I had been too frantic to wonder at the time what her words meant. But now I thought I understood. Helping me must have burned up Atthis’s reserves and so, instead of living long enough to be able to tell me what I needed to know to complete my quest as she had sworn to do, she had been forced to tell Maruman instead. Once she might have communicated directly with his mind, but maybe her frailty had made that impossible, and so she had summoned him to the ken.

‘You said you didn’t know anything about Cassandra’s key,’ I said, trying to speak calmly.

‘Marumanyelloweyes knows much of this thing from ElspethInnle’s mind, but the oldOne did not speak of it,’ he told me.

‘But how am I to find it, then? And what of Sentinel? Did Atthis say it was in the Red Land and if it is, how I am to get there if I am not to go back to the Land?’ I realised I was shouting the words as well as beastspeaking them, and struggled again to calm myself.

‘The oldOne said that you will learn what you need to know from those who come to meet you in the valley of the Skylake.’

‘The wolves are to meet us there,’ I murmured, wondering if going seliga would enable the pack leader to learn what I needed to know. But why had not Atthis simply told Maruman everything?

Then it struck me with renewed force that Atthis was dead. I saw in my mind’s eye the dusty red feathers and blind eyes of the ancient bird that had guided me in my quest since the beginning, and understood that her death was more than the death of a single creature. It was the severing of a link running back to the Beforetime, for Atthis had carried within her mind the memories of all of the Elders of the Agyllians before her right back to the flamebirds of the Beforetime. It was a flamebird that had sent Cassy Duprey in search of Hannah Seraphim and Obernewtyn in the first place and my past-dreams had shown me that the flamebird that had beastspoken Cassy had been the last one living, aside from the pair that had been transported to Eden after Doktaruth had put them into sleep pods, or so they had believed. But the great flock of Agyllians I had seen wheeling about the ken could not possibly have come from a single bird. The flamebird whose mind had been altered by experimentation in the Govamen compound in Old Scotia had to have been released before the Great White or it had escaped and had found wild flamebirds, despite the fact that humans had believed them extinct. The altered bird must have mated with the wild birds, passing on its abilities and the changes in its mind to their offspring. So had the flamebirds evolved into the Agyllians.