Thatch was rich. I had thinned out so much these last years I felt ravaged. My few remaining curls were, to a man, embarrassed by their conspicuousness, like dancers stuck in the middle of a ballroom with no hope of a partner. Vanity in the old is an unforgiveable thing.

I wiped my brow and tasted my own salts. The sun was reaching its zenith and I hastened my steps, momentarily certain that my one guide would soon be lost to me. Then I stopped, relieved I still had the wherewithal to laugh at myself. I sat in a shaded spot and waited for the sun to become useful once more. I couldn’t see the moon.

*

After a few wasted hours I resumed my course north, or so I hoped. Each step felt torturously slow and it occurred to me I might never get out of that forsaken place. But I wouldn’t give Christophor the satisfaction of knowing I had been the one to kill us with my ineptitude or lack of stamina. No, I’d rather sleep until we became his responsibility. It was his fault we were here after all. His fault—

I heard a different song than the birds. A voice, drifting through the trees. My salvation or damnation, who was to say between the two? I followed the sound as I was bid, sure in the knowledge that the melancholy, wordless tune was for me and me alone. Not wordless, I realised, and then I saw flashes of white through the trees. The Lord’s angels, perhaps, come to escort me heavenwards despite my night-brother’s sins. Despite my own. Like a fool I began to recount them, finding all manner of ways to trivialise or explain my indiscretions until I realised there was no need. They would know me for an old heathen who drank too much and cheated poorly at cards, who slept with married women and felt not a drop of remorse. They knew it all and more.

I glanced back at the dark forest, the choice obvious before me – as clear a metaphor as either testament ever managed. I chose to have it done with. Arms spread wide I walked towards the angelic host.

*

The singing continued as I stepped beyond the treeline. My divine salvation became more earthly as I realised the white I’d spotted was not in fact robes, but bed linen.

Enormous sheets swayed in the late afternoon heat. I was at the base of an incline that led up to the back of a house, which glistened along the bottom with the glass of a greenhouse. After long hours in the forest this homely scene felt so strange to me – just as the moon in the daylight sky, I was the imposter here. But my thirst couldn’t be denied. I skirted the sheets, still hearing the unsettling song.

He saw me first, I thought, because when I stopped he was staring at me around the edge of a coverlet. Eyes of a green to make all the trees of the forest envious. He was so short I mistook him for a very young child, but his face, the way he held himself, his confidence all spoke of a man at peace with who he was. That, not the eyes, struck a spark of envy in me.