Conmael spared me the indignity of having to ask. ‘Strike camp,’ he said, ‘and we will lead you to a more suitable spot, dry and sheltered. The necessities you requested will be ready for you there.’ A carefully judged pause. ‘I did explain before that I wish to help you, Blackthorn. There is no need for every encounter to be a battle.’

‘It was your manner that made it so. I hope you and your friends will do me the courtesy of absenting yourselves while I get dressed.’

They set down their lanterns and faded back into the shadows. Within the space of two breaths I could not see them at all. It was deeply disconcerting: not just the suddenness, but the feeling they might still be there watching, only invisible. On the other hand, the spectacle of me or Grim unclothed was hardly going to cause any excitement.

‘I’ll hold up a blanket for you,’ Grim said now. It seemed he, too, suspected we were still under scrutiny. ‘Better be quick, it’s cold.’

We put on our damp clothes. We bundled up our supplies. As soon as we had our packs on our backs, Conmael and the others were there once more, raising the lanterns, lighting a path through the woods. Not the track we’d come in by, since it was already deep in water, but another that snaked up around the rocks, then curved down under the trees again. An unpleasant thought came to me: that we were being led far astray, into a realm beyond the human, and that there would be some kind of trick attached. Perhaps Conmael had decided seven years of tending to the aches and pains of my own kind and staying away from Mathuin would not be enough to teach me whatever it was he thought I still had to learn. Perhaps both I and hapless Grim, whose only crime had been to follow me when he wasn’t wanted, would now be condemned to ten years, fifty years, a hundred years in the world of the fey. A hundred years doing Conmael’s bidding. If it was anything like the tales, I’d be sent back into the human world the same age I was now, and find that not only was Mathuin dead and gone, but his grandchildren were too. So much for justice.

I stumbled, and Grim’s hand shot out to keep me from falling.

‘All right?’ he muttered.

‘I’ll cope. You?’

‘I’ll do. Wish I knew what the fellow was playing at.’

Conmael was walking up ahead of us. He did not turn, but his voice came clearly, for all the moaning of the trees in the wind and the relentless voice of the rain. ‘Blackthorn knows the nature of this game. Whether she chooses to share the details with you is her business.’

‘She told me.’ Grim’s voice was granite hard. ‘And it didn’t make a lot of sense.’