The next thing I remember is fighting my way to the surface of a deep body of water, or so it seemed at first. After a few moments of struggle the realization came to me that it wasn’t water but layers of clothing. After a few more moments I understood that I was wrapped up in a bulk that sat atop my head like a hat. No matter how much I struggled with all my many arms and legs, no matter how much I called out, I remained imprisoned. And yet there was a voice that spoke to me from far away, calling me to it with such strength that I couldn’t resist it and such beauty that I didn’t want to. I pushed against my head until something tore and I was free to fly away.

I grabbed at my hat and the Bird shifted under my grasp but remained attached firmly to my scalp, to my mixed relief. Then I opened my eyes and knew where I was. I had not seen the tunnels of the fair folk for several years, but immediately I recognized the shape of the roof above me and the lamps that hung in the corners. It seemed to me for a moment that all my adventures had been only a dream from which I had now awakened.

“Thank Heaven,” I heard Rosédan say, and I knew that it was all real. When I put out my hand, feeling myself too weak to do anything else, Rosédan took it and squeezed it. Her face appeared in my vision, her eyes red. To distract her from whatever she was so worried about, I asked her what had happened to me.

“You fell down,” said Bekrao. “Don’t you know it’s bad luck to fall down on your wedding day?”

I hadn’t known that, and I said so.

“I was joking, Kësil. By Anu, you gave us a scare. We had no idea what was wrong until you opened your eyes and said, I still remember it clearly, ‘Take me to the hill of the flat stones.’ Not very helpful, as I’m sure you’ll agree.”

“No,” I said. “There must be ten thousand ten thousand hills with flat stones in this world.”

“Fortunately we had a little more than that to go on,” said Rosédan. “Can you sit up yet?”

“Not yet. I am very hungry and thirsty.”

Rosédan disappeared promptly upon hearing this, leaving Bekrao to explain more of how we came here. “You were behaving very strangely,” he said. “It seemed like a series of messages had been burned into your throat for you to repeat. The hill of the flat stones was one. Another was the name of a town, an Uste town we soon learned it was. There was a wandering Uste priest with a long name I can’t remember who was an immense help to us. In the end the only thing we could think of to do was bring you to the place you seemed to be talking about. You don’t remember any of this?”

“I remember nothing after the wedding.”

“You didn’t say much, but you ate and drank and you went where we directed you. When we were about a mile from this hill, they came out to meet us.”

“The fair folk?”

“Is that what you call them? They were very strange. Are very strange, I should say. But they were very polite. They apologized for bringing us all this way, though they wouldn’t tell us what had happened to you or why. They still haven’t, but they told us you would wake up soon. So you have.”

“Thank you,” I said. At that moment Rosédan returned with a plate full of the familiar delicacies of the fair folk, and I set myself to the task of filling my stomach. When this had been accomplished, I felt well enough to rise from my bed and walk around.

At this point I should correct any misapprehensions my readers may be under. The halls of the fair folk were not cramped tunnels like something a mole might dig, but grand chambers and passageways that seemed almost too large to fit under the hills. There were lamps everywhere, lamps that created no smoke and never needed to be filled with oil, but which filled even the largest chamber with a brilliant light. And everywhere the fair folk walked quickly through the halls, their eyes solemn and gloomy despite their way of walking, which was almost a dance. Now that she was here in their midst, Rosédan did seem like she could be one of them, at least physically. But her attitude and expression were entirely different. Outwardly she was sadder but inwardly happier, if that makes sense. Most likely it doesn’t, but unless my readers have met the fair folk themselves, there is little I can do to clarify things.

It wasn’t long before Maqira heard that I was up and walking about. He found me in the garden, where I had gone with Rosédan so I could show her the flowers kept there, some of which I had never seen elsewhere in the world, nor since in my travels. He announced himself with a single cough, then two more. “Welcome home,” he said quietly when I turned around to face him.

“This isn’t my home,” I said.

“I’m sorry to say that it is.” The fair folk had, in my limited experience, a habit of making such judgments without regard for what I might think. “We didn’t send you to wander the world without expecting you to return. We didn’t give you a—well, you call it a bird, which is a fanciful but useful name—without expecting it to gather up gifts from the outside world, visions and tongues and stories for us to enjoy and fashion into something new. This you have done marvelously well. We owe you more than we can ever repay.”

“You have a remarkable way of showing your gratitude,” I said pointedly.

“This exertion of the bird’s power seemed like the simplest way to draw you back here.” Maqira smiled, but his eyes didn’t follow the example of his mouth. “We’ve been kind to you, haven’t we? You’re fortunate that you didn’t fall into the hands of some of our northern neighbors. To us, the world outside is an opportunity for artistic endeavor, to make little images of the world in our hills just as we are little images of our maker. But there is a hill not two days’ walk from here whose denizens consider themselves too glorious to sully their hands with stone and wood and magic. There the weak are the toys of the strong, forced to play for their amusement. Oh, the strongest among them are glorious and glamorous, so much that if you met one you would swear you were in the presence of an angel. But there is less compassion in all the strong combined than in the little finger of even the cruelest of your people.”

