“She’s been let down by people she loved and trusted.” I think of how she talked about my birth mum, her best friend, Miranda, falling in love with Dad and how, to her, it was the worst possible betrayal.

“You’ve been let down too, Leora, and yet you’re not like Sana. I’ve seen you angry, true – but I’ve never seen that anger turn to hate.” She smiles briefly. “Well, maybe just once.”

I frown, dreading what she might say next. Mel slows her horse and we ride side by side.

“You were raised to hate the blanks. We all were. All of us in Saintstone are taught from an early age that these are evil beings who are desperate to steal our souls. So little wonder that you hated your father when you heard that he had married a blank. You hated him all the more when you realized you were that blank woman’s daughter and he had kept all this from you. It was fear and anger and self-loathing that led you to hate him enough to see his book burned.”

I swallow, remembering that day, the hatred that coursed through me bittersweet as wine.

“But that hate left you quickly,” Mel goes on. “And you have since acted to resist it. Sana is different. We can develop our anger into hate by feeding it with fear and ignorance, blame and bitterness. But eventually, the hate devours us.”

We ride in silence for a while and the fragrances of the forest rise up to greet us. Everything is just a breath away from full bloom, the buds and leaves fit to burst with life. The ground beneath the horses’ hooves gives up a herbal scent of rain and ritual, and I think of Gull taking me through the forest, walking barefoot and smiling at her surroundings as though they were her only friend.

“Tell me more,” Mel says after a while. “Was Sana really the one who killed Longsight?”

“She was the one who stabbed him, yes.” I remember that night. The night that Gull painted her skin with a paste of ash that burned her, desperate for a mark of her own, Oscar holding her arm under running water. Fenn telling us that we had to leave. And then the final piece of the puzzle falling into place. The box with Sana’s black clothing and red knife.

She confessed to us that very night – as though admitting to a ruse. She gloried in it – she knew the people’s hunger made them desperate for something to fill them, and that something, she had decided, was her – her as their leader, her as warmonger, her as the one person who could bring them victory. The people thought she meant all this to bring peace – when really all she wanted was the fight.

I dread to imagine what kind of a town I am returning to, what will be left of the people I care so much for. But Mel knows so little of Featherstone and its community – how can I prepare her for what she is about to find? A whole world of opposite.