I drifted down, deeper than I had ever gone, and yet there was no mindstream. I tried to rise, but a great hand seemed to press me gently but inexorably down into a void of shadows. I grew afraid at the realisation of my powerlessness, but I could do nothing to fight it. I thought of the spirit-force I had for so long feared as a murderous power that had taken up residence in me.

It is part of you, Rushton had told me just before I chained my secrets in the great inner vault that was his Talent. To pretend it is not is as foolish as binding your eyes and pretending to be blind.

Rushton, I thought, with a surge of grief and longing so potent that it disrupted the dreadful downward drift.

Then I was lying on my back beside a greatship driven up onto a sandy shore. The mast was broken and the sails hung in tatters. People stood around me talking.

‘There had better be water here or we’re done for even if the storm did spit us out,’ said one. I recognised the voice of the seaman Reuvan. Above him the sky was the colour of tarnished metal streaked with sickly yellow.

‘Can’t you help him?’ someone asked. ‘He won’t last much longer like this.’

‘He has lasted longer than I thought he would, but we need to gan the heat out of him,’ said someone else. A woman?

‘Dunk him in the waves and ye might as well drown him in this state,’ said a man. ‘His heart won’t take it.’

‘He’s awake,’ said another voice. ‘Surely that’s a good sign.’

‘He is not truly awake, poor lad,’ said another voice I knew; Gwynedd who was high chieftain of the Westland and king of the Norselands.

‘Rushton has survived a lot worse than this bitty storm an’ a wee flux,’ said Brydda Llewellyn stoutly, but when he leaned over me, his face was haggard with weariness and worry.

I am inside Rushton again, I thought, and then my heart leapt for if that were so, then this was no mere dream! He lived.

‘The trouble is he was sick and then the storm came,’ said Gwynedd. ‘One or the other he might have managed.’

‘He nivver says owt but Elspeth,’ said an older man. ‘Who’s that I’d like to ken.’

There was a profound silence.

‘That is the woman he loves,’ said Brydda at last. ‘Elspeth Gordie. Guildmistress of the Farseekers of Obernewtyn Shire, and a stronger woman I never met. If she were here, she would nowt let him slip away. Once before he near died and she held onto him and forbade it and he lived.’

‘Ask me an’ I’ll tell ye he dinna hold to life because she dinna be here,’ said the old man. ‘Ye ken he asked her to bond and she left him, or so his ravings’d have it.’