Last part of the journey’s easier. We’ve got good food and warm clothes, and that helps keep our spirits up. Be happier if we’d earned those things with the work of our own hands. Heard too many tales about fey gifts and fey promises and how they turn a man’s life upside down. There can’t be good in it. Hard to weigh it up. A puzzle. Conmael saved Blackthorn from the executioner. That’s big. It’s big enough that I should forgive him plenty. But I don’t like him and I don’t trust him. His kind don’t think the way we do. They don’t have feelings, if the tales are true.

Anyway, he doesn’t come back, so we travel on without him. Lonelier country here in the north, mountains and lakes and dark forests. Not so many farms and not so many folk on the road. That suits the two of us. Some days we go from dawn to dusk with hardly a word spoken. Just walking on, stopping for a rest or a drink or a bite to eat, then walking on again. There’s a peace in it that has me wishing we’d never get to Winterfalls, but a day comes when we reach a crossroads with a marker. Letters scratched on a big stone slab, and arrows pointing off north and west.

‘Winterfalls,’ says Blackthorn, looking up the road to the north. It doesn’t surprise me that she can read. I reckon hers might be quite a story. She turns to look along the track to the west, leading to a soft woodland, all kinds of green. ‘Winterfalls,’ she says again. ‘Through Dreamer’s Wood.’

‘Which way?’ I ask. I can see the northern track is the main one – it’s broad and well kept and seems to run fairly straight. The path through Dreamer’s Wood is prettier. Looks like the kind of way that could lose itself quickly.

‘The northern one’s quicker, I’d guess,’ says Blackthorn. ‘But the cottage isn’t in the settlement of Winterfalls. It’s on the fringe of Dreamer’s Wood. That’s what Conmael said. So we’re going that way.’ She gives me a glance. ‘Looks as if we’re nearly there.’

I wait for her to say it: Thank you for helping me get here, Grim, now you can go your own way. But she doesn’t, just turns and heads off along the westward track. I hurry after her. If this place turns out to be a ruin, I’ll fix it up nice and neat. Mend the roof, dig new drains, put a good bolt on the door. See that the fire draws well, the shutters fit tight, the privy’s dug deep. Make it into a proper home.