The hall was silent as midnight in the chalet, when her breathing rasping in her ears was the only sound.

Great fairies stared down at her in their midst, cold and unmoving as the ice on the streams in December. And Cocot was trapped. They numbered two hundred, she estimated, perhaps more. Her eyes darted for an escape. But they created a wall of fine clothing overgrown with the wilderness itself—leaves and flowers intertwined with silver and gold, vines and twigs adorned hair and silk.

"What is this that disturbs our joyful gathering?" asked a tired voice from the far end of the hall.

The crowd of fairies parted, revealing a withered and aged fairy who propped himself upright on the armrest of his black, larch throne, and who did not seem joyful in the least. He must have been the king; he had a simple silver crown on his brow. His eyes narrowed on Cocot, trying to focus, and he coughed when he leaned forward.

"Come," he whispered, beckoning with a stick thin finger.

From either side of Cocot, came the hiss of metal. Guards forced their way through the dancers, their swords drawn. Another guard, fiercer and taller than the others, and wearing leather and silver armor advanced on her down the aisle that the fairies made.

Cocot gulped; half a dozen sword points were at her throat. Her legs trembled and a deathly chill rose from the floor through her feet to her chest. Her mother had spoken of great fairies who stood taller than the men in town and had pointy, upswept ears, but she had never told her about their faces made of hard planes and sharp angles, eyes like shards of crystal and the cruel disdain in their expressions.

The tallest guard raised his weapon a fraction higher, menacing Cocot and she sensed her own worthlessness in his action. He could run her through with the point of his sword and think nothing of it. She blinked, holding her tears and questions in check.

"Take this creature," he ordered the other guards.

"Captain, you overstep your boundaries," a voice called—a lady's voice of honey and salt.

"The festivities may continue. I will discover how she came to be in our hall, as my duty demands," he answered, not taking his gaze from Cocot. "I am perfectly well within my boundaries."

"Her presence in the middle of the hall begs the question of how perfectly well you perform your duty," replied the lady.

The captain tightened his grip on the sword handle and for a split second, Cocot was afraid he would strike.

"Captain Thraidox, the king has...summoned this creature. Your duty now is to bring her," the lady called.

The captain stepped aside. Next to the king was a woman fairy, bent in half and whispering in his ear.

The king nodded. The woman bowed deeply and then stood straight and tall to show a young fairy-lady face, sleek brown hair twisted in a knot and a crown of field flowers.

"Majesty," the captain said, "allow me to escort this intruder from the hall for questioning. She must answer why she has broken custom and come uninvited in your presence."

The lady stepped forward. "You call her an intruder and yet no one stopped her at our gate. You say she has broken custom and yet she comes before us humbly, head covered and feet bare. You would question her, but I believe the king wishes to do so himself. Majesty?"

"His majesty is ill-advised in matters of his safety by his nurse," the captain snapped.

The great fairies in the hall began to whisper and gasp, agitation stirring them as the music had earlier.

"And you, Captain Thraidox, are forgetting your rank," she said, "which is lower than any lord or lady present, including myself as court magician, and if the king bids the creature to come, then you shall step aside."

"Come," the king whispered, his voice rough with fatigue and disuse. "Come closer and remove your hood."

There was no refusing the fairy king's command. Just as the sounds of flutes and revelry called Cocot forward, so now her hands took off her hood and her feet moved her closer to the throne in spite of the crippling fear coursing through her veins.

"What sort of creature are you?" he asked.

Cocot opened her mouth to answer, but at that instant realized she had no words to use in reply; that all this time, the language the fairies spoke was neither French nor the local patois. But she had understood everything. Their language was like a faint fragrance that she had not smelled for years, but recognized instantly.

Her mother used a language sounded like a stream flowing over stones and willow leaves rubbing together; full of softness and gentle breezes, warm as the sun, deceptive as the moon and subtle as the stars—each word could mean many things depending on where it was placed and which others were used alongside it. What seemed carefree and weightless was also full of trickery.

She spoke to me in this way when I was little, but less and less as I grew older, just like the stories and fairy tales that she forgot one by one.

Cocot searched the depths of her memories for the words to answer with, but still none came.

"I'm sorry I can't speak like you," Cocot apologized in French, not sure if the king would understand.

"Ah," he sighed. The hall rippled with twitters of amazement and surprise. The king motioned and silence descended on the hall once more. Continuing in French, he said, "Fortunately, I am adept at many tongues of man and fairy kind. What sort of creature are you?"

"I'm a girl," she said.

"How is it that a girl who is not entirely human and not entirely fairy comes to stand in my hall?"

