A Fairy Affair at a Faire

"Wait a minute," John said, looking sidelong at the women in the tartan dress. "You're pulling my leg. There's no such thing."

"Ah, but every weekend the customers tear through Mr. Jones' hat shop like a hurricane. Yet somehow every morning it's spic and span and neat as a pin. And him the first to leave every night and the last to arrive in the morning to boot. How do you explain that now, love?"

"If you wanted to poach their brownie, you could always just sneak over there and leave out some doll clothes one night," Alessandra suggested playfully.

"Ach, you're a wicked little pixie, aren't you, pet?" the woman in the tartan dress teased with a wink.

"Is that like a J.K. Rowling thing?" asked John, his brow furrowed. "Like giving clothes to a house elf sets them free? Oh, hey! Another kind of elf."

"I'd think they'd be happy to get new clothes," Quinn mused.

"No, it's a grave insult to give clothes to a brownie," Alessandra said, and then she quoted a line from an old rhyme her Gran used to recite. "The strange ways of the good folk are not for us to ken."

"But if ye dance in Faeryland, ye'll ne'er be seen again," the woman in the tartan dress finished the couplet with a smile. "Oh, you're wise beyond your years, pet, so I don't mind telling you this..."

She leaned in close to Alessandra and quietly said "Just this morning they found a great, wide faery ring in the woods behind the Faun and Firkin. Mark my words, pet, the good folk are abroad."

John and Greg bought their baubles from the woman in the tartan dress. The agate pendant looked stunning nestled just within Leslie's cleavage. Greg showed off the expensive brass and leather compass he'd bought to enhance his own pirate costume. Alessandra had to try very hard to hide her jealousy when she realized she wasn't getting a present after all.

As the five friends wandered deeper into the faire, John held Leslie's hand and Greg held Alessandra's. They passed down an avenue of games and challenges. There were arrows to shoot and axes to throw, rings to toss, hammers to swing, and prizes to win.

But Leslie said games like that were always rigged to take the player's money. So Alessandra and her friends gave them little notice as they hurried past to seek out other entertainment.

"Oi! Cap'n Jack!" called a woman's voice from beside them, "Have ye got the arm to put me in the drink, you spongy, tickle-brained joit?"

They turned to see a chain link booth above a glass water tank. Sitting inside was a sopping wet woman in a bodice and dress of shimmering green. Sodden auburn tresses framed her face and the sign above her head read "Drench a Wench - 3 balls for $5."

Gregg pointed to himself with a raised eyebrow.

"Aye, you ye gorbellied, tallow-faced lewdster! Yer aim be as off as yer stench, I'd wager!"

Now, Greg had played baseball in high school, and while he wasn't good enough to play professionally, or even in college, he was much better than average, and very proud of it.

"Hold my hat," he said to John, loudly enough to be heard. "This wench needs a bath."

"Oh, I need a bath, do I?" called the wench in the shimmering dress. "You couldn't get a virginal, pox-ridden scullery-maid wet, and your girlfriend knows it!"

Greg paid his five dollars, just as the wench in the shimmering dress hoped he would. He wound up. He focused on the target. And he threw the first ball as hard as he could.

When the ball hit the target, the seat below the wench dropped away, and she fell down into the tank of water with a scream and a splash. Greg's friends all laughed and cheered.

The wench made a face at Greg through the glass tank, and when she turned to stand back up, it almost looked to Alessandra as if the swirling folds of her shimmering green dress were the tail of a great fish. But of course that's just silly, she thought.

"You got lucky once, Cap'n Jack!" the wench in the shimmering dress yelled as she reset her seat. "But it takes two to win a prize, and you probably need to rest awhile before you can go again, doesn't he Tinkerbell?"

Alessandra didn't mind being called 'Tinkerbell' by the wench in the shimmering dress. She was just playing a role after all, and Alessandra thought she played it well.

Greg's second throw missed, and his friends teased and needled him. "Just like your flaccid, toad-spotted cod-dangle!" goaded the wench in the shimmering dress. His third throw sent her back into the tank of water though, and Greg won a cheap circlet of plastic flowers.

"For my fairy princess," Greg said to Alessandra as he set the crown of flowers on her head, and she was so happy that she didn't bother to correct him. Instead, she thought about all the naughty ways she could reward her pirate hero.

