My words jammed in my throat, but I forced them out. ‘The morning I left. Paladin came with me, and . . .’

‘The morning you left. Oh, Fura. It must have been terrible.’

And she pulled her head closer to mine and I thought there was sisterly kindness in it, as if she were going to hug me so near that our tears mingled and we got the salt of them in our mouths. Tell me it wasn’t my fault either, and I wasn’t to blame myself any more than she was.

But I felt a cold edge on my throat.

‘He died, or you left him to die? Which was it, Fura?’

I tried to ease back, but whatever blade she had against my neck stayed put.

‘I’m sorry . . .’

‘You think I didn’t know? Bosa told me weeks ago. She picks up scraps, transmissions, whenever she can. Obituaries. He wasn’t much, our father, but he got his paragraph. And Bosa hoped the news would turn me nearer to her, and she was right.’

‘She didn’t turn you,’ I said, hardly speaking the words in case she cut my throat. ‘If she had, you’d have warned her about the trap.’

‘Oh, I considered it,’ Adrana said. ‘But then I thought: what’s more useful to me? Tipping off Bosa, or seeing what I can get out of her walking into it? She told me I was going to be the one, you see. Not for a while, not until I’d stopped being able to pick up the whispers, but after that, I’d be the one she favoured. That’s how it works, you see – how it’s always worked. Bosa picks the one to follow her, the one with the aptitude. It wasn’t a hard choice, Fura! I could read, and put two numbers together, and that already put me at the front of the line. But I also had her cleverness, she said, and I could be sly when I needed it, and she knew I’d soon see things the way she did.’

I had to keep her talking, so I said: ‘And how did she see things, exactly?’

‘Bosa’s not bad, Fura. That’s just how they make her seem. But it’s Bosa who’s been doing right all these years, not the rest of ’em. It was Bosa that worked out the quoins, and if the truth of that doesn’t cool your blood, nothing will. They’re souls, Fura. The souls of the dead. Only they’re not dead, exactly.’

I heard what she was saying, but the words weren’t making any sense to me. Not then, anyway.

‘So what happens now?’