The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill Quotes

“Where flowers bloom
And leaves are ever green
Fortune’s winds are shifting
By fairy touch unseen
—Folk song”
― Rowenna Miller, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

“I thought if I just kept on, I'd eventually get somewhere. But if you choose the wrong path, you're not going to end up where you wanted to go by charging on ahead, are you? You have to stop and turn around sometime, even if it's not easy.”
― Rowenna Miller, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

“Hidden behind a veil of velvet shadows pooling beneath low-hanging branches, Violet waited until Em had turned the corner of the path toward the sunlight, then collected the gifts. Wool black as night, glass like ice threaded on silk, and a jangle of pins the color of last autumn's leaves. She held each reverently, the potential of transformation shining in each. The girl had changed, her soft freckled face gaining the planes of an adult's and the sharp timbre of her laugh softening, transformed by the magic of the earthbound that couldn't touch Fae. But something of Fae remained in the girl-turned-woman, a thread binding them together as surely as blood might have. Violet smiled softly, pride in the girl she'd sent from Fae into her earthbound fate swelling like the bloom of magic.”
― Rowenna Miller, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

“Here's to thee, old apple-tree,
To buds in the spring and roots in the loam,
To the Fae who brings the apples home.
---Wassail song”
― Rowenna Miller, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

“And the fullness of Fae flooded Delphine, purple shadow and pale moonlight, perfume of sandalwood and rose, the bite of autumn wind and the cold rush of spring snowmelt. It was overwhelming, intoxicating, beckoning her to fall headlong in love with this side of the veil.”
― Rowenna Miller, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

“Tell me, Pierce, why do you think she left?"
"Why do---" He turned on her, his face a strange battle of anger and grief. "I don't know."
"I think you do." She stood, her height no match for his, but she pretended that she did. "You hit her, Pierce."
He was shamed into silence.
"And more than that. My sister is intelligent, and compassionate, and talented. And you--- you squandered those things about her. You told her, in action if not words, that she was less than the Perrysburg Graftons until she learned to be like them. You fool--- she was more. She is the best person I have ever known, and I hope she stays far away from you."
Alaine caught her breath, her heart racing. Pierce only stared at her, anger boiling behind his eyes. "I only ever wanted to help her."
"Help her!" Alaine bit back laughter that was too close to hysterical. "Help her do what, Pierce? The only thing you wanted was for her to help you. To be a perfect Perrysburg Grafton, arranging your parties and making you look good. Well, she's worth more than that.”
― Rowenna Miller, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

“She thought of the wax-white knook and shivered as she brushed against a pale pink tree branch. Was nothing the proper color here? Even the greens were more brilliant, more like paint than nature, the kinds of outlandish color she usually tried to temper in her own artwork.
If she stayed, she thought absently, she could paint with the trees themselves, learn to sculpt petals and dew, hone even an animal into an ideal she created for it. She could craft beauty more rare and arresting than she ever could with watercolor and oil. She'd craved more of the world on the other side of the veil, wanted to taste the kind of success and belonging Alaine had, wanted recognition for her talents. Perhaps she could make that for herself here. Perrysburg, Pierce--- those had been poor illusions blurring what she really wanted.
It would not be all pain, would it? Trading herself for Emily? All the places she had ever wanted to go, all the things she had ever wanted to see, all the art she had ever wanted to create--- didn't this place outstrip anything in her own world for beauty and discovery?”
― Rowenna Miller, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

“They gathered in the center of the Court as evening deepened the gloom of the forest. Tables covered with Fae delicacies rose from the moss itself and parted the waters of the brook. Delphine had not imagined that temptation could wield such strength. There was no hunger, only desire; she had not felt hunger, or thirst, or any other mundane discomfort since she crossed through the linden. But the fruits and breads and crystalline ices and even those things far stranger--- clouds encapsulated by thin leaves, braided blossoms that shimmered with uncanny glaze, lacework wafers like the finest marzipan--- all of it beckoned her, begged her to taste, to try. Their scents were faint but heady, rosewater and citrus and pungent herbs and the air after the rain. They promised more--- savor, yes, but deeper, thicker draughts of pleasure, joy, knowledge.”
― Rowenna Miller, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

