King of Morning, Queen of Day by Ian McDonald Read Free Book Online Page B

took me quite by surprise—all of a sudden, it just appeared out of the brambles. By the time I had recovered from the surprise and unfolded the camera, it had vanished. But at least I know that they are around. Better luck tomorrow.
    I am thinking today about the faeries—how in the old days there were many manifestations of the same person; how they could be a salmon and a rowan and an eagle and a great golden cauldron all at the same time. This leads me to wonder if maybe these latter-day faeries—the pookahs and the leprechauns and the Trooping Faeries—are also forms of the same mythological characters. But they seem to me much less highly sophisticated than the early, elemental personas, almost as if they have degenerated rather than developed. This seems strange to me, so I have been doing a little more reading. The Teaching Sisters would be horrified if they knew I had been reading Charles Darwin; yet it was to his Origin of Species (strangely enough, one of Mummy’s contributions to the library, rather than Daddy’s) I went for help. What I read there only confirmed my suspicions. Creatures do not devolve into less sophisticated forms, but evolve into more developed, generalised ones. Which leads me, dear diary, to my most startling conclusion yet. These smaller, more specialised species of faery are the early, primitive, less evolved forms; the ancient, elemental shape-shifters who were many bodies with one person, they are the later, more highly evolved manifestations. Which can only lead to one conclusion: Time in Otherworld runs in the opposite direction to the way it does in our world.

July 12
    S UCCESS TODAY! IN THE morning, I came up quietly on a group of Trooping Faeries at their toilet, washing themselves in the late dew still lying in the bells of foxgloves, and managed to take a couple of photographs. I cannot say if they will come out—I am no photographer—but I hope so much they will. It is so important that I have evidence. I received the impression that the faeries knew I was there and allowed me to photograph them. But, if time runs the other way in Otherworld, then what I did will already have happened to them; to them, the time I start to take photographs is the time I suddenly stop.
    The whole of Bridestone Wood feels strange today, as if it were not the place I have grown up beside to know and love, but a part of the ancient wildwoods of Otherworld somehow imposed onto our world. The trees seem very tall, the air full of the sounds of birds—raucous calls, flapping wings.
    After luncheon I glimpsed the faery archer. This time there was no misunderstanding; she knew I was there and waited, smiling, for a full minute while I fumbled with the camera before she went leaping off through the undergrowth. Toward teatime, I stumbled across the trail of the Wild Hunt itself and followed them for the better part of half an hour. Alas, all I will doubtless have to show for my efforts will be a few blurred images of antlers silhouetted against the sky.
    I am thinking about what I said yesterday about time running the other way in Otherworld. It seems to me that this might be an explanation for the mechanics of magic, though it makes my head spin, thinking too long about it. For example, we wish for something in our present (which is the same as the faeries’ present, this point where our worlds pass each other). The answer comes in our future, which is their past, because the faeries, in their future, which is our past, cause things to change about and set events in motion so that at the proper time—in our future, their past—that wish will come true. This is why magic is just what it is— magic; why there is no apparent link between cause and effect, because, in our direction of time, there isn’t, but to the faeries, everything is done in accordance with their arrow of time, and their laws of cause and effect. In their past, they see the effect, the wish comes true, and so in their future,