ne day, in the fine warmth of Spring, Faer Selena flew in from the Far Mysting Woods alighting on the wooden back porch of his small house only to find him not at home.  She strolled back to the Ivy Stream intending to wait for him, but found him already there, sitting alone on a large moss-covered stone with his toes dangling in the cool water and his breeches rolled up to his knees.  His head was down as if he were sad and he held a rosy blossom in his hand, plucking petals off one at a time and dropping them into the stream.

 When she came near he looked up into her clear eyes and delicate smile and his heart melted, just as it had the first time she had ever looked at him.  He took her hand and pulled her closer, and stood upright, towering nearly her own height over her.  She was a woman now, fully grown, but still barely three and half feet tall.  And beautiful as she was, he had grown accustomed to her nakedness and hardly noticed that she was anything more to him than perfect and precious.

 Her girlish smile was gone, transformed by the years into ravishing beauty, but her innocence remained and her smile was untainted as she gazed up into his serious face.  He kissed her, long and deeply, and then knelt before her so that she would not have to strain to look into his eyes.

 "I love you," he said, and she smiled again.  "I cannot live in this life without you.  I will do anything for you.  I will sacrifice anything, or everything, just to be with you.  But I am a man, and a human, and I want more.  I want to marry you, Selena.  I want you to live with me.  I want you to be there when I wake up in the morning and I want you to be there when I come home at night, and I want you to warm my bed before me and hold me in your arms until morning returns."

 She was so small in his presence, and yet he did not overshadow her.  She sat on his leg and curled up in his chest, caressing his cheek with delicate fingers with a touch like magic.  She kissed him again, and searched his honest eyes.

 "I love you forever," she responded truthfully.  "And I would die the instant you ceased to love me, for I exist only for you, my love.  I will do anything that you ask of me, but I do not think that the other humans will welcome our union."

 "Then I will teach them to welcome it," Thaddon replied softly.

 She smiled, but sadly.  Not sad because of him, but sad because she did not believe the humans would ever accept the presence of a Faery among them.  When she said as much, he was forced to agree.

 "So who," he wondered aloud, "in all this world, will marry us, so that we can at last be complete?"

 "The Faeries of Kynd will marry us," she chuckled happily.  "Humans may fear and flee before the Faeries, but the Faeries have no such distrusts.  They know all about my relationship with you and approve wholeheartedly.  They have long wondered when we would at last marry."

 The sadness in him fell away then, replaced by pure joy as if thick, dark clouds had suddenly broke and bright rays of sunlight shone through.  And somehow, to the blacksmith and Faer Selena at least, the world seemed a brighter and happier place.

 

 

Thaddon's visit's with his mother and father had decreased in frequency from the day he moved out and settled down in his own home.  They attributed that to his long isolation from others during all the years he had spent with the Faer Selena, and they felt pity for him while their animosity toward the Faeries of Kynd flourished.  And so it came as a great surprise to them when he unexpectedly announced that he would like to have dinner with them the following evening.

 It was a blessed event, in the eyes of parents long deprived of a son's love.  They talked over old times, and laughed over the current local gossip, and reveled in the completeness of their lives now that they had their son back and there was just the three of them.

 And then a cloud of gloom passed between them.  Thaddon did not very much like any reference to completeness that omitted Selena, but he held his objections inside, and cleared his mind and set himself to the purpose he had in having dinner with his parents.

 "Father, mother," he said formally, looking proudly from one to the other.  "I have an announcement to make."

 He had their full attention: his father with fork in hand, a bite frozen halfway to his mouth, and his mother, mopping her mouth daintily with her napkin, her attention focused as keenly as the edge on a sharp knife.

 "I am going to marry Selena!" he said, pride flushing his face.

 "What?" his father shouted at the top of his lungs.  He slammed his fork down on the tabletop and glared at Thaddon as if he might consider murder an excusable offense in this case.  His mother averted her eyes, shaking her head despondently.

 "I-I only wanted you to share my happiness," he said, practically in tears, and when they did not reply or even look up at him, he forced himself to trudge on.  "I had hoped that you would attend the ceremony with us?"

 "Who in Freeman's Crossing would perform such a marriage?" his father growled hatefully.  "Give me his name and I will kill him with my bare hands."

