‘You want something that cannot be. It pains me to tell you, but it is so. If you should try to walk a different path, with one not of us kind, you’ll not escape. He will destroy the one you love so that you may be claimed back.’

I bring my fists down on the table so hard that the clay figure rattles. I will not hear her words. I have resisted my power, have caged the dog. He’ll not find us. I will steer my fate, take my own life in hand, as she never did.

‘You cannot remember how it feels, too much time has passed.’

A smile transforms her face, surprising me. ‘I remember saying these same things to my mother. It was all not so very long ago, lass. Though sometimes it feels another life.’

She sighs, rubs the small of her back and lifts her face towards the tattered roof. ‘All I want is to protect you. You put yourself in the way of pain.’

She cannot understand. Her time to protect me is gone.

‘Better to embrace what lies within yourself than search for happiness in another,’ she says. ‘Don’t be feared to discover your own power.’

‘You take me for a fool, if you think this will make me reveal—’ I almost say ‘the dog’, the words dance in my mouth like bees.

She steps forward. ‘It’s all right. You can tell me. Share your burden. Tell me what you’ve conjured. ’Tis here to protect you as you grow into your powers, nothing to fear.’

Her eyes are clear and soft, as I remember them from when I was small, those times when I ran to her for comfort, burying my face in the welcoming folds of her petticoat. When she wiped my tears and washed my scratches. Should I speak, the dog will run separate from me as Dew-Springer does and have its own will, no longer controlled by mine.

But I am weary with hiding it. Perhaps if I tell her she’ll teach me to master a familiar that runs separate, and keep it under my bidding.

As I open my mouth to let the bees out I hear Annie laughing and clams rattling, and next the slam of the door and pounding of feet. Not just Annie’s but Seth’s too.

‘Sorry, Mammy, I know you said not to talk to anyone but it was only Seth and he’d already seed me, hadn’t you? So I thought—’

‘Aye, right,’ Mam says. ‘Stop that prattling now.’

She takes the bowl of clean clams, places it in front of the clay figure, blocking it from Seth’s view. And I’m saved from revealing the flicker in the corner of my eye. Exhausted, I pull out a stool, sit and lay my head on the table.