“Set the table, china fine
Acorn cup and dewdrop wine
Crumbs of cake, berries wild
High tea for Fae beguiled
--- Children's rhyme”
― Rowenna Miller, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

“Only a dozen or so of the Fae who had been gathered in the Court when she arrived waited on the green. Most held the reins of creatures so incredible that even Delphine, subsumed with sick fear about Emily, was momentarily transfixed. The Fae man with the golden eyes stood next to a salamander on legs like tree trunks, its ink-black body spotted with brilliant yellow. It opened its maw for a treat from the man, revealing a row of terrifying gilded teeth. A woman with dark blue eyes and a faint blue tinge to her complexion absently stroked the head of a white chicken whose comb bloomed with crystalline roses and whose dark red talons raked the earth. A dark-haired Fae woman with sinewy arms and strong shoulders bare had turned a black-and-white goat into a unicorn by twining its horns into a single ivory-hued spiral, as well as giving it a generous increase in size.
Emily clapped her hands in delight.
"Would you like to pet one, love?" the Fae woman asked, guiding her toward a bronze-furred creature that Delphine slowly appreciated had once been a squirrel, its size now outstripping a large dog. "That one cannot be ridden, but he is as good a scent hound as any earthbound canine."
"Where did they come from?" Delphine gaped.
She didn't expect a reply, but the man with the salamander laughed. "The same place you do. They wander in, rarely. When the door is opened, whether we mean it to be or not. Occasionally, they are bargained. But mostly they are just strays." She opened her mouth to ask how, and he cut her off with an abrupt wave of his hand. "We do not know how it works or why the doors open of their own accord any better than you, and we wish they would not."
"Why, when they become wonders like these?" She reached tentatively toward the squirrel, who butted her hand with his enormous velvet head.”
― Rowenna Miller, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

“Some have suggested that the preponderance of trickster stories in folklore ranging from the Norse Loki to the Coyote of the New World may have in their origins stories of bargains gone awry, though the opposite may be as likely to be true--- that stories of human pride's comeuppance are a commonplace theme.
---Changelings and Gambler's Chances: Tales of Fairy Mischief,
by William Fitzgerald”
― Rowenna Miller, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

“She stepped inside a vestibule with a silver bowl of pure, clear water set on a pedestal made of what Delphine could only assume was a very large, very sturdy zinnia. Was she supposed to wash in it, or was she firmly barred from touching it? She glanced in its shallow depth, and it began to pulse and swirl with pale light. She stepped away quickly. A filmy veil of light separated the interior; she held out a tentative finger, and the light brushed it like organza and separated for her. She stepped through into the Court, sprawling and open to the sky above, yet bound by the pale walls on all sides.
Inside, the Court looked back at her.
Dozens of Fae, gathered in twos and threes, beneath trees of gold and silver and around pools of deep azure blue, inside pavilions made of sheer flower petals and on carpets that must have been woven bird feathers. They all watched her, silently, unmoving. Each was almost painful to look at, beautiful and yet sharp and cold. All of them were arrayed in the spoils of their bargains, with sheer gowns of watercolor silk and robes of pliable silver, elaborate braids adorned with finely wrought metal and tautly bound silk, and even, on a few, wings and horns and talons refashioned from wood and bone and glass. Delphine was terrified of them, and yet also drawn to them. A great and terrible power hummed among them, just below the surface, a nearly tangible potential for change, for creation, for more than anything the world on her own side of the veil could offer.”
― Rowenna Miller, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

“Faintly rattled, Delphine rounded a curve in the path and found herself at the edge of clearing, the trees pulling back from a carpet of verdigris grass. They gave up the wildness of the wood here, tamed into symmetrically intertwined branches whose openings revealed more pale paths into the forest. The diffuse light of the forest concentrated here, as though emanating from hidden gas lamps. Delphine toed the boundary of what she now saw was an enormous fairy ring.
A structure of pure white rose from the center of the ring, the beams arching like the bones of a cathedral, the space between filled with delicate filigree of brittle white. Windows like translucent dragonfly wings shone under cornices carved like birds and flowers and trailing vines. A castle, Delphine thought, or a church--- all the same emphasis and gravitas translated here, and something stranger and deeper.”
― Rowenna Miller, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

