Cornwall, 1955

Her first child was born on a moonless night, when even the wind seemed to hold its breath-a portend of things to come. If it had been at all within her power, she would have held her babe tight within herself until the first fingers of dawn crept above the horizon. Jack was in the hospital again-ten years away from the second Great War and her husband was still feeling its effects. The same gas that ravaged his lungs in the Eastern Theatre still wrecked his health, and the excitement of an incoming newborn sent him over the edge. That left only her mother, Joan, and their impromptu midwife-a young neighbor hoping to one day become a nurse-to help her through the birth.

The girl was helpful. Her own mother-who clucked about ill omens and wrung her hands-was not.

Her mother was deeply superstitious and for the past two hours Meliora had been breathing and pushing and screaming, Joan had been listing off the ways the birth could go wrong. The first was that Meliora had forgotten to sweep the front doorstep that morning, an action sure to draw bad luck her way. The second was that it was the beginning of May, and that meant that "the fairies are about Meliora, and they look for those betwixt." Joan rattled on and on about the fairies until Meliora had to shout at her to stop. Imogene, already wracked with her own nerves, shot her a look of gratitude as she wiped the sweat out of Meliora's eyes. The baby, it seemed, was going to take its precious time. .

The third blow to Meliora's confidence in her own luck came when Joan looked out the window and saw that the moon was absent. Her own first child had been born on the dark of the moon and died before his first birthday. The reminder sent her mother into hysterics.

"If you keep up your wailing, I'll-" but whatever threat Meliora might have issued was cut off by a terrible shriek; the baby had decided at that moment to enter the world.

Imogene was quick to help, coaxing Meliora into a deeper breathing pattern. She watched and waited and when the baby crowned, reached out for her. From deep, deep within, Meliora felt like she was being pulled apart at the seams. She pushed one more time, and swore she heard something tear.

"Stop," Imogene whispered, so soft Meliora thought she'd imagined it. "Stop!" she said again, and in her inexperience and worry, she placed a palm against Meliora's bulging stomach and pushed. Already in agony, Meliora saw dark spots dance across her vision.

"The baby-the cord is wrapped around her chest," Imogene said, wiping her forehead with the back of her wrist and streaking gore across her skin in the process. "I'll have to… see if I can reach up inside."

The prospect sounded about as appealing to Imogene as it did to Meliora, and Meliora chose to ignore the girl's questioning tone. Her mother's insistence on mumbling about bad luck became even more aggravating, but even Meliora was starting to think she should have shooed away the magpie that rested on her windowsill that morning.

"Mama, water, please," Meliora whispered, her lips feeling like paper. She was losing her strength quickly, and wanted nothing more than for the birthing to be over-or better yet, to have never fallen pregnant in the first place.

No, don't say that, she chided herself. And when she thought those betwixt should not think ill thoughts, it was in her mother's voice.

"She's struggling too much," Meliora heard Imogene say as if from far away. She blinked slowly, heard the soft breaking of an ampoule, then felt a sharp prick in her arm.

And with a shuddering sigh, Meliora slipped into unconsciousness.

Her first child was born on a moonless night, but Meliora was only there for part of it. When she woke, it was to a new baby girl sleeping in a trundle beside her bed. She felt too sore to ever move again, but Joan made her get up and walk around the room again and again. The only time she was allowed to truly rest was when a visitor knocked on the door, drawing her mother away.

The baby slept on, wrinkled and hairless, when Meliora first caught sight of her reflection.

I look positively ghoulish, she thought, sliding her fingers down her right cheek. Her eyes were bloodshot and she had red spots trailing from her face down to her chest, a testament to the pressure and pain she'd been under just hours before.

"Where's Jack?" she asked her mother, turning to face her somber expression. He got sick frequently-that was only to be expected-but had never had to spend more than a week in the hospital before. Not since being discharged.

Her mother looked away.

"Have you named the baby yet? It seems silly to keep calling her 'the baby'..." Joan leaned over the smooth the infant's nonexistent hair. Meliora frowned.

"Jack and I were going to narrow it down together, " she said. "Once he got out of the hospital. I guess we will have to wait until then."

Joan took care to avoid looking her daughter in the eyes, conspicuously staring down at the baby. Meliora did not overlook the way her mother's hand stilled, nor the way she swallowed.

"Mother… who was that? At the door just now?"

Joan licked her lips, glanced at Meliora, and then glanced away again.

"Nobody. The priest," she corrected herself after a pause. "He… wanted to see how you were holding up, considering."

Meliora quirked a brow at her mother, who looked to be attempting to fold in on herself. "Considering?"

"The birth was difficult," Joan said, her voice creeping into a whine. It only ever did that when she was verging on territory she didn't want to speak about with her daughter.

"Mother," Meliora said, narrowing her eyes. "Father Donahue didn't know anything about last night. Not unless you rang him, for whatever reason. now, why was he really here?" Despite not being a very good liar, Joan still tried it from time to time; it wore down her daughter's patience quickly. Joan looked away from Meliora. Meliora tapped her fingers against her vanity.

