Autumn had heaved Marcin along, putting all her hungover desperate strength into keeping him moving. Whatever was after them seemed to be like one of those predators in wildlife documentaries that circled their prey, then rushed in. Maybe her putting up a fight that time had made it wary. What did those documentaries say about facing a bear? Make yourself big and yell? Or was that for a mountain lion? Living in rural England, she hadn’t paid much attention to those bits.

Marcin had been yelling questions at her, only about half of them in English. What were they running from? It hurt! He got to the point of actually fighting her off, and so, finally, she’d been forced to drop him. Now here they were, on a slight rise among some close trees, which Autumn hoped might give her some idea of when the thing approached. Marcin was lying on the ground screaming insults at her in Polish, and she was looking around, trying to watch out of the corner of her eyes. Which was really pretty bloody difficult. It kept making you want to just keep turning your head.

How the hell was she going to get him to close his eyes and put his fingers in his ears? Would the pain of his injury even let him lose concentration? Assuming that was actually how they could get out of this.

She needed to be able to see her enemy. What could let her see it better? What could let her see something the extra senses given to her by the well in the woods didn’t let her see?

She realised. Today she had already experienced just that. That dust Judith had thrown over her. If she could find some . . . She looked desperately in her pockets, ran her hand through her hair. Thank God. Here was just a trace of it on her fingers. The dust that had actually worked must get used up as it did so. She had no idea what this stuff was, so she could only hope that Judith activated it just by thinking some magical power into it.

But, what could she actually do with it? She could throw this tiny handful of dust at whatever this thing was when she was sure it was near. That would give her something of it she could see. But having to let it again get that close . . .

Oh. Oh, she’d just thought of something awful.

No, she couldn’t hesitate. If Judith had shown her anything, it was that magic was about sacrifice.

She held open her left eye with one hand, and with the other . . . she quickly rubbed the dust into the eye, thinking magical power into it as she did so. She could hear Marcin make an uncomprehending noise of fear.

The dust was very fine. It didn’t hurt as much as she expected—

Her eye was suddenly on fire. She screamed.

She blinked and slowly the pain subsided, and the colours washed into half of her brain, and she had to close the other eye for a second, because now she could see . . . everything!

The knot they were in, she could see the lines of force all around it. It was really small, and it was . . . getting slightly smaller, all the time, she could see the tension in the coloured threads. She could see them moving. And oh God, they were, they were moving inwards!

She looked down and saw the threads that still wrapped round her, how they loosely led off to connect to . . . she could see the connections now. They ran off from her body in all directions, linked into a great weave that was wrapped around the knot, that was the knot, that also went beyond it. All she had to do was to concentrate on one particular aspect, the shrinking or the relative tension, or one colour, and there it was, at the front of her mind, clear to her sight.

She turned and looked at Marcin. He was swimming with colour, all the flavours and influences that had made him. She could see his family, their history, the big moments of his life, intimacies that she shied away from and regretted seeing, but . . . okay, overall feeling, here was a good guy, so thank all the gods she didn’t believe in for that at least. She didn’t know what the individual threads meant, she’d been seeing stuff at random, had no idea how to discern that part of it. That would be the next level of this deep structure, that lived underneath their own special senses, that Judith knew about and could access if she wanted to, but that she’d never bothered to . . . no, when had Judith not done what had to be done? It must be more like she’d never needed to examine it.

It was like Autumn had a tube map, but without any of the names of lines or stations.

Still, hell of a map.

She heard a sound behind her that she was pretty sure she couldn’t have heard before, because the warning signal flared in her new sight too, a sudden burst of threads into her eye. She spun round.

And there was the creature. Right beside her. It had the shape of a man, but was almost a silhouette, a few lines of a sketch. Only it was stark white. It had no features, but Autumn knew it was looking at her.

Suddenly, it hopped from one side to the other, then back again. That was something that predators did, wasn’t it? It was getting its eyes lined up on her, and it wasn’t sure how strong she was.

Neither was she.

Slowly, keeping her eye on it, she reached down and helped Marcin to his feet. “You’re . . . seeing a thing?”

“Yes, and it’s real and it’s right in front of us.” She managed to get him upright, and was about to reach down to pick up the biggest nearby stick when she realised she was trying to get her hand past one of the coloured threads to do it, that she could feel them now, by touch as well, feel them wrapped around her like she was covered in a sort of . . . electric pullover.

This ability to see and feel the threads wouldn’t last long. But it would last longer than they would if that thing attacked. However, it was planning to do that. She could pick up the stick or . . .

She didn’t know what any of the threads meant or where any of them led. But now she could see how they fitted together. So if she just—

The creature leapt forward.

