He has been gone now for ten days. I watch for him every night, and I do not see him in the moonlight by the ash tree. The hours stretch out before me, empty. I do not know what to do with myself. My father thinks I am pining for Horace the curate. I do not disabuse him of this notion. He eats his eggs with relish in the morning, thinking that soon I am to marry, and that one of his troublesome daughters will be safely provided for. He has started to write the sermon he will give. I hear him practising it under his breath.

— From the diary of Margaret Ravenswood

The morning after he’d seen the prisoner on the lawn, Tom was sitting slumped in the window seat of the library. It was another grey day, the sun gleaming weakly off the surface of the moat. Just below, he could see the dark shapes of fish, weaving about; something must have disturbed them, because they scattered.

The night before he had dreamed, and he hadn’t known if he was dreaming or not, so vivid had it been. He’d been falling through a great darkness, through a square inside a square inside another, until he reached the smallest square of all. And inside that there was nothing, nothing at all.

Now his knees were drawn up to his chin and he was looking out across the island and the moat towards the mound where it loomed up from the trees.

As far as Tom could tell, Jack never went out of the house.

Tom could hear him now, stomping about in his rooms.

Two paths lay in front of Tom. He could try to leave. But what might Jack do to him? Would he hurt his own flesh and blood? Would he cast a glamour on Tom and turn his hair and his eyes silver? Kit was so far in Jack’s power now, he was barely his own person. The bracelet around Zita’s wrist – that was a way of controlling her, Tom could see that. And Zita. Could he leave her here, becoming ever more like Kit? He couldn’t imagine Zita without that ironic gleam in her eyes, that flamboyant warmth.

Or he could stay and find the Captive and release her, and Zita too, and Kit.

And then what might happen? Could he face Jack and the strange, dark powers he had at his command?

And that was not the only threat. What would happen to him if the Samdhya broke through the wards and poured into the house?

But they could not cross the moat, he reminded himself. Then perhaps he would have to remain in the house until his own death, a different kind of prisoner.