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registers at once and had broken windows in all of the Western Counties as a child when bidden to do so by a silly prince one vivid day in spring.
    My sisters and brothers and I were a mix, of course, both gentle and loud. But I, the thirteenth fey, was supposed to be the gentlest and loudest of all.
    The events I am about to relate really began nine months before the princess was born. Her birth had been long awaited. The queen, a wart-ridden harridan, was thought barren. Years of royal marriage had produced nothing but promises. Yet one steaming hot day, so the queen said, she had gone bathing in a mountain stream with her young women. More for the sake of cooling than cleanliness, I imagine. Humans are, for the most part, a disgustingly filthy lot. And a frog had climbed upon her knee and prophesied a child.
    Now I have known many frogs in my time and though the peepers especially are a solipsistic tribe, believing they alone bring spring up from the edge of the world, frogs have no magical talents and they do not have the gift of prophecy. The queen was entirely wrong. It was not a frog at all. It might have been a Muryan. Tiny, dressed in green, one might be mistaken for a frog by a distraught, hot, and desperate queen. But Muryans are a mischievous lot and their natterings are never to be taken seriously.
    The queen had rushed home, trailed by her still dripping handmaidens, and told the king. He was well past believing her promises. But much to everyone’s surprise (except my father, who expressed the gentle judgment that, according to a law to be enacted years hence called Probability or Murphy’s—I forget just which—occasionally a Muryan prophecy might be accurate) the queen gave birth some nine months later to a girl.
    They named her Talia and invited—or rather insisted—all the local feys come and bring a gift. We who were so poor as to be forced to live on moonbeams, the free fare of the faery world, had to expend our small remaining store of magicks on that squawling, bawling human infant whose father owned a quarter million acres of land, six rivers, five mountains, and the tithing of all the farms from the Western Sea to the East. It was appalling and unfair and Mother cried about it for days. But Father cautioned her to keep her voice low and, as she knew he was right, she did.
    The family gathered to discuss the possibilities but I was sick again with a fever and so had no part in the family council. Who would have believed that a bout of ague brought on by dancing one starry night in a wet field should become so important to the fate of us all.
    Father portioned out the magicks at that meeting, one to each child and something for Mother and himself. But he forgot me, sick abed, and so left nothing but an old linden spindle, knotted about with the thread of long life, in the family trunk. The instruction sheet to it was in tatters, mouse-nibbled, shredded for nests. Besides, the spindle lay on the very bottom of the trunk and was covered with a tatty Cloth of Invisibility that worked only occasionally and, as it happened to be one of those occasions, Father hadn’t even noticed it. Besides, having decided on gifts of beauty, riches, and wit—all appropriate and necessary gifts for that particular human princess—he wasn’t likely to think of giving a newborn the end of life spun out on a wooden distaff.
    So the family went to the christening without me, though Mother laid a cool cloth on my head, left a tisane in our best cup by my bed, and kissed both my cheeks before leaving.
    “Sleep well, little one,” she whispered. It was always special when she was careful to modulate her voice and I knew then how much she loved me. “Sleep well and long.”
    I expect her admonition forced itself into my fever dreams. I woke about an hour later, feeling surprisingly cool but parched. I had drunk up the tisane already and so cried out for some weak tea. When no one but the doves answered me with their