Somewhere out there, in the dark woods under the cold moon, is the place where he went down in the earth. The place where he fell and fell and didn’t come back again for a hundred years. Or what felt like a hundred years, only when he came back that man he loathed and feared was still here, but older. So it can’t have been so long. Was it long enough for them? When he found a way out did they simply let him go, his father’s debt at last acquitted? Was the price of his father’s error Bardán’s sanity? His mind is a muddle, his thinking disordered. His body is a shambles too, but that is his own doing. A penance imposed by himself. He will not bathe in hot water, will not cut his hair, will not come fully back to his own world until he finds . . . Until he finds . . .

There is a sticking point, a door in his mind that simply will not open. Something happened. Something dire and terrible, something back then, before he fell down and down and ended up in another place entirely. He was running through the woods, through the night, running and running, running to get away, running from the monsters, and then he fell, and he hit his head, broke his teeth, and when he woke up he was in that place and he couldn’t remember what had come before. Couldn’t remember anything. Only, when the fey had patched him up and fed him and given him something that made him sleep for two days and two nights, he did remember how to build. He remembered the skills his father had taught him. And they set him to work. Years and years of work. Years and years of silence. At first he couldn’t talk. His lip was split, his jaw was not right, his teeth were smashed. And by the time they were healed as well as they ever would be, he’d got out of the way of speaking, and he never quite got back into it, down there.

While he worked, the past came back to him. Not all at once. Just bits, snippets, half-thoughts. The master. The wretched heartwood house. Gormán, who’d once seemed a friend. And, later, the story of his parents, who were never quite part of Longwater settlement. Who were always thought of as different. His father, whom the fey blamed for fleeing, and blamed twice over for stealing his mother away. His parents’ escape had condemned their son to those years of servitude. And yet, he treasures the memory of them. He holds it dear.