"I wanted to wait to tell you," Joan said, her voice a hollow husk of what it usually was. "With the baby coming, and then with the complications…"

Meliora sat down heavily and winced at the movement. Whatever her mother was about to say couldn't be good; she just hopes that whatever it was, Jack wouldn't be too angry. While Meliora didn't care herself, Joan wanted the infant baptized, an action which Jack was dead set against. Baptizing the baby in secret while Jack was in the hospital seemed like an action her mother just might entertain.

"He passed, honey. The pneumonia was bad. The doctor said that perhaps, if his lungs had been stronger…"

Meliora sat and listened, and although she knew that the words meant, she couldn't make any sense of them. She let them wash over her as she looked at her newborn daughter. The girl was small-and at a few weeks early, that was not that much of a surprise-but Meliora was struck by just how fragile she looked. It wouldn't take much to hurt her, Meliora realized with a shudder. And she already was; there remained an ugly bruise wrapped around her chest, disappearing under her armpits from the umbilical cord.

My fault, Meliora thought to herself. I did that to my own baby… Her hands began to shake, and she reached out for her daughter, the last breathing reminder of Jack she had.

"Darling, are you listening to me? I said Jack is-" Her mother's words were gentle, but Meliora reacted to them as if she'd been slapped. Whatever spell she'd put over herself was broken, and she felt tears stinging her eyes.

"I heard you," she spat. "You lied to me. You let me think… my husband… Jack…" Meliora shuddered and tried not to think of her husband, lifeless in a hospital bed or morgue. He'd always hated hospitals and the clinical atmosphere that cloaked them. That's why they agreed upon a home birth, so their baby could be brought into the world in the same place she'd grow up. Home.

"I can begin funeral preparations," Joan said nervously. Meliora's eyes snapped back to her mother, as if she'd forgotten she was even there.

"Do whatever you think is necessary, just leave me alone."

And so Joan did.

They lived in the same house but did not speak to each other. The only time Meliora was aware of her mother's presence was when she came to get the baby-the baby who Meliora refused to name.

She couldn't.

Meliora loved her three-day-old daughter, but couldn't look at her tiny, wrinkled face without seeing Jack's death written on it. His passing was no fault of the babe's, of course; but thanks to her mother, Meliora couldn't separate them in her mind.

Logic had no place in the pain of her heart.

So she lived like an automaton: wake up, feed the baby, feed herself if she could bother, bathe the baby, change the baby, ignore the letters and phone calls from well-wishers, feed the baby more and, finally, sleep. Meliora passed her days in a haze of repetition, avoiding her mother and daughter as much as she could.

Sleep was her only refuge; in sleep, she sometimes saw her dear Jack again, could tell them of their daughter and how much she missed him. But Jack was always as silent as the grave he was being put to rest in, and the baby often woke her at odd hours. It wasn't unexpected, but a part of her resented her daughter's cries and wished for silence. That part of her wanted to never hear the baby whimper in her sleep or scream until she was red in the face again.

That part of her remembered that Jack was the one who truly desired children in the first place, and resentment for the unnamed child only grew. Meliora tried to ignore it. She tried not to loathe her baby, who did not deserve it.

But still, every time she was woken from sleep, and every time she desired even just an hour of quiet, she was forced to remember that she was doing it all alone. The man who was supposed to be with her through all of it was gone too early. Her mother had little patience for Meliora's unwashed hair or dark under-eye circles, and Meliora had little patience for Joan as a whole.

She grew accustomed to being exhausted, to waking with the baby in the early hours of the morning. Meliora was only ever half awake when feeding the baby, and often fell asleep midway through.

More than once she'd woken to find her shirt still open, the baby still in her arms. Her mother would have scolded her for that-Meliora had already been lectured once since the babe's birth that infant should sleep by themselves. Meliora's response was to shrug and privately retort that her mother should mind her own business. Joan would grow tired of scolding her eventually; it was only a matter of time.

She woke in the pre-dawn hours once again to find that the baby had fallen asleep in her arms, and that Meliora herself had drifted off sometime during the feeding. The babe's face was pressed up against her chest. Meliora had a hazy memory of half-waking to the infant's squeals and bundling her in her arms. She must have fallen back asleep right after that.

But something was wrong; her child did not nestle in closer after Meliora moved, nor did the air faintly whistle in and out of her tiny nostrils. She didn't seem to be breathing at all.

With trembling fingers, Meliora stroked her baby's cheek. It was cold. The child's skin was pale gray, even, and she would neither warm nor wake o matter how much Meliora begged. She held the corpse of her only child-of Jack's only child-tight to her chest and stood on shaking legs.

Half-remembered stories from her mother flitted through her memory while terror and desperation thrummed through the rest of her.

She thought back to her hanger the night of the birth, how she wished she'd never gotten pregnant.

My fault, my fault, my fault, she repeated to herself, slipping barefoot out the front door of her cottage. Meliora stumbled westward down the pathway and out the front gate, where she tore the edge of her nightgown on a stray splinter. Her baby, cradled in her arms, remained silent.

