The faerie-hunter, home from the hill

I have a copy of Cloud & Ashes. I got it tonight at nineweaving's reading at the Harvard Book Store.

It has a little sketch of Grevil on the frontispiece, with his masterwork Reliquiae Nebulosae—Remains of Cloud—in hand.

You will not know this character if you have not read the novel. I encountered him first in drafts and fragments four years ago in November, a small-gentry scholar with badly kept secrets: a neater refraction of Tom o Cloud by his faded hair and his distraction, but like anything well-loved, he turned flesh from sticks and leaves as the story branched around him; and he was very dear to me.

Here he is.



Turning to the window, he looked out. "'Tis a history," he said, "of Cloud its ancientry, high Cloud. There are remnants of it, that in custom and in vulgar memory, the common tongue, yet live." Still his back to her, his arm raised to the windowframe, his brow to the glass. "A kind of monument."

"A book?" He turned round at her voice. Her face now one astonishment. "You've made a book?" As if he'd said, I wrote this tree.

Pink to the ears now. "Pieces of one. That is, 'tis matter for a book . . ." He gestured at the table, helplessly. ". . . but in a sort dispersed."



She wrote that tree.