She raised her face to him and for a moment he saw Iridial’s drenched face, water pouring from her water-logged hair. He swallowed the half-chewed mouthful of girdle cake as if it were bitter medicine; it had lost all its savour.

‘Who’s been talking to you?’ he said. The question rasped out more roughly than he had intended; fear for her sanity filled him with anger. ‘What mischief has someone been stirring up? Has Dr Tartarus been here behind my back?’

‘No one’s stirred up anything but me,’ she said defiantly. She had begun to twist a loose strand of hair repetitively round and round her finger. The obsessiveness of the gesture disturbed him.

‘Then how did you find out –’

‘I went to the Asylum.’

‘Dear Goddess.’ His legs felt weak all of a sudden; he sat down, fumbling for his kerchief to wipe his brow. ‘Orial – why didn’t you come to me?’

‘Why do you think?’ Blue-ice stare, streaked with frost.

He had forgotten how the rainbow eyes could change with different emotions, could reinforce those emotions with startling impact.

‘I –’ He lifted his hands as if to protest – and then slowly let them fall back. ‘I wanted to protect you. To shield you.’

‘But you could see I was changing.’ The accusing eyes still bored whitefrost into him; he almost shivered under their chill. ‘I needed to know.’

‘What exactly did Tartarus tell you?’

She pressed her lips together; he could see from the trembling of the lower lip that she was fighting to keep from crying.

‘That there is no cure.’

‘Such insensitivity!’ Jerame got up again, almost knocking over the chair; she flinched as she had always flinched from loud noises as a child. ‘He had no right.’ He turned on her. ‘He had no right to tell you such things.’

‘On the contrary,’ she said in a flat, hard little voice. ‘He was honest with me.’

The implied criticism hurt more than he could ever have anticipated.

‘What else haven’t you told me? What else am I going to have to learn from strangers about my life? About my own mother?’

‘How dare you!’ He was shouting now. She had touched the rawness of his secret pain. ‘You will not speak to me like that! You will go to your room!’

‘Yes, I’ll go.’ She retreated, one step at a time. ‘But not to my room. I’m not a child anymore, Papa. I’m going out.’

‘Come back, Orial!’ He went after her but she grabbed her cloak and evaded him, slamming the front door behind her.

‘Tsk, tsk,’ Cook had appeared with her tray. ‘Another unfinished meal. Why do I go to all the trouble to prepare it, I ask myself…’

Jerame found he was still clutching his napkin. He threw it down on the table.

‘I’m not very hungry, Cook.’