What's it worth?

Luke leans back in the chair and turns his megawatt smile on the interviewer. Sure, the girl is just some college kid, but there's no reason to risk bad publicity by treating her rudely. "Tell me about your project."

He doesn't care, of course. But the careful interest, like the smile, is all part of the persona of the big shot executive that he dons each morning as carefully as he does the suit that cost more than the young woman's rent for the month.

"It's a, a social anthropology thing." She clears her throat, shuffling towards the edge of her chair, fingers plucking at a sweater that looks like it was knitted by a doting - and, if the colour choice is anything to go by, senile - grandmother. "Childhood stories. It's the sort of thing I read loads of when I started studying, stories of my parents' or my grandparents' generation, all building dens and climbing trees and disappearing til sunset and, well. No one asks our generation this stuff."

Luke raises his eyebrow at the casual lumping in of him with the crowd of barely fledged twenty-somethings the girl presumably runs with, but he's long looked younger than his forty years. He isn't sure what his PR team told her when they arranged this interview - humanising you a bit was all they said to him, and he smiled blandly and filed the comment away - so he'll leave his precise age vague.

"And it's not all video games and TikTok." The girl is still speaking, earnest now, her eyes bright. "We've got those stories too, but even when we don't, when it's Pokemon Go and Instagram Stories not... not sticks for swords and jumpers for goalposts, it's still our childhood and it still deserves recording."

"I see." He does see. He's seen it all before, at the entry levels of his company: earnest little rich girls whose liberal arts degrees do less than Daddy's money to smooth their way into employment but who are nonetheless convinced they're changing the world on the way. "Well, then, sweetheart, let's get on with it."

Her eyes narrow sharply. "Very well, Mr Greybriar." She fusses needlessly with the recording device for a moment before turning on him a smile that seems rather less genuine than her previous one. "Tell me a story from your childhood."

It's years since he's told this one but he's long since lost any self-consciousness in the recitation. Humanise you, they said, and this one will do that. It will soften the hard-headed businessman by association with the tow-headed naif he was at six, and the investors will thank him for it. Plus, maybe she'll be the one. Maybe she, after all these years, will be the one to explain it away to his satisfaction and he can finally fucking rest.

He lets his smile soften at the edges, his eyes lose just enough focus to hint at nostalgia but not enough for an unscrupulous photographer to confuse with lunchtime overindulgance, and shrugs self-deprecatingly. "When I was six, I found fairies in our garden."

xxx

Luke stumbled from the house, tears blurring his eyes and his shoelaces untied. It's not fair. The flagstone path jarred his knobby knees and his breath rasped in his lungs as he quickened his pace. Not fair not fair not fair.

Dinah had a friend over. Dinah always had a friend over because Dinah actually had friends and Dinah wasn't a specky weirdo like him. He'd assumed the insult referred to the patchy colouring where his eczema flaked away and the new skin made mottled, speckled patterns with his lingering suntan but, no. It was the glasses, of course. Stupid, heavy, milkbottle-thick things because Dinah had all the luck and all the friends and Luke had all the doctor's appointments.

Dinah had a friend over and Luke had only wanted to play, but dolls aren't for boys and I'm worried I'll catch it and Dinah had scowled and shooed him away. She'd only looked back briefly to mouth "sorry" over the new girl's head. Stupid new girl. He kicked at a rock and then bit his lip and refused to cry out as he hopped about on his other leg til the pain went away. Stupid new girl. Stupid Dinah.

Well, fine. He didn't need them anyway. Didn't need friends in there because he had friends out here, with the robin that sometimes hopped nearly close enough to touch if he dug around a bit worms came wriggling out, and the squirrel that would take sunflower seeds from his hand if he sneaked them out of Mum's cereal box when she wasn't looking.

He ducked behind the straggly rhubarb into the hollow between the plant and the garden fence, and was about to drop to the ground in what definitely wasn't a tantrum because he was six and six year olds didn't have tantrums, when something stopped him short. Something red and sticky, which had once been grey and furry, and Luke knew that nature was like that sometimes but seeing it up close and personal and no longer in any state to take seeds from his fingers was just a bit too much. Especially on top of the stupid girls and it was right here in his den, and it wasn't fair it wasn't fair it wasn't fair.

He stumbled blindly out of the other side of the bush and froze in horror. And screamed.

It was probably a fox, Dad said later. Luke's adult memories would colour Dad's voice with scepticism and put shadows in his eyes but in the moment Luke clung to the words with all the strength a six year old could muster. Because foxes were predators and predators ate squirrels and that was the way of the world. And maybe foxes didn't eat cats quite so often, but it was certainly possible and, crucially, foxes couldn't be blamed for their natural behaviour. Even if they'd only snacked on the cat just a little bit. Even if they'd left the cat an a strangely outstretched position, almost like it was on display. Even if the insides of the cat that were now outside the cat had exited through a wound that looked just a bit neater than Luke would have imagined a fox could make, if he'd ever given it any thought. Natural behaviour, predators and prey. Instinct, nothing more. Definitely not intent, no matter what it looked like.

