‘Bardán is still at Wolf Glen,’ Blackthorn said. ‘Wild, yes, but a man who can feel love and grief and pain like any other man. He’s the way he is because on the night his daughter was said to have died out in the forest he fell down a hole and ended up in the Otherworld, and the fey kept him for fifteen years. That’s why the heartwood house was not finished. When Bardán came back his mind was scrambled; he had forgotten a great deal of the past. When he looked at you, perhaps he was reminded of his wife or of his mother, who knows? Grim has befriended him; been his protector, as far as he could. And Grim shares my suspicions about the official story of what happened that night and afterwards. Here.’ She handed Cara a clean handkerchief. Cara wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

‘Cara.’

‘What?’

‘This calls for cool heads. You should give yourself thinking time. By all means keep looking for the heartwood house story in the library. Whether it can cast further light on this I don’t know. Consider what I’ve told you, and decide whether you want to talk to your father about it. If you don’t, I will respect that choice, as I said. But don’t forget your other father, who loves you just as dearly. It seems he has been very badly treated. Grievously lied to. If you decide to do nothing, he will never know that his daughter survived. And . . . I think Grim would find it hard to keep the truth from him.’

‘I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to believe.’ She wanted it to be back before this happened, when all she’d had to worry about was Aunt Della fussing about muddy skirts and leaves in her hair. But everything Blackthorn said was making the bizarre story truer. He – the wild man – had fallen down that hole, that same one, she knew it was, and he hadn’t had the birds to help him, and those fey creatures had taken him, stolen him away, and kept him for fifteen years. Nearly the whole of her life. That was truly terrible. ‘Why are they so wicked, Mistress Blackthorn? The fey, the Fair Folk? In the tales they’re noble and good.’

‘I suppose they are like us. Some good, some bad. Some downright evil.’ Blackthorn got up and stretched. ‘We should go to supper. I don’t suppose you feel like eating, but a hot meal will be good for you. What I was saying before, Cara – promise me, please, that if you decide to go and talk to your father you’ll tell me first. You should take me with you, and we’ll have to take one of the Island men as a guard, perhaps two.’

‘Why them?’