Merlin's Harp Read Online Free Page A

Don't you know, all of them Good Folk are little."
      (My own height is quite usual among the Fey. For years now I have traveled the Human kingdom disguised as a Human boy, maybe twelve years old. Only here and there, now and then, an innkeeper or shepherd has crossed cautious fingers behind his back.)
      I met Elana in the Children's Guard. She drew me from the first, maybe because she reminded me of Dana with her coarse, redbrown hair and surprisingly solid build. Maybe it was simply fear that drew us together. We were "free in the forest" for the first time together, and quite frightened, though Lugh showed and taught us much. By then, he was a Guard Leader, the only sort of leader most Fey ever acknowledge in their lives.
      Elana asked me, "Why is Lugh so kind to you, Niviene?"
      Easily, carelessly, I told her, "He is my brother."
      "What? He is your what?"
      "We have the same mother."
      "Oh? How do you know?"
      "We all live together. We are…we are…"
      "Very good friends?"
      "That, and more." I could not explain it in words.
      But Elana understood. Something in her nature understood and responded, though she had never heard Merlin's stories, and knew nothing of Human-type relationships.
      "Listen," Elana said later. "I want to be your brother too."
      "You can't be that."
      "I know I don't have the same mother. But we could pretend."
      "Oh, yes!" The idea brightened my heart. "But you still can't be my brother. You have to be my…" I remembered Merlin's word. "Sister. That's what you'll be. You be my sister, and I'll be yours."
      Under cover of night, the Guard raided nearby villages. Humans see poorly at night, and we slipped among granaries and byres like shadows. Elana and I went together, each toting a sack as big as herself.
      When we found bread, cheese, or cloth on a doorstone we left that hut alone, then and for a while after. Lurking in dusk I have heard a woman tell her child, "Go put this oatcake out for the Good Folk." Her man, gobbling soup within, knew nothing of it. He would have called it waste of a good oatcake. But the wife knew that a bare doorstone meant real waste.
      Finding no offerings, we Good Folk laughed openmouthed, showing off our dagger teeth, and robbed the hut.
      We snaked our ways into dark, fetid hut or sweet-smelling granary and filled our sacks. We stole into the byre and milked the goat. Close by many a sleeping family we tiptoed, watching them toss and turn together, kick and push and yank at their bedclothes. We watched infants nurse at sleeping mothers' breasts.
      Rarely, a Fey might steal a sleeping infant from his mother's bed. It was almost as easy as stealing a loaf of bread, so said the Lady. Elana and I never did that, for we never had a customer waiting back in the forest. Fey mothers whose babies had died bartered for these babies; or Fey women unblessed by the Goddess, who wished to sacrifice to Her nonetheless by raising a child, though they could bear none.
      At times I sensed a presence that hovered in the close heavy air of these Human dens. But I would live long and travel far before I understood that presence, the Human mystery of which the Lady had told me, of which we Fey are ignorant.
      Once an ancient man sat up and looked at me. As he moved his aura flared, a low dull flame in the dark. Among us Fey such a decrepit oldster would by now have wandered away to give his bones back to the Goddess. But Human families keep their old ones close, and their sick ones, and sometimes even deformed children.
      I stood still as a cornshock, leaning forward, one hand outstretched to snatch the spread cloak off his feet. I slowed my breathing. Across the hut, Elana stuffed bread and cheese into her sack. She did not know the old one was awake, and I could not signal her.
      The ancient swung stringy legs off the pallet. I guessed he was making for the piss pot, and we would collide. I could not tell whether