It was a week before he went back to his den behind the rhubarb. Dad had cleared the bodies away at once, of course - Luke's squirrel to the dustbin and Mister Tiggles back to number 24 wrapped in a towel that had once been grey but quickly stained to rusty brown - but their ghosts had haunted the garden and Luke had stayed indoors.

Four whole days had passed - which is like a hundred years when it's the summer holidays and you're six - and had eased the horror into something less visceral. But then it had rained, and Luke had had a sniffle even though it was summer, and Mum had said "your chest, Luke" in that voice that made him feel more embarrassed and squirmy than cared about, and he'd been stuck inside with his inhaler until the weather had got its act together. And that had taken the rest of the week.

By the time he got back out there, thoroughly sick of his bedroom and his sister and her annoying friends, there were toadstools growing where his squirrel had died. He kicked at them angrily, thoughtlessly, splintering them into pieces. If his squirrel had to die here then this stupid fungus could, too.

When he emerged the sunlight had dimmed; nowhere near dusk, given the time of year, but giving enough length to the shadows to signal the closing hours of the day. His feet took him to the place where the cat had lain and there the toadstools were much neater. Forming a circle precisely where the animal's body had been, they looked almost... intentional.

"Good evening."

He startled so hard he fell backwards over his feet, glaring up from the mud into... empty air.

"Oh. I'm sorry I startled you."

The voice came from his left this time and he redirected his glare, expecting one of Dinah's coterie, but there was nothing there. Until, a little exasperated now, he heard "down here."

She was slight and elfin and all of a foot tall. Miniature freckles sprinkled her nose and aubern ringlets tumbled to her shoulders and she was clad in a dress the colour of mint ice cream that Luke would have called diaphonous if he'd known the word. Instead, he said, "Uh."

"My name is Clarabelle." He hadn't asked, which suddenly struck him as appallingly rude, and he scrambled up onto his knees and wiped his muddy hands hurriedly on his shorts.

"Luke. I'm Luke." Her eyes twinkled like stars and her smile looked like sunshine and bad decisions and Luke grinned back at her so wide he thought his face might break. "Will you be my friend?"

xxx

The rest of that summer is a blur. Luke spins enough tales to fill a dozen pages of the notebook alongside the recording that's still running between them, but only half his mind is on his words.

Clarabelle. She was a figment of his imagination, of course; an elastoplast to cover the hurt of the cat's brutal evisceration, her name lifted straight from Thomas the Tank Engine. But he couldn't get enough of her company, found himself addicted to the stories she conjoured and the games she invented and the comfort of a presence which was much too large for her body.

He spent every remaining day of the holidays in the garden with her and his sniffles vanished and his chest got stronger and even his eczema retreated back to two tiny spots on his inner elbows. The fresh air, his parents had said, delighted. And it had been his turn to shoo his sister away, his turn to make plans he didn't care to share, and she'd sulked and retreated and Clarabelle had woven magic through the summer days.

"You had quite the imagination!" the girl - he really should have asked her name, it's far too late now - says, harsh and bright against the background of his memories.

"Apparently so." His smile is too forced, and he sees a faint confusion in her eyes, and smooths his face out before it can take root. Still, the words have needled him and suddenly there are more memories spilling from his lips. "It's weird, though. I learned so much that summer. About nature, you know? Identifying plants and animals." Disection and the structure of a rabbit's heart. "How to forrage and what's safe to eat." And what will kill in a large enough dose but, if used sparingly, merely give your sister a tummy ache on the day of her best friend's birthday party. "How to predict the weather." Which direction to face, and which words to use, and what offering to leave, for a chance to influence it. "And, all of it holds water. Stuff I've looked up in books since, it's all like I remember it. Like I remember the fairy telling me."

"Oh!" To his surprise the girl beams at him, suddenly delighted. "Were you a big reader as a child? It's fascinating, the way we weave things into our memories, or things we learn later we convince ourselves we knew as children. I would swear up and down that I could read at the age of three, but my Mum can show you my reading records all through primary school and I was hopeless!" She sounds stragely proud of that, for reasons he can't parse. "Could barely read a sentence til I was seven, but that's what memories do!"

"I've never really thought about it," he lies. As if he didn't pour over boxes of books when they cleared his parents' house, seeking the source of the knowledge rooted in his bones and coming up empty.

"Well, thank you for your time, Mr Greybriar." He blinks, summarily dismissed, and is half out of the chair when she says, "Oh! Just one thing."

