At that moment I smelled coffee. Good, genuine coffee, not chemicalized instant. And then a huge cup of this delightful coffee appeared in front of me.

“Thank you,” I said, looking up.

Smiling, Arina took my plate with the scrambled eggs and left it on an empty table. She said: “Don’t eat that garbage. I tell you that as a Witch.”

She held out another plate, with fried eggs, cooked just right, so that the yolks had thickened but were still liquid, sprinkled with finely chopped spring onions and with pieces of fried fatty bacon just visible in the congealed whites. Arina set down another cup of coffee in front of herself.

“ ‘Eat the hare’s dung, it makes you feel young’?” I declared. Since Arina’s only response to Filatov’s poem was simply to raise an eyebrow in surprise, I sighed and said, “You’re not a Witch anymore, you’re a Light One.”

“There’s no such thing as a former Witch. How did you sleep, Higher One?”

First I dispatched a piece of fried egg into my mouth and followed it with a large gulp of coffee. Then I said: “Your doing, was it?”

“What, exactly?” Arina asked in surprise.

“My dream.”

“I’ve no idea what you dreamed about,” she said, shaking her head and frowning. “Something unpleasant, was it? Prophetic? I don’t interfere in your dreams.”

“It’s nothing—nonsense, really,” I said, with a dismissive wave of my hand. I downed the rest of the coffee. “Listen, do you earn a bit on the side as a waitress in London?”

“Unfortunately I don’t have a work permit,” Arina laughed. “It’s all charity work. You’re looking a bit crumpled.”

“I had a nightmare,” I admitted reluctantly. “Nothing very informative. Just Nadka, grown up already and . . . kind of strange . . . like all teenagers, I suppose . . . Not very nice, to be honest. And she accused me of doing something to the Others.”

Arina’s expression turned serious. And what she said only convinced me that she took this dream seriously.

“It’s nonsense, Anton. Some dreams are just dreams. Can you tell me about it in a bit more detail?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Okay, let’s drop it. Do you happen to know if fairies really exist?”

“Er . . .” Arina hesitated. “I don’t know. Probably not, of course, but it seems kind of rude to say that right beside Kensington Gardens.”

“Yesterday, as I was walking to the hotel, I saw a little boy on a fallen tree. He was playing a reed pipe, and glowing insects were swarming around him. He saw me, grinned, and ran off.”

“Ran off or flew off?”

“That I don’t know.”

“And you decided you’d run into Peter Pan?”

“God only knows what I thought!”

“Inversion. And projection.”

“What?”