Liska pointed at a row of pansies dotted along the track. Something about the specks of vibrant colour in such a wasteland – the loneliness of it – made her feel sad. Even though she had never met Elowen, she felt she understood a little of what it must be like living out here in isolation amongst the dead, haunted trees.

‘Come on,’ she whispered. ‘Let’s follow them.’

Walking from flower to wilted flower, they made their way through the Cryptwood.

*

‘I think this is it,’ said Lug as they stepped into a clearing. There were more primroses and pansies planted around the edge, although most of them had shrivelled away, leaving showers of blackened petals on the ground.

‘I can’t see a house,’ said Liska, looking around. ‘Where does she live?’

The clearing was ringed with thick clods of dead bushes. Limbs of skeletal trees reached their bare fingers up to the sky. The silence of the place was like a cold, suffocating blanket.

‘There.’ Lug pointed to what Liska had thought was a hummock of earth. She now saw it was the rough shape of a triangular prism: the top metre or so of a roof, jutting from the ground. The rest of the house must have been slowly swallowed by the earth, and what remained was coated in so many overlapping layers of moss and lichen, its edges were blurred and unrecognisable.

Next to it were the topmost branches of an oak tree – bare, dead, so old they had almost fossilised to stone. At one time, Liska imagined, tree and house could have stood, built around each other like the mages’ houses in Arborven. There might have been a whole cluster of buildings just the same. A lonely woodland village outside the city rings, now forgotten and crumbled.

‘There’s a way down,’ said Lug. He had begun edging closer to the house’s remains but now shuffled behind Liska, letting her go first. She peered at one end of the mossy lump and saw a deep hole had been cut into the earth, complete with steps. It led down, down, until it reached a heavy door, banded with strips of ornate, curling iron.

‘What do we do?’ Liska found herself talking in a whisper. ‘Just go down and knock?’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t do that,’ came a voice from behind the dead oak. ‘They’re all fast asleep at the moment.’

Lug let out an ear-wrenching shriek and wrapped his arms around Liska. They both stared in the direction of the voice, trembling as a ghostly shape began to emerge from behind the lifeless branches.