"I followed the music."

"And whence came you?"

"I come from past the bend and through the woods," she said, clutching her shaking hands together.

"Why have you come here?"

"I wanted to listen to the music, that's all."

"How is it you were not stopped at the gate?" the king asked. He glanced at the captain.

"Majesty, no creatures came through the D'Enhaut Gate this evening," Captain Thraidox said, but fell silent when the king shook his head.

"None were at the door to stop me," Cocot whispered, terrified. She was a trespasser and she had let herself in using her mother's keys; Soufflé had warned her to tell no one about the keys. They would find out; they would take the keys and they would punish her.

"The Fountain Passage," the king said, interrupting her thoughts. He would have said more, but a wracking cough seized him.

"Majesty!" called a new voice from the crowd. A tall, gawkish young fairy with fair hair and a boyish face pushed his way to the dais. "She could not have come through the passage door, I assure you—"

The king lifted his fingers for silence. The flower-crowned lady gave him a stone cup to drink from and his cough subsided. He studied Cocot for a moment until she shifted, uncomfortable under his piercing gaze.

"Bring the passage keeper," he ordered.

The captain acquiesced with a bow and pointed to two other guards to go. Then he approached the king to speak in a low voice. "Such conversations would be best done in the privacy of a cell."

The king stared past him into the shadows at the back of the hall—an old, tired fairy lost on a massive throne. The lady placed her hand on the throne's arm to lean slightly over the king, drawing Cocot's attention to the flowers in her crown. The main part of the wreath was made of miniature daisies—a hundred or more with dozens of other buds, vines and tender leaves worked in among the tiny white flowers. Like the simple crown of daisies she gave to the old woman in the pharmacy.

Another cough shook the king and Cocot was reminded forcibly of her mother before she died, but also of Hector in a strange way.

"Leave us," the king said, his eyes still in the distance.

Rustling cloth sounded through the cavern. The fairies, young, old, and children, bowed or curtsied, and then melted away into two arched openings that she assumed led deeper into the hills. No one took the narrow hallway that Cocot had come from or the largest opening that must be the gate.

Soon only the king, the lady, the fair youth, and the captain with a couple of guards were left standing in the hall.

"Shall I go, as well?" the young fairy asked.

"No, Nephew. Stay," the king said.

The king's nephew, Cocot thought, seeing the tall fairy in a new light. This made her realize that there was no other family near the king: no queen or children. Was the lady with the flower crown a younger sister, as well as the court magician perhaps?

"Where is your dwelling, child?" the king asked her.

"On the side of the hill, halfway up from the valley floor."

"And you live with your family, on the side of the hill?"

"I...I have none, save Hector. He is my, my friend even though he is old. I am caring for him," she could not, would not admit that she was alone.

"But whence do you come?" he asked, obviously intrigued.

"As I said, from past the bend and through the woods."

"No, not from where you have walked this evening. What sort of creature are you; tall as a great fairy child, eyes and face of a human girl, ears and grace of a mid-sized forest or swamp-dwelling creature?"

She understood what he wanted to know. It was the story her mother often recounted to her during long winter evenings while she brushed and braided Cocot's hair.

"My mother told me that one time she heard singing coming from the nearby field and when she went there, she found it was coming from a poppy flower. She transformed the poppy with her second wish into a baby. A baby girl. That is where I come from." She expected the fairies to snicker and laugh, or at least smile with patient indulgence at this implausible story. They did not react how she expected them to.

The fairy lady whispered to the king, gesturing urgently towards Cocot. The captain stirred for the first time from his unnatural stillness which made his leather vest creak softly.

"Where is your mother?" the king asked.

"She died last winter," Cocot replied.

"Your father?"

"I never had one. My mother's husband died long before she found me."

"What else did she tell you about wishes?"

"Nothing, except that in all, she made two wishes. That she would have a child and that I would change from a flower into a girl."

"Two wishes!" the king's nephew exclaimed.

"Who could have such wishes granted?" the fairy lady asked quietly to herself.

"What kind of power did she have?" the nephew asked.

"Pixie dust," Captain Thraidox muttered.

"It would wear off," the lady said.

"Who, then?" the king asked Cocot. The creases deepened around his mouth and his shoulders sagged lower.

"My mother's name was Fanchon," she said, unable to remain silent at the king's question. She pressed her lips together to not say any more. Soufflé had told her that her mother was one of these great fairies, but Cocot surmised that she had either run from them or had been chased away.

"That name means nothing to me," the king said. "Captain, surely you or the guards would have noticed such a powerful creature residing so close to our hill."