Autumn grabbed the nearest thread and heaved.

* * *

Lizzie had tried calling Finn’s name into the microphone, and all the other names she’d heard associated with him. She’d waited, but no response had come. Of course, it was perfectly possible that he could hear her, but couldn’t get inside the knot. Given how he’d walked into her house, however, despite the collapse of the borders into new shapes, she rather doubted that. The problem had previously been that he hadn’t been able to find where this was.

So she’d started to describe their location, both geographically, talking about the old barn and the track that led up the hillside, and temporally, trying to precisely describe where the full moon was. Because, and a quick peep outside the barn had confirmed it, that moon was staying put.

Now she was elaborating on those details. The bemused DJ was looking on, convinced that she’d flipped. And yeah, maybe a lack of faith in her sanity right now would be appropriate. A shout came from outside. Then a whole bunch of yells and cheers and even screams.

Lizzie got up from the mike and ran for the door as the DJ did also.

Outside, the crowd were staring at . . . oh, there was a circle of day, bright summer day, blazing into the night of the woods like a searchlight. Lizzie squinted, blinked; she could just about see something in the light. Figures. Oh, and now the light was expanding, as if heaving against something. Great, this must be Finn; they were being rescued!

Suddenly the light burst through, and the night collapsed around them like a stage curtain, and they and the barn and the generator were all standing not in the woods, but in a bright, open summer meadow in broad daylight, with the most beautiful, invigorating fragrances blasting into their nostrils.

But Lizzie was now not so reassured. Because they weren’t home. She knew this exaggerated version of her own world from distant sightings. This was the place Autumn had been left so scarred from visiting. This was a meadow in the land of fairy. And standing in it wasn’t, as she’d hoped, a relieved and/or petulant Finn, but a trio of strange, thin beings who seemed to be reflecting the sunlight in mad, angular ways. She could just about perceive that they were wearing armour, an armour of green and gold, and had in their hands swords that were making the air around them sing with their sharpness, that were somehow breaking the very air that drifted across them.

She saw all of this with the new senses given to her by the well in the woods. She had no idea what the others were seeing, but whatever it was, it was making them huddle together and back away in alarm.

She took a look behind them. More of the same endless summer meadow, around a circle of mulch from the forest floor. The knot had collapsed, or been forcibly demolished, more like, and they’d been dropped into the middle of fairy.

The shouting from around her made her turn back. The three figures had stepped forward. Their shadows had suddenly lengthened and fallen over the cowering humans, deliberately, a show of force. Where the hell was Finn? He must work so hard, she thought, must have observed Autumn and the rest of them so closely to even pass as human. Because these fellows of his who weren’t trying . . . they were something completely Other.

“You!” the lead figure bellowed, the word seeming to twist into a translated version as it got to Lizzie’s ear. “This is our land now! You are inside! We want you out!”

* * *

Rory had been gesturing angrily at the sprites. “You send gods home, or gods get angry, gods strike you down, capeesh?”

Judith had wanted to ask what language, exactly, “capeesh” came from, but she’d suspected he didn’t know. The sprites had been twisting in urgent conference. Rory had kept trying to get through to them on his own, limited, terms.

She’d been hoping the sprites might offer her some power she could use to get out of here. She’d been putting that off until she absolutely had to do it, because, though the spell she had to cast was clear in her head, she was terribly afraid of how much of her strength it would use. But no, these poor things could barely feed themselves, and no other solution was going to present itself, and she was feeling weaker rather than stronger, so . . .

What had she been thinking about? She put a hand to her brow.

Why had she been hoping the . . . whatever they were called . . . why had she been . . . ?

Oh God. Oh God. What were all these . . . things?! Where was she? Was she having a nightmare? Who was this old man? Where was her family? “Dad?!” she called out. Was this Dad? No, he didn’t look anything like . . . but what did Dad look like? She should be able to remember!

The old man was looking at her in horror.

* * *

Autumn had heaved her way through a glowing web of colour, rushing through it, grab and run, grab and run, one-handed, holding Marcin with the other, pushing all her rage and frustration into just getting past something she could finally connect with, something she could finally . . . rip through!

And then she was through it.

She stumbled out onto a . . . grey, empty expanse. She looked around. It wasn’t quite a world. Distant . . . mountains? No, they faded again. They kind of shied away. It was like they were asking if she wanted to have mountains there, and when she’d mentally questioned that, they’d shyly retreated.

Marcin was gasping. She looked to him. He was looking round in horror. “Work,” he said. “Work, all, nothing else, all life.” She had no idea what his eyes were seeing. The expression on his face was that of someone who was in their own personal . . .

