Continuing to explore the theme of love in Warner’s writing, it is clear that her stories dwell on a question that has recurred throughout her oeuvre (particularly in Mr Fortune’s Maggot): what exactly is the connection, adverse or causal, between love and freedom? ‘Elphenor and Weasel’ relates how a wandering fairy couple’s enjoyment of the human world depends precisely on those things that result from the shortness of human life-spans. This is explicitly linked to the recklessness of their love which ends with an ordeal where ‘death by lightning would have been easier’ (42) as the price to pay for the ecstatic freedom that comes with love. ‘Winged Creatures’ follows other doomed but exhilarating loves and longings. Lady Fidès, for example, fails to become a bird, but invests birds with all of her love, above even the love of her child: ‘Love was what she felt for birds — a free gift, unrequired, unrequited, invulnerable’ (141). Gobelet the changeling in turn enjoys a short spell of bliss with Lady Fidès’s fairy son Grive — the French name for a thrush, but also only one letter less than grieve — who for a time provides the greatest attachment and at the same time the greatest freedom of his life.

With that morning Gobelet began the happiest epoch of his life. As nearly as possible, he became a fairy. He lost all sense of virtue and responsibility and lived by pleasures
— pell-mell pleasures: a doubled rainbow, roasting a hedgehog. (150)

This story provides a marvellously complex opening of the imagination on matters of desire, need, freedom and constraint, where nothing is ever tied down. ‘Foxcastle’, the story that closes the collection, resonates forcefully with Warner’s life-long concern in her fictions, and arguably also in her life, with the question: how to be, become, and make one another free. The story centres on a human who is captured and studied by fairies. Ultimately indifferent to him and what knowledge he can give them, the fairies quickly lose interest, and the protagonist remains in Elfindom, until his visible ageing makes him noticeably undesirable, and he is returned as an old man to the human world again. For him, the experience is a revelation of freedom that results, quite in contrast to ‘Elphenor and Weasel’, not from the reckless bliss of love but rather from the promise of detachment.

For by the simple act of discarding his fetters and walking up a winding stair he had attained the wish of his heart. Watching these happy beings for whom weeping was impossible, he had become incapable of grief; watching their inconsistencies, he had become incapable of knowing right from wrong; disregarded by them he had become incapable of disappointment […] he lived in a perpetual present. (258–59)

When he is returns to his own kind, he totters towards some passers-by ‘making noises’ which they fail to understand, for he ‘had lived so long with the fairies he had forgotten his native speech’. Our last sighting is of someone giving him some alms with the instruction that returns us abruptly to how humans do things: ‘Take it, take it,’ said the gentleman, ‘Go away, and be grateful’ (261).