She climbed after Crows, to find that the wall wasn’t the only addition. There was a new pavement in front of the doorway, and somehow the tower seemed taller and more substantial. If that had been all, she’d have just put it down to her faulty memory, but the circular wall was something else. She hadn’t forgotten it, and neither could she dismiss it.

And inside, the roof, or at least, the floor above, had been repaired. But not in a new wood way. The boards now over her head looked old and tired, the beams supporting them rough and soot-stained.

‘Crows? What the fuck is happening to your castle?’

‘You’ve noticed,’ he called from the back room where he kept his stores.

‘I’m not blind. Or stupid.’ The ceiling was too far away for her to jump up and touch, but it obviously wasn’t at the top of the tower. There were going to be stairs somewhere, and she started searching for them.

She found a dark alcove that, when she looked up into it, she could see faintly. Uneven stone steps led upwards, and with a quick glance behind her, she started up them, hands feeling the way against the walls of the narrow staircase. It grew brighter as she climbed: the stairs ahead of her grew more ragged, until there were whole sections of tread missing, but there was a doorway to her right just before it became unusable. She stepped through, and found she was standing on the boards she’d been looking up at before.

They seemed solid enough when she pressed them with the toe of her boot, and she walked out on to them, listening to them creak softly.

Above her, the crows had moved up a level. There was another threadbare set of rafters hanging from the sockets in the walls, and the birds returning to roost seemed perfectly at home. She paced the square sides of the tower, and ended back at the door.

She wasn’t imagining it, and Crows wasn’t denying it.

‘Dinner is cooking,’ he said, appearing behind her.

‘How is this even possible?’ she asked him, throwing her hands up in disbelief.

He shrugged. ‘I cannot tell you why, but I can tell you how. There are lines of energy that flow under the surface of the land. Where those lines cross, the energy pools as in a well. Miracles happen there.’

‘So, what? The castles just appear?’

‘Yes.’ Crows shrugged again. ‘What can I say? Down was like that before I got here. I did not make the rules.’

‘What about the villages?’

‘Yes, those too. If you stay long enough in one place, a house forms for you. Those are along the lines. Where two or more meet, you get castles.’

‘Fucking hell. That’s crazy. Why isn’t everybody running around trying to find their own castle, then?’