Dunstan put his hand in his pocket and pulled out his kerchief. He could no longer look at the woman. He tumbled out his money onto the counter. “Take enough for this,” he said, picking a pure white snowdrop from the table.

“We do not take money at this stall.” She pushed the coins back toward him.

“No? What will you take?” For by now he was quite agitated, and his only mission was to obtain a flower for… for Daisy, Daisy Hempstock … to obtain his flower and to depart, for, truth to tell, the young lady was making him exceedingly uncomfortable.

“I could take the color of your hair,” she said, “or all of your memories before you were three years of age. I could take the hearing from your left ear—not all of it, just enough that you’d not enjoy music or appreciate the running of a river or the soughing of the wind.”

Dunstan shook his head.

“Or a kiss from you. One kiss, here on my cheek.”

“That I’ll pay with goodwill!” said Dunstan, and with that he leaned across the stall, amid the twinkling jingling of the crystal flowers, and planted a chaste kiss on her soft cheek. He smelled the scent of her then, intoxicating, magical; it filled the front of his head and his chest and his mind.

“There, now,” she said, and she passed him his snowdrop. He took it with hands that suddenly seemed to him to be huge and clumsy and not at all small and in every way perfect like the hands of the faerie girl. “And I’ll see you back here tonight, Dunstan Thorn, when the moon goes down. Come here and hoot like a little owl. Can you do that?”

He nodded, and stumbled away from her; he did not need to ask how she knew his surname; she had taken it from him along with certain other things, such as his heart, when he had kissed her.

The snowdrop chimed in his hand.

“Why, Dunstan Thorn,” said Daisy Hempstock, when he encountered her by Mr. Bromios’s tent, sitting with her family and Dunstan’s parents, eating great brown sausages and drinking porter, “whatever is the matter?”