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She could not remember the quarrel that had brought her the boy. A real or perceived dalliance or slight, a transgression on her part or her husband's-who knew? They had been quarrelling for as long as they had been in love. She forgot the quarrels as soon as they were resolved, but the gifts her husband brought her to reconcile-even when she was at fault-she never forgot. The boy had been one of those gifts, brought home to the hill, stolen from his crib in the dark of the night and presented to her by dawn. "That is not sufficient to your crime against me," she remembered saying, and remembered as well that she barely paid the child any mind during her restless sleep, except to push it away from her when it rolled too close. Oberon had rubbed poppies on its eyes to quiet its crying, so it was still sleeping soundly when she woke. For a while she lay on her back, watching the stars come out upon the ceiling of her grotto, listening to the little snores. Oberon was snoring more magnificently. She turned on her side to better look at it, and noticed for the first time how comely it was, how round and smooth were its face and shoulders and belly, how lustrous was its hair. It made a troubled face as it slept. She put her hand out to touch it, just very lightly. Right away it sighed and lost the troubled look, but then it gave a moan. She draped her hand over its shoulder, and when it did not quiet she rolled it closer to her. It stopped moaning only when she held it in her arms, and put her nose in its hair, and breathed in its scent-poppies and milk and warm earth. Oberon had woken, and was looking at her and smiling, propped on one elbow with a hand against his ear, the other lost under the sheets, but she could hear that he was scratching himself. "Do you like it?" he asked. "I am indifferent to it," she said, holding the boy closer, and squeezing him, and putting her face in his neck. "This place is so ugly," Titania said. "Can anything be done about that?" She was talking to the oncology social worker, one of a stream of visiting strangers who came to the room, and a woman who had described herself as a person to whom one might address problems or questions that no one else could solve or answer. "Nonmedical things," she had said. "You know-everything else!" "But you've made the room just lovely," the woman said. Her name was Alice or Alexandra or Antonia. Titania had a hard time keeping track of all the mortal names, except for Beadle and Blork, but those were distinctive names, and actually rather faerielike. Alice gestured expansively around the room, not seeing what was actually there. She saw paper stars hanging from the ceiling, and cards and posters on the wall, and a homey bedspread upon the mattress, but faeries had come to carpet the room with grass, to pave the walls with stone and set them with jewels, and to blow a cover of clouds to hide the horrible suspended ceiling. And the bedspread was no ordinary blanket but the boy's own dear Beastie, a flat headless creature of soft fur that loved him like a dog and tried to follow him out of the room whenever they took him away for some new test or procedure.
