I stroked his leafy brow with my fingers, and then I put my lips to his and breathed for him, as I had once before. One, two. A pause. One, two again. Live, I willed him. There are folk here who love you. Live. Live! As I breathed, the Old Ones sang, their voices making an eerie music that filled the safe place with its throbbing, humming, gurgling beauty. It was a music old and mysterious, a music like the heartbeat of the earth, timeless and deep. I shivered to hear it, even as I kept breathing, breathing, holding onto the thread that still bound my baby to this life. A thread of story so old it stretched to the time of our first ancestors. A thread of love so strong that not even a prince of the Fair Folk could break it. Live!

The song died down. I could not tell how long we had been there, I breathing, they singing, but I sensed, all of a sudden, that over at the other side of the enclosure, just beyond the gate, someone was standing in complete silence. When I lifted my head to look, Becan’s chest continued its slight rise and fall. He was breathing on his own.

“Ahhh,” said the Old Ones in chorus, and turned toward the gate. Dog Mask still held my brother in its arms.

The gate creaked open without challenge. She stood in the gap, a figure of about the same size and shape as myself, clad in a trailing garment of leaves and vines and flowers, with her hair cascading over it in dark, tangled tendrils. The torch nearest the gate flared. She shrank back before it, trembling, terrified. The flame illuminated wide, wary eyes in a face that was both sweet and strange, for she was no human woman, but a creature of woods and thickets, hedges and coppices, her body a lovely female shape built from all the wildest and most secret materials of the forest. To come so close to humankind must set a great fear in her. But then, I had her child. And now, so soon after I had brought him back from the brink of death, I must give him up again.

This time I did not hesitate. Her great eyes, fixed on me in terror and wonderment, filled with bright tears as I approached with her baby held against my breast. I could feel him breathing now; I could sense the life returning to his body with every step I took. His mother gave a cry, not an eerie shriek of pain this time, but a low, yearning call from deep inside her.

And Becan answered. He opened his mouth and let out the hungry, uncomplicated squall of a healthy child who has had a fright and now wants his supper. My own eyes brimming, I took my last step forward and laid him in his mother’s reaching arms.