‘Come on!’ he says, breathing hard. ‘Why are they so crazed about you – get in here!’

But something’s making it hard to move forward. Something reaching, grasping. Something that cries through the trees and stampedes over the ground. A rush, coming harder and closer, that pulls at me and makes my eyes sting.

‘Stella!’ Yanny pulls me through the hatch, panic in his eyes, and the trapdoor slams shut over my head as he rushes me down shallow steps that have been cut into the earth.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say, recovering myself.

We’re in a small, rounded hallway lit with veins of quartz, a corridor leading off in one direction. Tiny flowers nestle in the fine cracks, and ivy trails along the earth floor.

‘They were so strong, Yanny . . . Did I make them worse?’

‘I don’t know about worse,’ he whispers, looking from me back up to the hatch. He takes a deep breath and smiles, though he still looks a bit freaked out to me. ‘We’re here, now. Forget about it. Come and meet the others.’

He leads me down the corridor, past little alcoves where stacks of books and coppery pine cones nestle, and the quartz in the dark walls gets brighter as we go, until we arrive at a door that opens into a kitchen area. At one end, round windows look out on to the glittering stream. Heavy iron pans flash in the light of the glowing veins that criss-cross the ceiling, and beneath the windows, a long wooden table is laden with steaming copper dishes of knobbly potatoes and long-stemmed brown mushrooms, pale fish and sprouting green vegetables.

‘Where is everybody?’ I whisper.

Yanny grins. ‘You can’t see them?’

‘Should I?’ I ask, straining my eyes.

Here and there, a flash of movement, a swish of light. Then I hear a tiny, bright giggle, a spoon dances and falls to the floor – and there they are. A whole flock of near-Yannies staring at me from the benches that line the table, wide smiles mirroring his own.

‘They were practising their glamouring,’ Yanny whispers. ‘Stella, meet my brothers, Fin, Dart and Ro – and my sister, Willow . . .’

Four small, freckled faces look up at me, and tiny hands shove at each other as they all squiggle together on the bench beneath the window.

‘Fin is six; Dart and Ro are five; and Willow is four.’

I give them a smile, noting the whisper of wings at their backs. And then a woman with the same chestnut hair woven into elaborate braids charges in from the back of the house. She startles as she sees me standing there with Yanny, but recovers quickly, walking over and raising her hands to cup Yanny’s face. Her cheeks are bright, her smile warm, but her eyes are troubled. Her own wings are faded, folded like lace at her back.

‘Home,’ she says. ‘My lovely boy. I was worried, you didn’t take your faelight, and the nights are drawing in. Who have you brought with you?’ She turns to me.