The Fae have always been here. For thousands of years, we have lived alongside them, sharing our homes and our world. Once, they were as accepted a part of our lives as harvests and cider, milk pails and meadows. And yet, throughout that long co-existence, the Fae have remained essentially unknowable. For though they have infiltrated our songs and our stories, being whispered of by firesides and sung of in taverns, we know them only through fleeting glimpses, and half-remembered anecdotes. They are the dappled light on the forest floor, the flicker in the corner of your eye, the rustle on a darkened lane. They are the faces in the flowerbed, the noise behind the hearth, the tapping on the windowpane at night. Worse, they are the missing cakes and spoilt cream, the mysterious pains and sudden deaths. Private and enigmatic, faeries have always kept themselves other – part of our world yet from another dimension, part of nature yet supernatural. And because the Fae are so little understood, so little seen, they have been accorded every imaginable attribute, every size, every appearance. There are benign faeries and evil faeries, noble faeries and vulgar faeries. There are faeries who help and faeries who harm. There are solitary faeries and sociable faeries; large faeries and tiny faeries; beautiful, hideous and monstrous faeries. Indeed, perhaps the only consistent features of the faery folk are their mysteriousness and their menace. For the faeries of folklore are nothing like the faeries of modern culture. These faeries are not sweet. They are not pretty. They are not sparkles and flowers and fluttering wings. No, faeries of folklore – true faeries – are at best mischievous and at worse malevolent, liable to steal your baby or pinch you into paralysis.