As soon as the door to his bedroom closed a fairy who looked just like him slipped into his bed, he knew, though he never once saw her. At dawn when he dropped back into bed, tired and sweaty, the fairy was always gone again, though sometimes he imagined he could smell her on his sheets—a savory smell, like thyme or oregano. She always remade the bed, always with the pillow at the wrong end.

  Although his strength and power grew all the time, to the nuns it looked like Orwen had become gravely ill. He couldn’t rouse himself in the morning, or even for lunch, and regularly slept on till early afternoon, when he awoke, his muscles aching, and demanded a huge meal. The nuns alternately beat and blessed him, and barbers and surgeons bled him. They whispered darkly about fairies stealing away his vitality. But the truth was precisely the opposite.

  They were lonely, his silent sessions with John Matchstick under the sparkling, twittering beech tree under Cow Pond, but they were satisfying in a way that nothing else had ever satisfied Orwen. John Matchstick taught him a different style from what Oriel was learning back home in the practice yard. Orwen was neither as big nor as strong as the other boys, at least most of them, but John Matchstick was small too, and he taught Orwen to fight like he did, a fairy fighting style that made a virtue of his light, lithe frame. He couldn’t beat the other boys on strength, but he could be quicker, and more flexible, and better balanced. He could use their power and weight against them. He learned to fight from his core and from his legs. John Matchstick taught him odd sinuous parries and thrusts, and acrobatic twirls and flips, and bewildering eye-bending feints to lead the big boys astray, lure them off balance and off-center.

  At the end of his first year, to the day, John Matchstick presented Orwen with a gift: a sword. Not a hand-me-down, a sword of his very own. The blade was huge, wide and thick, and it took some getting used to. The metal was midnight blue and matte, not shiny, with silver filigree that showed only when the fighting got hot. The pommel was in the shape of a steel acorn.

  He loved it. But every morning when he bid goodbye to the pond and returned to the world above, he had to leave it behind.

  * * *

  • • •

  By the time he was fifteen Orwen had put on real muscle and become a serious menace with a variety of different weapons. The sword was his first option, but he practiced with mace and poleax and bow and unarmed too. Whenever Orwen wasn’t training he felt like he was wasting time. He lived in an inverted universe where the world was a prison and the only freedom was in a bubble at the bottom of a pond.

  But the thing was, Orwen was in a bubble in time, too, and sooner or later that bubble was going to pop. The adult world was closing in on him. He had muscle now, but he also had breasts. He’d wondered whether his body would really make good on its threat to develop and blossom, and it had. When people looked at him now they saw a woman. And my how they looked—strangers, his brother’s friends, even his father’s friends, even the village priest. His chest drew male eyeballs to it like a lodestone.

  Shortly after he turned sixteen, Orwen’s parents informed him that a match had been found for him. He would be married to William Colingham.

  They’d met. William was the wild black-haired boy who captained the other side in the local football games. Orwen hadn’t seen him since he was nine. Well, he’d been a little monster then, and he was probably a big monster now. Orwen wished him much joy on his wedding day, but he personally didn’t plan to be there for it. He would run away, bind his chest, pack his crotch, and become a soldier of fortune. Or a pirate. Or a monk, like Saint Marina. Or a knight.

  Except that, maddeningly, it wasn’t that simple. The match between Orwen and William had been brokered only after long and exhausting negotiations by the sheriff, who’d been appointed by the Crown to keep the king’s peace in the valley, and who was tired of arbitrating endless disputes between Colinghams and Dugfalls. (Thanks very much, King Arthur!) The purpose of the wedding was to put their long and mutually destructive feud to an end. It was not an exaggeration to say that lives depended on its successful completion.

  Orwen couldn’t even say it was unfair. It was just that without knowing it they were asking him to commit a kind of suicide, to destroy who he really was and replace that person with William Colingham’s wife. The mother of William Colingham’s children. It was so absurd it was almost funny. Almost but not. Orwen didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t stay, and he couldn’t flee.