“A riot of transparent blue flowers grew up the side of a tree, reaching its highest branches and sending tendrils of milky blue to nearby trees. A net made of tiny lilac-hued blossoms crawled over the moss, snaking into the patterns of the bark. And overhanging the path, where two branches came close to touching each other, a canopy that looked as though it must have been made of downy feathers, if feathers could be diluted into something like a cloud. It was eerily strange, yet so beautiful.
"Who made this?" she murmured, tracing a blossom of syrup gold suspended by a streamer from something not unlike a willow tree. "Did you?"
"No one made it," the girl answered. "It is just--- this place. It takes what is given from your world and uses it."
"The whole world---the world does this magic?"
"What is magic?" The girl lifted her finger and beckoned Delphine. She pulled a thread from the red broadcloth. "Where did this come from?"
"It's wool, the fibers from a sheep. It's cut off, and spun, and woven, and---"
"Sheep. Where did 'sheep' come from?"
Delphine paused. "I--- I suppose from some wild animal, domesticated many years ago."
"Ah. A wild animal. A creature, begot from--- what? Its dam and sire?" She shook her head. "Now that is magic. And your plants--- they sprout, from seeds in the ground? That, too, is magic." She tested the thread between her fingers, rolling it--- no, Delphine saw with wonder, stretching it. It became thin under her fingers, flat like a ribbon, and lengthened, the color washing from scarlet to pink to palest apple blossom as the single thread became two yards long and the girl wrapped it around the crown of her head, binding her wheat-sheaf hair.
"And that is what we call magic.”
― Rowenna Miller, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

“A strange landscape stared back at her. Delphine gasped and let the tree support her weight as she slowly took in the sight of of the forest drawn tight around the ring of moss surrounding the linden. The trees were skeletal and pale as bone, branches gnarled and twining in complicated knotwork that might have been intentionally woven or might have been the wild striving of trees reaching for the sky. There were no leaves, but a thick hoarfrost of silver coated every branch, every twig, every barren bud. Bracken grew tangled at the roots of the trees; it, too, was layered in sparkling pale beauty.
The ground was covered in the same thick silver, which Delphine slowly appreciated was not cold at all, but still as fragile and sharp as frost. No grass grew on the ground, only a thick carpet of the same moss surrounding the tree. The silver didn't pass through the circle, fading to a film near the green encircling the linden tree.”
― Rowenna Miller, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

“The first fruits. The firstborn. That's in the law of Moses, for pity's sake--- old as dirt, first fruits are the acceptable offering.”
― Rowenna Miller, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

“I could not make it grow. But I made more apples." She drew an apple from the folds of her gown. Alaine gasped. It was translucent, with a blush like blood on ice in its thin skin. "Try it."
The Fae woman held the apple to Alaine, who took a step back, all of Gran's warnings and fears flooding into her at once.
"I know better than to eat Fae food."
The woman smiled a sharp grin. "Of course you do. This wouldn't harm or bind you. It is offered freely, and offered in your world, not ours. But--- as you will." She split the apple in two with her little fingers as she stepped near the edge of the ring. The fruit snapped like dry bread, drops of silvery juice falling on the grass like dew. "What food is shared cannot bind," she intoned solemnly, and held the slice of fruit to Alaine with a steady hand.
Tentatively, Alaine took half the apple. Her teeth sank into it as though she were biting into water, and the pale starlight flesh yielded and dissipated in her mouth. The sensation was unsettling and deeply unsatisfying, but the taste--- the flavor of the fairy apple was newly unfurled blossoms under sunlight and tart fresh cider and, faintly, the smoke of applewood.”
― Rowenna Miller, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

“We can twist the fate of your world and bind its luck up with our will, but we cannot make anything of our own."
"Make?"
"In Fae, nothing grows. There is no ore hidden beneath our barren soil. We must ply whatever we would use from what we are given in trade. Some things--- silk, silver, bone--- we can work better than others." Her pale fingers moved against her hair; a sheer filament of silver wove a plait of her mist-colored hair from one temple to another. "This was spun from one of your pins."
Alaine leaned forward, looking closer. Wrought into the thread of metal were flowers and leaves, their minute veins and even dustings of pollen worked in silver. "Everything that you have is remade from our world?"
"Yes." She let the breeze stir her hair and her gown, and Alaine wondered what scrap of silk ribbon had been stretched and unspooled to a thin shadow of itself to produce the diaphanous cloud of pale blue surrounding the Fae woman, the wonder of it almost enough to make her forget the reason she had summoned the Fae.”
― Rowenna Miller, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

