The fey were angered, for this was never meant to be. The young man was to stay there, to work, to use his skills in the service of the fey. Why else would they have nurtured him from a babe and taught him all he knew? They had raised him, they had trained him. He owed them. As for the young woman, the fey considered her one of their own. But it was too late. Both were gone. They were safe in the human world. Or so they believed.

When you stole from the fey there was always a price to pay, and that price could be high indeed. But those two, Bardán’s father and mother, did not think of that when they ran out together, making their escape. That was the way they saw it, an escape from servitude. To the fey it was theft. The young woman had been theirs, and the young man had not only turned his back on them, he had stolen her. At first, the fey left the two alone. That did not mean all was happy ever after. Inevitably, there would come a demand for restitution.

Bardán rocks to and fro in his meagre shelter, thinking of the good, trying to shut out the bad. They’d been young when they’d left that place, the two of them. His father sixteen, barely a man. His mother even younger. But they had been strong of heart, and staunch in their love for each other. So his father had worked as a builder, and his mother had taken in mending here and there, though folk thought the two of them too odd to befriend. In time their only child had been born. Little Bardán. They had raised him simply, according to their means, but with kindness. There had been no more children, and his mother had died when Bardán was ten or eleven years old. It was not a violent death, but a slow decline over a long, chill winter. In the end she could no longer draw breath.

The local folk would not have her in the village plot. They could not trust a man who had lived in that other realm – never mind that it was through no fault of his own – and still less a woman who might have sprung from anywhere at all. Bardán’s father buried her himself, not far from their little house on the edge of the forest. He spoke words over her grave, and young Bardán, standing beside him, hummed the song she had loved. The song she had sung to her little boy, her only child, from the day he was born:

Starling, woodcock, owl on wing

Nightjar, chiffchaff, bunting sing

Goldcrest, warbler, thrush and jay

Redpoll, siskin darting by

Golden feather, scarlet, white

Bright as summer, dark as night

Weave a charm for luck and good

Every birdling in the wood

Feather bright and feather fine