“As someone who’s lived with it for years, I can assure you that it was very effective,” he told her. “But people here understand. Whenever I drop something, all I have to say is ‘fairy curse’ and they just nod and shake their heads and say nothing else. You don’t get that out in the real world. Or at least, you didn’t before the Pope Lick Monster incident. Anyway, all Seamus had to do was apologize, and the whole family would have had a different destiny. Idiot Seamus didn’t believe her, despite her explaining the how’s and the why’s in great detail in front of his entire family. At first, he wasn’t worried, after all he was so self-assured he never got nervous. It started off small, dropping something when he was talking to a pretty girl, tripping when he was walking down the street. But it was a crack in his armor and his nerves got worse and the accidents got more serious. The family fortunes waned because it takes a steady, clear mind to run a large farm and it’s hard to keep steady when anything could go wrong at any moment. Seamus never repented, even when his family begged him to–because somehow, his pride was more important than admitting that he’d done a stupid, cruel thing. Eventually, he was run over in the street by a carriage, and there was a pretty sparse crowd at his funeral.”

“It feels mean to say ‘good.’ And yet…” Charlotte noted.

“Well, the curse didn’t end with him, obviously. The family lost the farm, well before the Great Famine set in. We moved to America, hoping that maybe distance from the fae would weaken the curse. Well, it took a couple of tries for us to move to America. One of my great-great-uncles fell off the gangway of a steamer ship to Boston, and drowned, and the rest of the family chickened out and went back to Galway for a few years. We managed to eke out a life here, but we’ve suffered a lot of tragedy along the way. A lot of us end up single because no one wants to date the guy who dumps half a punchbowl on them at the school dance. I guess that’s another added smack from the curse. If the bloodline isn’t ended by accidental death, we’ll blunder our way right out of the gene pool,” Leonard said.