Whenever the fairies trooped off on a raiding excursion into the outer world, he wandered about the halls and corridors of Foxcastle, almost and never quite familiarizing himself with its layout. For instance, he never discovered how the fairies quitted it. Quit it they certainly did, since they came back with spoils. Perhaps they used some watery stair; the hill was veined with springs; some were trapped for the water supply, others only existed as murmuring voices at a distance. When he was left alone, he could hear them quite plainly. But this was only possible when he was alone. The raiders came back, the silence was painted by their gay glittering voices, they were extremely hungry, they had tricked all the mortals they had met. Fingering his watch, that old harmless acquaintance, he sat listening to their brag, and admired the faithful traditionalism with which they recounted exploits well known to him before ever he met a fairy: Mungo’s mother gaping into her churn, the elf bolt spanged off an invisible thumb that knocked the peddler senseless as he made off with his load of thorn-tree wood, the girl laid on her back in the greenwood. ‘Burd Janet’ was one of the ballads he had fallen asleep to. But Janet’s babe had been fathered by Tam Lin, who was a stolen mortal like himself, and so uneasy lest at the end of his seven years in fairyland he should be picked as the teind to hell that he invoked the girl to lie in wait and snatch him out of the Queen’s retinue. He himself was safe from such a rescue, since no one in the outer world had loved him enough to snatch him back to it.

Falling into dreamless sleep in his bed of fern, waking to the splash and gurgle of the running water, opening his eyes to the brooding dusk of the stone roof it was inconceivable that he had lain there unreconciled and heard his shout of despair re-echoing from the vault overhead. A fuss about nothing, a midge-bite madness, a fit of the tantrums. 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. Alone or in their company, listening to music or to silence, he lived in a perpetual present—like the Queen with her knitting, each stitch the stitch of the moment.