‘So if the Samdhya find the Knot, and use it to break through to the farm, they will have to abandon one of you to mortality?’

‘Yes,’ she sighed. A buzzard mewed overhead. ‘It will be me. I have been chosen.’ She turned away from him.

‘What if you do not go willingly?’

‘I must go willingly.’ She looked vulnerable for a moment, this proud warrior woman with her bow and arrow and her dagger at her belt. ‘I would like you to help me.’

‘You want me to find the Captive and release her?’

She nodded. ‘I can give you help.’

‘I don’t want to be like him. Like Jack.’ Though even as he said it, he thought of his parents and being able to see them whenever he liked. ‘I’ve tried to find her. I can’t. There doesn’t seem to be room for her in the house.’

‘That’s because you are looking in the wrong places.’

The breeze rustled in the trees around them, and the Samdhya girl bent closer to him and explained.

The house itself was under a glamour, and the Captive was hidden in one of the layers that James had cast over it. The glamours were distorting reality. She pointed to the leaves, the life going out of them, the bleached nature of the sky.

Tom nodded in recognition. It felt, at night, when he’d gone to look, as if the house had been growing and stretching. All that energy had to come from somewhere, and James Swinton was pulling it in from the land around him.

‘How do I find the right layer?’

‘You have to find the glamour.’ Her face took on a serious quality. ‘It is not an easy task. And James is in that house. You must look without him finding out, or he will put a stop to it and work a stronger spell.’ She gazed into the woods. The Samdhya never seemed to display fear, but her eyelids were twitching.

‘How do I find it?’

‘A glamour is anchored to an object. Find the object, and you will be able to see the glamour and find the Captive.’

‘And then how do I release her?’

‘I do not know how she is kept. It may be that you will need some darker magics. Or it may be that you need the help of those in the house.’

Darker magics, thought Tom. How much darker can there be?

‘What are you?’ he asked. He could not help it. They were so strange, these people, and so beautiful.

She grinned, and her teeth were uncomfortably white and sharp. Tom felt that he was in the presence of an animal. The Samdhya did not smell human, but like the wind and the trees, and their movements were fast and fluid.

‘Our name – our earliest name – means the Holding Together. Let me show you.’