I straightened, gathered my courage and then I reached up to hold my hands palm-down above his head. I closed my eyes and delved down into myself, finding the shadowy niche where the dark power slumbered. Even now I hesitated to wake it. In the past, awakened, it had terrified me with its violent potency. But perhaps there was no need to wake it wholly, for there was no great enemy here to conquer. There was only the chaining of a spirit, which would offer no resistance. I formed a delicate probe and sent the tendril into the slumbering pool of power. Carefully, I drew a trickle of it into me. It felt like a rivulet of icy water, or maybe of Grufyyd’s special mead, for there was something intoxicating in it. For the first time, I did not feel it to be violent or malevolent and I wondered if this was because I was drawing it into me rather than holding it off.

I willed the power to flow through me and out of my fingertips just as I did when I was creating a spirit-form. I did not try to force it into any shape, I merely fixed my mind on the need to bind my secrets to Rushton’s spirit so that there would be no trace of them in his conscious and waking mind, nor even in his dreaming and unconscious mind. I opened my eyes and found that I was holding a length of chain. The dark links were clumsily formed and heavy and I wept as I wrapped them about the bear’s body. It sat passive, making no protest, and when I was done, I held the ends to the stone beneath him and watched them melt into it.

To my shame and dismay, when I looked into the bear’s face, I saw that part of the chain had altered and flattened to become a hateful muzzle. Only its eyes could speak now and it broke my heart to see there was pity in them, but also serenity. The latter stopped me falling on the chains and trying to tear them away again, but I said, ‘I did not know what it would mean.’

The bear could not answer, but his grave green eyes held mine, and when I reached out to touch him, I heard the words he could not say.

It seems that after all there is a part I can play. I am to keep your secrets safe. I will wear these chains, my love, for are they not the price to be paid for our loving; even for this golden link that binds us? I pay it gladly and with all my heart.

‘The chains will not last forever,’ I reminded him, kissing his head. ‘One day they will fall away and you will remember …’