Darkness drew down around her, and she knew she had arrived. The cavern was a shaping of a soul, a soul lost within itself.

The air was damp and cool. No insects buzzed or lit on her skin. The stone under the soles of her feet was dry.

She could see nothing, and the howl had fallen silent.

When she stepped forward she knew it was her mind that moved, her mind alone, leaving her body, questing out, seeking that chained beast.

‘Who?’

The voice startled her. A man’s voice, muffled, taut with pain.

‘Who comes?’

She did not know how to answer, and simply spoke the first words that came into her head. ‘It is I.’

‘I?’

‘A – a mother . . .’

The man’s laugh grated harshly. ‘Another game, then? You’ve no words, Mother. You’ve never had them. You’ve whimpers and cries, you’ve warning growls, you’ve a hundred thousand wordless sounds to describe your need – that is your voice and I know it well.’

‘A mother.’

‘Leave me. I am beyond taunting. I circle my own chain, here in my mind. This place is not for you. Perhaps, in finding it, you think you’ve defeated my last line of defence. You think you now know all of me. But you’ve no power here. Do you know, I imagine seeing my own face, as if in a mirror.

‘But it’s the wrong eye – the wrong eye staring back at me. And worse, it’s not even human. It took me a long time to understand, but now I do.

‘You and your kind played with winter. Omtose Phellack. But you never understood it. Not true winter, not the winter that is not sorcery, but born of the cooling earth, the dwindling sun, the shorter days and longer nights. The face I see before me, Seer, it is winter’s face. A wolf’s. A god’s.’

‘My child knows wolves,’ the Mhybe said.

‘He does indeed.’

‘Not he. She. I have a daughter—’

‘Confusing the rules defeats the game, Seer. Sloppy—’

‘I am not who you think I am. I am – I am an old woman. Of the Rhivi. And my daughter wishes to see me dead. But not a simple passage, not for me. No. She’s sent wolves after me. To rend my soul. They hunt my dreams – but here, I have escaped them. I’ve come here to escape.’