There was a long, sweet dizzy falling, when his life spun about me in pieces, flashing and flying too fast and numerous for me to catch hold of more than vivid snatches. I saw a pretty brown-haired woman with Rushton’s jade eyes and yellow flowers in her hair singing in the forest, and then the same woman, cooking, cleaning, weeping, scolding a jack who had sold her a shoddy pot, chopping herbs and, finally, gaunt with sickness and lying in a bed, begging Rushton to go to the high mountains, to Obernewtyn.

‘I do not know why it matters, Mother, but if you wish it, so it will be,’ Rushton told her, his voice less deep than I had ever heard, and breaking so that his boy’s voice showed through. His reflection in his mother’s eyes was very young.

I saw Obernewtyn as he had seen it the first time, half swathed in mist and darkness, and no less drear and sinister than it had seemed to me the first time I had seen it. He had known no more than I how beloved it would become when he hoisted the pack higher and wondered aloud why on earth his mother’s dying wish had been for him to come to such a wretched place.

Then he was older and stronger and I saw him laughing with Louis Larkin and then swearing a solemn pact in this very hut with Roland, Gevan, Selmar and Domick. How young they all looked and how radiant with hope and determination. Then he was older and sitting at a campfire with Selmar, her face all quick brightness and laughter.

With a shock, I saw myself as he had first seen me on the farm, a pale, long-boned girl with a thick fall of black hair and dark green eyes, narrowed and wary under arched black brows. What had there been in my face and form that had struck such a deep and instant chord in him? His mind did not know and yet I felt the impact of that first meeting shudder through him and remembered that I had felt the same, though I had read my reaction as fear.

Suddenly I was enveloped by the memory of despair so black and choking and bottomless that I was afraid. I saw my face at the core of it and the strange purple and orange of a sky with a firestorm in it. This was how Rushton had felt when he had believed me dead after the fire in the White Valley that had killed Jik. The memory was replaced by another, in which I felt Rushton’s incredulous delight when I first told him that I loved him, following the Battlegames in Sador. I relived that first sweet kiss and saw the tiny seed of doubt planted in his mind by my evasions and the thin explanations I had offered of my long absence after the fire in the White Valley. I saw how the way my body healed itself and the things the futuretellers said or did not say about me had fed his doubt, confirming in his deepest consciousness that there was much about me that I had not revealed, despite my avowed love for him.