‘I don’t know! I don’t know what lace . . . tatting is, and now I never will.’

He belches and doesn’t look sorry at all. ‘Lace tatting is the construction of particularly durable lace. It’s useful for making doilies.’

‘Doilies –’ I spread my hands – ‘are what, exactly?’

‘Those little frilly mat things that go under sugar bowls.’

I huff at him and pull my book closer. ‘Please don’t eat any more. You never know. Maybe lace tatting is really good for anti-shadow armour . . .’

‘They’re not clouds, Stella. They have teeth. Real teeth, real claws. You’re going to need more than a lace doily against all that.’

‘OK,’ I say.

For a few minutes, there’s silence while I try to translate some old Germanic that seems to be hinting at something to do with the blood of a yew tree. But I’m too distracted to concentrate.

‘Peg?’

‘Yes, dear Stella,’ he replies from the nearest pile of books, reaching into a small copper bowl of pumpkin seeds.

‘Why are you going along with this? You didn’t exactly like it when I started school.’

‘Change,’ he says, tossing a bunch of seeds up into the air and sending them spinning with a gesture of one small hand. He huffs, and they form a smouldering ball, which fragments piece by piece as each finely toasted seed falls into his waiting mouth, until only a crescent-moon shape remains.

I breathe a few spell words, and the crescent becomes a fiery bird that swoops down over our heads before collapsing into ash on to the table. Peg watches me.

‘Sometimes, it’s inevitable, and you may as well just go along with it. You wouldn’t have tried that spell before. Last week, you wouldn’t have called the school. Last year, the shadows hadn’t spread the way they have now. We are drawing closer to our futures, Stella. May as well read up on it.’

‘Very sage advice,’ I say. ‘Coming from a paper-eating, seed-shuffling imp.’

He grins.

But it’s not quite funny. The way he said it, the flicker in his eyes, there was something dangerous there. Something different, even in him.

Peg was Nan’s familiar when she was alive. When my parents died, Nan was called upon by my mother to look after me, and he came with her. I don’t know that she could have done it without him. And I don’t know why my mother didn’t linger as a ghost. Why all this happened in the first place. I have wondered. More than wondered – I have felt it burst from the hollow place deep inside that hurts, when the dusk is yellow, and the swifts gather in the sky in tumbling, swooping tides, and summer is over. A why and a where and a how – but mostly the why. Why did it happen? Why is Nan a ghost and my mother isn’t?

Nan says it’s because my mother was a better person than she is; her spirit went straight where it was supposed to go. I wish it hadn’t gone anywhere. If she had survived the Plaga, everything would be different. My father did survive it, but not really. His illness, combined with his grief, cursed everything in Winterfell. Why? Why did he descend so deep into shadows that he couldn’t even see me? Does he even remember I exist?