If Crows had slept at all, she didn’t know where or when. The tumbledown ruin – perhaps a victim of the same wars that had claimed the riverside village – still had a couple of rooms that were mostly weatherproof. The blankets she’d found smelled of cold air and flowers, and despite the terrors of the night and the uncertain quality of her saviour, she’d not woken once.

She found him on his doorstep-without-a-door, hunched over, staring over the woodland beyond. The castle had been set on a rock outcrop, on the highest point of a ridge, and the trees swept away like a carpet before them.

‘Does the wolfman know we’re here?’ she asked. She leaned against the stonework, watching the sun cut away the early-morning mist.

‘He knows nothing of this place, so both you and I are safe here. He knows I come and go into his mistress’ domain, but he cannot catch me.’ His words were accented but precise, his voice pitched higher than hers. ‘I have places to hide, and ways to hide those places. Sit, Mary. Drink in the view, for there are few sights finer.’

She sat beside him. ‘So what am I looking at?’

‘Down,’ he said. ‘Whoever first named it, named it right. Down is where we are: it is both a destination and a direction, it is how we fall and where we land.’

‘And how did I get here?’

‘Like everyone else. You needed it to be there. I take it you had reason enough?’

She remembered the heat and the noise. ‘I thought I was going to die.’

‘Down is a gift of grace, a last-minute mercy, unlooked for and unheralded. You do not find it: it finds you, when you least expect it but want it the most.’

‘I don’t get it, though. Why us? Why me? Almost everyone else I was with that night died.’ She remembered, and shuddered.

‘You are asking if you have been especially chosen. Hmm.’ Crows steepled his long fingers in front of his face. ‘I have thought long and hard over this. Is there a thread of meaning, linking all those who have come to Down, marking us out like gold amongst the dross?’

She huffed. ‘Is there a reason why, then? Why us and not others? Why it didn’t appear sooner and save more of us?’

‘If there is an answer to those questions,’ he shrugged, ‘I cannot find them. Why you, why me? You may as well ask the moon, Mary. What makes us special is that we are here, Mary, not the why or the where or the when of it. We were granted an unexpected second chance, but it is a blank sheet, a tabula rasa as the Romans say.’

Crows paused, as if to contemplate his own words, and Mary grew restless again.

‘Crows …’

‘Can you write, Mary?’ he asked, pre-empting any more questions.

Not often, not well. ‘Sure.’