Even as I think it, I smile. Because however complicated today might have been, it’s been a day. A day of school. Of lessons, and lunch, and new friends who talk and share, even though they hardly know me at all.

No matter what Nan might say, I know I won’t regret that.

Nan is furious. I round the corner to our house, and she is billowing out of the chimney in a great dark cloud of worry and fear. All the lines I’ve been rehearsing, the stories I’ve held in my head to tell her, vanish completely. I loiter, walking slowly down the lane. I need time to work out how to talk my way around her, and my mind is still working through everything that happened today.

It was chaos. Loud, and hot and completely bewildering. I hardly remembered to breathe for much of it, and I still don’t know anything about any of the lessons, or how to read the flipping timetable. The smells and the sounds still clamour in my mind, and that fizzing feeling of nervous excitement I had this morning is still there in the pit of my belly.

But.

I grin. It was fun. And I made friends.

Peg darts up to me as I bend down to pick up an acorn, searching through dried amber leaves for its cup.

‘Well, I hope it was worth it,’ he says, whirring about my head.

I sigh and plonk myself on to the ground, cross-legged, catching him in my hands and holding him up to eye level. He blinks. His presence is so small, and yet it fills me up. He’s been with me for as long as I can remember; there is no part of my life that he couldn’t sing.

Except today.

‘Peg, I think it was,’ I say through a sudden lump in my throat. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry that it upset Nan, and if it caused trouble for you, but I wouldn’t change it. I won’t change it!’

‘You’ll go back?’ He tilts his head.

‘Tomorrow.’ I look at the dark earth, packed and dry beneath the leaves. Peg flutters to my knee as I start my search once more. ‘And all the days after that.’

‘Every day?’

‘Not weekends. Just Monday to Friday. Nan will get used to it,’ I say, finding the pitted acorn cup and holding it up with a grin. It’s bigger than the silver one around my neck, but even so . . . they’re such small things that the great oaks grow from. ‘She will, Peg. She loves me. She’ll see that it makes me happy . . .’

Funny how such a tiny creature can make such a sound of deep disapproval. Peg manages it, and then he launches off and away into the forest.

He keeps secrets. All the time, off in the forest, and he’ll never tell me anything about what’s really in there. I want to hear news of the centaurides and the sprites, and the mirror lake where golden fish speak bewitching tales to unsuspecting passers-by, just as they do in all Nan’s best stories. I want to know of the shadows, of my father. But all Peg ever says is that the forest is fair, and frightful wild besides.