The night was not cold, but the wind tore at her lank hair and alerted her to the tears streaming down her cheeks.

"Get to the stones," she ordered, stumbling over her own words. She continued to order herself-continued to force herself to place one foot in front of the other-all through her mile long journey through the dark. Her legs almost gave out under her more than once, and she ached-burned-from the life she brought into the world just a few days prior. A life already gone.

The area was flat, mostly, and once she stepped off the main road of packed dirt, she had to find the trodden path to the stones, where travellers and tourists had worn down the earth. Her toes were going numb from the cold dew on the ground.

Meliora fell to her knees a few paces from the stones and crawled the rest of the way to the one she needed with one arm; the other was still holding her child to her.

She remembered the stories her mother would tell her about the Men an Toll, how people brought their influenza-stricken children to the Crick Stone for healing. How before the flu, babes with rickets might be cured by passing them through the stone.

Meliora thought the stories were fanciful at best, or dangerous at their worst, should parents rely on them instead of the modern sciences. Now they were her only hope.

She kneeled in front of the middle stone as if at mass, feeling the damp grass and well-worn dirt on her knees through her nightgown.

"Please, please, please," she croaked, her tears and snot making her throat raw. "My baby. Please, spirits, fair folk, whatever you may be. Please, save my baby."

She passed the empty body of her baby through the middle of the circular stone three times, as her mother's stories said to do. She begged the people of the mounds to help her. She prayed to whatever might be listening.

Nothing replied.

"Please-anybody. I'll do anything."

She placed her baby on the ground, as if offering it up as a sacrifice; she could no longer hold her daughter. Meliora kneeled over her failure and sobbed, pressing her forehead against the cool dirt in front of the stone.

The night went slowly silent. Insects stopped chirping; the wind fell in a decrescendo.

"What do you mean by offering me a corpse?" A voice asked, sounding disgusted. "There is no fair trade to be had here."

Meliora looked up, dirt and tears streaking her face. There stood a man wearing clothes that blended in with the night sky, a crown of stars around his head and while blonde hair. He looked down at her, hand on his hips.

"Who-who are you?" Meliora asked, leaning over her baby as if she could protect it from anything. The man did not look human-in fact, he certainly was not human. No human man had skin that shimmered faintly with starlight, no human man could appear out of thin air.

"The one you called upon, stupid girl. Did you not ask for help? Say you would do anything?" The man sneered down at her, and Meliora felt her heart sink. This was to be her savior?

"My baby," she said, having to mouth the words a few times before she could force them to come out. "My baby has died. I need her back."

"Those are strong magics you ask for, mortal. You would get a child. What would I get in return?"

Meliora tried frantically to think of what it was her mother said the mound people wanted, and came up only with silly things. Surely they wouldn't be enough to make this strange creature being her daughter back.

"Warm milk at a windowsill and honeycombs in the summer," she offered hopefully. "Fresh bread every Friday."

The man tipped back his head and laughed uproariously.

"Is that all your only child is worth to you? Is that all that the last memory of your husband is worth to you? I think not."

A chill swept down her spine; how could he possibly know those things? How dare he mock her with the death of the person she loved most in the world? Tears filled her eyes again, and she looked down at her baby. If all was lost… If she had no hope left… Then would it not be better to join the rest of her small family, wherever they were?

"Look, woman; I cannot bring back your child to you."

"Cannot?" She asked. "Or will not?" If he was not going to help, and with her future seeming so bleak, she saw no reason to check her temper.

"Will not," the man said with a feral smile and a not in her direction, his face lit up by his crown of light. "But what I can offer you is this. A trade. Look, and see your dreams fulfilled as best as you can hope for."

She looked up at him again from her position on the ground, and in his arms he held an infant. It seemed only to be a few days old, no bigger than her own daughter. Meliora choked back a sob and reached up to take the babe in her arms. The baby fussed against her hold, and Meliora smoothed the tiny shock of bright red hair down on her head.

"Mine?" She asked her voice filled with awe.

"A trade," the man clarified. "This child is of no use to me, but rest assured that she is perfectly healthy, in human terms. She will grow to be human, as you will be the only mother she knows. Do you accept?"

Meliora heard nothing but that she might keep the babe, and its tiny coos. She nodded. Her own blood child was beyond her reach but she needed only a second chance. Needed another opportunity to take care of a babe, to prove that she could be the mother Jack thought she could be.

"And in return, I will be given a child."

Meliora snapped all of her attention to the man, eyes wide with terror.

"But-"

"The child in your arms is yours. I will even do you the service of taking this one," he motioned towards the cold baby at her feet, "away. But years from now, you new daughter, or your daughter's daughter, will have to make a decision. I am owed a child. You have accepted the terms. So may it be."

He leaned down at took her dead baby in his arms, and in the light from his crown she looked almost alive again. But the babe in her arms squealed, pulling her attention away from the man and her blood daughter. When she glanced back in his direction, he was gone.

She was alone at the stones.

"Irene," she whispered, holding her baby close to her. "I will call you Irene."