It was March in Faerie, and where bluebells should have shaded sunlit ponds and rosebuds filled the forest with delicate perfume, a heavy whiteness covered the land.

In a clearing ringed by prickly blackthorn bushes and leafless rowan trees, the fairy folk thronged, summoned by the King of Faerie himself, Lord Oberon. Soap bubble wings jostled for space with dagger claws dripping with venom. High sidhe, low sidhe, boggles, and goblins milled to and fro, dressed in their court finery: butterfly brocade tunics, cloth-of-gold leggings, cobweb gowns, and the filmy, intangible stuff of dreams.

Cosith shivered in his thick fur coat, his paws numb from slogging through the snow between his warm burrow and Oberon’s court. He squeezed in between a trembling pixie and a cranky leprechaun.

“Wretched no-rank hob!” the leprechaun said. “There’s not room enough for you.”

“Nonsense,” Cosith said. “Scoot over or I’ll bite.” And he bared his white teeth with their cat-fangs in front and razor edges in back.

Cowed but grumbling, the leprechaun gave way.

“At least put down your tail,” the pixie squeaked.

Cosith squinted over his shoulder. His bushy tail was fanned straight up over his back--the long hairs fluffed out like the branches of an evergreen tree. It blocked the pixie from view except for one tiny foot.

“Sorry,” Cosith said. “Tail does as it will. Like pixie hair that flies in your eyes in the wind.” He pawed at the winding, gossamer strands that had drifted in an itchy fashion over his nose.

The pixie pushed her errant locks away. “It’s not at all the same thing.”

“’Tis to me. But if you like, you can sit on my back--since my back is in front of my tail, if you catch my meaning. I’m also soft, so I’ve heard.” He bowed his nose modestly.

Mollified, the pixie clambered up and settled into the thick ruff of his fur. “Oh, you are soft! And warm.”

“Not warm enough,” he muttered. But he found he quite liked being used as a couch by the pixie. She weighed less than a sprig of thistledown, and she smelled of violets in the dawn before they opened their faces to the sky. Although her flaxen hair did have a tendency of billowing about his whiskers in a most distracting fashion.

Just then, King Oberon stepped into the clearing. He wore a mantle of dove-white feathers that flowed down his back and over the drifts of snow at his bare feet. Two black mice clasped the downy fringes at the King’s shoulder, their shining eyes gleaming like jewels.

Oberon raised his milk-white arms. Mistress Silence spread her cloak over the assemblage.

“All ye faeries hear me!” Oberon cried. “My queen, the Lady of the Forest, is lost. These four and ten days I have searched for her and found not a sigh of her shadow or a spangle from her dress. She is vanished and until she returns, there will be no spring.”

No spring? Cosith stamped his paws in dismay.

The King was not finished. “Mourn for her, my fairies,” he said. “Let your laments guide her back to us!” A single tear, round and white as a pearl, rolled down Oberon’s face. It fell to the ground with a peal like a silver bell. More precious than gold, more delicate than a whisper was the tear of the King of Faerie. It was enough to move all the gathered fey to sniffle and wail piteously.

Cosith bawled. Huge, muddy tears beaded under his round eyes. They rolled down his nose and dripped off his whiskers, forming a lengthening chain of icicles.

The pixie wept as well. A damp patch on Cosith’s back attested to that.

But his tail twitched and thrashed in a disorderly manner, not at all in keeping with the solemnity of the occasion. No matter how he tried, he could not get it to still. Cosith grew so embarrassed at its antics, he no longer felt like crying. He brushed the sprinkling of ice from his whiskers with one paw, and shook himself. The pixie slid off and fell into a drift of snow as high as his chin.

“I beg your pardon!” He plunged his nose into the snow, intending to dig her out. But she did not answer him. She sobbed and sobbed as though her tiny, sugar spun heart would break. As she cried, her tears froze and encased her in a spreading, crystalline prison.

It alarmed Cosith; his tail sprang straight up. “You must stop crying, Pixie!”

But she didn’t. A moment later, she was enveloped in a cage of her own tears. Within, her motionless face continued to leak slushy tears.

“King Oberon, make her stop crying,” Cosith cried. And then he realized everyone in the clearing, high fey and low, King and subjects alike, were caught too, trapped in their own iced tears.

Cosith jostled the clear cells, jogging from pixie to leprechaun to goblin, but even with his great front claws, so wonderful at digging up mushrooms and roots, he could not so much as scuff the prison walls.

“They need to be thawed.” Cosith frowned. Thinking was not his knack. “I must find the Lady,” he decided. “Spring’s warmth will melt them free.” But where to look for her?

Cosith lifted his nose. He trusted his nose. Though his eyes often mislaid him, as he was quite nearsighted, and his brain often baffled him, he could depend on his nose. It was the best nose in all of Faerie. It could find a juicy caterpillar buried beneath an avalanche of autumn leaves, and the last, ripe strawberry nestled in a tangle of bushes.

He squinched shut his eyes, sat in the snow, and sniffed. The smell of crisp, clean whiteness--winter’s breath--was everywhere: frozen sap within oak trees, brittle twigs of slumbering daisies and snapdragons, and the mellow tang of hard earth like the taste of white metal on his tongue.

But these were not the way to the Lady.

He let his nose sift the air past where Father Winter had set up its fortress walls and laid battlements fringed with rime.

