Amazingly, she did. She knew it instinctively. “You’re the King of the Silver River,” she said. “The legend of the Hawk speaks of you. You are an ally of the Word and a child of the Land, they say. My mother told me of you.”

“I am what they say, but mostly I am things that no one knows. Secret things. I was a Faerie creature once, in a time long ago. I was caretaker of the old world, of the world that disappeared when the Faerie folk gave way to the coming of Man and everything changed. My space has become much smaller since then, a fraction and no more of what once was given to me. I keep it hidden now from all, but it is still here, part of a better time and better world.”

She looked past him to the gardens. “Your flowers are beautiful. They seem to grow everywhere, as if the gardens never end.”

“In one sense, they don’t. When you walk within them, there are no boundaries. You cannot leave or become lost or reach a point where you can see what lies beyond them. Would you like to visit them? Will you walk with me?”

He reached for her hand, which she gave to him willingly, and he led her away from where they had been talking and into the gardens. Once there, they strolled down pathways formed of flat stones here and crushed rock there, of mossy earth and deep grasses. Hedgerows bracketed their passage at one point; vines grown thick on trelliswork shadowed their quiet walk at another. All around, the vast sweep of the flower beds formed blankets of color that radiated in a sudden wash of sunlight, their myriad scents filling the air.

“This must take an awful lot of work,” Prue said to him finally, unable to conceive of how he could manage.

“It takes everything I’ve got to offer, but not more than I wish to give.” He pointed. “See the rainbows formed by the sunlight reflecting off the moisture from the dew? There, where the scarlet and gold meet? I cannot imagine life without gardens. Can you?”

The way he said it told her he already knew the answer. There were flower beds and gardens in her world, but nothing like this. Mostly there were only the forests, meadows, and rocky heights of the mountain peaks, and for her people beauty such as she saw here was solely the province of the imagination.

“The legends say you were alive at the beginning of things when the old world was born,” she said. “That would make you very old. But you don’t look old.”

“I don’t always look the same. This is how I look to you, but to others I look different.”

She studied him a moment. “Am I safe here? Are you going to send me back?”