The sky spun around me now, clouds and dark velvet, studded with early stars. The wind stirred harder and the grasses whispered back and no more, no more but the world darkened forever by this act. I fell upon the boulders that held the pole and found his clothes there, and I wept over them.

EMBERS

EMBERS

I woke on a bed in another house, one I did not recognise.

The furnishings were even more spare here. A simple glass lamp burned on a stand beside my head, the wick trailing a coil of cotton. The sharp stink of whale oil filled the room. A man sat on a plain chair in the darkened corner opposite. I jumped when I saw him, fearing that the spectre from the hill had returned. But his face was unmarked, and he had a taper in his hand from the lighting of the lamp. He spoke gently.

‘Don’t be alarmed, miss. I am William Slack, here keeping watch.’ His speech was more formal than the other islanders’, as though he had once been somewhere else, in higher company. He was my father’s age, bristled and wind-beaten, but his face was not unkind. I lay silent a moment, assessing him. There was a seal hide over me, a hessian sack under my head that smelt of oily feathers.

‘Where is my father?’

‘In the room next door. His condition is grave, miss.’

I considered this and he waited for me. ‘Can you get up?’

I went to stand, found I was still dressed in the same clothes I had worn up the hill, blood flaking dark on my right palm. I was weary but not hurt. ‘How long have I been in here?’

‘A couple of hours. They have not found the man.’

He led me out and across a small communal room. Nobody was about. There were signs of a finished meal, a candle burning and a low fire in the hearth. Another doorway on the far side, a darkened bedroom. Slack brought the lamp.

My father lay there, in much the same state as when I had left him. The lamp threw wild shadows at the wall beside him: the standing spikes of hair on his head were horns and fangs, his forehead a vast dome. Then all of it shrank to nothing and he was a tired old man. He opened his eyes once, still unseeing but perhaps reaching for the memory of sight, and closed them again.

As I bent and pressed my cheek to his, I heard people filing into the larger room behind us, clumping heavily on the floorboards, speaking in lowered tones. The men who’d been hunting Gideon. Argyle’s voice was there among them.