‘They would. My companions. My brothers and sisters. The Storm, the Deep. The Wildmark. Because I have come to thank you.’

Mystified, Tom said, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t – I don’t know what you mean.’

She laughed and knelt, holding her hand out for the dog to sniff. A buzzard mewed. After a second or two, the lurcher padded forwards and licked her hand.

‘She will not chase me now.’ She looked up, as if she had heard distant voices. The deer barked once more, insistent and loud. ‘I must go, or they will know.’ She sprang up, agile and lithe, and then she was gone, melted into the trees like a doe.

Tom felt as if he had been in contact with something wild – a fox or a stoat or an owl. He looked around, desperate to catch sight of her again.

In her place, on the grassy path, was a small wooden flute. There was a carved hare on the end of it.

Tom placed it carefully in his pocket. The lurcher sprang after a squirrel, which scuttled up a tree, and Tom turned his steps back to the farm.

It was a message. A clear message. He held the flute tightly and wondered what would happen if he played it. Would it summon something? Might it summon her? She had made it, and he felt the wood beneath his fingers, knowing she had touched it and crafted it and loved it.

He went straight back to his room and hid the flute in his drawer with the photographs and letters from his parents. It still felt warm, as if someone had just stopped playing it.

On his desk was the book that Zita had given him. He picked it up and began to read the diary of Margaret Ravenswood.

The journal started when she was seventeen and her father wanted her married to a forty-two-year-old curate with, as she put it, ‘bristling brows, bad breath and a voice to turn an Archbishop pagan.’ A few weeks away from marrying, she met Rohenga, one of the Samdhya, and fell powerfully in love with him.

Rohenga told her about his people: the Wildmark, they called themselves, but also the Storm and sometimes the Deep. Their true name, in their own tongue, was the Samdhya: the Holding Together.

He read her words avidly, finding in Margaret something of his own longing for change, and his own sense of being lost. He read so long his stomach rumbled, and he crept downstairs to sneak some hard bread rolls and butter.

Over the next few days, Tom fell into a routine. In the mornings, after breakfast, he dipped in and out of the diary. At eleven, he walked the boundaries with Kit, making the wards, the power of it becoming more and more a part of him, and he began to enjoy being with the quiet, strange, silver-haired boy whose pained, silver eyes held such depths.