There was no sinister figure lurking near the Castle, and there was no sign of anyone having been inside the lighthouse either. I locked the heavy door and then I went back outside, moving around the wall of the cottage carefully, keeping an eye out for the mysterious dark figure, and for Mrs Baron too. The last thing I wanted was to be caught and sent away all by myself, without Mags. There was no sign of her, though. If she had come looking for us, she must have been and gone already. The only sounds were the cries of sea birds in the heavy sky above, and the gusting of the stormy air.

But then there was another sound. There, entwined delicately about the rushes of the wind, was a high, piercing thread of song. The Daughters of Stone.

I went straight to the stone on the left – the stone that was pointed at the top like a diamond, the one that had always been mine, ever since I was tiny. The song was stronger here – not louder, just, somehow, stronger – sharper and clearer. I put my hand flat against the stone, and it seemed to vibrate beneath my palm, like the heartbeat of an alarmed animal. It felt like a warning.

I thought then about that long, lonely night I had spent on the clifftop, and of how the stones and I had sung to the sea in the eerie dawn light, praying for my father and sister to come safely home. I had made a solemn promise, just as the Daughters had so many centuries before. Pa had been killed, but, miraculously, Mags had come home to me. What did that mean? Was there a price to be paid or not? Would I end up being turned to stone?

Mags would have dismissed the idea as superstitious nonsense. She would have laughed. But I knew that the magic was real. Was it faith, or fear? – that terrible, quiet knowledge I had possessed deep in my bones ever since I had first heard the legend: my fate was somehow entangled with the Wyrm and the stones, and there was nothing that could be done about it.

In that moment, a herring gull landed on top of the stone. I noticed that its beak and eyes were exactly the same shade of vivid yellow as the nose of the German fighter plane. The gull looked right at me with its cold, yellow eyes, opened its beak and let out a piercing peal of screams before flapping its wings and launching itself out over the sea.