For some reason her words made me think of the black power coiled in the darkest corner of my mind and I thought bleakly that if saving a spirit was the greatest power, then the ability to kill must be the darkest, for was it not the opposite? The severing of the silver link that binds spirit to flesh?

And then, just like that, it came to me how I could give the help I had been asked to give.

‘Elspeth?’ Kella said. ‘Are you ill?’

I shook my head, and prevaricated. ‘I took a slight chill when I was caught in the rain last night on the way to the farms, and between that and everything happening, I seem unable to concentrate on anything.’ Nothing would do then but that Kella prepare a potion for me. I let her do what she liked for I was beginning to feel light-headed. When I was sipping at the honeyed liquid she had concocted, she sat by me and resumed her story.

‘More than anything else, after Rushton told me what had happened to Domick, I felt a terrible guilt, because while he had been suffering and dying, I had been realising that I had fallen in love with someone else. That is why I left Sutrium when I did and why I was not there to hear what had happened to Domick. I had to go after him and tell him.’

I stared at her. ‘Tell who?’

A lovely colour bloomed in Kella’s pale cheeks and she said, almost tenderly, ‘Elspeth you were ever blind to such things, but I cannot believe that even you have not guessed it by now. It is Darius that I love. I have never met anyone more wise and kind and sweet-hearted. It was because of those qualities that I told him everything about Domick when we were travelling down to Sutrium last year. I swore I could never love anyone else, for so it seemed to me. Then Darius went with you to Saithwold and Dragon and I went on to Sutrium. It was not until Dardelan brought Vos and Malik down to Sutrium that I learned Darius had fallen terribly ill in Saithwold. I went to see him when I heard he had been brought to the gypsy camp on one of the greens and he was truly in an awful state. I wanted to help but my being there seemed to make him worse. That mortified me but I went to the Healing Centre, yet I could not stop worrying about him.’