‘This is Marleya,’ she says. ‘The governor’s palace.’

I nod. ‘Home,’ I say.

We set off down the hallway together, Sofika murmuring softly beside me as she takes in every part of the dreamscape. Often in dreams the shape of a place is different and distorted, but not here. Save for the candles, this fragment of my home is exactly as I remember it, right down to the smell. Candle smoke and rain and cold air, and beneath that the earthy tang of whisperpines. Every hanging drape is where it should be. Every book and roll of parchment posted into the niches in the walls.

‘I have spent so many years inside your dreams,’ Sofika says. ‘Never once have I seen this place.’

‘Because I have not dreamt of it since I left it,’ I say. ‘Not for forty years.’

I raise the lantern a little higher. The wind tugs at the flame, trying its best to blow it out, but the light perseveres.

‘Here,’ I say, and I point to the stairway leading off and upwards. The bare stone steps are smoothed by the passing of feet over generations. If I listen carefully, I can hear the keening cries of birds echoing down from above.

‘Ahri,’ Sofika says, because she knows of the spire tower, and what it means. She knows almost everything about me, for better or worse.

I shake my head, and start up the steps. They are steep and narrow and curl around and around in a spiral. The keening of birds grows louder and louder until the stairs give way to the roost at the top of the spire tower. The floor is littered with feathers and flakes of straw that turn in the wind coming through the large, glassless windows. Several hunting birds sit with their claws hooked around their resting posts, crying into the storm. I don’t look at them. Neither does Sofika. We are both looking at the two figures standing with their backs to us, gazing out over the mountains and the terrible storm that crowns them.

The first is tall, with broad shoulders that suggest a strength he once had. He is clad in robes of regal blue and leans his weight on a gilded wooden cane, easing the pressure on his old wounds. The other is just a child, barefoot and clad in nightclothes with a lantern in her hand. She looks strangely fragile with her long, dark hair catching in the wind just as the flame inside the lantern does. Sofika follows me as I move to stand beside them at the open window.

‘You need not carry the lantern much longer,’ my father says, to my younger self.

Just like the hallway and the stairs and the spire tower, his voice is exactly as I remember it, even if his words are not. His profile is, too. His steep, dark brows and the broken step of his nose. His deep, old scars. It is almost too exact for a dream. I rest my hands on the worn stone sill of the window, feeling the cold stone under my hands. The mountain air on my face is colder still, and flecked with rain.