 "N-No one in the village, father.  We are going before the High Lord of the Faeries of Kynd, who will conduct the wedding and perform the marriage, all in accordance to law and accepted, even welcomed by the whole rest of the Faery Nation.  Surely you can accept this one and only eccentricity in your own son?"

 "Eccentricity?  You are an outcast and a traitor.  You belligerently defy one of the most basic human laws of our people, a breaking of law that is surely as loathsome and unforgivable as murder!"  He threw his napkin down and shoved his chair back so hard that it fell over and he stormed out of the room shouting, "You are no son of mine."

 Thaddon looked to his mother for sympathy, but she had none to offer.  She avoided his eyes with obvious effort.  "Mother," he said, pleading.  "Mother?"

 But she would not hear him and left the room also.

 

 

Thaddon was further surprised and humiliated when his father publicly announced, from the middle of the village square, with very nearly every man, woman and child in or around Freeman's Crossing in attendance, that he was formally denouncing and disowning his son, the village Blacksmith, for reasons so personal and humiliating that he would not speak of them in open forum.

 The villagers wondered at this and cast shaming glances at the blacksmith, but they did not question the family's reasons for this action.  Most of them thought they could guess what had pushed poor Murdos to such extremes.

 Talk, as he almost fled the village square, was of finding a new blacksmith, that, if he was not so badly needed, they would surely put him out of Freeman's Crossing, banished from decent society.

 Thaddon was too big to cry, but the pain inside him as he fled was almost overwhelming.  But his hurt was not so much for himself as it was for Selena.  She was quiet and shy, properly demure for a woman, so polite and gentle and forgiving of every human frailty.  Why was she such a threat to them?  Why could they not accept her, if not as a Faery, then at least as his wife-to-be?

 

 

One fine spring day the villagers of Freeman's Crossing were surprised to find a notice nailed to the closed door of the Blacksmith's shop.  In a graceful and flowing hand was scrawled the following notice:

  To whom it may concern–

  On this day, and for the next three days hence,

  this shop will be closed.  I am going away to

  be married and will return in four days.

  –Thaddon Jur Payne

 

 

 

 Thaddon had never given much thought to the forest that bordered the far bank of the Ivy Stream.  He had certainly never thought that he would find himself traveling through it.  Selena could make the journey from Freeman's Crossing to the Faery Realm of Kynd in less than an hour, he thought absently, but Faeries fly with astounding swiftness, when they know where they are going.

 He, unfortunately, was doomed to traveling on his own two legs, through country deeply forested and entirely unfamiliar to him.  He could not even ride a horse through such country.

 He shouldered his pack and bedroll, hung the goat-hide waterskin at his belt, checked his breast pocket for his small pipe and leaf, and then turned away from the Ivy Stream for the last time.  He was thankful that Selena had been obliged to accompany him – on foot – to guide him to the Faery Realm.

 He looked worried, his brow furled in deep thought or concentration as he studied the woods in front of them.  He carried his sword in hand, not to cut down imagined foes lurking in the woods, but to clear the path ahead, as needed.  Selena giggled at him and he frowned.

 "Do not fear," she said comfortingly, "it will not be as bad as you think."

 He nodded, unconvinced.

 But Thaddon soon learned that she possessed more knowledge of this part of the forest than he had given her credit for.  Less than an hour into the woods she brought him to an ancient track that the people of Freeman's Crossing were unaware of.  It was not a road, exactly, but a cobblestoned footpath, lined with perfectly rectangular lengths of granite.  The path had been constructed long ago by the Faeries of Kynd to handle the considerable traffic between the human and faery communities.  Selena could not tell him what had gone wrong in the relationship to cause the humans to bear such ill-will toward the Faeries of Kynd for communication between the two races had been severed so long ago.  But she was certain, as were nearly all of the Faeries, that it was some kind of silly misunderstanding that would one day be resolved.  And so the faeries maintained the highway almost to the edge of the woods, in hopes that one day, ties to the human world would be restored.

 Thaddon smiled at her naive hopes.  He did not say so, but he knew the humans well.  There would never be ties between the Faeries of Kynd and the humans of Freeman's Crossing.

 They traveled casually, sometimes conversing, often in thoughtful silence, for all of that day and part of the night.  The Far Mysting Wood closed in around them, a wood far denser than Thaddon had ever imagined it would be.  Night was virtually perpetual here for the sun never penetrated the high canopy this deep in the woods.

