"The Fey of Cloudmoor" by Terry Brooks

Terry Brooks, "The Fey of Cloudmoor" IN Greg Bear and Gardner Dozois, Eds., Multiverse: Exploring Poul Anderson's Worlds (Burton, MI, 2014), pp. 185-209.

Jimmy Cullen was younger than Mistherd and Shadow-of-a-Dream in Poul Anderson's "The Queen of Air and Darkness" but is older in Terry Brooks' "The Fey of Cloudmoor" than they are in Nancy Kress's "Outmoded Things." Thus, Brooks' story is set later than Kress's, if indeed they are set in the same timeline.

In "The Fey...," Sherrinford has died but both Barbro Cullen and her son, Jimmy, now an adult, are still alive. In "The Queen...," they had lived about a century after the founding of the human colony on Roland. In "Outmoded Things," which explicitly agrees about the "...hundred years..." (p. 16) of  Rolandic settlement, a member of the second generation of colonists is old but still alive, dying just at the end of the story. However:

"Manipulation of human minds had allowed [the Rolandic natives] to create a set of beliefs and superstitions that had helped to keep the Old Folk isolated in the wilderness of their ancestral lands for centuries." (p. 196)

(The Rolandic natives are referred to as "the Old Folk.")

"What [Sherrinford] had missed seeing was the stubborn refusal of by the larger part of Arctica's inhabitants to want to challenge the old beliefs and superstitions. By now, with centuries gone, those beliefs and superstitions formed an integral part of their human makeup." (ibid.)

Brooks contradicts the two previous stories by explicitly stating first that human beings have lived on Roland for centuries and, secondly, that those centuries have made it difficult, if not impossible, to challenge their telepathically manipulated and ingrained belief system. This contradiction places Brooks' story in a different fictional timeline from the other stories despite all their overt similarities, including even characters' names and place names.

I did not expect to reach this conclusion but it is inescapable because of the difference between one century and "centuries."