Mistress Blackthorn gave her a funny look. ‘He looked well enough, though he didn’t have much time for me. I asked for the materials for a talisman and he sent your aunt to find them. She brought these. You can tell me if they’re suitable.’

She must have laid the little items on her bed while she was changing her clothes. Now she fetched them and put them on the table near Cara.

‘That is from a tunic Father used to wear when high-born folk visited us,’ Cara said, picking up the scrap of dark blue silken fabric. ‘It got so worn out that Aunt Della couldn’t mend it anymore, and he was sad. It was his favourite. This is hers. Aunt Della’s.’ She remembered the woven edging, twisted wool of green and brown, on a cloak her aunt used to wear. ‘This one . . . I don’t recognise it. Was it my mother’s?’ This piece looked older than the others, the cloth so worn it was almost in holes. It would have been delicate even when new: a summer fabric in soft rose.

‘That’s what your aunt said. I didn’t ask her what the garment was. A shift, maybe. I wish I knew how the dyer obtained that colour. How about that one?’ Blackthorn pointed to the strip of leather that lay beside the other tokens.

Cara felt a smile spread across her face. ‘Gormán?’

‘Correct.’ Blackthorn did not smile back at her. She wasn’t angry anymore. But she wasn’t happy either. What had happened with her manuscript had really upset her. If this had been someone else, Cara would have said it had frightened her. But Mistress Blackthorn wasn’t scared of anything.

‘Did you see Grim?’ Cara asked.

‘I saw him, yes. Not for as long as I’d have liked. Your father doesn’t give his workers much time off. And I visited some other people. In Longwater.’

‘That woman with the baby.’

‘Fann, yes, and her mother, and some other folk.’ A silence, as if she was thinking hard. ‘Cara?’

‘What?’

‘Do you know a young man called Fedach? A farmer’s son, from a place near Longwater?’

‘You mean that boy with the . . .’ There was only one farmer’s son Cara had ever spoken to in Longwater, and she remembered him well. But she didn’t know his name. Maybe he’d told her what it was, that first day when he’d come over to talk to her while Gormán was busy on the loading jetty. But if he had, she’d forgotten.

‘With the what? Sweet smile? Nice manners? Bright eyes?’

Cara could feel a blush rising. Ridiculous, she hardly knew the boy. ‘What about him?’

‘I visited the household where he lives. Met his mother. He mentioned you.’

‘What did he say?’