The Peculiar

Arthur Jelliby was a very nice young man, which was perhaps the reason why he had never made much of a politician.

It was called the Smiling War because it left so many skulls, white and grinning, in the fields.

It was a fine day by London's standards. Which meant it was a day slightly less likely to suffocate you and poison your lungs.

A word could cause a riot, ink could spell a man’s death, and the Sidhe knew those weapons like the backs of their hands. Oh yes, they knew.

He wanted a faery. More than anything else in the world. He had already imagined exactly how it should happen. He would set up the invitation, and the next day there would be a petal-winged pisky clinging to the top of his bedpost. It would have a foolish grin on its face, and large ears, and it wouldn’t notice at all that Bartholomew was small and ugly and different from everyone else. But no. Mother had to ruin everything.

Her voice was loud and cheerful, the way it was when nothing was well and she was determined not to show it.

Feathers fell from the sky. Like black snow, they drifted onto an old city called Bath.

Don't get yourself noticed and you won't get yourself hanged.

Don’t get yourself noticed and you won’t get yourself hanged.

She was too thin, her face all sharp bones and pale skin, tinged blue from lack of sunlight. Ugly, like him. Her eyes were huge and round, black puddles collecting in the hollows of her skull. The tips of her ears were pointed. In a pinch Bartholomew might still pass as a human child, but not Hettie. There was no mistaking the faery blood in her veins. For where Bartholomew had a mess of chestnut hair growing out of his scalp, Hettie had the smooth, bare branches of a young tree.

He had an image in his mind of a gaggle of long-necked geese, all done up in petticoats and crinolines, sitting around a stuffy parlor and talking about him.

…it struck Mr. Jelliby that a wide-eyed faery was not a surprised faery. It was an angry, angry faery.

The staircase was a mass of rotting wood, carved with such cruel-looking mermaids that Mr. Jelliby was afraid to put his hand on the banister.

The Buddelbinsters, he’d heard them called. Once they’d had seven changeling children, and Bartholomew had seen them playing in the windows and the doorways. But other people had seen them, too, and one night a crowd had come and dragged the children away. Now there was only one, a frail-looking boy with thistle-hair.

It was then that everyone knew for certain what they had been dreading all along: the Small Folk, the Hidden People, the Sidhe had passed from their place into ours. The faeries had come to England.