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Gilt over wood, fine as lace, lighter than it looks. I stand over it at first light with my boots in my hand. I could take it down to the kitchen and put it in the fire. I don’t. I’m not pretending the last fortnight didn’t happen. I turn it face down on the chest and leave it there, for when we come back, and I go down.

Malo is in the yard with the horse. One horse, tall and grey like everything else he owns, saddled, with a bag behind the saddle that Malo is buckling shut.

“Bread and cheese, madam. And the good boots, I see.”

“I’m riding to my master on the back of the Ankou’s horse, Malo. I’m not doing it in slippers.”

“No, madam.” He does not smile.

Riwal comes out and swings up, and the horse does not so much as shift under the weight of him. Malo gives me a leg up behind the saddle, and when I am up with my skirts bunched he looks at me for about a second and a half and says, “Mind yourself,” and goes to open the gate.

I put my arms round Riwal because there is nowhere else to put them.

Cold through the coat. Rain on stone. I have had my face against this chest in the dark for a fortnight and never once in daylight with the whole fen looking.

“Hold on,” he says.

“I am.”

“Harder than that.”

Trevern is four miles off, at the end of the causeway, and I am frightened for every one of them.

I am not good at frightened. I am good at furious; that burns out. This does not. It sits under my breastbone and gets heavier, and there is nothing to hit, and the only person within four miles is the one I am holding on to, so it comes out at him.

“I should have been there,” I say, into his back, before we are off the first stretch. “I stood in your hall with a rag in one hand and asked you for three days, and you told me the fen wasn’t safe and then you gave me nothing.”

“Yes.”

“I’d have been in that house. I’d have seen what was sitting in his kitchen with my own eyes, because he’d have told me, Riwal, he’d have been pleased, he’d have said Nora, you’ll never guess who’s been by.”

“Yes.”

The reeds go past at the height of my knee. He does not turn his head and he does not slow the horse, and despite my worry, I realize I’d like him to do one or the other.

“I told you about the fen. That was true, and it was not the only reason. I was afraid you would not come back.” He says it low and it does not carry past the two of us. “I am sorry. It is still true.”

I had the next thing ready and it is no use, because he has agreed with me. What is left is the fright, and under the fright the thing I have not let myself look at since last night.

“I had that letter nearly a week,” I say.

“Enora.”

“I read it on the bench in the hall and went cold all over. I told myself he was confused, and I put it under my pillow, and I let you into my bed that night and the next and the next. I wrote to Katell and told myself that was doing something.”

“We each had half of the solution, and neither of us spoke up. I will not let you carry all of that so that my share is lighter.”

I put my forehead against his back and leave it there.

Four miles of water, flat and grey, with the reeds standing up black, and the two of us on one horse in the middle of it.

The horse throws a shoe on the stones where the causeway comes up off the water at Trevern.

I feel it before I understand it. The rhythm under me goes wrong, one beat in four landing short, and then Riwal has pulled up and is down and has her near foreleg in his hand before I have finished working out what I heard.

“Shoe,” he says.

“Can she go on?”