  The night before the wedding, when Orwen should’ve been praying and washing and receiving ominously veiled erotic advice from his mother, he reported to John Matchstick for the last time. He trained as hard as he ever had. He didn’t say anything about what was going on in the upper world—over the years Orwen had become almost as silent as John Matchstick was—but he was sure the fairy knew something was up. They always knew things like that.

  When he couldn’t wait any longer, when dawn was almost on him, Orwen stopped. He took a moment to look over his beautiful sword. He brought it to his lips and kissed its strange blue blade. Then he offered it to John Matchstick, as he always did.

  But John Matchstick didn’t take it. He shook his head. No thanks.

  Orwen hesitated. The fairy made a shooing gesture at him. Go on, take it.

  “I can’t. You know I can’t.”

  The fairy’s expression didn’t change.

  “I’m getting married tomorrow, John Matchstick. This is the end, my training is over. I have to go and live a different life now.”

  John Matchstick cocked his head and narrowed his eyes skeptically. Do you, though?

  “It’s not what I want.” Saying it out loud Orwen felt it more keenly than he ever had. His voice didn’t break but tears spilled down his cheeks, mingling with the sweat from his exertions. “I loved all this, it was my favorite thing, and it always will be, but it’s over now. I have a different destiny.”

  John Matchstick folded his arms.

  “Take it, you pigheaded leprechaun!”

  Dawn was coming. Orwen had to be off.

  “Fine,” Orwen said, less graciously than he would’ve liked. “All right. Thank you. It can be my dowry, I’ll stick it in my hope chest.” It wasn’t the goodbye he’d wanted. He mastered himself and said, with proper feeling and respect: “Thank you, John Matchstick. These nights have been the happiest times of my life.”

  Orwen bowed and walked away, up the wet stairs, for the last time, as the star-birds winked out one by one.

  * * *

  • • •

  He didn’t run back to the convent that morning. He trailed slowly back over the wet fields like a sulky schoolboy, his sword stuck in his belt. He didn’t care who saw him now. He was ready to collapse in his fairy-warm bed and sleep till it was time for his God damned wedding.

  But he didn’t make it that far. The moment Orwen stepped into the convent somebody grabbed him from behind and a strong arm wrapped around his throat. He writhed and scrabbled at it—John Matchstick had trained him to break holds like this, but for all his training Orwen had never been in a real fight before, and he panicked. He strained futilely at the arm and struggled to breath while his attacker’s wine-scented breath rasped in his ear.

  The man dragged Orwen back outside into the predawn hush. Orwen managed to wrench his throat around into the crook of the elbow and get a sip of air. Three more men were waiting there—they must have been hiding in the bushes.

  “Good morrow to you, girly!” A man in a scarlet tunic cut so short it barely covered his privates stepped forward. Orwen knew him; he sold candles in town. He’d always thought the man had a kind face, lopsided but honest looking. But he didn’t look so kind now.

  “Where’ve you been so early this fine morning?” He stuck his thumbs in his belt.

  “None of your fucking business, thanks.”

  “If you’re marrying our cousin then your fucking is very much our business, Lady Whore-wen,” the chandler said. His wit was rewarded with some droll chuckles. “You’re fresh from some lucky fellow’s bed, and we’d like to know whose.”

  So that’s what this was. He’d thought he’d been so clever.

  “If you’re wondering if I’m ‘intact,’ you idiots,” Orwen said, “you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

  “What we’re worried about,” said a skinny man with a huge brown beard, “is our brother marrying a Dugfall slut.”

  “Looks like your fellow gave you something to remember him by.” The third man was bald and big as a knight out of armor. He pulled the sword from Orwen’s belt and held it up, puzzled by its curious shape and alien metal. Now Orwen stopped laughing. He didn’t care what they said about him, but they could take their filthy hands off his sword.

  “I’ll ask you again,” the chandler said. “Who you sleeping with, girly?”

