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“Our power is not what it was. The moon has waned too often. The sun is setting fast.We are old, old as our green hills, and year by year we dwindle into the grass.

“Time was when we would have raised war in heaven and riven the earth below, and broken the back of any army that came against us.Now we have shrunk into the little people, the faerie folk, dwellers under the hills. We feed on cream that goodwives set on doorsteps, and perform little magics for those who still, in their dim way, remember.

“We were proud once.We were gods, and mortals worshiped us. That is gone. All gods die; time rules us all, even us who saw this isle rise gleaming out of ocean.

“We are dying, but our time is not yet come.Yet we are being hastened to our end. Our shrines are violated, our workings fouled, our own land turned against us. The faith that sustained us is being eaten away. Cruel spells weaken and destroy us.”

“The priest’s crusade,” the hermit said in a flash of understanding. “He’s only one man. How can he—”

“Not one man alone,William Thorne,” she said. “Years, centuries of them. Bell, book, and candle drained away our strength year by year, robbed us of the mortal faith that fed us, and narrowed the sphere of our earthly power to one small ring of hills and a valley with a river in it, and an oak, and a Druid wood.”

“Ballynasloe,” said the hermit.

“Ballynasloe,” she said. “All those things, and an old tower that was ours long ago, set above the last of the hollow hills, with the last hermit living in the tower and the last of us living below.”

The hermit regarded her in a kind of a horror.“Then I’m destroying you, too.My devotions,my prayers—”

She laughed—astonishing, and ravishing, with her white teeth and her tumbled hair, and the sound of it like water bubbling from a pure spring. “Oh, no! You’re not destroying us at all. Such little strength as we have left, you feed, with your innocence and your trust, and your faith in the beauty of women.”

“My faith is in God!”

“And is not every woman an incarnation of Her?”

“God is not—” He stopped short. “You’re as pagan as Pegeen.”

“I’m of the Daoine Sidhe,” she said. “The water of baptism would sear the flesh from my bones.”

“I’m a man of God,” the hermit said. “I am.”

“Mostly certainly you are,” she said. “Will you help us? We harm no one.We’ll fade in time; but it should be our time, not that of the man who has taken such exception to our little tribute of charms and cream.”

“He says that you endanger the villagers’ immortal souls. He’s charged with the care of those souls. He has to defend them.”

“We are no danger to anyone’s soul,” she said.

He should not have believed her. If she had been in any way seductive, if she had slid eyes at him or curved her body toward him, he would have known that she was false. But she never moved. Her face was somber. Her words were simple and her eyes steady. She did nothing that a woman would do to tempt a man.

Her existence was a temptation. He signed himself with the cross, desperately. “Get you behind me! Go!”

To his lasting astonishment, she obeyed him. She winked out like a flame in a wind, vanished as if she had never been.

He should have been triumphant. He sank down by the hearth where the fire was dying, and wished he had never been born. Even with faerie women, he was crashingly inept.

WILLIAM THORNE,” said the voice that had been haunting his dreams. He had hoped and dreaded that he would not hear it again while he was awake. But awake he most certainly was. He was digging in his garden in a brief bit of sun between a blustery morning and the promise of rain at evening.

She cast no shadow over him as she stood between the poles on which the last of the beans were hanging rather sadly. Her garment was the color of autumn leaves, and her skin was as white and her hair as black as he remembered. In the plain daylight she seemed more real than anything around her.

“William Thorne,” she said. “Have you reconsidered?”

Get thee behind