"Mm?"

"You said fairies at the start. Plural. But you only told me about one." Her smile is inviting but barely this side of patronising. "Did she have friends?"

"Oh." He stops, suddenly wrong-footed, reaches for words that won't come. Her brow furrows and his growing distress must be visible on his face. "I guess I meant I found a fairy." A little laugh in his voice and she smiles, but it's brittle, confused. The one he returns is equally strained and he takes his leave too quickly.

Did she have friends? He shivers. Somehow those memories come less easily, and he is in no hurry to chase them.

xxx

"Dinah Greybriar." The young lady - Natasha, she said her name was - cocks her head as she repeats Dinah's introduction. "I think I met your, um..."

Dinah waits, lazy as a python, as she hears son and grandson war on Natasha's tongue. A second after the silence has stretched to an uncomfortable length she says, "Twin." The woman's too-slowly hidden shock is gratifying. "Luke, yes? He said he would be here."

"I... yes." She clears her throat, flips between pages in the notebook. "He... had a lot to say." Natasha blinks away her discomfort with visible effort and Dinah nods slowly.

"He told you about the fairies."

"Yes." She smiles, quick and condescending. "Quite an imagination. Although, he said just one fairy."

"Yes. Yes, he would." There's no good reason for her to be here. This little girl with her notebook and her rainbow gel pens can't do anything for Dinah. No one can. But thirty four years that weighs like twice that - like exactly twice that - is long enough for the impulse to set the record straight to become a burning need. "The others dealt with me, you see."

xxx

Dinah followed him, in the end. Three days of being brushed off by her little - not younger, but definitely little - brother and she'd had enough. And she stopped short of the rhubarb and boggled at the adult in their garden. A tall, elegant woman with a pinched face and too-white skin and, in the instant that she looked beyond Luke and straight at Dinah, eyes as sharp and cold as flint and half as friendly. And then she'd vanished, and in her place was a tiny creature with auburn curls and sparkling green eyes and an aura so dangerous that Dinah's knees had started to wobble.

She'd lurched forwards, Luke's name on her lips, and found herself frozen in place. No, not frozen, but pinned by hands that felt like ice and her voice muted by something she couldn't identify. "You did not see that." The words appeared in her brain fully formed. "You will come with us."

They held court under the rhubarb. In later years Dinah couldn't explain why that was anything other than comical, but the terror of the moment lingered alongside the recollection of a den beneath wide green leaves that shifted and overlapped with a huge stone hall and a vast emerald ceiling.

"You did not see."

Dinah was six. Dinah was six, and shaking, and she wanted her mum. But lies were bad and the... man? (Man seemed closer than woman, with androgynous not yet in Dinah's vocabulary, but the ice cold impression of razor sharp, breathtaking beauty and soul chilling cruelty made more of an impression than anything so mundane as gender let alone any physical feature.) The man was lying.

"Yes I did."

She shivered, unsure where the wintry breeze had come frm on a balmy summer's day, but more words placed themselves in her head. "You did not see. The trade is legitimate. You have no power here."

"Wait!" The rhubarb shimmered, suddenly more vegetable than cathedral, and Dinah spun round and found herself alone. But... Luke. Her little brother. "What trade?" A heartbeat. No response. Desperation bubbling up, pure instinct overwhelming common sense. "I want to trade!"

xxx

"You really believe this." Natasha looks so far out of her depth it's almost entertaining, but Dinah just raises an eyebrow.

"I am forty years old. So is Luke. Tell me, do I look it?"

"I..." Politeness quite obviously forbids the young woman from answering truthfully, but her face burns with the conspicuousness of the evasion. "I've never been good at guessing ages."

"They would take his youth. Just a trickle, and in turn they'd cure all the... look. He was a sickly kid. You wouldn't know it now. But I remember him blue-faced in Mum's arms and Dad crying on the phone for the ambulance and something like that... it does something to you. They'd cure all that. The asthma, the eczema, the allergies, the... we never even knew what it was that made him such a weedy little specimen. All of it. But they'd take his youth, a bit at a time, just like the illnesses did. And it wasn't fair."

"Did he know?"

Dinah shrugs. "He said the words. Enough to satisfy the laws of Faerie. But what's that, when you're six? 'I can make you better, but you'd get old a bit faster?' You'd just think it was a game. And older is a problem for adults, and at six that's a lifetime away."

Natasha nods slowly, swallows. "What did you do?"

"What do you think I did?"

"I..." She shakes her head. "It's just a story," she says, almost pleadingly.

"Of course." Dinah levers herself out of the chair, her arthritic joints protesting. "If you say so."

She's reached the door before Natasha blurts, "You made them a better offer."

Dinah stops but doesn't look back. "And tell me, sweetheart. Was it worth it?"