‘A changeling.’ The firelight’s on Blackthorn’s face, flickering. She’s got that thinking look. Hair curling in wisps as it dries out. Like little flames. ‘I can’t help wondering if that’s the key to getting Conmael back,’ she says. ‘Or to understanding why he isn’t coming back. I never told you, did I? The whole story about Cully, and my theory about why Conmael rescued us from prison?’

‘Tell me.’

‘It was a long time ago, when I was a child of ten or so. In the south, at a place called Brocc’s Wood. I’d been sent to live there with a wise woman who’d agreed to take me as her student. I got on all right with the other children, though they were wary of me, and with good reason. But they treated me with respect, because their parents trusted Holly – that was my mentor’s name. There was a woman who lived on the very edge of the village, a woman with a child but no husband. She was never looked on as part of the community. Folk told stories about her, how she’d lie with any man for a loaf of bread or a jug of ale, how she’d been thrown out by her husband for her slatternly ways, how she didn’t even know who her son’s father was. It was cruel. Even at that age I saw how unjust it was, since she and her son had only come to the village a couple of years before I did and nobody really knew much about her. It was all invention. But she was a poor soul, too beaten-down and sad to stand up for herself.

‘The boy, Cully, was a year or so younger than me. He was an odd-looking lad with long spindly limbs, pale skin, big eyes, and a nervous way with him. People called him the changeling. They didn’t mean he really was a fey child. They meant he was different; he didn’t belong. Cully had no friends. The other children shunned him as their parents did his mother.

‘That disturbed me. When I got the chance, I talked to him. Told him stories. Taught him some games, just little things we could play with sticks and stones. We weren’t friends, exactly. I didn’t have time for friends, what with Holly’s lessons and gathering herbs and helping around the house – Holly was quite old and had sore joints, so a lot of the cooking and cleaning fell to me. But I didn’t see why Cully should be taunted and bullied and shamed.’

I can see that boy, funny little thing he is, all by himself under a tree, watching while the others run after a ball. Them in the sun, him in shadow. ‘Go on,’ I say.