‘We know our Mother’s alive, don’t we?’ Mary said. ‘We know she speaks to us. Because everyone hears her, don’t they? Some faintly, some more loudly. We all hear her, and we all know she watches over us. We all know she calls out to our shadows when they’re all alone in the cold forest between the stars. All that’s still true, that hasn’t changed one bit! All we’ve learned now is that she’s not on the sad Earth that these three people come from. That’s the one new thing we’re finding out. I wished I’d listened better to our old stories about Earth, because then I’d have known that already. I wish I hadn’t been so quick to dismiss them as children’s tales. But let’s not worry just now about what we didn’t know and what we got wrong. Think about what we do know, and what hasn’t changed at all. We know our Mother calls us back to her, don’t we? We don’t need anyone to tell us that. We know as a fact she calls us home. But it seems she’s made a better Earth for us to return to, not an old home but a new one. And that’s the place of warmth and light that we’ve always known was out there waiting for us, that’s the place where we’ll be safe forever.’

Some people were crying now, just like in her old shows. She was touching the disappointment we all felt, and the grief and the loneliness that had been creeping back over us, but she was touching the anger too. There were hundreds there, like that woman Treelight, whose hopes had been so raised up by the people from Earth that they thought grief itself had come to an end. The Earth people had smashed that hope, but they’d done much more than just smash it. They’d taken away the comfort as well of our old stories and our circles and our songs. It was true those things had all been wobbly stones. It was true they hadn’t been strong enough to take our grief away from us, but they’d still helped us to bear grief and get through it. And, until Mary spoke, it had seemed that we were going to lose them now as well, with that ordinary young woman’s voice, still murmuring away in the background, slowly destroying what little was left of the Davidfolk’s True Story.

So it felt good good to hear Mary still standing up for it. Everyone was on her side. Everyone was angry angry angry with the people from Earth.

‘Yeah, you tell them, shadowspeaker!’ some guy shouted out. ‘These Earth folk don’t know everything, whatever they try and tell us!’