My own cry wakes me. “You’re a noisy sleeper,” Mel says. She pulls a book closer to her on her desk.

I go to the small bathroom and wash my face. While I’m there I lift my top and check my skin. Ever since I was bitten by Fenn’s dog back in Featherstone, I’ve had lingering marks which seem to keep travelling lower. Sure enough, the lines snake across my stomach now, a troubling image determined to appear. I try rubbing them away with a flannel and water, but I know it’s useless – I know that like the crow on my chest they’ll reveal themselves soon enough. These kinds of marks always do.

The study has a comforting smell. Mel’s oiled skin gives up its scent of rose, tea and lavender; the books on the shelves and her desk almost breathe with how often they are opened and are allowed to lie with their faces up to the sky. I sit straighter and watch Mel work.

She is frowning over a skin book, her red curls messy and escaping from their pins. Not the normal kind of skin book, but the skin book of a storyteller. Storytellers have no stories of their own recorded – their books are made up of our community’s sacred stories.

Mel must have taken this book from the secret shelves she once showed me. Up a set of steps at the back of the museum is a room you would not notice if you didn’t know to look. Had she really trusted me back when she took me into that intimate, holy place? It feels like another world. The storytellers are not named and remembered by their families for their deeds and accomplishments like the rest of us. They have no names along their spines, no family trees or faces – only the imprint of the stories they recorded and recounted. Storytellers of the past huddle together skin to skin on the shelves in that hidden room. They are unknown by most of the community, but for Mel, they are family and history and home.

We sit there for a time in silence, while she turns the pages and I doze. “Where are you?” she mutters to herself, and I watch as she draws the skin book closer and slowly leafs through its pages again, studying each one with a magnifying glass and a frown. “You must be here somewhere.”

I stretch and stand, and Mel looks up.

“Can I help?” I ask. I force a smile. “May as well make myself useful.”

Mel raises an eyebrow. “There is an art to this, you know.” Then she seems to unbend slightly.

“Which story is it?”

“Pull up a chair.” She moves hers slightly so there is space for two at her desk and I find a wooden seat – small and low, made for a child – and drag it over so I am sitting next to Mel looking with her at a storyteller’s skin book. I am surprised to see that the story she has been puzzling over is the tale of the Sleeping Princess – a story so familiar that we could probably all recite it before we started school.