"Impossible, your majesty. Such a creature could not have hid herself."

"Perhaps, then the passage keeper will be able to tell us more." The king waved to the guards escorting a third figure in a ratty cloak to come forward.

For a heartbeat, Cocot thought that this newcomer could be the hunched woman from the pharmacy. The woman, or fairy, crouched before the king, her tattered black cloak sweeping the floor, the frayed hood over her head; she was a lump of coal smudging the beige and gold hall, shedding bits of ashes and debris on the ground.

"Keeper," the king said, "why is it you allowed this creature to enter our domain?"

"I am to let all pass who bear the mark of fairy on their persons and who carry no evil in their hearts," she answered.

Cocot took a step backwards. The passage keeper's sibilant voice escaped from her as a sigh whispered from a cave or a cold wind through tree branches. This was not the same person she had met in the pharmacy, but her voice was familiar.

"The door was open? She walked right in?" the magician asked.

"Are you implying I left it open?" cried the king's nephew. "There are two of us who use that passage, and I only go that way for the Spring Equinox."

"Silence," the king ordered. "Keeper, do you know this fairy creature?"

The crone glanced upwards, her eyes flashing from the depths of the hood. Deathly pale skin and strings of graying hair framed the eyes. Licking her lips over toothless gums, the old woman replied. "This fairy creature is not known to me, but she is light of step and lithe of body and there upon her breast is the symbol of your house, if my sight does not deceive me. Is she not known...to you?"

"Return her to the spruce," the king ordered the guards. "Nephew, go and see that the keeper is taken safely to her cavern."

A couple of odd coughs came from the keeper's throat, like laughter she was smothering. The guards and the king's nephew ushered her out.

Above the throne was a tapestry of a raspberry bush; its brambles heavy with berries. Cocot had been too frightened to notice it before, but when the keeper had mentioned the embroidery on her dress, she had motioned with her chin to the wall.

"You cannot be who I would wish you to be. It is not possible, and I am too old to hope. Yet, I sense something of her in you. Some magic that found its way to you," the king said. He lifted a shaking finger to point just below Cocot's throat, on her chest at the 'v' of her collarbone. "Yes. Buried here."

A stinging pain grew in Cocot's chest; freezing and burning as though a bit of ice was lodged at the top of her lungs and was cutting through the tissue.

"The drop has turned to crystal. How did you come by it?" the king asked her.

Cocot shook her head, hands pressing on her chest to ease the pain, to melt the ice. It grew worse. "Please stop," she gasped.

The king dropped his hand and the cold began to abate. Cocot breathed deeply in relief, although, she could still feel a stinging point where the pain had been.

"It will descend to your heart. Perhaps one day, it will melt and you will be able to use it—the drop of Farafell's magic. All these years, I thought she was lost, but she was here in hiding," the king whispered.

"Your niece is no longer among the living, majesty," the captain said in cold, clipped words. He had switched back to the fairy tongue, clearly believing Cocot was not able to understand.

"This is her child," the king sighed.

"Your niece found this child and raised her, but she is not of your house. Farafell did this after she abandoned her pledge—leaving the fountain unwatched, unprotected!"

"Farafell blocked the fountain, and who knows what it might have done to her mind, her spirit," countered the lady.

"Something must be done for the child. It makes no difference where she comes from," the king said.

"Majesty, she is not one of us," Captain Thraidox hissed. "Your position is precarious as it is; the other clans from D'Enhaut are closing in like carrion birds on this house. Give them one excuse, show one weakness and all is lost."

"Let them take my throne then for my weakness. Have I not sacrificed enough of my family for my position? Do I have any joy or comfort left to turn to? Everything is gone—everyone. Three sons slain in battle by Dark Huntsmen, my wife lost to her grief, my two sisters and only niece destroyed by that cursed fountain. I would keep this half-fairy creature here with me and send the rest of the fairy realm to rot!"

"Your nephew returns, majesty. There is still comfort for you in this hall. Do not forget, if fighting breaks out, every member of your faithful court stands to lose home, family...and life," the captain said quietly.

Footsteps echoed from the passageway as the guards and the king's nephew strode into the hall. He stepped across the rocky stream that flowed through the middle, cutting the room in half.

The king turned from his nephew to look at the lady by his side. Her face was an unreadable mask as she stepped into the shadows behind the throne.

He turned agate eyes on Cocot. "You will leave this hall, child," he said, speaking in French. "You are banished from this place, never to return of your own volition."

*** The fae were of the wilderness itself - Cocot couldn't tell where the forest ended and the fairy began... ***