Honeycomb

world.” And he handed the midwife a tiny vial, no bigger than the ball of her thumb, filled with something that looked to her like honey, dark and clear and just out of the comb.
“But whatever you do,” said the man, “do not allow the medicine anywhere near your own eyes. Although it is harmless to our kind, it would be dangerous to you.”
The midwife agreed, and delivered the child—a healthy boy—without difficulty. She took the vial of medicine and anointed his eyes with her fingertip, as the father had instructed, before turning her attention to the mother. The mother’s condition was serious, and it took all of the midwife’s skill to save her life. And when she had finished, the midwife wiped the damp hair from her eyes, and a tiny smear of the medicine with which she had anointed the child went into her left eye, making it sting and water.
For a moment the midwife was afraid that the medicine had made her blind. But as the mist cleared from her eye, she found that, far from having lost her sight, she could see all kinds of new things. Closing her unaffected eye, she looked around at the cottage and the woman whose baby she had birthed.
But it was no longer a cottage. Instead she found herself standing in a fine bedchamber, with marble pillars and mosaic floors and a four-poster bed, all hung in white silk, in which lay the most beautiful woman she’d ever seen; a woman with lidless, honey-dark eyes. The baby, too, looked different; it was plump and golden-skinned, with its mother’s troubling eyes.
Some instinct made the midwife hide her new-found vision. She simply swaddled the baby, put him back into his crib (which her left eye now saw as a silver swan all draped in moon-blue muslin), then went to fetch the baby’s father, who was waiting outside the door.
Here, too, the midwife had to hide her surprise at what she saw. Instead of the humble living-room which she had seen some hours before, she now saw, with her left eye, a hall, with a double staircase and a floor of chequered marble. The small stove at the back of the room had become an enormous fireplace, upon which roasted a whole ox, turned by a couple of turnspits. A pair of armoured guards stood by, all in black, and gleaming; and the stranger who had come for her help was sitting there on a gilded throne, a golden band around his hair—hair the shade of a moth’s wing. For a moment he looked at her. One eye was a curious butterfly-blue; the other, as dark as honeycomb.
Then he said with impatience: “Well?”
The midwife kept her face very still. She knew that if the stranger guessed that she had disobeyed his orders, she would never leave that place, or see her village, ever again. For the midwife had realized that she was among the Silken Folk; weavers of glamours, spinners of tales, most dangerous of the Faërie.
“Mother and child are well,” she said. “Now remember, you promised to pay me.”
He nodded and gave her a handful of coins. From her right eye they looked like gold, but with her new-found vision she saw nothing but a handful of golden autumn leaves. The midwife said nothing, however. She put the leaves in her pocket, and silently she followed the man outside to a courtyard in which a silver coach awaited, drawn by four grey horses. (This was what the midwife had seen as a pony and trap only hours before.) She climbed aboard without a word, ignoring the marvels around her, and the stranger drove her home through forests and fields until they reached her village and her little house, just as the sun was rising.
It was over. Or so she thought. But in the weeks that followed, the midwife found herself unable to forget the strange things she had seen that night. The crowned man and the beautiful woman; the newborn child in the silver crib. The palace that had seemed to her just like an ordinary cottage beneath its veil of glamours. And now, with her new-found vision, she could see all kinds of things that no one—no one human—could see: little grey men under the hill; a dark man in a spotted coat of black-and-scarlet velvet; a woman riding the evening sky on a horse of rags and air; a pretty girl, dressed all in white, in the birch tree in the yard. All of them invisible to any but the midwife; all of them silently watching her with their strange and lidless eyes. But the midwife never looked back or gave any sign that she’d seen them. And little by little, the Silken Folk returned to their daily business.
The midwife longed to tell someone about her strange adventure. But she knew that no one would believe her. They might even think she was mad, or worse; possessed by some evil spirit. She learnt to ignore her unwanted gift, until, one day, five years later, as she was at the market, she saw the man with the troubling eyes and the golden band around his hair, moving among the market-stalls unseen by anyone but her.
The midwife flinched.
He looked at her. Understanding filled his eyes. And then, in a movement so sharp and precise that she did not even feel it, he snatched out the midwife’s left eye with his long, pale fingers.
The midwife lived to a ripe old age. But she never saw the man again, or any of his people.

3
T
HE
L
ACEWING
K
ING
And that was the birth of the Lacewing King, the last King of the Silken Folk, who live in the shadows and cast none themselves. What happened to the old King—who vanished without warning one day, taking with him the crystal vial containing the last of the nectar of dreams—is a tale for another time, but the boy ascended the throne when