John woke to the sharp crack of a slate breaking on the roof of his cottage. It was a curiously clear and ringing sound, and it was followed by a long sliding rattle as something rolled across the roof to the eaves and dropped into the street.

“John?” His mother’s muffled voice came from behind the withy partition at the other end of the garret.

“Just a stone falling from the cliff, Mother,” he reassured her, whispering, so as not to wake Ned.

She murmured something in reply and within a short time her breath had lengthened and evened again. It was a warm night and John, feeling thirsty, got up and went downstairs. While he was awake, he thought, he would take a look at the cliff path.

He pulled his jerkin over his nightshirt and went outside. In the street he stopped to look up at where the summer stars swam in a sky deeper than the village well.

A breath of wind lifted the hair from his forehead. Again, he thought he scented fruit.

What had woken him? He fell back a step to scan the cliff path. Nothing moved above, but then a footstep sounded near him in the street. He turned and saw someone coming down the road with a slow and meandering gait, like a Sunday afternoon dawdler—or like a sleepwalker.

She came a little closer.

Janet.

John choked back the impulse to cry her name aloud, and darted up the road. “Janet!” he whispered, remembering their talk on the cliff path that afternoon. “Janet! What are you doing here? Where have you been?”

She lifted blank and lifeless eyes to him. There was a dark stain, like blood, on her cheek. “John?”

He caught her by the shoulders. “Are you hurt, Janet? Where have you been?” Not to Faerie. Oh, please God, not to Faerie.

“Where…” She blinked, and seemed to wake all of a sudden. “John! Where am I?”

“In the Dale,” he told her. “Did you come down by the cliff path?”

Her head dropped forward. Shadows clouded her face; her voice was faint and wondering. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t—What, do you really not know where you’ve been?”

“I don’t know. I can’t recall.” She looked up at him, lost, groping. “I was dreaming…I thought I was at home.”

John had watched her grow up; he knew how she looked when she was lying, and she did not look like that now. But he had to ask.

“Janet, tell me you haven’t been in the wood? You know how dangerous it is to be in the wood after dark.”

“I…” She looked behind her, up the cliff. “I can’t recall.” Tears sprang into her eyes.

He bit back his fear. “Forgive me, love. Don’t weep.” He glanced at the white houses of the street and caught her by the hand. It would never do for anyone to see them out in the moonlight like this. “Come, I’ll take you home.”