Yes, said the beck. It grasped the gentleman in a grip of iron and bore him swiftly away.

Stephen was aware that Lady Pole spoke to him, that she tried to catch hold of his arm; he saw Mr Segundus’s pale, astonished face, saw him say something; but he had no time to answer them. Who knew how long the world would consent to obey him? He leapt down from the bridge and ran along the bank.

The trees seemed to greet him as he ran past; they spoke of old alliances and reminded him of times gone by. The sunlight called him King and spoke its pleasure at finding him here. He had no time to tell them he was not the person they imagined.

He came to a place where the land rose steeply upon either side of the beck – a deep dale in the moor, a place where millstones were quarried. Scattered around the sides of the dale were great, round, hewn stones, each of them half the height of a man.

The surface of the beck seethed and boiled where the gentleman was imprisoned. Stephen knelt upon a flat stone and leant over the water. “I am sorry,” he said. “You intended nothing but kindness, I know.”

The gentleman’s hair streamed out like silver snakes in the dark water. His face was a terrible sight. In his fury and hatred he began to lose his resemblance to humankind: his eyes grew further apart, there was fur upon his face and his lips rolled back from his teeth in a snarl.

A voice inside Stephen’s mind said: “If you kill me, you will never know your name!”

“I am the nameless slave,” said Stephen. “That is all I have ever been – and today I am content to be nothing more.”

He spoke a word to the millstones. They flew up in the air and flung themselves down upon the gentleman. He spoke to the boulders and rocks; they did the same. The gentleman was old beyond telling, and very strong. Long after his bones and flesh must have been crushed to pieces, Stephen could feel whatever was left of him struggling to bind itself back together by magic. So Stephen spoke to the stony shoulders of the dale and asked them to help him. Earth and rock crumbled; it heaped itself on top of the millstones and the rocks until there was a hill standing there as high as the sides of the dale.

For years Stephen had felt as if a pane of dirty, grey glass hung between him and the world; the moment that the last spark of the gentleman’s life was extinguished, the pane shattered. Stephen stood a moment, gasping for breath.