‘I don’t think so. You don’t know Mary, Trueheart, but I know she believed in what she did. I’ve got no doubt about that. I was with her two years, remember, and all that time she played the part of a speaker, whether she was doing a show, or whether we were alone. It was all she cared about.’

Trueheart shrugged, looking at the silent Circle of Stones.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘So she believed in that stuff, but in that case, she’d fooled herself. She’d persuaded herself what she heard was Gela’s voice, and now you’d called that into question by hearing nothing. No wonder she was upset.’

‘Maybe.’ I turned to look at her: strong straight Trueheart with her beautiful shoulders and the ugly hole in middle of her face. ‘Listen, dear, you should be careful about mocking people’s stories. They’re like . . .’ I struggled to find a way of describing the picture that was in my mind. ‘They’re like the paths in forest that stop us from getting lost. They’re . . . They’re like the trunk and branches of a tree.’

She didn’t answer me. I thought of all the times I’d watched her quarrel with her dad, Tom, and seen him lash out at her with a stick or the shaft of his spear gripped in his one good hand, and how she still refused to shut up, or hide her feelings. And I thought of the things her dad did to me, out in forest, that no one knew about except me and him, and how I told no one, didn’t speak about it even to Tom himself. She was braver than me and, because of that, she saw things in a different way, and maybe she was right as well. But still, I could only say what I thought.

‘Your dad’s wrong to hit you the way he does, but when you make fun of the True Story, I can understand why people get upset. It’s like you’re covering up the path that will lead them home. It’s like they’re lanternflowers and you’re chopping down the tree that holds them up, and feeds them, and brings them warmth, and connects them to all the other lanterns.’