‘Ouch! Teacake!’

Her green eyes flare. I stare at her, and then into the forest. The shadows’ smiles are not soft now. They are full of teeth. I back away, and they roar, and my knees buckle beneath the tide of their rage, but Teacake swats at me and yowls in my ear, and so I know – I know to turn away. To keep walking, against the pull of their desire, through the mist-thick grass and back to the house. Home to Peg, and to Nan, shivering and half out of my mind with the horror and the pull of those shadows.

There will be hell to pay, but at least it will be the kind of hell that loves me.

Nan is waiting by a smouldering fire. For a moment, it’s hard to see her, and then she blooms into full view, curled into her armchair. Her arms are folded, and her eyes are narrowed.

‘Estelle Brigg,’ she says.

‘Hey, Nan,’ I chirp.

Peg, in his usual spot on the mantelpiece, shakes his head wearily.

I smile sweetly. ‘How’re you doing?’

‘Don’t Hey, Nan me!’ she says, floating a little up into the air. ‘Worried, Estelle – that’s how your old nan is. Peg had the sense to tell me where you’d gone and with whom –’ Peg gives me an evil grin – ‘so I knew you weren’t alone and lost in there. But, Estelle, this is not good enough. You were forbidden from going to school, but there you are. And you were forbidden from the forest, for very good reason, and off you pop on a jolly with your friend!’

‘It wasn’t a jolly!’ I snap, my skin still flaring from the close encounter with the shadows, my mind flitting back to Yanny and his weary parents. ‘It was a visit with a friend, and you can’t expect me to avoid the forest forever.’

‘I absolutely do expect you to avoid the forest,’ she says, her hair puffing out in bright white streaks. ‘You know what happened the last time we were in there, Stella – we were lucky to get out alive!’

‘But we did get out! Other people live in there. They have torches to get through the shadows, they fight them, and we just sit here, hiding in our safe place doing nothing!’

‘Torches through the shadows?’ she says. ‘I suppose you mean faelight. How close to the shadows did you get, Estelle?’

I do wish she’d stop calling me Estelle. Once is quite enough of a telling-off.

‘Well, they’re everywhere, so they got pretty close,’ I say, folding my arms. ‘Why don’t we have a faelight? Why haven’t we tried harder?’

‘We do have a faelight,’ she says, glimmering at the edges with a faint, silvery light of her own. ‘We have an old lantern. And we have me – and we have you. The moon sprite in us means we have our own light, Stella. But it still isn’t enough! The lantern cracked; the shadows nearly took you whole!’