Children of the Hollow Hill

The fairy mound stood in the field behind their grandmother's cottage, unremarkable as a hill until the evening Cormac kicked a football into its side and the football did not come back. He was twelve, and his sisters — Niamh at fourteen, Aisling at ten — stood at the edge of the field and watched him crawl into the gap that had opened in the turf with the exasperated patience of siblings who have seen this kind of recklessness before and know they will have to follow.

The passage was not a tunnel so much as an absence of ground. The earth simply was not there where it should have been, and in its place was a corridor of pale stone that smelled of rain and hawthorn blossom and something older, something that Niamh recognised from their grandmother's stories as the scent of the Otherworld — the sweet, metallic tang of a place where time moved like water, pooling and eddying, running fast in some channels and not at all in others. They followed the corridor for what felt like minutes and emerged into a hall of silver birches growing in a circle around a lake so still it looked like poured glass.

The Fair Folk were waiting for them, which was the first sign that this was not an accident. They stood among the birches in garments that shifted colour with every movement, their faces beautiful in the way that a storm is beautiful — compelling and indifferent to your survival. Thetallest of them, a woman with hair the colour of copper and eyes that held no pupils, stepped forward and spoke in a voice that resonated in the bones rather than the ears. "The children of Maeve Brennan," she said, as though confirming a reservation. "You are seven generations late."