“Alaine remembered that she had paused and carefully studied the pattern in the apple. "It's like a little flower."
"That's it exactly. A flower--- five petals, just like an apple blossom. Inside every apple is the promise of a whole tree, blooming someday." She gave one half of the apple to Delphine and the other to Alaine. "There's a lot of work between that flower inside the apple and the one in an orchard in springtime. I tend to think it's worth it.”
― Rowenna Miller, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

“The Smokehouse variety were beginning to ripen in their rows at the far end of the orchard, where the hill sloped more sharply. She pulled one down from the tree; it resisted and the stem snapped off. She pulled another, holding both of the small fruits in one hand. Tinged rose red and washed in gold, and just as bright in flavor, they were among her favorites.”
― Rowenna Miller, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

“She'd completed a small still life in oils, her first time experimenting with anything save watercolors, and she was rather proud of it. She'd plied the light just as she'd wanted, illuminating a scatter of ephemera, fraying silk and loose buttons and bits of worn glass. On a whim, she had painted one of her straw glamours, the wreath presiding over the gentle chaos.”
― Rowenna Miller, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

“A fairy ring, it stated, is very much like a doorway, and in several cultures it is perfectly acceptable to knock. Though most American and American-antecedent ethnicities do not practice such summoning, some bargaining cultures did, or do, practice the art.
Alaine skimmed several photographs describing Sicilian stories of joining with fairies to battle witches and the Scottish worship of nature spirits, none of which seemed particularly relevant. She was growing frustrated at the author's apparent disregard for the separation between folktale and true practice when the chapter settled on a long description.
Recent research into English witch trials have revealed a connection between bargaining culture and some occult forms of practice in which fairies are ritualistically summoned. Though some equate the practice with the concept of a "witch's familiar"... Here Alaine began to skim again until the author found himself back on track. Interviewees from several small villages recall stories that those bold enough to enter a fairy ring could summon a fairy by placing a silver pin in the center of the ring, repeating an incantation such as "a pin to mark, a pin to bind, a pin to hail" (additional variants found in Appendix E), and circling the interior of ring three times. It remains, of course, impossible to test the veracity of such stories, but the consistency of the methodology across geographical regions is intriguing, down to the practice of carrying a small bunch or braid of mint into the ring.
Alaine shut the book on her finger, marking the spot. Impossible to rest, indeed. She opened the book again. It began a long ramble detailing various stories of summoning, but Alaine didn't need the repetition to know the method. A short footnote added that Mint appears to serve in the stories as both attractant and repellant for the fairy creatures, drawing them to the summoner but preventing from being taken unwilling into Fae, unlike tobacco and various types of sage, which are merely deterrents.”
― Rowenna Miller, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

“There was something behind the glass, behind her reflection and the wash of clouded sky above her. She gazed past the surface, as though she were looking deep into clear water, ignoring the ripples and movements on the surface to search out what lived beneath. A tree, she realized, bending in a faint breeze, draped with purple leaves like streamers. Pure-silver flowers winked and sparkled in the deep foliage, swinging gently like bells, though Alaine couldn't hear anything. She gazed deeper, drinking in the beauty of a silver mist of moss on the ground, of a tangle of pale branches woven into knot-work unnaturally symmetrical, down to thorns bowing deeply to one another in vine-wrought curls.
Something moved in the purple-and-silver forest, a figure, sliding like mist through the boughs. A woman--- Alaine started. She was tall and slim, shaped more than anything like a birch tree, with the same silver-pale gleam. Her hair was loose behind her, wound through with purple flowers, painfully bright against her fair waves. She looked up, gazing right at Alaine, almost meeting her eyes---
And then the mirror shattered in her hands.”
― Rowenna Miller, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