And there, at last, a tendril of sweetness like the fragrance of green growing things on the verge of blossoming. It was fleeting and faint, but true.

Cosith sprinted away, following his nose. The scent was playful. It teased him, disappearing completely, and then re-emerging, stronger than before. It led him a chilly romp over hill and under dale, across frozen streams, and over hard-packed snow. His legs, short and stout, were not intended for such long journeys. His dash switched to a shuffling lope, and then to a weary trundle. His paws became frozen lumps, and he grew sleepy. He would have stopped except his tail seemed to mock his exhaustion with its upright bearing and unflagging vigor.

As long as his tail could stand, he decided, so could he!

Cosith stumbled into a clearing.

The trees had sidestepped a flat area, bordered by a circlet of wild mushrooms jutting up through a crust of ice. The snow lay smooth within this ring, free of woodland paw prints or winter debris. Within the circle, the air was saturated with the rich, warm aroma of springtime: fragrant poppies in bloom, a willow tree bent over a dappled stream, honeycombs dripping with golden treasure.

Surely this was spring, straining to break free. But where was the Lady of the Forest?

Cosith sniffed. According to his nose, she should be here. Or perhaps, his nose suggested, under here. As his powerful claws bit into the snow, it occurred to him that King Oberon was not a digging, sniffing sort of fairy.

Cosith hurled pawfuls of the crackling whiteness away with each scoop. He struck a smooth surface, hard as diamonds: an ice wall. But no, not a wall, but a box, for something was inside it.

Within, a glow, like an endless summer afternoon, surrounded a beautiful fairy with golden-wheat hair and cornflower eyes. A pair of iridescent wings draped her body in a dress of seamless moonlight. It was she, the Lady of the Forest. She was crying, and her tears, like Oberon’s and the other faeries’, had trapped her.

“My Lady,” he called. “Please don’t cry.”

She did not hear him.

Perhaps she couldn’t see him in the dark, buried by all the snow. So Cosith busied himself with clearing a space, shoveling and pushing until she stood free in her iced chrysalis.

He waved his paws in the air. “Stop crying, my Lady.”

She saw him, he was certain. But she continued to weep.

“We have to get you back to King Oberon’s court so there will be spring again!”

The ice sparkled in the sun.

He tried to breach the prison of tears with his claws, but it was unyielding.

Cosith had seen icicles shatter when they fell from the branchy fingertips of trees, so he put his forepaws against the casement and pushed. It didn’t budge. He backed to the borders of the mushroom ring. Once, while following the wing trails of a dragonfly, he’d bounded headfirst into an oak tree. Oh the acorns that had fallen! But oh, the headache he’d had for days after. So he knew that knocking into the fortress of ice, which was surely harder than an oak tree, would also make his poor head ache. But there was no other way to tip it.

He stomped his paws into the hard earth. Behind him, his unruly tail fluffed straight up. Easy for it to be excited; it wouldn’t be the end that got knocked silly.

Cosith squeezed shut his eyes, the better to bolster his own courage. He charged forward, a cannonball of furry determination.

Around him, the sound of raindrops on still water pealed in his ears. Two arms caught him as he barreled forward. Instead of the anticipated thump, he felt as though he were being showered by sunbeams.

He opened his eyes.

The Lady of the Forest held him, laughing merrily, freed from her prison.

“Small, silly hob with such a blustering tail. What under the Faerie sky are you doing?”

Cosith was bashful. “You were lost, my Lady. I found you, but you were crying--”

The Lady frowned, like a gray cloud marring the peerless clarity of a sunny afternoon. “I remember now. I was lost. And I was so terribly sad.”

She swung Cosith in her arms so the wind hummed in his ears. “Then you found me.”

“Except--“ gasped Cosith, for he was quite unused to be spun about in the air. “Except we have to get you back to Oberon’s court.”

“Lead the way. I will follow your tail.” The Lady set him back on his paws, although he was so dizzy he wobbled more than walked.

But his nose didn’t wobble. It never did. It guided them both, unerringly, all the way back to Faerie.

As soon as the Lady saw the frozen figures that dotted the clearing, she laughed at such fuss, all on account of her. And everywhere the ice prisons shattered and fell away.

King Oberon, when he emerged, demanded to know how Cosith had succeeded where the King of Faerie himself had failed.

“It was my tail,” Cosith said. “It spurred me on when I would have faltered. And it was my tail that made the Lady laugh.”

Oberon grinned to hear such humility and announced: “From this time on, you will no longer be a rankless hob, but a taylup. And it will be your duty, yours and your kinfolk, to herald spring into Faerie.”

Cosith bowed his nose to the ground, speechless at the honor.

And forever after, spring arrived in Faerie on the day when the taylups, with their bushy tails straight up behind them, escort the Lord and Lady of the Forest to their thrones, and not a moment earlier.

The End

Eugie Foster is an active member of the SFWA and winner of the Phobos Award. Her publication credits include stories in Realms of Fantasy, The Third Alternative, and the anthology Hitting the Skids in Pixeltown, edited by Orson Scott Card. Her works for young readers have appeared in Cricket and Cicada, and she has many more stories forthcoming in Cricket. Additionally, she has an MA in Developmental Psychology and co-authored a textbook resource on Child Development, published by Allyn and Bacon. Visit her online at www.eugiefoster.com.

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