.

Jack's wife had, one morning early in the spring, gotten up, dressed, eaten, drank, and gotten in her car and drove away, with Jack's son, Thomas. She had never come back. Jack was in his first year of a custody fight.

Ben was at the reference desk one late May morning, surrounded by his fairy books when someone's question had taken him into the stacks. When he came back, Jack was standing there, reading his yellow legal pad. Jack looked up when Ben cleared his throat.

“Who's Valeria, Ben? Can she really fly?”

At first, Ben didn't know what to say to Jack. To say anything would be to give up this special and beautiful secret, this golden pleasure he had had and no one else. Yet, he needed to talk and Jack was his best friend.

“She's my neighbor, the blond I told you about. I think she's a fairy.”

“A dyke?”

“No, you idiot: a
fairy
. You know, like in
The Blue Fairy Book
,” he said and held up the book. “You know, with wings and fairy gold and—”

“She has wings?” Jack asked, as he flipped through Ben's legal pad.

“You know what I mean. I've been watching her—and I think she may be watching me, too.” The last part he wasn't sure about—maybe he had imagined her glances over the fence, her quick head turns at the door.
Imagining
it? Maybe he
was
imagining
everything:
the fairy flights, the disappearances, and this was just one more thing, surely he was going crazy—

Jack waved his hand to cut Ben off “Well, my reference question for you today is what is Ben Tyson going to do about his fairy babe? Don't stew over all that stuff, find out.”

So, if it hadn't been for Jack, Ben might have never met Valeria. He would have never found the courage; he would have talked himself out of it; he would have convinced himself it was hopeless—he was hopeless. Ben argued; Jack insisted. And one hot, early June night, Ben knocked on Valeria's door, carrying a Food Lion bag with an Angel Food cake and a bottle of white wine. (And five ten-penny nails in his pants pocket—just to be on the safe side, Jack had said. Iron's poisonous to fairies.)

Valeria, laughing, let Ben into what looked first like an ordinary living room, like any other living room he had ever been in: couch, chairs, lamps, pictures on the walls, bric-a-brac on the shelves. Then he looked around again. The TV was on without sound and he couldn't remember ever seeing any program like the one on. The lamps weren't electric. They were lit candles inside glass globes, yellow flames flickering and cutting away the darkness with yellow shadows. He looked back at the TV: it wasn't. It was a terrarium with a very strange-looking lizard perched on a rock in the middle. Smoke trailed out of its nostrils. And one of the pictures: a deep black pool, surrounded by white trees with silver and golden leaves. He stared, stepped closer: yes, the trees were swaying to an invisible wind. He looked back at Valeria, who sat in the armchair, her hands in her lap.

“I shouldn't have looked back at you,” she said. “But I think I wanted you to catch me.”

The next night they went out to dinner in Raleigh, to Swain's, a steak house. She walked around the car three times, muttering under her breath, as Ben stared. Safe-travel charms, she explained, and protective wards—like an alarm and a force field—just in case the Fomorii tried something while they were in the restaurant.
The Fomorii, she explained, as they drove, were dark elves, black elves, evil fairies. The shadow lords. Princes of darkness. The bad guys her
people
were fighting back home. (Thesaurus, she added, was one of her favorite games. She had memorized whole sections of Roget's.)

“They shouldn't be able to get to this universe, not anymore, but we can't take the chance.”

“The princes
of
darkness?” Ben grumbled, shaking his head. He reminded himself he had asked for this, he had to believe her, no matter how fantastic any of it sounded. He had really seen her flying in a
thunderstorm, and there was the picture and the little dragon and she had been looking at him. He looked over at her as he drove: for the first time, he could see points on her ears. She looked back and laughed and shook that bright hair and her ears were round.

“I let the glamour slip,” she said. “Wouldn't do to not have it in the restaurant, now, would it?”

“Glamour?”

“An illusion I cast to hide things ...”

 

I did not learn this entire story in one smooth, continuous flow. Rather it came in chunks and odd pieces, as Valeria and I came to know each other. But what I will tell you is the story assembled, the chunks connected. Valeria's people, who really are the Daoine Sidhe, and the Fomorii, have been at war for all of Valeria's life, and for years before that. Compromise and negotiation had been tried and failed. Truces had been made and broken too many times to count. Now, there was only war. The Fomorii came from another room. Creation, she told me, is like a huge, old rambling Victorian house, with different wings everywhere, rooms, towers, stairs, and causeways. The universe of humanity, the Earth, the Sun, the solar system, the galaxy—everything—was in one room. Faerie, the home of the Daoine Sidhe, was in another, next door. And next door to theirs was the universe of the Fomorii. The Daoine Sidhe believe the Fomorii fouled theirs and had come seeking another. How? Through the doors between rooms, between universes. That was how she had come to ours. Remember, she said, all those Irish stories about doors into the hills, warnings about stepping into fairy rings, that time ran in different ways here and there? I remembered. On certain days—Halloween or Samhain—the doors can be opened. May 1 or Beltaine is another day. And so she had come here.