She spurred her horse and rode fast on from the strange encounter.

That night she couldn’t sleep, feeling the weight of her castle stopping her breath. An hour before sunrise she was in the stables, scolding a sleepy stableboy, had a horse saddled, and rode at a gallop to the hawthorn brake. And he was not there and he did not come. She rode on over the moor. The sun was up before she saw him walking toward her. She reined in her horse, watching him approach. Keeping her pride, she looked down on him when he stopped beside her. ‘You’re out early, Queen of Elfhame,’ he said. She couldn’t think of anything to say. He put his arms round her and lifted her from the saddle, and she toppled into his embrace like a sheaf of corn. The dew was heavy on the grass, and when they got up from their lovemaking they were wringing wet and their teeth chattered.

From then on it was as though she lived to music. To music she followed him barefoot, climbed a sycamore tree to look into a magpie’s nest, made love in the rain. Once, they came to a wide rattling burn, with a green lawn on the further bank. He leaped across, and held out his hand for her to catch hold of. It was too wide a leap for her and she took to her wings. It was the first time in her life she had flown, and the sensation delighted her. She rose in another flight, curling and twirling for the pleasure and mastery of it, as a fiddler plays a cadenza. She soared higher and higher, looking down on the figure at the burnside, small as a beetle and the centre of the wide world. He beckoned her down; she dropped like a hawk and they rolled together on the grass. He made little of her flying, even less of her queenship, nothing at all of her immense seniority. Love was in the present: in the sharp taste of the rowanberries he plucked for her, in the winter night when a gale got up and whipped them to the shelter of a farm where he kindled a fire and roasted turnips on a stick, in their midnight mushroomings, in the long summer evenings when they lay on their backs too happy to move or speak, in their March-hare curvettings and cuffings. For love-gifts, he gave her acorns, birds’ eggs, a rosegall because it is called the fairies’ pincushion, a yellow snail shell.

It was on the day of the shell, a day in August with thunder in the air, that she asked him how it was he saw her, he who had only mortal eyes. He told how on his seventeenth birthday it had come to him that one day he would see the Queen of Elfhame, and from then on he had looked at every woman and seen through her, till Tiphaine rode past the hawthorn brake. In the same way, he said, he could see things which had not happened yet but surely would happen, and had made rhymes of them to fix them in his memory. She would live long after him and might see some of them come true.