She pauses, orientates herself. This is undiscovered territory; she has never used this route before. She should make a wish – that’s what you’re supposed to do when you step onto new land. They had done it when disembarking from the ship, her mother closing her eyes and grasping Viola’s hand, instructing her to send a request skyward. She had wished to go home, and it strikes Viola now that she wouldn’t make that wish again. Deep down in her dark heart, she acknowledges that there will never be any going back.

She takes the path to the right where it slopes upwards and must therefore lead to the Big House. The incline gets steadily steeper, the pine trees deliver a lemony sharpness to the lungs. Viola rounds the corner.

She stops dead.

There is a well to one side of the path and someone is leaning over it, black hair falling forward, sobs echoing into the hollowness below. It is a scene from a fairy tale.

February 2018

FEBRUARY 2018

Viola knew that she would have to be the one to do it – make payment for the fetching of the heart.

‘Do bad things happen on the mainland too?’

That was one of the first questions the Eldest Girls had put to her, the very afternoon she had emerged from her spying place and stepped into the stone circle. She hadn’t understood what she was being asked, not really. She had struck forward blindly, replied, ‘Bad things happen everywhere’, her only concern being to sound cool, insightful.

Then she had spoilt it all by bursting into tears. Not because of the pressure to say the right thing or her fear that they would reject her – though those feelings played their part – but because she had inadvertently spoken the truth, one she had wanted to say aloud for a very long time. Bad things happen everywhere, Mum. Accept that you can’t stop them. Let’s try and live our lives. Jump in with both feet. Move on.

‘My dad and brother were killed last year.’ The story had poured from her in a great unstoppable surge. ‘They were coming home from a football match together and there was a man at the tube station and he was sick in the head and he’d taken drugs – he was raving, saying mad stuff – and he had a carving knife and Seb just in the wrong place at the wrong time or had the wrong face or whatever and the man went for him and Dad tried to step in and it only got worse and both of them ended up … It was random. It was just … random.’