The trees shivered, and from between the trunks came surging a host of animals, deer and foxes and badgers, stoats and weasels and otters and what must have been a wolf, and then for a second they were not animals, but beautiful, tall people on white and black horses, galloping towards the island.

Within a second they were surrounded. Everywhere you looked there was a mounted Samdhya, everywhere the sound of a horse snorting. Some of them looked as if they were half animal, had still retained some aspect of their animal self in a badger’s snout or a raven’s wings.

A hare leapt forwards. It turned and turned in the air, seeming to dance, and then, in its place, armed with a sword and a spear, a quiver on her back, dressed in dark greens and browns, was Tanenwod.

‘Light on the Water.’ She did not bow, but it was clear from her bearing that she was in awe of the Captive.

‘And now,’ said the Captive. ‘James Swinton has been warping the world for too long. It is time to set things right.’

Tanenwod threw a dagger over the water, and the Captive caught it with one hand and offered it to Tom.

It was silver, studded with jewels, curved and engraved with ornate symbols that Tom understood in the same way that he had understood the tapestries the Samdhya had made. Truth was there, the wonderful, coruscating truth of the universe, and he knew that if he killed Jack it would be known to him. It was a glimpse of light, of the space between things, as true as the curve of a raven’s beak, as the point of a wolf’s tooth, as the bite in the winter wind.

Kit was holding his hands over his ears, but there was hope in his eyes. Zita was next to him, one hand on Kit’s shoulder, the other curled into a fist.

Tom knew now why Tanenwod had chosen to live with the Samdhya. The beat of the Samdhya’s drums was entering into Tom’s blood.

In Jack he saw centuries of darkness. He saw a twisted, terrible thing, that could have been bright and pure, that had corrupted, stewed, degraded.

He stood, trembling, with the dagger raised, poised. It was heavy in his hand.

In the lines of James’s face, he saw his own father’s features.

And he also saw his own, as in a mirror.

And when James opened his mouth and spoke, he spoke in Tom’s own voice.

‘Please. Don’t. Don’t kill me.’

The clouds above Tom, swirling and dark. The crowd of Samdhya, their animal noises and faces, their terrible strength and beauty.

He stood there, his whole arm shaking, the tip of the knife a foot away from James. It sang to him. There was only one possible direction it could go in, one answer to the torturous question, one simple solution.