Instead of answering, some impulse made me summon up a memory of the play and the song Miky and Angina had long ago made about a sleeping princess. They had used Dragon’s image for the princess and Cinda gasped to see her lying asleep on a flowery bier. When the part of the story came that showed the prince who wakened the sleeping princess in the story, I was startled to see that instead of having Dameon’s face and form, as in the empaths’ performance, staged to honour their guildmaster, the blind prince bore a striking resemblance to Matthew. I found myself explaining how the unformed feral child had fallen in love with the immature youth that Matthew had been, his head too full of heroes and heroines for him to recognise her worth.

‘He was very cruel to her,’ I said aloud.

Cinda shook her head. ‘Maybe he was only afraid. Love feels very dangerous sometimes.’

I stared at her, remembering my initial dislike of Rushton, who had been a man when I was still a child. Only later had I understood that I had feared what he made me feel, being unready for love. What made Cinda so wise? Was it the result of so much suffering?

‘I do not think suffering inevitably leads to wisdom, though I think it can teach compassion,’ Cinda’s image murmured. The fire cracked and outside I heard the wind in the trees. ‘Do you think she loves him still?’

I shook my head. ‘I think what Dragon felt for Matthew was only a child’s infatuation. She was very young and he had been kind and attentive to her while he had been helping to teach her to use her Talents. She mistook his kindness for love.’

‘Do not say only to what a child can feel, for do you not recall how powerfully you experienced emotion as a child?’ Cinda asked me very seriously. ‘We do not cast off childhood like the skin of a snake. It remains within us, even as we grow. It is the heart and core of us. And a child’s love can grow into a woman’s love.’

‘Perhaps, but Dragon has forgotten Matthew along with everything that happened to her since I found her on the west coast,’ I said. ‘It may be that she will never remember what she felt for him and I can’t help but feel that would be for the best.’

‘Maybe Dragon went to the west coast when she disappeared because she hoped it would help her to remember what she had forgotten. It must frighten her to have forgotten so much,’ Cinda’s image replied.