For days, he watched her but kept his distance. She feared him now that he had taken a form like her own. How could he tell her she would be safe in the woods when he couldn’t get close enough to use the man words?

Perhaps…Perhaps he had done something wrong with the form and that was why she feared him?

He found a pool of water on a still day and stared for a long time at the face looking back at him.

The woods looked back at him. The wild places of the world. A human face, but not completely human. Never completely human. The small pointed ears still looked like a stag’s ears—and small antlers rose from his brow.

Discouraged, he stayed away from her cottage for several days.

Then, one day at dawn, he saw rabbits feeding in her garden and chased them away, understanding now that these were the kinds of plants she and her young needed to eat, and if the rabbits ate them, she would not have enough to eat over the winter.

When he chased the last rabbit away, he turned and saw her watching him. He struggled to say the man words, hoping she would hear him before she ran away.

“I did not harm him.”

She smiled at him, and he felt the warmth of the sun again.

“I know,” she said. Then she went back into her cottage.

Slowly she got used to him. Slowly she began talking to him while she worked in her garden.

One day, when he brought her a rabbit he’d hunted for her, she invited him into her cottage, gave him clothes that had belonged to her mate, and let him eat with her young.

She called him Fae, which meant Other.

The other spirits called him Hunter, because now he walked through the woods with a different purpose.

Eventually the cottage became home to him.

Eventually her feelings for him ripened, and one night she took him to her bed and taught him the human way of mating.

Eventually, when he watched her suckle the child that had come from his seed, he knew he would never go back to being what he had been.