She could do magic. If that wasn’t astounding enough, the very land itself was magical, with castles springing up from the ground at her unspoken command. Eating some mediocre meals was a small price to pay for such wonders, and she’d do it without complaint.

Then when they’d finished, and she’d washed her face and hands and bowls in what had been that morning, a stream, and was now a stone arch sluicing water down a trough before it turned into a stream, she sat on the still-open doorstep while Crows fetched a sheet of paper and some ink.

She wasn’t sure where he’d get paper from, or pens. They spoke of being manufactured, while everything about Down was crafted – handmade, bespoke, using only raw materials.

The ink was made from soot and oils, the pens from strippeddown feathers, and the paper, she was both fascinated and disgusted to learn, was actually a scraped-clean square of animal skin, the size of a school exercise book.

She’d always been an inveterate doodler, tagging everything with the art she saw on the street. This was different. Even the ink was rare and precious, delicate and worryingly permanent. No hesitation, no erasing.

‘How do I do this?’ she asked.

‘You mark down everything you’ve seen, as accurately as possible. Mark where you have walked, the mountains you saw in the distance, the curve of the rivers, the lines of the hills. Guess the distances if you cannot measure them. Start where you started, finish where you are.’

‘And what do I do with it when I’m done?’

‘You keep it,’ said Crows. ‘This is the beginning of your wealth here in Down.’

‘Oh,’ she said, looking at the blank parchment. ‘Okay.’

She looked out over the land from the doorstep and the newly restored pavement, and the sun that was sliding around to her right. The long ridge that made the headland was a dark smudge.

‘Everything?’

‘It is most important that you put in every last detail, while you still remember it.’

She’d never used a quill pen before: she dipped the nib in the little pot of ink tentatively, before making an equally uncertain mark on the parchment at the top and right of the page. That was to mark the door they’d come through. Then another, bottom left, to indicate Crow’s castle. What she knew of Down would fit somewhere in between.

She scratched out the lines to represent the bay and the estuary, the river and the lake they’d completely missed because they were on the wrong bank. She added dots for where they camped and the village they’d found.

She was concentrating so hard on getting it as right as she could make it, it was only when she looked up did she see Crows staring intently at the picture she’d drawn.

‘How does it look?’ she asked him.