As lunch time approached, Alessandra and her friends made their way to an open plaza ringed with food vendors of every description. There were sandwiches and kabobs and pastries and sweets, roasted corn and fried dough and frozen bananas, all contrived to the theme. "Steak on a Stake" kabobs were billed on menus next to "Dragon Pork Sandwiches" and "Witch's Brew Smoothies". Everyone found something tasty to eat.

"Uh-oh," said John when his ice cream cone dripped on the ground. "Hope I don't attract a brownie!"

The others all laughed but Alessandra rolled her eyes.

"Hold on," said Leslie, "Can they do differential equations? 'Cause I could use the help with my homework."

"Are you telling me if a naked little dude came into your room and said he could solve differential equations, you'd believe him?" quipped Greg.

"Why would anyone lie about that?"

"To get the free milk and clothes, obviously."

"No," groaned Alessandra in exasperation. "That's not how it works. Besides, the good folk can't lie."

"Everyone lies when they think they can get away with it," said Greg.

"Not the good folk," insisted Alessandra. "In all of my Gran's stories, they always have to speak the truth. I mean, they can still trick you and deceive you, but they can't say something they know to be untrue."

It was one of the things she found most relatable about the good folk. Alessandra always grew so nervous and uncomfortable when she tried to tell a lie. She would always break down and confess. That was another reason she loved the theater. Alessandra could be anything she wanted or say anything she wanted, and it wasn't a lie if she was playing a character.

"That settles it then," said Greg with authority. "We'll all leave out milk tonight and get brownies to do our homework. Or maybe a couple of those sidhe elf dudes. They sound cool."

"Oh my god, stop taunting them," laughed Alessandra knocking repeatedly on the picnic table.

"Eh, I was thinking maybe a nymph or something," said John. "But I already get to watch Les do her homework naked."

"John!" Leslie protested, giving him a shove and causing more ice cream to drip on the ground.

"Ok, I tried," Alessandra conceded. "Don't blame me if a kelpie drags you to the bottom of her lake, or a bannik claws you to pieces," Alessandra teased her friends darkly. "Because it's your fear that sustains them, you know. And the less you understand, the more terrifying they can be."

"Wow. And these are the people you call good folk?" asked Quinn.

"You call them 'good' to remind them that they can be good... and you hope desperately that they will be," Alessandra replied. She was enjoying being the center of attention.

"Alright, well the jousting tournament starts in fifteen minutes," Greg said, looking at his watch. "John and I have to get going. You coming, babe?"

"Wait, when did you decide that?" asked Alessandra in sudden confusion.

"Oh, I guess it must have been while you were in line for your crêpes," Greg explained as John gathered up his backpack. "It's cool. You can hang out with Les and Quinn and we'll meet back up at that tavern in a couple of hours."

He pointed to the building across the plaza and gave Alessandra a peck on the cheek.

"Okay... Bye, I guess," Alessandra replied, not even trying to hide her disappointment. She decided Greg wasn't going to get a peek under her dress after all and tugged the hem down her thigh.

"Who wants to sit in the hot sun and watch guys hit each other with sticks, anyway?" asked Quinn, sensing Alessandra's change in mood. "We'll have more fun without them."

"Yeah," agreed Leslie, "We're going to hit Artisan Alley for the glassblowing and the blacksmithing, and on the way back, there's a Celtic dance workshop."

"But what about wandering? And the magic of discovery?" asked Alessandra. Everything was suddenly going wrong, and it seemed like the day was going to be ruined.

"We did that all morning," Quinn said, trying to be diplomatic. "Now it's time to do something different."

Poor Alessandra fell into an awful mood. Watching people hit things with a hammer in front of a hot furnace didn't sound much better than watching them hit each other with sticks under the hot sun. And glassblowing was only slightly more interesting.

She might have been excited about the Celtic dancing, but she was certain that Quinn was a much better dancer. Alessandra didn't want to watch Quinn's long, long hair twirling as she danced, or listen to people applauding Quinn and telling Quinn how good she was.

But what else could she do? Go watch jousting with the jerk who had given her cheap plastic flowers as an after-thought? Go off on her own like some kind of loser? Be a spoiled little brat and insist that everyone do what she wanted to do? Alessandra didn't see any good options.

