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And every doorstep, every one, had a saucer of cream somewhere on or near it, that the village cats were never seen to touch.

He stared at this thousandth bowl on this thousandth morning, and knew in his heart what he would have to do. He must preach a holy crusade against the old but unforgotten gods. As to who should preach it with him, he knew just the man.

“YOU WANT TO do what?” said the hermit.

Father Timothy had not found the congenial colleague he had expected. The hermit was clean, for one thing. Without his saintly armor of beard and vermin, he looked distressingly like one of the young sprouts of the gentry who infested the hills in hunting season. He had the same accent, too, and the same bland expression.

Nevertheless, Father Timothy persevered.Whatever this man had been before he elected the white martyrdom, he was a man of God now. “This village is overrun with pagan superstition.Why it was not scoured clean a hundred years ago, God knows.”

“Maybe it was,” the hermit said, “and the scouring didn’t stick.”

“That’s all too likely,” Father Timothy granted him. “These people are relentless in their determination to do as their distant ancestors did before them.”

“And yet you think you can rid them of their pixies and nixies?”

Father Timothy blinked, startled out of his fine fire of zeal. “I take it you don’t agree that the village would be more godly without them?”

“Certainly I deplore superstition,” the hermit said, “but you act as if these figments truly exist.”

“The villagers believe they do,” Father Timothy said.

“Do you?”

Father Timothy shifted on the hard wooden stool. He should be the doubter, man of the modern age that he was, and this relic of an ancient martyrdom should be frothing over the worship of pagan gods. But the truth was the truth, and he was an honest man of God. “I do believe,” he said, “that the old beliefs—and yes, the old gods—are still alive in Ballynasloe. It’s my duty as a priest and a Christian man to remedy that.”

“You’ve seen them? With your own eyes?”

“I’ve heard them,” Father Timothy said, “and felt them. They are there, watching and mocking, laughing at our modern pretensions.”

The hermit was obviously trying hard to keep his face expressionless. “I wish you good fortune,” he said.

“You won’t help?” said Father Timothy in a bit of a dying fall, but he had to cling to hope.

It was the hermit’s turn to be uncomfortable. That was gratifying enough that Father Timothy resolved to do penance for it later. “I—really don’t think—”

“Not even for the sake of the villagers’ souls?”

The hermit’s soft young mouth went thin and tight. “I’m not here to save anyone’s soul,” he said, “but my own. I’ll pray for them.Maybe God will listen.”

“I’m sure He will,” Father Timothy said, but not as truthfully as he would have liked.

THE HERMIT HAD been praying when Father Timothy interrupted him. When he tried to go back to it, he caught himself thinking instead. He had taken Father Timothy for a man of modern sensibilities and serious intentions. And here he was, obsessed with a bowl of cream on a doorstep.

“Silliness,” said the hermit, whose obsession with a fall of golden curls was blurring into a fixation on neat black braids.

He knelt on the hardest and coldest part of the floor, on his bare knees to be sure he suffered enough, and squeezed his eyes tight shut. He prayed in Latin because in his opinion a hermit should, and because it required a certain level of mortification of the brain.

He still could not stop thinking of Father Timothy and the faeries. He gave it up at last and resorted to mortification of the flesh: a brisk hour in his meager bit of garden among the beans and the potatoes. No faeries there. No Father Timothy, either. By the end of the hour he was lustily intoning the Stabat Mater dolorosa, as happy as a hermit could be.

FATHER TIMOTHY HAD all his weapons to hand. Bell, book, and candle—and a fire of devotion that burned higher with every day that passed. His