A shadow detaches itself from the forest right where it meets the edge of the sleeping city. Really, there is no border between the two; simply less and less trees, and then the first houses.
The shadow dances in the streets, wading through the light cones of the street lamps. It is looking for one house in particular, where something is going to happen—and no one is going to notice for a long, long time.
And there it is. A small, beautiful old thing, tall and crooked and covered in ivy. A man and a woman sleep a light, fragile sleep on the topmost floor, poised on the edge of wakefulness, ready to spring at the first sign of unease of the child lying in the cradle by their bedside.
But they don’t wake. Not when the shadow slips through the door, not when it climbs the stairs—they always creak, but they don’t, not this time. The shadow is silent, and so they don’t wake when it opens the door and steps—glides—into the room, nor when it kneels by the small cradle and the baby sleeping inside.
It is the first time in days the child is quiet, though the shadow doesn’t know that. Her face is angelic, tilted to the side, her eyes flitting from one side to the other under closed lids—she’s dreaming. The shadow regards her for a long moment, then turns its face, hidden by its hood, to the bundle in its own arms. A second child is there, though this one isn’t asleep. She’s observing the other baby with keen eyes. The shadow shifts her to one arm and reaches for the sleeping, human child with the other.
Only then does the mother stir. Is it a bad dream? The unconscious knowledge that something is wrong? (But in the end, does it really matter?) She opens her eyes, and notices how the silence is too silent, and then that the darkness is too dark, and she looks at the window and sees that the moonlight is blocked by the figure kneeling on the other side of the cradle. She watches, paralyzed, as the shadow reaches inside and plucks the baby from it, laying a different figure in its place with strange, tender care.
She is up and on her feet in the space of a moment, but the shadow springs away and onto the windowsill. The woman rushes to the cradle and sees a child asleep. And the child looks nearly the same as her own—but only nearly. And she says, or screams, or whispers, Stop!
The shadow turns, and the hood falls back from her face, and there she is, not quite right, with that silver hair and those pointed ears and that face that looks like water but is sharp as ice.
And there she is, the woman’s little girl, asleep in the fae’s arms.
The fae smiles, and the woman bristles, even though it is a kind, sad smile (with only the very points of her very sharp teeth visible). I can’t, says the fae. We need her.
Please, the woman says. Please don’t go. Please don’t take her away.
And the fae hesitates, because she understands—the woman is losing her child, but the fae is, too, and it hurts—but only for a second, because it has to be done. I can’t, she repeats, and thinks, it’s better this way. She thinks, by morning, she will forget. The child will forget. Life will go on.
Because a woman may plead, and a fae may weep, but it won’t change anything—because the Court needs humans, and the city needs magic, and life is ruthless and the world doesn’t care.
The night breathes, and the city slides back into sleep, and the fae runs away, a shadow once more—invisible and unheard—and disappears into a painting.
The sun rises and washes memories away, coating them in the haze of dreams. And if, growing up, the child has eyes that are a bit too dark, or hair that is a bit too shiny, no one thinks much of it.