I had to admit that the alternative Maqira offered didn’t sound very pleasant, and of course I would have been lost countless times without my Bird. Still, I felt I had to protest against my treatment. “I believe I would have come back if you had simply asked,” I said. Then I remembered that I had yet to formally introduce Rosédan and Maqira to one another, though of course no doubt they had met while I was unconscious. “Rosédan, this is Maqira, one of the leaders of the fair folk. Maqira, this is Rosédan, my wife.” There was something pleasant about the feel of those words in my mouth.

“So she said. We’d gladly speak with her more. There is an air around her that reminds us of you, and we suspect that her history is connected to ours, from the time of which we have little memory before we came into these northern lands. Your other friend, too, has an interesting tale to tell. We are a greedy people, understand, greedy for stories.”

“These tunnels,” Rosédan said. “How deep do they run? Unless my eyes deceive me, I don’t see how there’s room for them under the hill, unless they go very deep indeed.”

Finally the smile touched Maqira’s eyes. “Follow me,” he said. He led us out of the garden to the adjoining hall, to a door that I had never seen before. The door was nestled between two jutting pilasters, which perhaps accounts for my earlier inability to notice it. Then again, perhaps it doesn’t.

On the other side of the door was a narrow stairwell. We ascended, climbing for some time until we reached a hatch in the ceiling, which Maqira opened, pulling a heavy latch aside and shoving his shoulders against the hatch until it shifted loose. One by one we climbed up through the hatch into the open air.

Of course I had expected to see the pleasant rolling hills that I knew from experience to lie above the fair folk’s halls. I was, therefore, shocked and surprised to see instead a barren plain of mud stretching out as far as the horizon. But it was the tree that truly caught my attention. It stood in the middle of that plain, its roots running in every direction like roads, its branches sprouting into thousands of leaves of a pale blue color that that merged into the color of the sky. It was strangely difficult to judge distances and sizes in this place, but even at first glance it was clear that the tree was enormous, far greater than even the great trees of the forest near Tīuame.

Curiously enough, I found something familiar about the sight. I’ve pondered the matter and in the end I can’t account for this except by suggesting that I may have seen something similar in a dream.

“Now I understand,” said Rosédan. “It’s one of your images, isn’t it?”

I was still staring at the tree, trying to remember if I had perhaps seen it during my previous sojourn among the fair folk. Then I saw something moving near the base of the trunk, clambering over one of the roots where it emerged. It was a human figure, and what I thought were its garments were a vivid green.

“Who is that?” I asked.

Maqira shaded his eyes and gazed towards the tree. After a moment he laughed and said, “Why don’t you go and see? I promise you that no harm will come to you here.”

“Go, go,” said Rosédan. “I have some questions for Maqira about the magic he and his people used here.”

So I embarked across the plain, and here my remark about the strangeness of distance and time becomes relevant, since I seemed to be covering much more ground than seemed reasonable. The tree grew nearer as Rosédan and Maqira dwindled. It had to be the width of a house at least, and likely several houses. I traveled along the side of one of the great roots, which lifted up the dirt around it in walls that nearly reached my head, and when I reached the trunk at last the green figure was there waiting for me.

It wasn’t the garments that were green, I understood, but the figure’s skin. The figure wasn’t wearing clothes at all, and was quite clearly female. She was, in fact, the second most beautiful woman that I have ever seen.

“You’re very different from your brothers,” I said.

She laughed, “Am I? I suppose I am. Some of us resent our erstwhile pupils, but I find pleasure in visiting them every so often. And yet half the difference is in the one who sees, not the thing that is seen. The light hurts weak eyes but allows strong eyes to see. The fire consumes wood but heats stone. The water drowns men but sustains fish.”

“Who are you?” I asked. “What are you?”

She put a finger to her lips. “We are servants, even if sometimes we are bad ones. But if you want to know more, why don’t you climb the tree?”

“It seems very high.”

“Only as high as heaven.”

It all seemed very strange to me, but I decided that I might as well make an attempt. Not to reach the very highest branches, of course, which I doubted even the most adept squirrel could do, but at least to reach the thick branch that I could see hanging over our heads. I took off my shoes, rubbed my hands together, and began climbing up the mushrooms that stuck out from the side of the trunk in such a way that it seemed they had been deliberately placed to form a ladder, spiraling around the trunk.

I was about a quarter of the way to the branch that was my destination, and my arms were beginning to feel the strain, when I saw a mushroom large enough for me to rest. Apparently this plan wasn’t exclusive to me, because there was another man sitting on that platform, swinging his legs and singing to himself. At first I thought he was one of the fair folk, and I greeted him, saying that I didn’t remember him from my last visit.

“I’m not surprised,” he said. “I spend most of my remaining days in this place waiting for the dawn. Probably I’ll never see it, but I still have hope. It depends what Iddan does, I suppose.”

The old man may not have been surprised, but I was, so much so that I nearly fell off the mushroom. “The Shaddar from Mimiris̱?” I asked him. There could, after all, be hundreds of people in the world with the name Iddan, so I wanted to narrow it down a little.

“You’ve met him! Tell me, how is my son? Has he married at last?”

“The last I saw of him, he was planning to marry a Magharun girl.”

“I see. Good! That’s good. There’s no point maintaining the purity of our line anymore, I believe. Such things will not survive the end of the world.”

“The end of the world?” I asked. It sounded vaguely familiar.

“Indeed. I looked into the fire and I saw that soon it would consume everything, set it ablaze until everything of the old had been forgotten.”

“There is nothing that is forgotten by the Flame,” I murmured, quoting the Amber Books, I believe.

“What’s that?”

“I was only going to say that there are many ways for the world to end. Myself, I've seen an age come to an end three times, in Duri, Alka'ales, and Ghadareim. In Edazzo and Uste I saw a new age fail in its birth. But each time something of the old age survived.”

“Maybe so,” he said. “Soon we’ll find out which of us is right, I suppose. If I live long enough to see it.”

“Have you climbed higher into the tree? The green woman told me I should, but I don’t know why.”

“It is generally not wise to do what she and her kind say, but this may be an exception.” After giving me this remarkably unhelpful advice, the old man leaned back against the trunk and shut his eyes. To all appearances, he was fast asleep.

I continued to climb, until I was utterly exhausted, my arms and legs aching and my hands raw from some acidic juice of the mushrooms, and it seemed better for me to turn and return to the ground. I couldn’t see the green woman any longer, but thought I could make out the distant figures of Rosédan and Maqira. It was at that moment that my Bird made a triumphant sound like a rooster greeting the dawn and I felt a curious lurch in my stomach and a spinning in my ears. Then it seemed that I was falling, but not towards the ground.

The roots of the tree shrank away and the highest branches grew nearer as I fell. The blue leaves embraced me; the sky darkened into the rich color of the sea. There was a sudden blinding flash of light that forced me to shut my eyes against it, and even then I could feel it burning through my eyelids.

When the light faded, I opened my left eye cautiously and saw a coastline spread out before me, much as it had been when Rosédan and I flew on Halgh’s back, but the shape of it was different. It was a broad land shrouded in white clouds and mists, not at all familiar to me. But when I tried to open both my eyes at once, I felt a sharp pain behind them and my vision blurred into nothing comprehensible.

I tried my right eye, and this time I saw something like a spider’s web stretched across the space before me. It pulsed with waves of light from vertex to vertex. There was some meaning in the shapes that the lines of the web formed and the way the light moved around the edges of those shapes, but it was beyond me to interpret. When I described my vision to Rosédan later, she said that it reminded her of some principle of magic that she proceeded to explain to such an extent that I regretted asking her.

Again I tried to open both eyes, but again I failed. I was falling faster than ever, and then—

There are no words, at least none I have ever learned, to say what I must. I couldn’t see with both eyes open, but there was an eye that was not an eye. It didn’t belong to me, but I to it. Beyond this world there was a unity and a light and a vision that knew me to the smallest atom.

What more can I tell? There is but a little remaining for me to write. When I awoke, I was lying in the dirt at the base of the tree. Most of me was, I should say, but my head had a better resting place in Rosédan’s lap.

I did my best, in disjointed words, to explain to her what I had seen. She couldn’t have understood, not really, but when I had finished she was silent in contemplation for a while, then said, “We are all at the mercy of these great beings, of gods and angels and fairies and demons and ghosts. All we can do is act as seems right to us and trust in the grace of Heaven.”

The next day Maqira came to me and told me that it was time. I bade farewell to my Bird, of course. “I will miss you,” I said. “You’ve been my closest companion all these years, and I owe you my thanks for all you’ve done for me.” And the Bird replied, but in its own language of whistles and chirps that is the one language it will not translate for me. Then we submitted ourselves to the surgeons of the fair folk, who removed the Bird from my head with the same delicate art they had used to set it there.

Rosédan and Bekrao were there to greet me when I left that room, my head bare for the first time in a great while. “Akʰ tʰusranuli rosa!” said Bekrao.

“Ra tálət te?” Rosédan said in what was clearly a questioning tone.

“I don’t have the slightest idea what either of you are saying,” I replied, and I laughed.

It was that night, in one of the underground rooms of the fair folk, that Rosédan and I lay together to be united in the flesh for the first time. After delight that can not and, I think, should not be expressed in words, she sang to me in her own language. I didn’t understand her song, of course, but I found joy in the thought that there would be all the time in the world to learn.