When Libby Met the Fairies and her Whole Life Went Fae Read Online Free PDF Page A

thing. It wasn’t such a stretch.
    Plus it was right about then that Wallace filed for divorce. It wasn’t what she wanted. But she wasn’t stupid, either. She knew it meant she’d be eligible for a pretty big chunk of cash.
     
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    Yeah. Big chunk of cash. She was thinking about the cash the next day. Thinking, That’s what my land is. My marriage. My land is my marriage, every last stitch of my marriage, every second of it, every breath, every ache, cashed out into the divorce settlement and turned into land.
    Which is the real reason that she walked it every day, why she wanted to look it over again, every day. Tread on it. Learn it. The ground felt hard and sad under her feet. The hedgerows were laced together by rusty, slack pieces of barbed wire from when someone, years ago, had used the fields to pasture dairy cows. Wind blew in, steady from across the valley. She stood and looked out over it, a vast, simple valley, naked-looking from this height—vast because it had cradled the Genesee River once, but then the glaciers had scoured a new course for that river further west through Nunda, leaving the old river valley naked and empty except for the creek that you know was down there, hidden, winding through the course that the river had once followed . . .
    The posted signs were gone.
    No, not gone. Mounted on the other side of the tumbled wall.
    Good enough.
    She continued to walk uphill, to the easternmost edge of the land, and then she turned around and looked down again.
    This was her new beginning. Because as she stood there, on that ground, she could see that she hadn’t lost. Hadn’t lost anything. It had just changed shape, that’s all. Marriage into land.
    The alchemy of divorce.
    She was okay. She was okay.
    It was thickly overcast, so the clouds completely blocked the sunset.
    She started back downhill toward the house.
     
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    There’s a ditch along the edge of the field closest to the house. A manmade ditch. Someone had dug it to channel rainwater into a shallow little pond at the other end of the field—the pond was dry, filled in by time— and no doubt it had once been used to water the long-ago cows.
    Libby was walking toward the ditch, was maybe 10 feet away from it.
    And a little man suddenly stood up in front of her.
    From down in the ditch.
    “Little.” To be precise, he was about two feet high. Small enough to be hidden completely in the ditch, if he’d stayed crouched down. Which he had been—hidden—until he stood up, which made him seem to appear from nowhere. And yeah, she screamed. A half-scream. Clamped her hand over her mouth as she heard the scream come out, listened to the second half choke off behind her fingers.
    He looked at Libby evenly for a moment, and then spoke.
    “You’re rude.”
    If he’d said anything else—“I come in peace,” “take me to your leader,” even “don’t be frightened”—she probably would have lost it completely and run, shrieking, to her house, locked her door, run to her bed, under the covers. But to be insulted . . .
    Indignation kicked in.
    “I am not rude.”
    “You act like you’re rude.”
    “You startled me.”
    “You weren’t watching where you were going.”
    She stared at him. He was perfectly proportioned, a little on the thin side, and dressed in something brown that looked like paper—like a paper bag, creased all over. “What are you?”
    “ What am I?”
    She glared at him. Her brain hadn’t yet caught up—she wasn’t yet conscious of the sensible explanation, which was that she’d somehow blundered into a waking dream of some kind. Or, less graciously put: a hallucination. But her instincts were still true. No way was she going to refer to this thing—this phenomenon—as a “who.”
    Her stubbornness paid off. He gave in and answered. Sort of. “I look after this.” He gestured with his hand so she’d know “this” meant the land around them.
    Her property.
    Her pulse had