And so when Leslie and Quinn got up from the picnic table and started away, Alessandra trudged behind them, her delicate pixie wings drooping like her spirits.

As the trio wove their way through the crowded plaza, they were suddenly beset by a dozen small children storming past. The kids laughed and screamed and carried on, pushing and shoving and grabbing, heedless of the ruckus they caused.

"Where are their parents?" Alessandra wondered, turning this way and that, trying to avoid being knocked to the ground by the rambunctious youngsters.

The children looked to be eight or nine, dressed in identical T-shirts and bright red baseball caps. Perhaps they were from a summer camp or a day-care program, but why would they be allowed to behave so atrociously?

As suddenly as the horde of children in the bright red caps had appeared, they were gone and the crowded plaza settled back down to a more sedate kind of summery chaos.

But when Alessandra looked up, Leslie and Quinn were gone too.

Four avenues led away from the food court plaza and Alessandra realized with sudden frustration that she had no idea which one she had been following her friends towards. She still had a map in her bag. She could figure out how to get to Artisan Alley and the dance workshop, but Alessandra decided she didn't want to.

"If they don't care enough to wait for me, then I don't care enough to follow them," Alessandra decided.

She was standing next to a bronze statue of a satyr leaning against a barrel with his goat legs crossed and his curly-horned head thrown back. The statue raised a tankard and welcomed guests with a hearty laugh. It stood in front of the tavern where Greg had said they would all meet later.

Alessandra was feeling very wretched, lonely and neglected. So she decided to go in and have a drink. She thought a drink might do her good, and perhaps she would meet new friends inside.

Hidden behind the pub's facade was an open-air beer garden. A dozen costumed bartenders pulled lager, ale, and cider from taps into plastic cups and guests clustered around picnic tables arranged under the latticed shade of the forest canopy. On a small stage a piper and a harpist played a jaunty melody. Everyone seemed to be having a lovely time, and Alessandra hoped that she might too.

"A cider, please," she ordered after waiting in line at the bar.

"I'll need to see your ID," the bartender with jingling bells on his hat told her with an apologetic smile.

"Oh, um... I'll just have a Sprite then," Alessandra said. Her shoulders slumped and her wings drooped. She wouldn't turn 21 until next March.

"Sorry," said the bartender with bells on his hat. He set a cup of soda in front of her. "Here you go. It's on the house."

She took her cup with a half-hearted smile of thanks and sulked away.

After tossing the garish crown of cheap plastic in a garbage bin, Alessandra found an empty picnic table out away from the crowds. The duo on stage began to play "Danny Boy" and the melancholy tune carried Alessandra's sullen mood down even lower. She sat alone at the table with her knees clamped tightly together and sipped at her soft drink wishing she had never even seen the flyer for the Renaissance Faire on the bulletin board.

Over the din of the crowd a deep voice rumbled behind Alessandra. "It don't seem right to me," the voice said, "that you can't have a drink just 'cause you weren't born in time."

A large, callused hand set a cup of cider in front of Alessandra. When she looked up she saw a large man with a great bushy beard standing over her. He wore no shirt under an open leather vest and his hairy gut slumped over the buckle of his wide belt. A faded kilt hung to his knotty knees, and he carried a big leather mug with foam dripping down the side.

"I mean, that ain't your fault, is it?" he asked with a belch.

Before Alessandra could answer, or even say 'no thank you', the man in the faded kilt turned and strode off through the beer garden, sloshing ale from his flagon as he went.

Alessandra knew better than to accept an open drink handed to her by a stranger. There were all manner of ways he might have tampered with it. But as she watched the man in the faded kilt leave the pub and walk back out into the plaza, she wondered why he would.

He hadn't hit on her. If he meant her any harm, he surely would have stayed to see if she drank the cider or not. Maybe he had a friend watching her, but nobody else seemed to be. In fact, there was nobody paying Alessandra any attention at all—least of all, her friends.

The sun was warm and the breeze in the shade was nice.

As tiny bubbles drifted to the surface of the amber cider, Alessandra imagined how crisp and refreshing it would taste compared to the syrupy soda. It would be so pleasant to sit and enjoy the drink and listen to the music. Besides, she reasoned, there were lots of people around to turn to for help if she started to feel funny.

