It was some time before noon. He hadn’t heard the clocks chime for a while. He turned over and stared at the ceiling. And as he stroked Leana, he remembered the hare she’d chased; and then the wooden flute with the hare carved into the end. It could help him. She could help him. He reached for it where he’d stashed it in a drawer.

Trembling, he placed it to his lips and blew.

At first the sound was breathy. Then, after a couple more tries, he made a low, pure note, and he placed his fingers over the holes. The holes had been spaced on a scale different from any that Tom knew. He played them from bottom to top, and the notes that came out rose and fell in a way that thrilled his spine pleasurably.

Leana started to growl, her whole body tensed, and her hackles rose.

Tom’s stomach overturned, and the walls of the house seemed to fall away.

He was standing in a clearing in the woods near the farm. The leaves on the trees were browning, though it was summer. The sky above was bruise-grey and heavy.

Coming across the grass, nose twitching, was a hare. It paused. Tom watched it and was somehow not surprised when the hare vanished, and in its place stood the Samdhya girl. She was wearing a long, dark green tunic, and this time gold around her neck and wrists. She loomed, taller than Tom, and her dark eyes flashed at him. Tom remembered what Margaret Ravenswood had written about the eyes of the Samdhya, and he turned his head away.

‘You left me the flute – it was a message.’

‘They are near to finding the Knot now. It is a terrible thing.’

‘Why so?’

She trembled. ‘It will allow us to break down the wards, enter the house and release the Captive. But the price is high.’ The wind rustled through the branches.

‘What is it?’

She spoke quietly. ‘One of the Samdhya is chosen to represent the rest. When the Knot arrives, if we go through, one of us must be cast out from the Samdhya.’

‘Is that so bad?’

‘To be torn from the wonders we know? To grow weak and to die? We do not die, Thomas Swinton. We can only be killed.’

‘Is that what happened to the Captive? She was discarded by your tribe?’

She shook her head. ‘No. Your master, James, stole her from us. James trapped her with powers we did not understand. She was in the form of a fox, and James came with Kit Last, and they wove wards and powers and took her and bound her.’

‘You remember it?’

She looked at him oddly, as if that was a question she had never been asked.

‘I have seen it.’