His face and body was spotted with livid welts where the venom had got him. The middle finger of his left hand had gone, and the stone stump was heavy and painful. How he would explain all this to his father and his nurse he did not know. Delicately he tapped the place above his right ear. It was hard, harder than bone.

In shock, he examined it in his reflection as carefully as he could. The skin was discoloured, grey even.

A terrible thought came to him: he had been affected by the Last Gorgon. It wasn’t only his finger – a small patch of his head had turned to stone.

He’d closed his eyes, steadying himself on the edge of the bath. The tapping sound became louder. Where was it coming from? He stared at the sack. But it wasn’t that. Again and again it came, and he accidentally knocked over the table with his elbow as he turned to look. Ale splashed everywhere.

A rage gripped him, and he turned over a chest, kicking the contents all over the place – tunics, sword belts, a fine ivory draughts set – until he sat down in the middle of his room and placed his hands over his ears.

Now the tapping sounded even louder. It rang around inside him, seeming to overwhelm everything else.

Then he realised. It was horrifying, but it was the only explanation.

It was coming from inside his mind.

He looked at himself once more in the mirror. His own eyes glared back at him, lidded, heavy, with a hardness he’d not seen in them before.

Now, calmer and quieter, he sat in his hunting tunic, a dark linen cloak ready beside him, a new pair of sandals on his feet. He did not know in what guise the Swallows’ reply would come, but he was ready for anything.

Later, after about two hours had passed, judging by the level of oil in the lamps, his skin was itching, and even though he knew the Last Gorgon was dead, the presence of her severed head so near to him was a real, malevolent thing.

He had to stay awake. But he was so, so tired. His eyes were drooping.

And then he was back in the cave. The rank smell, the dankness. And he had no reflective shield, no sword; he was defenceless, and a beautiful woman was coming towards him, stretching out her arms, eyes so deep he felt himself falling into them, and her hand was grasped around his wrist, and it was turning into a talon …

Something tickled his nose. He opened his eyes and saw, drifting to the sheepskin rug at his feet, a swallow’s feather.

He stretched out a hand and caught it.

Another one fell, and he caught that one too, automatically, with his left hand.