“I cannot wait to see them,” Eve said. “Many were the nights we heard their singing in the Garden, but the wall stood between us.”

“All part of the pattern,” Adam said. “El did not wish us to know the wonders of Spring’s creations, for fear that we would spurn him and wander freely about the Land.”

A wolf emerged into the circle of faint white light cast on the ground by Mab, cringing at first but gathering courage as Adam squatted down on his haunches and beckoned it forward. Having satisfied itself that Mab could do it no harm, it sprang forward and sank its fangs into Adam’s hand.

Adam was still looking on in amazement, trying to make sense of the intense new sensations running up his arm into his mind, when Mab dove straight toward the wolf’s forehead, blazing with such brilliance that both Adam and the wolf were blinded for a moment. The wolf’s jaws were no longer gripping his hand, but the unpleasant sensation was still there. He lifted his hand to his face to rub his eyes and felt a wet hot liquid. Eve was tugging sharply on his other arm, pulling him to his feet. “We must get away!” she cried. “They are coming for us!”

They ran. Behind them, alongside them, and even ahead of them ran wolves, pursuing them across the grassland. Mab was everywhere, sometimes pulling sharply upward, the better to illuminate the way ahead and to spy upon the movements of the wolves, other times diving this way or that to rush into the face of a wolf that had ventured in to nip at Adam’s or Eve’s pounding legs. Behind and around them they could hear the snap of jaws as a beast would rear up to bite the onrushing sprite out of the air, and a whir of wings as Mab dodged the flashing fangs. For all the distraction that Mab provided, it seemed impossible that they would reach the hill before their legs gave out and the wolves took them down. Even were they to reach it, the wolves could climb it as easily as they could.

A heavy thud reverberated through the ground. Then there was another, and another, the pace gradually quickening. Mab, during a brief respite between the attacks of the wolves, swooped up to cast light on the way ahead of them. This ought to have been a featureless sea of grass. But instead there was the hill, so close to them that Mab faltered and recoiled from it. The hill was in the wrong place; it was much steeper than when they had left it; and it was moving.