It’s a smaller bedroom that connects to the previous one with a little doorway in the corner. And it’s chaos. The room, under all the dust and debris, has been torn apart. A chest of drawers lies on its back, its legs broken; its drawers have been ripped out and lie in a pile of wooden shards beside it. A tiny bed has been snapped clean in half, its boards like jagged teeth.

I swing the lantern about me, catching my breath at the destruction it reveals. Something winks in the fireplace. I hold my breath and move towards it, as my vision flickers with what this room might have been like before it was destroyed. The bed beneath the window, heaped with blankets and pillows; the chest of drawers spilling soft clothes. A thick, intricately patterned rug on the floor, and an iron guard up against a gently flickering fire. My mother’s voice, and the sound of laughter. My father’s broad smile as he reaches down for me, the amber acorn glowing at his neck.

The vision clears as I reach the empty fireplace. Empty, but for a single acorn, almost hidden by a thick pile of ash. I pull it out, and dust drifts through the grate to the floor. A fragment of charred, blackened chain falls from the loop on the top of the acorn to join the ash, and I don’t try to rescue it. The acorn is enough. It is the one he wore, of rich dark amber, still warm between my fingers.

I fold it into my palm, and my throat tightens, a sharp cough exploding from my chest. My eyes are burning; my skin stings all over. I bring the amber acorn to the one at my neck, and I feel again that magnetic pull as it merges with them, threading a fine strand of amber through the heart of the silver and gold.

A bolt of something rushes through me, something wrenches and falls apart, and I stumble, catching myself on the wall. Nan’s glamour, unspooling as my own power takes over. It’s thunder in my veins, but there’s no time – there are footsteps on the stairs, heavy as mountains falling, quick as a river, coming towards me . . . The Shadow King himself stalks into the room. There’s no time to hide or run – I didn’t prepare myself for this. I never even really imagined being in the same room as him. The sheer physical presence of the fae king, so close I could touch him, is a shock that makes the hairs on my arms stand up.

‘What do you here?’ he asks in a cracking voice. The hair that escapes his hood is long and lank; his beard reaches to his waist in scraggly wisps. He wears threadbare grey robes, drawn in over his thin waist by a knotted leather belt. He comes towards me, and the shadow curls at his side as if trying to get away, but my father fights and wins, and finally. Finally. He is there before me.