‘A faerie tree?’ he says. ‘I thought only hawthorn made faerie trees. And this tree is already dead.’

Her face breaks in two, fractures and comes apart, and then it becomes sombre and whole again, except for the cavern in its centre. She was smiling, he realises.

‘Ah,’ she says. ‘It is my face, which you think is unnatural. I would not give you the axe anyway. There is some despairing thing in you, and I have some sense with men. They do seek me out enough.’

Monsieur Hacquelebacq shakes his head at this. ‘I must be on my way to Nobber,’ he says. ‘The day is too hot for dallying. There is no shade under that tree. I would not join you.’

‘You do not believe me, do you, that men seek me out?’ she says.

As she says this drool rolls down her chin from the crack in her face. She wipes it away with the back of her hand and laughs at her own clumsiness.

‘That is unfortunate, but even this is life spilling out of me,’ she says.

She lifts her hand up, covered in saliva, for him to see. It glints in the light.

‘Look at this stomach, these breasts, these eyes. I am strong and fresh like cool mornings. Sickness does not touch me, because all the particles of the world have been flowing untrammelled into me since birth. My cracked face is the rap on the mouth that God gave me to break me into life, and it rejects nothing. But more important than all my vanity, I emanate luck from my face. It is a famous one. You may have heard of it in your wanderings, and you can tell the people this cracked face you saw belongs to Segnat. They will know it.’

She pauses, chuckles to herself. ‘Listen to me. I am foolish,’ she continues. ‘Like a child, justifying myself to everyone I come across as if this face were a new gift rather than birth’s blessing. I do not care what you think of it. I have many diverse pleasures out of the society I keep; my children, the work I do. The world is beautiful and I do not need the approval of a man who poaches starving peasants’ livestock.’

‘If you believe your hideous deformity to be such good luck,’ Hacquelebacq says, ‘why would you provoke wrath on yourself by chopping down such a tree?’