In September Tam Lin returned to the ice to dance, more ephemeral than ever. She watched him from the shadow of the tall bleachers that stood firmly and unmistakeably solid in their cement casements and wondered how that hard bronzed body that he seemed to wear and cast off like a set of clothes could just as easily dissolve and leave nothing but the shimmering suggestion of a spirit set free behind. She was earthbound and leaden, bound to the same laws of physics that assigned mass to the bleachers next to which she stood.

He was there but not there; he seemed to exist in a world that overlapped her own but never truly melded, so that he seemed a mirage, visible but unnatainable. She knew that she would try to approach and, like the Red Queen, discover herself running as hard as she could simply to keep him the same distance away. The toe he used to have kept in the world had vanished; he was now inarguably a creature of air, that danced and spun in the chill of the fairy-ring and drew those who knew that the only way to see was not to look.

There was the sense of a light just outside the periphery of her vision, and she ran to the window, in time to see a quiver, the air tilt, and the faintest suggestion of a presence vanishing around the jagged brick corner below.