Days passed and the bride did not return. The young shepherd began to grow suspicious. On Midsummer Eve he went back to the waterfall where he had first met her and he heard the strains of a strange, sad music drifting from a distant glade. Curious, he followed the sounds of the music and came upon a company of the Faer Folk beside the waters, dancing and making such music as he had never heard before. And foremost amongst them he recognised his bride.

Forgetting his promise, he called her name aloud – and in that instant, she gave a terrible cry and threw herself into the waterfall. A mist swirled about them – and when it cleared, he was alone on the bare hillside.

Nothing would console him. For years he roamed the hills searching in vain for his faerie bride, clutching the lock of golden hair she had left as a keepsake. And some say she came to him on his deathbed, as young and as beautiful as when he had first seen her… for in their halls of Faerie, the passing of mortal time is but the blinking of an eye…

‘That story always used to make me cry when I was little,’ Orial said, setting the book slowly down, ‘though I was never sure why. Was it because the shepherd died for love? Or because I wanted to find the Faer Folk for myself and everyone kept telling me it was just a silly story and, besides, faeries don’t exist?’

‘I’m sure I never told you that.’

‘Oh, not you, Jolaine, never you.’

‘It was always my theory, as you remember, that these faerie tales contained a grain of truth. A folk memory, maybe, of events long since forgotten, unrecorded in the written annals of Sulien,’

‘But a memory of what?’

‘The Lifhendil.’

‘Now you’re going to tell me I’ve faerie blood in my veins. Should I expect to sprout little wings and fly?’ Orial said teasingly, making her hands flutter upwards like a butterfly.

‘Lifhendil blood.’ Jolaine was not to be distracted from the line of thought she was pursuing. ‘Suliens called it “faerie” to explain away a phenomenon they would not, could not, understand. By reducing it to a children’s fantasy, they defused the myth of its potency. There’s nothing too threatening about rainbow-winged sprites, is there?’

‘Threatening? The Lifhendil were a peaceful race. The Allegondans slaughtered them.’

‘The Allegondans did not understand the Lifhendil. Their religious rites must have seemed utterly incomprehensible. Confronted by such alien beliefs, they reacted in the time-honoured way.’

‘The religious rites?’

‘At first I thought the rites must be some form of ancestor-worship. And then, more and more of the inscriptions led me to believe they were… something else. What have the Lifhendil bequeathed us? Our funeral customs – and the Accidie. A terrible legacy. And yet they were a serene, gifted people – all the wall-paintings and writings confirm that. Something went wrong, Orial.’