‘Hard to stand back.’ Grim wiped out his bowl with a piece of bread. ‘Not to do anything. Harder than running forward with a big stick in your hand, screaming your head off. But this is something you can’t run at. If you do, you get rubbed out. Gone as quick as a snap of the fingers. And Mathuin keeps on doing what he does.’ When I did not reply, he added, ‘Hard to choose. Wait, and let the bad things go on. Act, and maybe waste your chance anyway, because the timing’s wrong. The best plan in the world can fall apart. Like Flannan with his pigeons. A hawk happens to spot the chance of a meal, and just like that a message falls into the wrong hands. Mine, as it turned out. If it hadn’t been for that, he would have got what he wanted, and so would Mathuin. And we’d be . . . somewhere we didn’t want to be.’

A shiver ran through me, deep down. We’d had some very strange adventures, Grim and I. We’d driven each other half-crazy at times. We’d saved each other’s lives more than once. We’d solved some knotty puzzles; we’d dealt with the uncanny and with human evil-doers. We’d become used to each other. Only . . . just as there was unfinished business between me and Conmael, so there was unfinished business between Grim and me, something neither of us would put into words, something that had lain between us since Midsummer Eve, when I’d been cursed into a monstrous form, and Grim had – so it seemed – broken the curse by holding me in his arms and letting his tears fall on my face. At the time it hadn’t mattered a bit to me how I’d become myself again, only that the hideous experience was over. But the wee folk that lived in the woods around Bann had been hinting for a while that true love’s tears would be vital to the success of my mission there. I’d thought they meant the herb that went by that name; had even gathered some and taken it with me. Later on, the wee folk had made it clear they had meant a different kind of tears.