The Faery Reel by Ellen Datlow

Author:Ellen Datlow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2019-11-22T19:09:58+00:00

Immersed in Matter

Nina Kiriki Hoffman

I admit it, after fifteen years of denying it: I, Owl out of Ginger, am half human, more my father’s son than ever I thought.

Everyone in my generation of faery has a human half. We all have the same human father. We never speak of it.

The race of faery was dying until our father came, sent as an ensorcelled emissary by our dead king. Before that, the only new children to enter the underground lands in three hundred years were those born of human women: halfbloods, never as gifted as their faery fathers. Most halfbloods stayed aboveground among humans, where their pieces of gifts could serve them well; the few who came to our lands were treated as lesser beings, servants, or sometimes slaves.

The faery I knew my own age or near it were my half-brothers and—sisters. The fraction of our human father in us was too small to show. We were all beautiful and skilled. We seemed entirely faery to everyone, with no stink or stamp of human. Most of us resembled our mothers; we looked different from each other, and our gifts were as strong as any among the purebloods. We were accepted as the next generation of faery.

Like everyone else, I never looked twice at the halfbloods who had been born aboveground, except to notice they were different, lesser. They smelled strange, and many were less than perfect physically. Fit for kitchen work, laundry work, work that involved dirt. Fit to pass among us as shadows.

My mother sang over my cradle when I was little about what kind of creature my father had been. She had loved him. She remembered him. She wished he would return.

I took it for a human tale and believed it not, just something with which to scare children. None of the other children I played with had mothers who sang such songs.

My generation was taught as previous generations had been—to pursue our own interests and gifts, choose our own teachers.

Mother taught me the basics of magic and survival, but my favorite teacher was Golden, who knew the languages and shapes of animals.

My mother was not happy with my choice of specialties—to shapeshift was to acknowledge our kinship with lesser beings, so the skill was disdained by the most prejudiced among us—but she indulged me, since that was where my gift lay.

Golden and I went up the tunnels and through the gates into the world above, where the lights in the sky changed and so did the temperature of the air, and water fell from the sky, as well as flowing in streams and springs. We wandered wild lands, swamps and forests, met animal people and saw what they could be persuaded to do. Golden had a gift for speaking with wolves and foxes. Bird language came more easily to my tongue. Golden taught me many lesser dialects, and together we learned cat language, though cats great and small ignored us when they liked, whether we got the accents right or not.

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