One autumn evening Oswin and Elowen climbed to the hill above the forest. Below them the trees had turned the colour of fire, and beyond them the human village glowed with little yellow windows. They had met there many times before, but that evening Elowen was unusually quiet.
“What troubles you?” Oswin asked.
The wind stopped.
Elowen pulled her hand from his.
“Oswin.”
The Fairy Queen appeared from between two trees.
She was tall, dressed in moth wings and moonlight. Her crown was made from the antlers of a white deer.
“You have made a forbidden promise to my daughter,” she said.
Elowen whispered, “Please.”
But her mother only raised one finger and touched it to Oswin’s forehead.
Oswin fell.
When he woke, he remembered his home.
He remembered the village, the mill, the church, the lamb he had once lost in the forest.
He remembered everything.
Except Elowen.
She found him the following morning beside the millpond.
Oswin was mending a broken fence.
“Oswin,” she said softly.
He looked up.
There was no recognition in his face.
She had imagined anger. Fear. Disgust.
She had not imagined politeness.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Do you know me?”
He studied her.
“I am sorry.”
“You once knew me.”
“Did I?”
“Yes.”
He frowned.
“You loved me.”
Elowen wiped her eyes quickly.
Oswin lowered his hammer.
But then he said gently, “I’m sorry, but I think I would remember that.”
Later, when the sun had set, Elowen went to the Fairy Queen.
She did not kneel.
“Give him back to me.”
“No.”
“You stole me from his memory.”
The Queen opened her hand.
Upon her palm lay three grains of golden dust.
“What is this?”
The Queen blew softly across her palm. The grains trembled slightly.
“Each grain will restore one memory.”
Elowen stared at them.
“One memory?”
“One moment. No more.”
“I have hundreds.”
“Then choose three.”
“That is impossible.”
The Queen said nothing.
Elowen took the grains.
For three nights she wandered through the forest.
Which memories could make a man remember love?
Their first meeting?
Their first kiss?
The evening he made his promise?
She feared choosing wrongly.
Perhaps she should give him the happiest moments.
Perhaps the most beautiful.
Perhaps the most painful.
On the fourth night she went to Oswin.
He was sitting outside his cottage, peeling an apple.
“You again,” he said.
“Yes.”
He did not sound displeased.
Elowen sat beside him.
“I have something to show you.”
She placed the first grain of fairy dust upon her fingertip.
“What is that?”
“A memory.”
Before he could answer, she touched it to his brow.
The world flashed gold.
Oswin remembered a hawthorn tree.
He saw himself younger, muddy from the forest path.
He saw Elowen sitting among the roots, healing a wounded sparrow.
The bird opened its wings and flew from her hands.
Then she felt his gaze upon her.
She looked up.
Their eyes met.
And in the next instant there was nothing beneath the hawthorn but fallen blossom.
The vision vanished.
Oswin gasped.
He looked at Elowen.
“That was you.”
“Yes.”
He touched his forehead.
“I remember.”
Hope leapt inside her.
“Do you remember loving me?”
His face changed.
“No.”
The hope died.
Elowen kept the second grain for seven days.
She considered their first kiss.
It had happened during a storm.
They had hidden beneath an oak while rain crashed through the branches.
Then lightning struck the hilltop.
Oswin kissed her.
For the rest of her life she would remember the taste of rain.
Surely that memory would restore him.
But on the seventh evening, as she approached his cottage, she saw Oswin standing beneath an apple tree with his little sister.
The girl was crying.
Oswin knelt and tied the ribbon on her shoe.
“You will fall if you run with it loose,” he said.
“I don’t care.”
“You will when you scrape your knees.”
The girl sniffed, but let him tie it.
Elowen stopped.
And suddenly she knew what the second memory must be.
Not the kiss.
Not the storm.
Something smaller.
She waited until Oswin was alone.
Then she used the second grain.
He remembered winter.
A brutal winter.
Snow had buried the roads. The river had frozen. Food was scarce.
Elowen had brought him a silver apple from the orchards.
“Eat,” she had said to him. “You have had nothing.”
Oswin broke the apple in half.
One half for her.
One half for him.
It was not enough for either.
They ate it anyway.
The memory faded.
Oswin stared at the ground.
“I remember being hungry.”
“Yes.”
“And you gave me what you had.”
“We gave it to each other.”
Oswin reached towards her hand.
Then stopped.
“I still do not remember loving you.”
“I know.”
“I am sorry.”
One grain remained.
Elowen carried it for a month.
Then two.
Winter came.
Oswin began to seek her out.
Not because he remembered.
Because he liked her.
They walked together.
He asked her questions he had asked years before.
Why do fairy rings grow?
Where do swallows go in winter?
Can stars hear us?
She gave him different answers this time.
Sometimes he made her laugh in exactly the way he once had.
Sometimes he said something entirely new.
And Elowen began to understand that remembering a person was not the same as knowing them.
One evening he said, “Perhaps you should use the last memory.”
“I am afraid.”
“Of what?”
“That it will not be enough.”
She had always thought the answer would be their first night together.
Or the first time he said her name as though it were something precious.
But suddenly she remembered another day.
A quiet day.
A day on which nothing had happened at all.
She brought Oswin to the hill where he had once promised to love her until the end of time.
“This place feels familiar,” he said.
She held the last grain of fairy dust.
He watched it glitter upon her finger.
“Is this the moment when I told you I loved you?”
“No.”
“Our first kiss?”
“No.”
“What, then?”
“The moment I knew.”
Elowen touched the dust to his forehead.
It was summer.
Oswin was asleep beneath the hawthorn.
Nothing extraordinary was happening.
There were no kisses.
No promises.
No moonlight.
Elowen sat beside him.
A beetle crawled across his sleeve.
She moved it carefully onto a leaf.
Oswin slept.
She looked at his face.
And suddenly, without reason, without magic, without anyone speaking, she understood that the world contained one particular soul whose existence had become the centre of her own happiness.
She had not wanted anything from him.
She had not asked him to stay.
She had simply looked at him sleeping beneath a tree and thought:
There you are.
The memory ended.
Elowen waited.
But he shook his head.
“I am sorry.”
Her last hope broke.
“You still do not remember.”
“No.”
She turned away.
“Elowen.”
She stopped.
He took her hand.
“I do not remember loving you.”
She looked back at him.
“But I remember being loved.”
The forest became very quiet.
Elowen stared at him.
“I cannot give you your old love,” she whispered.
Oswin lifted her hand and kissed her fingers.
“Then perhaps,” he said, “we should not try to find it.”
“What should we do instead?”
“We begin again.”
Oswin did not remember the moments with the girl beneath the hawthorn, or the rain upon their first kiss, or the promise that had once cost him everything.
But the hawthorn remembered.
The stream remembered.
The birds remembered.
And somewhere in the deep earth, three tiny grains of golden dust remembered.
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