. . .

Saul and his puppy play together in the fields.

He grows up.

He fixes the tractor. He rebinds the limbs of the great round-bellied field demon. He leaves some milk and shoes out at night for the cobblers to fix.

That’s the kind of life one gets, a svart-elf among svart-elves, in their fields and farms and caves and palaces underneath the earth.

“Mother,” he says, one day, “I think that I am working harder than I must, simply to not be bad.”

“I know,” she says.

“Why?”

“If you’re good,” she tells him. “If you’re good, if you’re good enough, then the sugar fairies will come and they will carry you away.”

“. . . oh,” Saul says.

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