But his brother ignored him. Stepping forward and raising his hands in a gesture that clearly denoted the wish to talk rather than fight, Ulf set about making his new world.

FIVE

If there was one day Nessa remembered from her childhood, it was the day when she found the tower in the earth. If she hadn’t argued with Kinart and gone off in a huff, it might never have happened, and her life might have been quite different. She’d been a very small girl then. Kinart had made her so cross that she’d forgotten to be careful, and she’d wandered into a forbidden place, a place nobody walked across because it was brimful of magic. She’d gone without thinking, and suddenly there it was, a hole in the ground, hidden among the rocks beyond the low line of grass-crested dunes. If she hadn’t been the sort of girl she was, one who liked adventures, she’d have been too scared to scrape away the earth and look in, for there was no doubt it was a spirit-place, a place a good child would do well to keep clear of. Kinart was down by the shore gutting their catch; gulls squabbled all around him, fighting for the scraps. The little skin boat was drawn up on the shingle close by. When she’d forgiven him, Nessa would go back.

The strong westerly wind whipped her hair across her face, and she brushed it back impatiently. A little spade would be useful, a shard of bone, anything she could dig with. She scrabbled the earth away with small, capable hands; there was a bigger opening now, and the spring sunlight glanced in over her shoulder to show some sort of chamber there below, large, dry, lined with precisely laid slabs of stone and floored with earth. The hole was too small; she could not see properly. It almost looked as if the subterranean room opened down to another, but peer as she might, Nessa could not quite make it out. And the tide would be turning soon. When you lived in a place like the Whaleback you could not let disagreements delay you too long, or there would be no going home until low water came round again.