Sound the Fairy Call
By K.L. Noone
Gather to your fairy piper
When he pipes his magic tune:
Merry, merry,
Take a cherry;
Mine are sounder,
Mine are rounder,
Mine are sweeter
For the eater…
—Robert Graves, “Cherry-Time”
Mud. Mud and rain. Mud and rain and tree roots, Eoan amended, having just stumbled over the fifth one in as many minutes. No decent roads.
Of course no decent roads existed. Too much fighting. Too few men left to care about smooth tracks for village cart-wheels.
He put one foot in front of the other, in the rain.
He’d liked the country, briefly. It’d been green. It had reminded him of the gentle mists and jewel-green rolling hills of his foggy island home.
Country was a misnomer, of course. The present war had split the region into brittle pieces; he wasn’t ev