So she took a sip of the cider. It tasted just as lovely as she'd expected. By the time she finished it, she was feeling so much better.

The duo on stage finished their set and the audience gave them a round of applause with scattered cries of "Huzzah!" For a moment Alessandra considered finding the dance workshop and going to meet her friends, but before she could dig the map out of her bag, she heard someone new singing.

When she looked up, there was no one on the stage and there were no loudspeakers that she could see. No one else in the garden was paying any attention to the rich tenor voice that sang without accompaniment. Perhaps one of the other patrons was signing for his friends.

The voice came from deeper into the trees, and Alessandra couldn't see who it belonged to, or quite make out the words. It was a merry song though, with an upbeat cadence and a snappy tempo. Alessandra wanted to hear more.

She stood up and stepped away from her table, planning to go just far enough to peek around the closest tree, or maybe the next one. Or perhaps beyond the crowd standing and chatting around a table. Before she was quite aware of how far she'd gone, Alessandra found herself at the furthest end of the beer garden, but she still hadn't found the singer.

The last table was crowded with three young families, taking a break from their day. The grownups seemed haggard, nursing their cups of beer and talking about how much easier it was without the kids. The toddlers were cranky and the moms found juice boxes and toys in the strollers to keep them distracted.

They weren't paying attention to the singer in the woods and Alessandra gave them a wide berth.

Just beyond that last table, out amongst the trees, Alessandra spotted a wide ring of white toadstools speckled with red growing on the forest floor among the dry leaves and sticks and moss.

It was the fairy ring that the woman in the tartan dress had told her about back in the Bits & Baubles shop. According to legend, the ring of fungus meant that the good folk had danced there the night before.

"A 'firkin' must be a kind of barrel," Alessandra thought to herself, realizing that the satyr statue in front of the pub was actually a faun, and so the tavern was called the "Faun & Firkin."

Of course, Alessandra was much too smart to just step into a fairy ring. She had heard all manner of stories about foolish mortals who did so, and the horrible fates that befell them. But the singing voice was coming from beyond the circle of toadstools, and Alessandra stood just at the edge, listening to the indistinct words, trying to figure out how the trick was done.

Then she was pushed from behind.

Alessandra caught her balance as she stumbled forward into the fairy ring. But when she turned to see who had pushed her, there was no one there.

There was no one anywhere.

The families at the picnic table were gone. All of the people at all of the tables were gone.

Without the background din of the crowd, Alessandra could hear the noises of the forest clearly for the first time—birds singing and insects humming, rustling leaves and scampering feet.

The verdant greens of the leafy canopy above were so much brighter than they had been a moment ago. The browns of the wooden tables were richer and everywhere she looked there was color—scarlet and saffron and lilac and cobalt—in pops and streaks that bejeweled the world. The earthy fragrance of the forest filled her. The sun on her skin was warmer and the breeze was cooler, and Alessandra realized that in twenty years she had never felt truly alive before this moment.

"It's all true," Alessandra thought to herself looking around in wonder at a world she had never really seen before. "I'm in Fairyland... It's all real..."

"Oh, shit," she said.

The very first thing Alessandra thought to do was step out of the fairy ring to see if she would return to the world she knew—to see if she could come and go as she pleased. But of course, when she looked down the circle of toadstools was gone as well.

"Alright," said Alessandra to herself, "I'll have to find another way home... if I want to."

Fairyland was beautiful, and she wanted to see much more of it, but Alessandra knew it was beautiful in the same way that forest fire or a blizzard is beautiful. Fairyland was dangerous to the unwary.

For every brownie who helped a poor cobbler, there was a red-cap who would slit his throat. For every hulder who watched over a sleeping charcoal burner, there was a kelpie who would drown him.

"No dancing," said Alessandra out loud, to make sure she was listening. "That's the first rule. And don't eat or drink anything, no matter how good it looks."

She tried to remember all of the lessons from her Gran's stories, all of the mistakes that had condemned the hapless mortals who stumbled into Fairyland.

"And be polite," she continued, "Always be polite. And don't ask questions. An answer has value and anything of value has to be paid for... Oh, man. It's going to be hard to find my way home if I can't ask questions, though."

"Oh yes, very hard indeed I should surely think!" said a cheerful voice.

"If you don't ask, you'll never learn," said another.