Chapter Text
Prologue: Tuesday
There is an old tradition in the back country of Ireland.
Not a well-known one. Not the kind that makes it into books or Ministry records or the careful published ledgers of magical creature classification. The kind that lives in the spaces between those things, in the low places where the ground is soft and the light comes sideways and the distinction between magical and not has always been, in the local opinion, beside the point.
The fae take babies sometimes.
Everyone in the back country knows this the way they know about the weather and the kelpies in the lower fields and the mushroom circles that appear overnight and are best walked around rather than through. It is not discussed at length. It simply is. Has always been. The strongly worded letters from the British Ministry on the subject arrive periodically and are received with the polite attention given to correspondence that will change nothing.
What fewer people know is why.
The why is this: the fae take babies because they always have. It is traditional. Tradition, in their understanding of the word, carries a weight and a logic that does not require further justification. It has always been done. Therefore it is done. The circular nature of this reasoning has been pointed out to them on numerous occasions by numerous people.
They are not especially interested.
Seamus Ollivander had worked with magical creatures for eleven years by the time the incident occurred.
He was a careful man. Practical in the specific way of people who spend a decade in fields and low places learning the logic of things that are older and stranger than human institutions. He kept good records. He filed thorough reports. He had a system for the reports, organized by incident type, cross-referenced by location and creature classification and whether or not the situation had been satisfactorily resolved.
The baby acquisition category had the most files.
He had also, over eleven years, developed what his colleagues charitably called a rapport with the fae community of County Clare and what he privately called an ongoing professional dispute that was going nowhere but that he refused to abandon on principle. He had filed seventeen formal complaints. He had attended thirty-two field meetings, which in practice meant standing in a specific field at a specific time speaking to things that may or may not have been listening. He had returned four children.
On the Tuesday in question he arrived at the eastern well in the late afternoon following a report of unusual activity, which in his experience meant one of several things, none of them simple.
It was a baby.
Sitting in the center of a mushroom circle, wrapped in something that was not quite cloth and not quite not, looking up at the sky with the complete equanimity of a creature that had not yet learned it should be alarmed. The fae were arranged around the circle in the way they arranged themselves when they wanted to be seen. This was deliberate. Seamus noted it.
He looked at the baby.
He looked at the fae.
He said, with the sigh of a man who had been doing this for eleven years: "You cannae keep doing this."
"Not our fault," said one of them, "that you lot keep choosing the changelings."
"It is your fault," Seamus said, "for taking the babies in the first place."
"Traditional," said another.
He had had this conversation before. It was in the files, under recurring dispute, justification by tradition, which was the thickest subfolder in the baby acquisition category.
"Do you even know," he said carefully, "who this one belongs to."
The fae were silent. It was a specific silence, the kind that answered the question without answering it.
"She was left by the well," said one.
"In the circle," said another.
Seamus looked at the circle. At the well. At the field around them, the late afternoon light going sideways through the low clouds.
"How long ago," he said.
The fae said nothing. Which meant long enough.
He asked around. That was what you did, you asked around, you checked with the local magical community, you made enquiries through the appropriate channels, which in back country Clare meant standing in three different fields talking to three different sets of things that may or may not have been listening. He sent owls. He walked the surrounding area. He filed a preliminary report marked origin unknown, active enquiry.
Nobody was missing a baby.
Nobody came to the circle.
Nobody came at all.
He went back to the fae on the third day.
They were waiting. They had, he suspected, been waiting since the first day. Since before that, possibly.
"There's nobody," he said.
"No," said one of the fae.
"She was just left."
"Yes."
He looked at her. Still in the circle. Still wrapped in the not-quite-cloth. Still looking at the sky with the same equanimity, which was beginning to strike him as less the blankness of infancy and more the look of something that had already decided to be patient about things.
He thought about the files. The baby acquisition category. Four returned children, four families, four front doors he had knocked on with his heart in his throat and the relief of having something to give back.
There was no front door here.
He looked at the fae.
"You've given her something," he said.
Not a question.
"A gift," said one of them, "should be good quality."
He understood then. Eleven years of field meetings. Seventeen complaints. Four returned children. And they had been, in their ancient unbureaucratic way, keeping a tally. He had done good work. The work required acknowledgment. This was how they acknowledged things.
It was, he would write later in the margin of the incident report, in smaller writing than the rest, the most comprehensively irritating application of his own arguments about tradition that he had ever encountered.
He picked her up.
She grabbed his finger with the grip of a child who had already formed opinions about things.
"I'm taking her," he said. Not to the fae. Just to the field. To the decision, which had already made itself.
"We know," said one of the fae, with what might have been satisfaction. "You always take them."
"The others had families," Seamus said.
The fae said nothing.
"Right," he said. "Right."
He went home.
His wife Maeve was in the kitchen. She looked up when he came in. She looked at the baby. She looked at him with the patience of a woman who had been married to Seamus Ollivander for fourteen years.
"Seamus," she said.
"We have a child," he said.
A pause. The kitchen was warm. Something on the stove. Outside the window the Clare evening was doing its thing with the light, going gold and sideways through the low clouds the way it did in October.
"Give her here then," Maeve said.
He gave her over.
Maeve held her, looking at her in the careful way of someone taking stock. The baby looked back with those eyes. The ones that went straight through.
"She's ours," Maeve said. Not a question. The plain shape of the thing, set down.
"She's ours," Seamus agreed.
He wrote to his brother that night. One of the rare letters that said more than field logistics and family news and the ongoing question of whether Gareth was eating properly in that shop of his.
Her eyes see straight through everything, he wrote. Maeve says she's ours.
She's ours.
It was raining when I brought her home. Tuesday.