 A thin mist began to appear at his feet, and the birdcalls and furtive scurryings of animals that had made the outer woods seem so full of life ceased so that there was nothing to break the ominous silence of the wood.  The trees grew more and more ancient and gnarled and whole mazes of massive roots covered every inch of forest floor between them.

 Mosses covered the roots and gigantic boles of the trees or hung in spidery webs like drooping hair from the branches above.  Giant colorfully spotted or striped toadstools sprouted at odd intervals and sometimes they encountered whole forests of mushrooms that glowed with an unearthly incandescence.   Suddenly they found themselves surrounded by vertical outcroppings of rock that glowed magically in odd hues of red or gold or green.  They stopped without warning, Thaddon gazing about him in open-mouthed awe.  Selena stood proudly to announce that they were standing on the very threshold of Kynd.

 To Thaddon it was all very much like a dream that could not quite be recalled, and forever afterward his memories of Kynd remained fuzzy.  But he distinctly remembered the scores to buzzing fireflies flying in long lines in and out of the dark channels between roots and rocks and other trees.  And when he hesitantly stepped across the threshold, he heard laughter, faint but distinct, like hundreds of small children giggling from their hiding places all around him and he felt the unmistakable chill of being observed by many eyes that he could not locate.

 Selena took his hand in hers and smiled, and his fears were leached away like mist in the sunlight, absorbed by the earth and the magic of the Faeries of Kynd.

 Faeries sprang out of every opening or dark cavity in sight.  They were all winged and tiny, glowing in a multitude of colors, like a rainbow hued swarm of fireflies.  There were thousands of them, most it seemed, friends or family of Selena, greeting her faery-fashion, and no doubt wanting a look at her betrothed.

 They were escorted through a deep cleft in a granite wall that opened abruptly on a giant egg-shaped bowl carved out of the living mountains of rock and strangely overgrown along the rim with more of the enormous trees that made up the forest.

 This, Thaddon guessed, was some sort of audience hall or auditorium, for at one end of the bowl a low, smooth-topped granite dais had been raised right out of the ground – probably by magic.  Upon the dais sat a throne, and upon the throne sat the wizened figure of a large and majestically winged faer male of obvious bearing and status.

 Selena bowed, stooping low to the ground with one knee bent.  Thaddon awkwardly mimicked her actions and the Faer King nodded and motioned for them to rise.  In a voice gruff with age and phlegm, he spoke.

 "It has been many generations of faery Kings since this hall was last graced by the presence of any human.  Be welcome among us, Thaddon Jur Payne: we know you and see the great hope in your heart."

 Thaddon blushed, but managed to dredge up enough courage to speak the words he had rehearsed since leaving Freeman's Crossing.  "I have come among you to petition the father of Faer Selena for her hand in marriage, with hopes that the Faeries of Kynd will conduct and perform the marriage according to the laws of both Faer and Men."

 The King's face became grave and he stepped down from the throne and from the dais and came to stand before Thaddon.  "It may surprise you to learn that the hand you seek in marriage is none other than that of the Faer Princess and daughter of the King and Queen of the Faeries of Kynd.  I am Selena's father.  Do you now withdraw your petition?"

 Thaddon was stricken dumb.  He lowered his head and dropped to his knees.  For some time he said nothing and only stared at the ground.  But then, with a shake of his head he raised his eyes and looked into the grave face of the Faer King.

 "I-I cannot withdraw my request, your Highness.  I am in love with Selena and cannot live without her.  I will answer any condition you set upon our marriage, and go to any length to satisfy such conditions, but I must have her.  I say again: I cannot live in this world without her."

 "Then her hand I give freely and without condition.  Such love should be answered only by love.  My daughter, you have said to me that your heart is truly set on this.  I ask you now, do you love this man and will you consent to this petition of marriage?"

 "I will, father.  Since the first day I saw him I have loved him.  There is no price, among Faeries or Men, that is too high for his love."

 "That price, if you choose to live in the lands of Men, may be very high, my daughter.  Are you sure?"

 Selena looked at Thaddon, smiled, and nodded.  "Yes.  I am sure."

 "Then so be it.  Let the word be spread throughout the Realm of Kynd that the Princes Faer Selena, Daughter of King Nesmond of Kynd takes Thaddon Jur Payne, a Human, in eternal marriage at sunset on the morrow, to be held in the Royal Palace of Yurrin Kynd."