The existence of the kennet had become too much for the hawthorn people to bear. They had spent too much, gone hungry too often. They had made a final effort, staged a great collection. They had paid farmers and fishers and soldiers to suspend their duties and come to the kennet over several days with the longest light. Tonight was to be the last night of that process. Tonight was the last time a great column of people with torches had come up from the village. Tonight was the last time the woman in the kennet would have visitors at all, be talked to at all, be loved at all.

Quill looked back to the memory of moonlight at the end of the kennet and saw it as precious now, as some fondly kept remembrance, but now gone. Tonight, the terrible night that went round and round in memory, was when the light at the end of this tunnel had been cut off. The sleeping place of this dead woman was about to be turned into a tomb.

Over the last three long days the men had used levers and gestures to lift the stones of the grove at the kennet and brought them inside the opening, intending to seal up the wound in the ground that so alarmed them.

Quill needed to be close to her as the horror approached. The men with the stones were inside the kennet now, their shadows in the way of the moonlight. He wanted to comfort the dreaming woman as he comforted his daughter, as he sometimes had to comfort his old dad when he forgot something. He wanted to be the law for her, to do something about this terrible injustice, but he could not be anything but a fragment of her dreams, an observer. He made himself stumble into the darkness, his hands reaching out. He reached a chamber at the end, where a ridge in the mud at his feet marked the edge of the space where the woman was. He felt the fear radiating out of the darkness in front of him. He could sense that immense fury roaring around and around, anguished at the idea of being bottled.

She didn’t know what he was. He tried to reach out to her. She was too big. He smelt male and new. His every gesture bounced off the roaring whirlwind that was her, a terrified animal rushing around and around.

The stones started to be placed against the end of the small enclosure. They wanted to keep using the rest of the kennet, Quill realized. They wanted to move their animals into it to shelter them from the cold, to make profit from it. By sealing her up in this part they would cleanse it and make it into just an ordinary place. Perhaps they could use the terror of her too: pray to the sun and the moon, or the wight will get you.