“There being no reliable measurement for the incidence of magic,” Maud agreed. “Or, for that matter, any way of measuring it.”
“Precisely so. How on earth is one to know the, as it were, ambient power of a place without becoming familiar with its inhabitants?”
“Well, that’s why I remembered the old Abbot,” said Maud. “It seemed likely enough that a place where a vampire has lived for a thousand years probably has some magic lying about.”
Silver coughed. For a moment, their dialogue had felt like a type of conversation he hadn’t had in years, since before the Wood and before Tobias, even; the type of conversation one had with fellow learned young enthusiasts.
Which, it became increasingly clear, was what Maud was. She wanted to talk about magic; she wanted to talk about places of power; she wanted to talk about monsters—not what they were, but what they might mean. She was twenty-one years old and quite remarkably clever. She had read almost everything Silver had; God alone knew how she had got her hands on some of the more esoteric stuff. She had read some things Silver hadn’t; he had not been keeping up over the last year or two. She admitted freely to subscribing herself as a young man in letters to certain scholars she admired, the better to get some reasonable correspondence out of them. Silver let the conversation continue along byways marvellous and strange for some time. He found himself enjoying it. A creeping suspicion: had his self-indulgent wallowing at Greenhollow Hall (he could see, now, that it was self-indulgent) been as much boredom and loneliness as genuine misery?
“As a child, I had those books of fairy tales,” said Maud. “You know the ones—all flowers and dewdrops. But when it becomes real—!” She leaned forward over her mug. Her watery blue eyes took on a surprising intensity; her voice was low and urgent. “Do you know what that’s like—when the impossible becomes true right before your eyes?”
Silver did know, by God; he understood her perfectly. Tobias, as he had been: the Wild Man of Greenhollow, so solid and real that the rest of the world was dim by comparison. He swallowed.
“I remember the first time I understood what Abbot Julius really was,” Maud said. “Oh, it was a little frightening, but how extraordinary, too. Nine centuries lay on his shoulders; sometimes you could see it in his eyes. Can you imagine that? To meet someone who had lived so long, and seen so much, and to know that you stood in the presence of magic—magic!”
“I can imagine,” Silver said.
He knew very well the exact sensation Maud described, the thrill of discovery, the wonder of a living impossibility before one’s eyes. Tobias sat now on what looked like an upturned gravestone, both hands around his mug of tea. He was only an ordinary man. The Hallow Wood had chosen another.
“And yet you killed the marvellous Abbot,” he said.
“Yes; because I needed the crypt,” said Maud. “Though also, he did eat people. If it hadn’t been for that, I don’t think I would have killed him.”
“But, Miss Lindhurst—”
“Maud.”
“—Maud. To bring us back to the point—why exactly did you need a place of supernatural significance to, as you put it, ‘start from’? You mentioned an expedition?”
“Didn’t I say?” said Maud, sounding quite surprised. “I’m going to Fairyland.”
* * *
Fairies.
Silver had been rather disappointed by fairies.
He had loved fairy tales as a boy, and he had read widely as a young man. But fairies were conspicuously missing from the terse accounts, privately circulated, produced by practical folklorists like his mother. Where they appeared in the diaries Silver’s father had kept as fuel for his researches, they were invariably noted with an H for hoax. Local girl in costume. Paper cutouts and lantern. Petitioner deranged.
Silver at fifteen had helped himself to his mother’s keys and gone into the locked chest where she kept her own records of her most serious cases, but there had been no fairies there, either: just one incident of a missing child, where in her concluding notes Mrs Silver had written, murdered undoubtedly, but little for a magistrate to go on; no evidence of fairy abduction as claimed; most likely the mother.
And then he had discovered Tobias and the Wood—a real magical kingdom, a real spirit out of legends! And in the Lord of Summer he had been briefly convinced that he had found a fairy lord out of ancient ballads along with the rest. But there he had erred most seriously. Fabian Rafela, so-called Lord of Summer, had been another type of creature entirely.
There were a few petty-scholars among the hunters who passed their time in orderings and classifications. Silver’s father had been among the best of them. About six months ago—well after Tobias’s departure, this, as Greenhollow Hall began to fall into an ivy-choked ruin—Silver had in a self-immolating mood gone through the lists and tables and concluded that Rafela had belonged among the genii revocati malignantes. He had spent an hour in the library then writing up a case note for the monster, in the style of his father’s diaries: behaviour, intelligence, habitat, and prey.
He had not yet dared to investigate where he himself belonged in his father’s tables. Presumably the Wood’s avatar also came under the heading of spirits of place, the genii locorum.
Fairies had a whole collection of categories to themselves, with supposed classifications tentatively based on fairy tales and ballads. It was all speculation. Increasingly, sorrowfully, Silver had come to suspect they did not exist. But in the golden span of months where matters seemed to have resolved themselves rather well, he had asked Tobias about it. Lounging on Greenhollow’s lawn over the remains of a picnic—Silver with a book, Tobias as ever with some small work of his hands to do, carving perhaps, or sewing, Silver could not recall it now—the question had occurred to him out of nowhere.
And Tobias had said, “Oh, them?”
Under his neatly trimmed beard, the corners of his mouth had turned down.
This was what the former Wild Man of Greenhollow had to say about fairies:
They were real.
They did, indeed, take children—occasionally. They usually forgot to feed them.
He believed they were sensible beings, able to think and plan and converse, though he had never as a matter of fact heard one speak.
They were rare. Very rare. In his four hundred years in the Wood, Tobias had encountered no more than half a dozen for sure; though sometimes he thought they had passed through the Wood and he had not seen them.
“Not seen them?” Silver had asked. “Do you mean you couldn’t find them? Or were they invisible?”
Tobias had thought about it. “Invisible, I’d say, after a fashion. They don’t find it easy, I think, to be here.”
“To be here? So they come from somewhere else?” Silver could not help grinning in his excitement. “From their own kingdom? From Fairyland?”
Tobias shrugged. “Who can say?”
“Surely you can, if anyone can at all.”
“Never saw any sign of Fairyland,” Tobias said. “Not a road, not a path. And as for a kingdom, well, I never saw a lord or a king, as you might call them. No, not a queen either,” before Silver could say it. “Sometimes I’d feel a fairy loose in the Wood, but I couldn’t find it. You know.” Silver did know. The Wood was entirely open to him, and he had learned that he could tell when something uncanny was afoot; could turn to Tobias and say, I believe the barrow on the eastern hill is waking up, so Tobias would nod and in his casual determined way set out by night with pistol and flint knife to quiet a pack of flesh-tearing ghouls.