by a great rat, who cut it away with his sharp teeth, and carried it carefully down a rathole. There are ratholes everywhere, even in palaces, and they lead underground, underground, into the world of shadows, where the queen of the Dark Elves weaves them into webs, to trap mortals and other beings. Your shadow is folded away in a chest in her dark house, where the rat took it, running through tunnels and corridors, clutching it softly in his sharp teeth. He is her friend and servant. They can use a human shadow to trap the man or woman to whom it belongs, to snare them in darkness and use them to work their will. All this kingdom, when you are king, can be ruled by them, through the manipulation of your shadow in the shadows. Bit by bit they can draw the whole land into the shadows and take it from under the sun.”
“This appears to be my fault, but I have done nothing,” cried Thomas.
“Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm.”
“What must I do?” asked Thomas, for he saw clearly that the Elf Queen had come to tell him to do something.
“They cannot use your shadow until you, and he, are men, and not boys. So you must go underground, now, whilst you are still a boy, and the shadow is harmless, and find it, and bring it back to the upper air.”
“How can I do that?”
“I will take you some of the way. You must mount behind me.”
“I am not ready,” said Thomas, thinking of his life in the palace, the things in his room, his books, his games, his anxious mother and father, his old nurse.
“You are as ready as you will ever be,” said the Elf, and bent low, and held out her hand, with the whip in it.
He had the thought—he was a canny boy, even if honourable and straightforward—that she might herself be a malign force, come to do him harm.
“If you do not trust me, this will be the worst day of your life,” she said, and he seemed to know, inside himself, that this was so. So he stretched up, and took her hand, which was cool and dry, and swung easily into the saddle behind her, and put his arms around her fine waist, and bent his face towards the velvet gown.
“Now,” she said, “we ride, with the wind, into the waste lands.”
And the horse leaped out of the mound, and went like a wind (there are creatures that do move like the wind) towards the high wall that surrounded the palace. There it collected itself, and stood back on its haunches, and rose, and leaped, and cleared the wall with space to spare, and the green cloak flying, and the wind in Thomas’s hair.
And they rode away fast, across that kingdom, and into strange lands, and stopped for a while by the gate of an orchard. The Elf Queen told Thomas he must not pluck the fruits, which hung invitingly on the boughs, because they looked fair, and were foul, and would poison him. But she gave him a milky cake from a bag at the saddle-bow, and a flask of clear water to drink. And the sky began to darken, not as it did at home, but as though a curtain was being pulled over it, or they were entering an invisible cave.
“This is the border of Elfland,” said the Queen. “This is a shadowland where the shadowless travel.” The rocks, and the grass, were grey, and a little river that ran beside the track was grey, and thickets they passed were grey, rat-grey, shadow-grey, and there was a sound of rushing and roaring, like breakers on the beach. And the grey stream went faster over the grey pebbles, breaking with little crests of grey foam. The skirt of the lady still shone green, and the coat of the horse still gleamed ghostly-white, and Thomas’s own hands were still pink with the human blood that circled under his skin.
The river opened out onto a pebbly strand, where a tide of water lapped, and rose and fell, quietly enough, a pink and grey frill. Thomas could not see the other side of the tide, whose surface shimmered endlessly before him, but he did see that it was not grey, but red, like blood, or perhaps was blood. There were neither sun nor moon in that evenly slate-grey overarching roof. The horse stepped forward without hesitation into the bloody tide and walked on, lifting its proud feet delicately. And soon it was in knee-deep, and occasionally breast-deep. And Thomas saw that the blood appeared to stain the white coat, and then dripped off fetlock and silver hoof, leaving no permanent mark. And they went on in this way for what seemed to Thomas not hours, nor days, but weeks, with a sullen water-roaring in his ears, and flat grey and crimson ripples before his eyes.
They came to another strand, in the end (or I should have no further tale to tell) and the horse stepped out on the fine sand. It shone golden, and before Thomas’s eyes was a long beach, and cliffs of white chalk, covered with fine green turf, and white gulls swooping and crying, and a few woolly sheep balanced on the cliff-edge, munching the low bushes that grew there. The cliff-walls were riddled with caverns, out of some of which little rivulets ran, cutting edged tracks in the sand, meandering round pebbles. Thomas looked back, and there, a space out at sea, was a red line which was the edge of the blood, and a great wall, like a looming sea-fret, which was the edge of the grey world, through and beyond which nothing could be seen at all.
“This is my own country,” said the Elf, dismounting and helping down Thomas. “And here we must part, for although I live under the hill, I cannot go with you underground, where you must now go. I will give you my satchel of food, and the water bottle which was filled at the spring in my orchard, where I hope in time you will come. The right way in—one of the ways in, for there are many—is through the central one of those three slits you see in the cliff-face. You must wind your way in and down, in and down to where the Dark Elf and the rat are waiting. The way is long—walking, scrambling, climbing, crawling. The mine-tunnels down there are populated with all sorts of creatures, human and inhuman, ancient and very young and lost. You will find help and companions—so much I can see—and you will meet dangerous things, and wild things, some of which She will have sent, and some of which have their own concerns, nothing to do with Elves, or rats, or shadows. You will do well to travel with others, but you must choose your companions wisely for there are wicked things down there that seem reasonable and friendly at first sight.
“I have three gifts for you. The first is a light which will shine in the darkness—it is made of elvish fireflies, enclosed in a glass, which will spin into flaring brightness, briefly, if you shake them and whisper to them the words ‘Alfer Light.’ I advise you most earnestly to let no one know that you have this glass—or any of these things. The second is an imperfect map of the tunnels that lead to the dark court. It has been made by Light Elves, many of whom perished in the passages, and we do not know—for no one has survived who knows—how accurate it is, or how many major branches are not recorded. If you could mark on it where it goes wrong, and where it is of help, other later travellers will be grateful.
“The third thing is another thing even I do not perfectly understand. It is a little brass case in which is suspended—we do not know how, or by what physics, or magic—a needle of crystal, that spins around and shows the way to the centre. It is said, also, that it gives out a strange light, blue like a gentian, when it comes
