i.

No one knew who picked the right ones first, but the hobbits had their own sayings to sort one mushroom from another. It served them well now and had served them well for as long as they remembered, and that was good enough for them.

First, there were poisonous ones that had grown from the rotted flesh of evil things long ago, bloated red or shaped like goblin’s ears or wolves’ toes. There were the ones that were pure white and yet more difficult to find than all others, which had been carried in from the darkest caverns of the dwarves in their carven mountain halls and left to cluster deep in the shadows. Then there were the delicate little pointed-capped ones that turned even the most sensible hobbit into an utter fool, which the elves had planted in their footprints at midnight and filled with a lot of nonsense, so as to share their dreams with other folk.

And there were the brown ones, round or crinkled or knobbly, which were the best for eating, fragrant and chewy and delicious with all manner of little variations in flavor, so remarkable that it was said that in some long-ago time past the edges of memory, they had brought the little folk the favor of a king. All hobbits craved these mushrooms, but the other kinds were — well. They made for a mighty poor second breakfast, so why bother?

ii.

It was still raining lightly and the night was near pitch black, but Belladonna knew that the clouds would be drifting off into the east soon enough. She had pan and tinder and tools and food, and two lanterns, and she knew the place she was going. It had rained heavily for only a few hours this evening after the last dry spell, and she was going to see all the mushrooms come out.

Left and right, and around the hung-over oak and between the dense ash. It was barely drizzling now, and the air was warm and heavy. Into the well-known clearing she came, and on to where the path turned downwards, between close dark trees. There she stopped for a moment –

(“Don’t be a fool now, I wouldn’t put it past old Gerontius to serve them fairy-caps to company if they annoyed him enough, but d’you really think that family needs an excuse to be crazy?”)

— and held her arms in to avoid getting soaked by the inward-hanging leaves on both sides as she plunged into the darkness down and curving leftwards until it widened, suddenly. Belladonna stepped in, lantern high and cutting swathes of transparent light through the haze and turning all the dripping wet green into curtains encrusted with sparkling amber. A dell like a bowl with the biggest and oldest trees curling around it, with branches and roots like fingers on a pair of closed hands. It was darker here than anywhere before, but on one side it opened up to a grassy ridge overhanging the farmland, and the mountains could be seen in the west. It was long after midnight now, and the air was still. Belladonna lowered her lantern in a long slow arc and peered at the ground, searching. Once, and then again –

There were mushrooms, brown ones spread out in rings and spirals all around, waiting for hobbits to pick the tastiest ones. There were a couple of poisonous ones too, gleaming dark red with white spots. There were porcelain-white dwarf mushrooms in close huddles retreating into the darkest hollows of the outskirts of the dell, still collapsed and shrunken close to the ground, and so numerous that their wet gleam in the lantern’s light made the air around them seem to glow and dispel the shadows around them. But up on a grassy bank beside an enormous elm was a row of tiny pointed pale-brown fairy-caps, tiny and drab but to her eye, as obstinate in formation as if they had stood there in old elf-footprints forever, and had brewed whatever dreams or nonsense had lived inside them forever too.

iii

She prepared carefully. A dozen large meaty brown mushrooms picked and placed in her pockets, and then the cooking fire, low and stable. Her pan she placed beside it, and a knife and a wooden spoon, a bottle of cooking oil, and thyme, rosemary, toe-sprouts and door-curls, an onion and a filled pipe. She settled on one elbow, thinking of roads and wizards and her vanished great-uncles and mountains bluer than the sky. She lit her pipe with an ember, folded her arms beneath her head, and looked up at the sky, and the stars breaking through in the west. She held up a pair of fairy-caps in her cupped hands in the firelight, and then carefully ate them.

Later, there was a slow rushing and a play of frolicking spirits in the crackling fire, and twined round the trees where the flickering red light leaped, and time slipped backwards and kicked up its heels. The stars wheeled high over Belladonna’s head, slowly yet not slowly, for the sky was as vast as the world and still more vast and yet the stars swung over all its lands in perfect time, in a single night, as steady and implacable as a wound clock. Beside her swiftly, yet she knew not swiftly, for they moved an inch yet more slowly than the stars, the glowing white mushrooms drank deep of rainwater sweeter than moonlight and grew up out of the loose black soil and raised heads strong and full with satisfied broad-brimmed caps tipping and unfurling on smooth lengthening stalks, letting down lace trains and veils of the same white and spreading them daintily wide, like a dozen brides rising from a curtsy.

She thought the ground she lay on was covered in footprints, of people who had been, those buried in the cemetery back home and those who had passed through, towards the sea or out of it, or from under one mountain to another. The air was growing brighter and she looked at the blue mountains in the distant west with their ragged plunging cleft, and thought she saw from their shape that they might have been whole once, before they were broken apart by forces stronger than the stuff of the earth. The stars wheeled fainter in their paling vault, and she thought she knew that there were no fences between the Shire and the wide world, or between the wide world and the Shire, for all the hills and water was the world, and all the world to the stars was but the palm of a cradling hand.

She sat up and stoked the fire in a snapping gust of sparks, and set on it her pan and a bit of cooking oil. On a stone she sliced onion, herbs, and the mushrooms from her pocket, thin and careful with a steady brown hand. Into the oil they went with a hiss and a crackle, and then as water burst from them at the touch of salt, a deep sizzle of morning to make the mouth water.

The fragrance of the mushrooms bloomed rich and more vividly colored than anything she had seen that night. It rippled outward and gently rolled the night back where it touched, rich and nutty and deep sharp green and stinging hot. And it carried on its edge bustling feet and a whistling kettle and distant cows and roosters, the splash of water and clang of breakfast in wrought iron and gleaming copper, the broad warm red bricks on the fresh dancing hearth, and the wide circle, bright as a new penny, of blushing sunrise through the window of her mother’s kitchen.