She was getting used to it, to them. There was nothing to it, really, just a difference in her gait, a change in her posture, a slight delay in her turn. She’d have to open the door wider. That was fine, too.

Wings. She had wings. Her breath caught in her throat, coming out like the first sob. She’d wanted this – not this exactly – but this: to bend the world to her will. It had always been coldly inflexible before, uncaring, unresponsive to her wants and wishes. Now Down was giving her her dreams in a piecemeal, overgenerous way that didn’t make any sense and wasn’t controllable.

She could snap her fingers and light fires. She could drag light and dark out of thin air. She could weave the natural world around her for camouflage and for weapons. A castle was growing out of the ground to her unbidden command.

No one had said Down was safe. It was the ways in which it was unsafe that confounded her. Friends that turned out to be enemies, she could understand. Growing wings was incomprehensible.

She could ignore that for the moment, despite the ever-present weight on her back. The first thing she did was check the little room she’d slept in for the map she’d drawn. It had gone, taken by Crows.

Of course it had. Maps were power and wealth. Why did people tell her the truth and then betray her with those same truths? Because they could. Draw a map, said Crows, put everything down that you remember. How stupid could she be? He’d told her exactly what he was going to do, and she hadn’t even noticed, in the same way that the wolfman had: in Down, there was no one to stop you doing whatever you wanted. She hadn’t asked, what if you wanted to be very wicked?

So the map had gone. She could make another one, with the right materials, which inevitably had gone too, with the rest of Crows’ supposed hoard of knowledge. It became more of a question of what he’d left than what he’d taken.

The candle was still on the table, and she lit it almost casually, even though the act itself was extraordinary. There was grain, which she could boil, but there was also a cake of something dark and heavy and sticky. She licked her fingers and tasted the dense flavours of sweet, rich fruit, dried and compressed into a single solid block.

Which she tore into, pulling and clawing, and when that wasn’t fast enough, picking up and worrying chunks out of it with her small white teeth.