As her memory raced around him, searching for him, he saw that she lay on a bed of charcoal. Around her was a scattering of star shells, round lumps of rock that had been cracked open to reveal a five-pointed symbol, which seemed to be made of rock too, but also looked as if it had once lived. The fish traders sometimes still brought star shells to the hawthorn people, saying the rocks came from the sea, and calling them ‘nuts’ or ‘knots’. There was a counting rhyme sung to babies:

One is you, if you’re lucky,

Two is the mother, you on her breast,

Three is the father, the words,

Four is the chair, the world,

Five is the knot, the knot that catches things,

Six is the flies, the infected wound,

Seven is the secret, the heart of the sky.

Quill felt the power of the song getting stronger and stronger, reflecting from one end of the kennet to the other. The sound shapes of such old songs were made to be sung in the kennet. He hid from the power of the song, hid from her, as the song gradually faded in intensity and her memories drifted into those of happier times.

She had been happy here after her death. For a very long time. She had become a small god because of where she had been placed. She would share wisdom with her people who entered having made the right signs and sung the right songs and filled themselves with the rotten beer.

Quill wondered what had gone wrong, and instantly regretted it, as she shrieked the answer, the screams reverberating, trying to find him, to grab him so she could tell him and take some tiny comfort in the telling. She was so alone now, driven out of her dead mind by loneliness, in an afterlife of one.

The people of the hawthorn bushes had changed, her scream said. The men had stopped visiting her. The few women who still had, before this terrible night that was about to happen again, as it happened time after time in her dreams, did so secretly, and said awful things like, yes, she was still a small god to them, but they were being told that the sun and the moon were much bigger gods. The men had told their wives not to come here any more. The priesthood of the sky had said terrible things about her and had started to point out the kennet as it cast a shadow on the hillside, saying it scared the children, that it soiled the cloaks of the sun and moon whenever they rolled over it. They had a new name for her now: they called her a ‘wight’.