Quill felt the slow second death she’d experienced. She’d gone from being the mother of her people to being more and more excluded, her existence becoming more sour every day as love was slowly drained from it. She couldn’t move from here to plead her case. She couldn’t leave the kennet because that was how the land was shaped. The shape of the land that had been chosen to give her a continuing presence also kept her here, because if she left it she would be powerless and would roll back here like a leaf being blown back into a hollow by the wind.

Men were now in control of the hawthorn people, the last few women who had visited had told her. Those women had laughed bitterly that at least it cost them nothing to come to the kennet, except the usual boughs and flowers and roots to burn. The sun and the moon demanded expensive sacrifice, of livestock and grain. The priesthood had started to make their own currency, of unpolished axe heads that could never be used. What was the point of hoarding something and exchanging it and never using it?

Quill felt the terrible night coming to its climax. Something bad was approaching from the direction of the village of the hawthorn people.

The new wooden circle had been made. He could see it in the dreams: a better sort of grove than the stone grove around the opening of the kennet, the only place now from which to adore the only gods. The people, as instructed by the priesthood, whose actions they encouraged with every acceptance, had built ditches around the new circle, banks for the audience to sit on, a ceremonial way to progress into it, wooden trackways off in several directions for the spirits of the dead to leave it and join their fellows with the sun and moon in the sky.

The kennet was in the way of one of those tracks. They felt it might infect the path, that the terrifying wight in the kennet might snare the beloved dead and drag them in here with her. Why would she do that? How little they knew her!

He could feel the seething fear and hatred of those who were approaching. He could feel only tiny protests among them, concealed in the minds of a handful, not to be spoken aloud.