  “Nobody,” Orwen said. “You dumb shit. I don’t have a lover.”

  “Well, you’ll have four of ’em in a minute.”

  Baldy sauntered forward, loosening his hose. The other men cheered him on. Orwen took a wild kick at his crotch but he danced back out of reach, and the arm around Orwen’s neck tightened so hard that his vision grayed out.

  But Orwen hadn’t expected the kick to connect, he’d just wanted them to keep on thinking he was helpless. He’d had a minute to calm down and it was all coming back to him. The men were still cheering when Orwen reached back and grabbed his captor’s fruits and squeezed hard. The man yelled and his grip loosened enough for Orwen to jab him hard with an elbow in the solar plexus.

  He scrambled to his feet, gulping air. The strangler turned out to be a squat, square-headed man with a greenish complexion. He was doubled over, groaning. Orwen kneed him in the face and felt his nose snap.

  “Ooooh!” the burly bald man said with a huge grin. “We’ve got a fighter!”

  Orwen grinned back. That was exactly what they had.

  Though he’d never fought four full-grown human men before, at the same time. They weren’t expecting his strength, and his skill—his first move was to hit Big Bald hard and sharp right in the pressure point in his armpit, cutting off all feeling to his arm—but the men were strong, too, and three of them had knives. Orwen had never been hit hard in the face before, and it hurt. He took cuts on both hands and another along the side of his neck that he was lucky to walk away from. Skinny Beard walloped him in one ear with a cupped hand, and he would never hear well out of that ear again.

  But Orwen felt a perverse gratitude to these men. Thanks to these assholes he could finally let it out, all of it. He could finally show somebody who he really was. It cost him an eardrum, and a scar or two, but so be it. And when he finally got his hands on his sword, his beautiful fairy sword, the fight was over very quickly indeed.

  * * *

  • • •

  Orwen was harnessing a horse in the convent stable when Oriel found him. The sun was up, and the church bells were ringing prime. Somewhere tables were being laid, flowers arranged, a jeweled and overwhelmingly embroidered dress spread out for him on a blameless white coverlet.

  Orwen had a strange warm floating feeling after the morning’s excitement. His head, his hands, and his ribs were all in significant pain, and one ear was singing a single insistent high note, but the membrane that separated his fairy-life from his real life had finally been ruptured. The two had become one and combined into a new as yet unexplored third life, rich and strange, and he had no idea what would happen next except that now everything could really begin.

  Not inappropriate sentiments for one’s wedding day.

  “I heard there was trouble,” Oriel gasped. He’d been running. “By the convent. God’s holy knees!” That last was when he got a look at Orwen’s face.

  Oriel wasn’t a bad young man, Orwen reflected. He was obnoxious and arrogant and pretended to be dumber than he was, but he wasn’t like those shitheads who’d come after him either, whom Orwen had left with a smashed nose, a missing finger, a missing earlobe, and assorted stab wounds. They wouldn’t die, but they would never forget.

  “Let me guess,” Orwen said. “You heard I was attacked by robbers, and by sheer grit and manliness four Colingham men fought them off and saved their cousin William’s bride-to-be.”

  “Something like that, yes. Why?”

  Orwen took a deep breath.

  “Only thing those men got robbed of was some serious fucking misconceptions.”

  “Well, are you all right? And what the hell are you doing now?”

  “What the hell’s it look like?” Orwen said. “I’m leaving the valley and I’m never coming back.” He gently positioned the saddle and cinched it in place. The horse was a fine black palfrey, presumably belonging to one of the wedding guests. “Or not for a long time anyway.”

  “Is this about—” Oriel lost heart in the middle of the sentence but then manfully soldiered on. “Is this because you think you’re a boy?”

  “I don’t think I’m a boy,” Orwen said. “I know that I am a man.”

  Oriel’s brow furrowed and his eyes got shifty, usually a sign of mental effort.

  “There weren’t any robbers. Were there?”

  He sat down heavily on a hay bale. Orwen shook his head and yawned. He hadn’t been to bed yet and wouldn’t get there for a long time. He had some distance to put between himself and Greenstone House.

  “So then what happened?”

  “They jumped me and tried to rape me. We fought. I beat them up.”

  “But…how?!”

  “The fairies have been teaching me how to fight under Cow Pond.”

  “See, this is why I can’t take anything you say seriously. You know those assholes are going to start another war now?”

  “No, they won’t,” Orwen said. “Because they would die before telling anyone I beat them. I’d best be off, brother of mine, before it’s too late.”

  He swung up into the saddle. He wanted to keep the number of people who saw him galloping out of town on the morning of his wedding day to a minimum. Oriel rose wearily from his hay bale.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To seek my fortune.”

  “What fortune?”

  “Well, I won’t know till I’ve sought it, will I? Maybe I’ll become a knight.”

  “A knight?!” He laughed, though not as meanly as he might have. “Sir Orwen?”

  Oriel did have a point. He was going to need a new name. He supposed it didn’t really matter what it was, knights had all kinds of weird names. He’d heard there was one called Sir Bleoberys.

  It could be anything. Sir Ringading. Sir Falala.

  “Dinadan.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll be Sir Dinadan.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Nothing,” Sir Dinadan said. “I just like it.”

  “Well I’m glad you’re taking this seriously—listen!” He grabbed Dinadan’s bridle. His face was a little desperate. “Listen. I know you don’t care about this place, I know you don’t want to come back, but if you don’t marry William Colingham we’ll never have peace! It’ll be worse than before!”

  “I’ve thought of that. Go look in my bed.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t need me to marry William, you just need someone who looks exactly like me to marry him. Take a look. She’s in my bed. No one will ever know the difference.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Trust me when I say that she’ll make a far better wife to him than I ever would have. Just tell him to keep a lot of honey cakes handy. Good luck to you, my brother. I’ll see you again, I hope.”

  With that Sir Dinadan rode out of the Great Wold Valley forever.

  He rode for hours, at first through woods and then out into yellow grasses that went on for miles, broken here and there by clumps of poplars. Not much cover, anybody who was looking for him could see him a mile away, but Dinadan would’ve seen them, too, and he didn’t.

  At noon he took a nap under an oak, then pressed on till he was past Harwood—somewhere along the way he must’ve passed the puddle where it all began. The sun was setting and the light was failing when he saw something glowing in a tree up ahead. It was a flock of those little birds, the star-birds, the ones from the tree under the pond, hopping and chirping away just like they always used to. The whole tree sparkled with them. Underneath it sat John Punch, taking his ease.

  Dinadan wasn’t completely sorry to see him again. John Punch was the first one who’d seen him for who he really was. He wouldn’t forget that. The fairy toasted Dinadan with a little silver cup.

  “Congratulations on completin’ your education,” he said. “Now there’s just the wee matter o’ yuir fee to settle.”

  “I hadn’t forgotten.”

  “No more had we.”

  “Well?”

  “We’ll be requirin’ ye to kill Merlin.”

  Dinadan laughed, louder and longer than he had in a long time.

  “Merlin? The wizard?”

  “Well, ye could kill Merlin the butler but he’d mostly likely’ve died of natural causes sooner or later. Merlin the wizard, though, I’m not so sure about him, which is why he will indeed require killin’. By you.”

  “Why?”

  “He knows what he did. That’s all ye need to know.”

  Dinadan shook his head, still chuckling. Was that all? Well, life was a rum business and no mistake.

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Yes, ye surely will.”

  Dinadan rode on.

  He had a destination now anyway. He was riding south, riding for Camelot and the Round Table. He’d pay his debt to the fairies, probably, by and by, though it seemed to him that the killing of King Arthur’s personal wizard, the greatest sorcerer in all of Britain, would not be a simple thing. Not the sort of thing you’d want to go rushing headlong into.