He was still mechanically moving his rod as another perch jerked the line. The angler hauled it out, removed the hook and tossed it down on the ice. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the rider dismount, toss the reins onto a leafless bush and walk towards him, treading gingerly on the slippery surface. The perch flapped about on the ice, flexing its spined dorsal fin and moving its gills. Gosta stood up and reached for his chisel, which as a last resort might serve as a weapon.

‘Fear not.’

It was a girl. Now, the scarf was removed he could see her face, disfigured by a hideous scar. On her back was a sword. He saw a hilt of exquisite workmanship, sticking up above her shoulder.

‘I won’t do you any harm,’ she said quietly. ‘I only want to ask the way.’

Course you do, thought Gosta. Pull the other one. Now, in winter. In the frost. Who treks or travels? Only a brigand. Or an outcast.

‘This land, is it Mil Trachta?’

‘It is…’ he mumbled, staring into the ice hole, into the black water. ‘Mil Trachta. But we says: Hundred Lakes.’

‘And Tarn Mira lake? Do you know of such a place?’

‘Everyone does.’ He glanced at the girl, frightened. ‘We calls it Bottomless Lake, mind. It’s enchanted. Awfully deep… Rusalkas live there, drown folk, they do. And phantoms live in the ancient, enchanted ruins.’

He saw her green eyes light up.

‘There are ruins there? A tower, perhaps?’

‘What tower?’ He couldn’t suppress a snort. ‘Stone upon stone, covered over with stone, overgrown with weeds. A heap of rubble…’

The perch had stopped flopping, and was lying, moving its gills, amidst its colourful, striped brothers. The girl stared at it, lost in thought.

‘Death on the ice,’ she said, ‘has something bewitching about it.’

‘Eh?’

‘How far is it to the lake with the ruins? Which way should I ride?’

He told her. He showed her. He even scratched it on the ice with the sharp end of the chisel. She nodded, trying to remember. The mare at the lakeside struck its hooves on the frozen ground and snorted, belching steam from its nostrils.

He watched her move away along the western edge of the lake, gallop along the edge of the cliff against a background of leafless alders and birches, through a breathtaking, fairy-tale forest, adorned with a white icing of hoarfrost. The black mare ran with unutterable grace, swiftly, but at the same time lightly, the beat of its hooves barely audible on the frozen ground, a faint silver powder of snow dropping from the branches it knocked against. As though it were not an ordinary horse but one from a fairy-tale, as if a spectral horse was running through a mythical forest, the trees bound in hoarfrost like icing.

And perhaps it was an apparition?