‘Legend says you will face him – I’ve told you so before. When you are grown. This house and all the magic we have gathered here is headed for that day.’

‘Well I’m not doing it. I don’t know how to face him. I don’t even know what I’d be facing! Besides, every time we’ve tried to get close, all we’ve done is make it worse. I need to have more than just legends, Nan.’

‘Just legends,’ she splutters. ‘All the world is made of legends!’

‘No! It’s made of people!’ I shout. ‘I need this. I can keep our barriers strong. I can study and make the house safe. I will be here when the time comes. But I need to have this too.’

‘It’s a bad idea,’ she says.

‘Can you stop me?’ I demand.

‘Well. I could lock up the house so you can’t get out . . .’ Her eyes gleam.

‘I could unlock it.’

‘With magic?’

‘I do know a spell or two.’

‘I should think you do! I’ve been teaching you for long enough. And you’ve been reading the books, no?’

‘Of course I’ve been reading the books. The books are all I’ve had for years!’ I fling myself into the old armchair by the fire, and she floats to hers opposite.

‘And your old nan,’ she says with a growl in her throat.

‘And you . . . and Peg. But you’re not . . . You’re not people, Nan!’

‘People.’ She sniffs. ‘I think I’d take a ghost or an imp any day, over people.’

‘I do. I have. But I really want to at least know some people before I decide they’re all rubbish.’

She sighs, and a ravel of her essence puffs out like smoke.

‘Perhaps it will be a relief, not to have you trailing around like a lost cloud,’ she concedes after a moment.

My heart leaps, and I grin, dancing my feet on the floor.

‘A trial period,’ she says, raising a finger. ‘And you must tell me everything.’

So I do. I tell her about the lessons, and how the corridors fill with charging crowds and flapping bags. I don’t tell her about Yanny, or the magic I felt in him, or about the hidden corridors. I don’t really know anything about them, anyway.

‘And there’s a lot of stationery,’ I finish. ‘And . . . good lunches.’

‘I didn’t go to school,’ she says. ‘We had a tutor, my brother and I.’ She folds her arms. ‘What’s this about good lunches? We don’t have good lunches here? Cheese from the cellar and sweet apples? Bread from Mrs Mandrake?’

Mrs Mandrake delivers food every Saturday morning. It’s a standing order Nan has, and she’s paid up to infinity, she always told me. The bread Mrs Mandrake makes herself, and there’s milk and golden butter from her cows. Sometimes, there is elderberry cordial; sometimes, she’ll bring cake. She stays and drinks tea and looks out of the window towards the forest and talks about when she was a girl and she discovered the fae magic in Winterspell, and Nan rescued her from the lake where the mer-fae like to sing. Nan loves to see her; she puts so much energy into being here when she visits that I barely see her on Sundays.