So they let their guest live.

At first he was little trouble to the young people who looked after him. He regained strength slowly, sleeping much, sitting or lying quietly most of the time he was awake. Parth named him Falk, which in the dialect of the Eastern Forest meant "yellow," for his sallow skin and opal eyes.

One morning several days after his arrival, coming to an unpatterned stretch in the cloth she was weaving, she left her sunpowered loom to purr away by itself down in the garden and climbed up to the screened balcony where "Falk" was kept. He did not see her enter. He was sitting on his pallet gazing intently up at the haze-dimmed summer sky. The glare made his eyes water and he rubbed them vigorously with his hand, then seeing his hand stared at it, the back and the palm. He clenched and extended the fingers, frowning. Then he raised his face again to the white glare of the sun and slowly, tentative, reached his open hand up towards it.

"That's the sun, Falk," Parth said. "Sun—"

"Sun," he repeated, gazing at it, centered on it, the void and vacancy of his being filled with the light of the sun and the sound of its name.

So his education began.

Parth came up from the cellars and passing through the Old Kitchen saw Falk hunched up in one of the window-bays, alone, watching the snow fall outside the grimy glass. It was a tennight now since he had struck Rossa and they had to lock him up till he calmed down. Ever since then he had been dour and would not speak. It was strange to see his man's face dulled and blunted by a child's sulky obstinate suffering. "Come on in by the fire, Falk," Parth said, but did not stop to wait for him. In the great hall by the fire she did wait a little, then gave him up and looked for something to raise her own low spirits. There was nothing to do; the snow fell, all the faces were too familiar, all the books told of things long ago and far away that were no longer true. All around the silent House and its fields lay the silent forest, endless, monotonous, indifferent; winter after winter, and she would never leave this House, for where was there to go, what was there to do? …