“That first evening home from the honeymoon, she'd hung a braided wreath of golden straw to catch the light of the setting sun and set a glamour over the table in the breakfast room--- to make it special, to bring Pierce's full attention from a stack of contracts to their first meal at home as husband and wife. The wine had seemed lusher to her, the vinaigrette on the salad brighter, the flash and shine of the silver and the creamy porcelain china enchanting.”
― Rowenna Miller, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

“You all go running your yaps about using the funds— but we don’t use them! Not really. Bringing in a speaker, maybe, now and again, the Mercy Fund— what good does that do in the long run? No real tangible benefit.” Alaine saw some of the farmers’ mouths harden into angry lines. Those speakers brought new research and techniques that many of the farms now used. And the Mercy Fund had saved many of them from small calamities time and again. Olson didn’t understand how those small calamities could snowball into losing a farm outright. “No real long-term benefit, not like good policy from the mayor’s office.”
“Yes, Mr. Olson, but you can’t buy good policy,” Alaine said.”
― Rowenna Miller, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

“Mama, is that Aunt Eula’s chicken recipe?” Emily tore into a drumstick with enough fervor for both of them.
“Sure is.”
Her aunts had been up since before dawn cooking. The sweets table was piled with pies and sponge cake with fresh berries and Aunt Marline’s divinity fudge. She picked at her chicken, feeling her appetite improving with each bite of familiar cooking.
“Can I have seconds, Mama?”
“Of course. let me get some for you.” Alaine took Em’s plate to the buffet, still loaded with more food than an army could do away with. She chose a drumstick from the plate of chicken, then froze.
“Now, Stella, it’s quaint,” Mrs. Mark Grafton, Pierce’s mother. Alaine stiffened. “They’ve done the best they can— and I think they rather expected us to enjoy a country luncheon.”
“But chicken fricassee? For a wedding luncheon? Are they going to have us dance a reel next?” A woman younger than Mrs. Grafton, but bearing the same sharp dark eyes, tittered quietly.
“I told Pierce they should have a fish course, at least. And a consommé. Of course I knew an aspic would be asking far too much.”
“Pierce always did have an independent streak.” Stella said this as though it were a blight. “Marrying some country nobody when the Harris girls or Georgia Lawson would have—”
“Not polite to speak of it now, dear,” Mrs. Grafton said with a tone that told Alaine it was only propriety keeping her from joining. Alaine seethed. Delphine wasn’t a nobody— she was better than any of these Perrysburg ninnies.
“Pierce has his career to consider, that’s all I’m saying. She can’t go blundering about, mucking that up. After all, we stand to catch the ill effects of any mistakes she makes.”
“I’ve advised Pierce how to handle himself, and he’ll make sure she knows her place. You needn’t concern yourself with your brother’s affairs.” Mrs. Grafton swept away in a wake of heady perfume, but not before Alaine heard her add in a sharp whisper, “He didn’t listen to me about marrying the girl, why do you think he’d listen about a fish course?”
Neither Grafton woman had noticed Alaine; they were, Alaine presumed, well practiced in ignoring anything that didn’t benefit them specifically. Country nobody, indeed— Del would show them all up before Christmas. If the best chicken in the county wasn’t good enough for the Graftons, she would enjoy it double.
”
― Rowenna Miller, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

“The linden tree. It stood unchanged since the first time Papa Horatio had seen it, all those years ago— unchanged, Alaine thought, for perhaps centuries. Always green, always blooming, even in the middle of winter. Now, at the cresting of summer, it almost blended into the deep green of the forest, except for the perfect circle of velvet green surrounding it. That, and the scent. Ebbing like a tide on the gentle breeze that stirred the linden’s leaves, the perfume mingled the ordinary golden florals of linden blooms with strange notes of vanilla and cedar and incense.”
― Rowenna Miller, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

“Watching the trees bloom in a riot of pink clouds in spring, the red-gold sunrise in the skin of an apple, the shadows mingling on the moss, the moments of novelty and beauty hidden in the repetition— this was the orchard that captured Delphine. She tried to catch its movement in sketches and coax its colors into painted landscapes. And she knew, intuited it from the quietest, deepest part of herself, that there was more of that novelty and beauty waiting to be discovered. Waiting for her.”
― Rowenna Miller, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

“I asked for something I didn’t really understand, and I got something I didn’t really want.”
― Rowenna Miller, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill