The Elves of Wood, Sky and Water

THE ELVES OF WOOD, SKY AND WATER From Lanterns Past the Edge of the Map: A New Londoner in the Celtic Union, chapter four.

I should say at once that nobody in the Celtic Union calls them elves. They say the Good People, when they say anything, and mostly they do not. A woman who had poured my tea for three weeks told me more about them in one evening than I had found in all the Union's printed literature, and then asked me, very kindly, to forget the half of it that had dates in. I have. But I am writing for readers at home in the rings, who were raised on the same old books I was, and for us there is one word that holds the whole shelf. I will use it, I ask the Union's pardon for it once, here, and I will not keep asking.

I saw none of them. I want that on the page before anything else. What follows is what I was told, on the coast and in the uplands of Tír na nÓg and by Union people from further out, and what I made of the telling. I am a traveller and not a scientist, and the sorting is mine.

Having heard all of it, I believe there are three kinds, and that they keep to three places, as birds do. A field guide sorts the birds of a country by where you will find them before it troubles you with what they are, and I have done the same.

The Wood Elves

Where to look. In the old pale groves of the uplands, where the bark is white or silver and the leaves answer the wind a heartbeat after it has passed. You will know such a grove before anyone tells you about it. I did. The delay is very small, and once you have seen it you cannot stop seeing it.

What you will see. If you are fortunate, which I was not, a tall figure standing among the trees, quite still, as if it had been part of the grove a long while and had only now decided to be noticed. The upland families do not go into these groves to look. More than one of them grazes round a hollow rather than through it, and has done for generations, and would rather not say why, and I did not press.

What they are, I think. The elves of the old tree-stories, and the eldest of the three kinds, as patient as their trees. If they live anywhere, they live in the wood.

The Sky Elves

Where to look. In the wind; precisely, in the small sudden whirl of it that gets up out of nothing on a still day, lifts a skirt of dust or a handful of straw, and is gone before you reach the place. The Union's old word for it means the fairy wind, and nearly every Union household I asked had a story of one, though not always from its own world.

What you will see. Nothing, which is their charm. What you find afterwards is a tool in the wrong hand's kit, a nameplate on the wrong door, a door that for one day opens the other way. Union households leave a bowl of milk out and say by your leave at certain thresholds. I did the same while I was a guest, and nothing in my room was ever moved, so I am in no position to say it does not work.

What they are, I think. The youngest and most playful of the three, and the only ones who travel. They ride the wind from place to place, which is why the stories come from everywhere and agree on nothing but the mischief.

The Water Elves

Where to look. At the tide line, on the night the two moons meet.

This is the part of my book I am proudest of, because I did not find it in anything printed. The coast keeps the Conjunction. The almanacs give it in minutes, and the coastal towns schedule nothing else for the hour round it: not a feast, not a vigil, nothing at all, which a visitor takes at first for indifference and is not. On that night, I was told by three people in two towns who did not know one another, the Good People are seen at the water's edge, tall and unhurried and lit the way a lamp is lit, standing where the tide has just been, and gone again before the moons part.

What you will see. I was asked not to print a date, and I have not.

What they are, I think. The people of the sea, who come up out of it when the moons pull hardest. The larger moon is Donn and the smaller is Cliona, named for a queen of the old stories whose great wave is heard before it comes, and I do not believe the namers chose her by accident.

A Word on the Sorting

I know the Union's own survey people would not sort them like this, and I offer it as a reader's first map rather than the last one. Wood, sky and water are the three oldest homes there are. If the elves of the Celtic Union keep to them, it is because elves everywhere always have, and it is a pleasure to find, so far from home, that the old stories had the habits right even where they had nothing else.

---

Filing note, appended by the receiving desk

Filed as received: a popular account, valid for its author, and an honest one. The author says on the first page that nothing was seen and that the sorting is the author's own, and kept the Union's request and printed no date; this note prints none either. The record's position on what the chapter describes is settled and is stated below in the record's own terms.

There are no elves in this record. The word is kept here as the author's, as off-world speech is kept wherever the record quotes it, and it is not adopted. What the chapter sorts into three kinds of one thing is three different things, and only one of them is known to be a people.

The wood is the Dryads. A figure at a dryadic grove is a projection: a presentation shaped at the boundary and pitched to be met, belonging to something under no obligation to resemble it. It is found only where the Harmonic Membrane runs close, which is why one grove has had a figure described for generations and another, a day's walk off and otherwise identical, never has. It is not a people on this side at all, and it does not live in the wood: the tree is an organism, and the figure is cast across a membrane. One caution the chapter had no way to give. A dryadic anchor holds more than one kind of thing, and elsewhere in the record the same anchors hold Obligers, which are nobody's Good People.

The sky is the crossers of Sí Gaoithe, a second universe unrelated to the first in design, lineage and Worldwright. Nobody has seen one, which the chapter has right, and they are known by their aftermath, which it also has right. They do not ride the wind. The gust is the one consistent tell of a transient tunnel opening and closing at that spot, and the stories come from everywhere because that membrane brushes Union space at more than one boundary zone, not because anything travels between them. Whether they are one population or several, the record keeps open. The household customs are filed as cultural practice: no measured correlation with any incident rate has been found.

The water is the Caomhari, the Union's Good People, crossing bodily from Tír Tairngire at a Conjunction window and luminous by their own voice while it stands, a lamp's worth and never more (Luminescent Ethereal Beings). They are not of the sea and do not come up out of it. The window keeps the Conjunction's calendar and the Conjunction is a tidal event, so on that night the tide line and the window keep the same hour; the shore is where they are met, not where they live. The chapter's three tellers are the first Union accounts in the Archive's holdings to place them at the tide line as well as at the tree line, and the record now carries that (Who Crosses). It carries the place and the correlation and nothing more. Why the window and the moons share a calendar is still open.

Where the line belongs. If the record drew a line through the chapter's three, it would not run between three homes. It would put the wood and the water on one side, since the Dryads and the Caomhari are both met across the same neighbouring membrane and the record cannot say whether any witness has met the same person both ways, and the Union's own field notes already put the Good People at the tree line on a Conjunction night, so some of what the author was told of the wood was the water. The sky would stand alone on the other side, from another universe altogether.

The sorting is wrong in kind on every count. In where to look it is right three times out of three: the pale grove, the gust, the tide line on the night the moons meet. The desk commends the chapter to anyone going out, for that heading only.