“Who are the Aelf?” I felt I ought to know.

“Don’t you know, Able of the High Heart?”

That was the last thing she said for a long while. I sat down to watch, but sometimes I looked at the back of the cave where she said I had come from. When I looked away from her, she got bigger and bigger, so I knew there was something huge behind me. When I turned and looked back at her again, she was not quite as big as I was.

That was one thing. The other one was that I knew that when I was little I had known all about the Aelf, and it was all mixed up with somebody else, a little girl who had played with me; and there had been big, big trees, and ferns a lot bigger than we were, and clear springs. And moss. Lots of moss. Soft, green moss like velvet.

“They have sent you with the tale of their wrongs,” Parka said, “and their worship.”

“Worship?” I was not sure what she meant.

“Of you.”

That brought back other things—not things, really, but feelings. I said, “I don’t like them,” and it was the truth.

“Plant one seed,” she told me.

For a long time, I waited for her to say something else, waiting because I did not want to ask her questions. She never did, so I said, “Aren’t you going to tell me all those things? The wrongs and the rest of it?”

“No.”

I let out my breath. I had been afraid of what I might hear. “That’s good.”

“It is. Some gain there must be, so this I decree: each time you gain your heart’s desire, your heart shall reach for something higher.”

I had the feeling then that if I asked more questions I was not going to like the answers. The sun stretched out his hands into our cave and blessed us both, or that was the way it seemed; then he sank into the sea, and the sea tried to follow him. Pretty soon the place where I had stood when I had waded out was hardly wet at all. “Is this the slack of the tide?” I asked Parka.