Once upon a time there were twin babies born to a woodcutter and his wife. Their mother planted herbs and kept a garden, and sometimes the neighbours from their village would come to her for medicines—tinctures to help them sleep, a salve to soothe the itchy red spots that came from mistakenly touching one of a hundred different plants in the forest.
The birth of the children also brought the mother a great sadness, and she had no balms to treat it. She had heard about this sadness and had hoped to avoid it by being prepared; she and her husband covered their lintel in birch sap, buried stones from the river at every corner of their house. Before the twins came—two girls, their hair bright like fire and their smiles just as holy—the mother made sure to go for daily walks along the river.
“The water will carry you,” the river said. “Come back to the water every day and let your sadness float away on the waves.”
After the girls were born, the mother went to the river, ready to give her sadness away, and instead fought the urge to throw her daughters into the water. She knew the girls belonged to her but somehow did not feel it. They were demanding and greedy, all primal emotions. Try as she might, she couldn’t see herself in their tiny faces. Everything about them seemed alien, strange.
The river, to her surprise, told her that this was normal. She had given birth to changelings. When the mother consulted the old river sprite who lived beneath the waterfall, the sprite said much the same.
“You have been given children by the fairies,” the sprite said. “See how pale they are? See how they scream when you yourself have always been so gentle? These children might look like you, but they are not of you. This is why you don’t feel like yourself. These children belong with the fairies, and the fairies will come to take them soon enough.”
“But if I have changeling children, where are the baby girls who belong to me?”
“The mountain fairies stole them,” the river sprite told her. “You must ask the mountain fairies to bring your children back. Take these changelings into the forest and leave them on the forest floor. Turn in three circles and say Give me my children. If the fairies do not appear, take the children home and try it again the next morning.”
The woman did this, but her babies did not appear, and so she took her changeling children home and put them to bed as if they were her own. The next day, she did it all again, to no avail. When she did it for the third time, she cried aloud into the forest air and begged the fairies to listen.
“I miss my babies!” she said. “I will not be whole unless you give them back to me.”
The forest was silent; the forest said nothing.
In frustration and despair, the woman turned from the two babies on the ground and left the forest. When she had gone beyond the trees, three mountain fairies—one red-haired, one brown-haired, one with hair black as night—crept out from the trees and reached out for the babies.
“Come with us,” they said. “We’ve been waiting for you. We’ll give you halls full of golden toys and warm fires to lay by, and so many good things to eat.”
The babies were cold and defeated by the rumbling of their stomachs. They held out their hands and the fairies scooped them away.
When the mother suffered deep regret and came back to find them, it was as if the twins had never been.