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It is known as Dragonfield. Once dragons dwelt on the isles in great herds, feeding on the dry bush and fueling their flames with the carcasses of small animals and migratory birds. There are no dragons there now, though the nearer islands are scored with long furrows as though giant claws had been at work, and the land is fertile from the bones of the buried behemoths. There is a large mount of ash-colored rock that appears and disappears in the ebb and flow of the tide. No birds land on that rock, and seals avoid it as well. The islanders call it Worm’s Head, and once a year they row out to it and sail a great kite from its highest point, a kite which they then set afire and let go into the prevailing winds. Some of the younger mothers complain that one day that kite will burn down a house and they have agitated to end the ceremony. But as long as the story of Tansy and the hero is told, the great kites will fly over the rock, of that I am sure.

The Thirteenth Fey
    I N THE MIDDLE OF a stand of white birch on a slight rise is a decaying pavilion, inferior Palladian in style. The white pilasters have been pocked by generations of peashooters, and several kite strings, quite stained by the local birds, still twine around the capitols. The wind whistles through the thin walls, especially in late spring, and the rains—quite heavy in November and April—have made runnels in the paper. It is very old paper anyway. As a child I used to see different pictures there, an ever-changing march of fates. My parents once thought I had the sight until they realized it was only a vivid imagination supplemented by earaches and low grade fevers. I was quite frequently ill.
    I was born in that pavilion, on the marble and velvet couch my parents used for the lying-in for each of my twelve brothers and sisters and me. And I was hung on my baby board in the lower branches of the trees, watched over by butterflies; the mourning doves to sing me to sleep, a chorus of crows to wake me. It was not until I reached my thirteenth year that I understood what my dear mother and her mother before her knew and grieved for but could do nothing about. It was then that I discovered that we are tied to that small piece of land circling the pavilion, tied with bonds of magic as old and secure as common law. We owe our fortunes, our existence, and the lives of our children to come to the owners of that land. We are bounden to do them duty, we women of the fey. And during all the time of our habitation, the local lords have been a dynasty of idiots, fornicators, louts, greedyguts, and fools.
    As the last of thirteen children I was not expected to be of any special merit. It is the first and seventh whose cranial bones are read, whose palms are searched, whose first baby babblings are recorded. Yet I had been marked with a caul, had been early to walk, early to talk, early to fly. And then there were my vivid dreams, my visions brought on by ague and earache and the peculiar swirling patterns of moldy walls. I was, in my father’s words, “ever a surprise.”
    My father was a gentle soul. His elven ancestry showed only in his ears, which he was careful to hide beneath a fringe of graying hair, so as not to insult his wife’s innumerable relatives who dwelt nearby in their own decaying whimseys, reposes, and belvederes. They already believed my mother had married beneath her. But my father, though somewhat shy on magic, lived for his library, stocked with books of the past, present, and future. He was well read in Gramarye, but also in Astrology, Philosophy, and Computer Science, an art whose time was yet to come.
    My mother was never so gentle. She came from the Shouting Fey, those who could cause death and consternation by the timber of their voices. She had a sister who, on command, could bring down milk from dried-up cows with one voice, or gum it up with another. There was a great-aunt, about whom little else was said except that she could scream in six