At long last, my fingers find a door. I open it as quiet as I can and come out in a hall dimly lit by moonlight. A table sits centre, and the Queen’s badge, a falcon above a rose, hangs on the wall over the head chair. Along the other walls are the banners of the most loyal families. Black Fingers’s lion hangs to the side of the Queen’s banner. Beside the lion is the family banner of Katryna, the Queen’s stepmother, the fair-haired maiden rising from a flower. Beyond that is a banner with a stag. The Country Mouse’s family.

In my head I see the dark pool of blood on the altar. I didn’t stop them. I crawl under the table and hug myself into a ball. I breathe in and out, in and out, for a long, long time.

Dawn light’s just creeping in the window when I’m startled awake by voices passing outside the hall.

‘It was witches?’ a woman’s voice asks.

‘Don’t know,’ a second woman answers. ‘But the Queen’s likeness was on the altar. And the blood . . .’ I see the altar again in my mind. ‘Hope you’ve plenty of rags in that basket.’

‘Oh, I’ve seen how the little ones bleed out,’ says the first voice. ‘You’d think all they had in them is blood!’ My heart lurches in my chest. She says it so easy, as if it’s nothing to have seen a babe murdered.

What black place have I come to? What hope do folk have in a world such as this? I bury my head in my knees, so I only barely hear her when she finishes. ‘Slaughtering a piglet on the Maker’s altar, the sin eater will feast on that one day.’

It takes a moment for her words to settle in. When they do, my bark of laughter is so loud, I fear the women will hear it from the corridor.

A piglet, not a baby.

It’s the first good news I’ve had in I can’t remember how long. Whatever the Willow Tree is about, it’s not murdering folk. I shove my skirt into my mouth, because after all the misery of this night, my heart wants to laugh. Never did I guess I’d count a pig slaughtered in a Makerhall as good fortune. Which just makes me laugh all the more. Which is how they hear me.

19. KIDNEY PIE

I’M HELD IN a chamber on the ground floor of the castle. Through the window I can see the dungeon entrance across the courtyard. The window’s glass is old and has thickened near the bottom so the dungeon door seems to be sinking down towards the earth.

The Willow Tree refolds his hands at his waist. The thick, silver needle on his finger catches the light from the misshapen window.