The Watchtower

English so well?”
    “Ah, my friends the lumignon, recognizing my hunger for knowledge, have brought me books and information over the years. That’s how I learned about you. The fey community has been all abuzz about the arrival of the Watchtower in Paris.”
    “The fey community? You mean there are more of them?” Although I’d met half a dozen fairies in New York, I hadn’t thought of them as a community exactly. They had seemed more like a handful of scattered exiles who had all managed to disappear without a trace once they were done with me. It hadn’t occurred to me that there might be a larger population here in Paris.
    “Oh my, yes! The Parisian fey community is one of the largest and oldest in the world. It is composed of three main classes…”
    The minute he began, I knew I’d made a mistake. He was a botanist, after all, trained to classify and catalog. I could be here all night listening to a disquisition on fairy phyla while what I really wanted to know was when Will had been sighted in Paris and how long ago he had left. I felt bad interrupting him, though. As he had said, he didn’t get many visitors, and I figured it wouldn’t hurt to know a little more about the local fairy population. They might be able to lead me to Will. So I settled onto my stool to listen.
    “The arboreal fey, or les fées des bois, are considered by most experts to be the original indigenous species,” he was saying. “They are so old that they don’t remember themselves when they first came into existence, although one I’ve spoken to remembers saber-tooth tigers…” Jean Robin spent the next ten minutes discussing the difficulty of dating the arboreal fey, their habitats—parks, mostly—and demeanor. “They are very shy and reclusive. They often attach themselves to a particular tree, like this one. My informants tell me that there are still substantial nests in the Jardin des Plantes, the Luxembourg Gardens, the Bois de Boulogne, and the Parc Monceau. The largest population in the Île-de-France is in Fontainebleau. They are, in general, a merry and simple people, fond of French home cooking—they adore crêpes!—singing and dancing—they invented the cancan.
    “Then there are the light fairies—or les fées des lumières …” He went on to describe various types of light fairy, including the lumignon, who derived substance from the light and color in the stained-glass windows of the great cathedrals: Notre Dame, Sainte-Chapelle, Saint-Eustache, Sacré-Coeur, Saint-Séverin…” I lost track of all the churches where the light fairies roosted. “Most experts agree,” Jean Robin concluded, “that the lumignon evolved from a species of flower fairy and that they first appeared in Paris with the advent of the great Gothic cathedrals, but whether they were attracted to the area because of the windows or if they originally inspired the creation of the first stained-glass windows, there continues to be dispute—”
    Jean Robin was interrupted by a violet-colored fairy loudly chattering in his ear.
    “Yes, yes,” he said, his gnarled features creasing with merriment, “I’ll tell her that. My friend has reminded me that there’s a long tradition amongst the lumignon that Abbot Suger was introduced by Eleanor of Aquitaine to a lumignon who inspired him to create the windows of Saint-Denis.”
    I recalled what Oberon, the King of Fairies, had told me about the relationship between mortals and fey: “The humans we touch bloom in our company. They do their best work while we drink of their dreams.” Thinking of the great flowering of Gothic stained-glass windows under the direction of Abbot Suger, it wasn’t hard to imagine that he’d been touched by the fey.
    “And then there are the fées de la mer, ” Jean Robin said in a graver tone. The violet lumignon on his shoulder startled at the name and flew into the air. All the light fairies that had been roosting on top of Jean Robin took wing, like a flock of finches at the passing of a hawk’s shadow.
    “Sea fairies? What would they be doing in Paris?” I asked.
    “They aren’t native to the region. In fact, the tree and light fairies refer to them, somewhat disparagingly, as ‘the boat people.’ They came down from the sea on the Seine, exiles from a great cataclysm. Some say it was the drowning of the island of Ys.”
    The name Ys stirred an old memory. My mother had told me a story once of a fabled kingdom off the coast of