I stood up, and started to sing. It was the German lullaby Mutti used to sing to me when I was a baby. My lips were dry and my voice shook – I had barely spoken out loud for a day and a night. I sang about the moon and the stars, shadows and mist – ‘the world in stillness clouded, and soft in twilight shrouded’. I sang about being ‘in His keeping’ – protected and safe through the darkness . . .

I was aware of the stones all around me as I sang. I knew from the quickened pulsing of my heart that the ancient magic was not dusty and sleeping: it was alive, it was awake. I didn’t need to look at the stones to know they were listening to me, their granite glittering like frost in the dawn light. Their song floated in the air with mine, a song like gauze or thistledown – I couldn’t hear it; I felt it: fine and strange. The back of my neck prickled and my skin turned to goosebumps. My hair streamed in the wind, just as it had in my drawing. The sea breezes flapped around me like the beating of feathered wings, whipping the words from my mouth and carrying them away – out over the sea. Was the magic working?

Then I saw it. A boat, emerging from the mist, heading for our harbour.

I could hardly breathe. I just watched the boat coming closer and closer to the shore. If it is the lifeboat, I thought, or the motor boat – if it is Pa or Mags – what will happen to me now? Will the Wyrm take my soul? Will I turn to stone? I wrapped my arms around myself. My skin felt numb – rough and goosebumpy. Perhaps it was happening already.

Fingers of mist reached up towards me from the sea . . .

It is the lifeboat! And, for a moment, I really believed that it was.

Your brain can do terrible things to you when you are in that sort of state – when you are desperate for something to be true. To this day, I could swear that I saw the dark blue and white paintwork, the red trim, the little flag at the front . . .

But I saw no such thing. It was not the lifeboat at all. It was Kipper’s fishing boat.

Kipper was safely home, then, but not Mags, and not my Pa.

The sun kept rising slowly. At least it seemed to – I couldn’t see the sun itself – it was hidden, like a burning face behind a widow’s veil of smoke. The horizon glowed red and the sky reddened too. The scraps of cloud drifting above were as ragged as the sail of that little dinghy, shot through with bullets, crimson.