Where it crossed the stream we left the road itself and followed the bouncing waterway through the tangled brambles, the rocks and bushes and hollows full of wet snow, climbing all the time, until we were nearly at the waterfall. Then we took off our shoes (soaked through now, anyway) and stockings, and stepped gingerly into the dark water. It wasn’t deeper anywhere than our knees, and even Charlotte could have lain with her head on one bank and her feet on the other; but the stones at the bottom were sharp and painful and the water was worse than cold: it was deadly. We stumbled across, holding our shoes and stockings in numb, shaking hands, until our feet could bear it no longer, and we hopped out, crying with the pain of it. We slapped each other’s feet and ankles until the blood unfroze and we could move them again, then put our wet shoes and stockings back on.

“That should throw the hounds off the scent, anyway,” said Lucy in satisfaction—at least, that’s what she meant to say, but her teeth were chattering so much she might have been speaking in Turkish.

We came to the waterfall, and gasped, not with cold—for we were beyond gasping with that—but with astonishment. A thick crust of spiky, sugary, bristly spears glinted and shone in the moonlight, all set about with a million tiny diamond-sharp stars of frost; and under it somewhere, the little stream tinkled in a subdued sort of way, like a child put grumbling to bed too early for its liking. The world by moonlight could be lovely as well as threatening; the sky was clear, now, of those lean and wolfish clouds and seemed almost serene.

“Only a little way further,” I said, to cheer them on.

The path to Bruno’s cave was a little overgrown and I couldn’t find it at first. But soon I had it, and five minutes later we were nearly in the clearing, talking cheerfully about getting warm again. When—

“Shhh!” Lucy held her hand up.

We stopped.

“What is it?” whispered Charlotte.

I turned my head so as to hear it more clearly, for I’d heard something, too. From the cave.

The unmistakable sound of a snore…a full, deep one. A man’s snore. We’d arrived too late: the cave was already tenanted. Lucy looked at me, her eyes full of fear.

“What shall we do?” she whispered.

But I didn’t have to answer, because as she spoke the snorer gave a sudden grunt and the snoring stopped.

And a voice from the cave said: “Who’s there?”

Chapter Four