Suddenly, walls sprang up around them. Bare walls with peeling paintwork, a smell of stale beer that made her once again want to vomit, a bar overflowing with ale pump signs for unreal brands all about bulldogs and Spitfires, and everywhere around her, Union flags and the cross of Saint George, and red, white, and blue bunting and suddenly hemming them in on every side, fat, white men in Union Jack waistcoats, wearing flat caps, laughing their heads off as they chinked their handled beer mugs together, the foam splashing over her in great waves. Their laughter urged her to join in, join in, join in.

She pulled Marcin, who was looking up and down at where to her there were gaps, seemingly in an entirely different world, to the door. She flung it open, but outside there was just more of the same. A television was on in here, and an ecstatic posh-voiced commentator was shouting, “It’s us against the world now! The sun will never set on the land of hope and glory!”

Autumn slammed the door. She mustn’t lose control. She had to think. That moment of mountains had been this place sizing her up, testing out her mind before finding out what sort of world she didn’t want to be in and then flinging it at her. This was . . . oh God, this was actually hell, right? For anyone who came here. A hell, anyway. But how could there ever be anything more definitively hellish than torments that immediately suited themselves to you personally?

She looked back to the exact place they’d been when they entered, and now, to her shock, a new figure was squeezing its way through the laughing men, the thin white shadow that had pursued her earlier. It must have been so close behind them it had come here, too. It was cringing, its fingers clenching and unclenching, staggering, spinning around as if looking for release.

Oh God. It was suffering in its own private hell too. Whatever surrealism that involved, Autumn couldn’t imagine.

She gathered all her courage, and heaved Marcin along to stumble toward it. Okay, it was time to make use of the rage she felt at everything that was crowding in around her here. She concentrated again on seeing the threads that underlay everything, while she still could, and sure enough, there they were, and seeing them made her stop in shock for a moment. Here they’d been twisted into a web that looked expertly woven, that wrapped round the heads of all three of them, that looked like they were the captives of some enormous . . .

She locked away that thought before this world realised how terrifying it was and made the fear real. She grabbed the threads and heaved.

And heaved . . . and heaved . . . and now she was simply pulling more and more of the stuff out of the air, building it up around her, wrapping it around her, trapping them more and more every second, and now it was billowing out of where she was pulling it, uncontrollably, and she realised that this place had latched on to that part of her fear too.

* * *

“Okay!” Lizzie had shouted to the leader of the fairies. “We’re all for that! We want to get out and get back to our world as soon as possible!” Because, after all, this wasn’t usually the problem with humans and fairies. The problem was usually that the fairies wanted the humans to stay. “But how do we do that?”

The fairies had been silent. Then they’d just taken another threatening step forward. And those shadows had once again lashed out with a sort of internal visual . . . roar.

“This isn’t happening,” Stewie had whispered beside her. “This is some . . . hallucination!”

“Then we’re all having it,” the bearded boy had whispered. He’d looked to her. “Who are they? What can we do?”

“They won’t even tell us the rules!” the DJ had yelled.

Because, Lizzie had thought, there was something a bit stagey about all this. Was what happened here going to be related back to Finn’s father, the king, as some sort of border incident, perhaps something Finn, as the go-between, should have prevented? The most worrying possibility was that if they were going to be portrayed as an invading horde, then their deaths might be a useful part of that portrayal. Not that the court were ever going to hear their version. Could this incident be used, even, to start a war? That was something the whole human race was unprepared for, never mind the three of them who supposedly guarded Lychford and now had not much in the way of boundaries to help with that.

She spoke up, aware that, following the lad’s lead, more and more of these kids were looking to her. “We need to work out how to get out,” she called to them. “How about we start by backing up to the edge of this?” She pointed to the ground where the circle of woodland soil and mulch around the barn, with trees still standing inside it, was a plain indicator of the area that had been in the knot, now not wrapped back around itself, but obvious against the shining green of fairy grassland.

They ran together, away from the fairies, to the edge of the circle. Lizzie quickly stepped across it. Nothing. There must be a way, a way which would be obvious, probably, from the fairies’ own point of view, because otherwise how could they characterise this as an aggressive action?

She walked round the boundary, the others following her, hoping clearly that at any moment something magical would happen. Stewie was shaking his head, yelling that whoever had done this to him would pay, but the bouncers who’d come with her had serious looks on their faces. Those guys knew when they were in trouble.

Lizzie felt a vibration on her wrist. She looked at her exercise monitor. “Congratulations!” a tiny scrolling text read. “You’ve doubled your target!”

What? But she couldn’t have gone further than . . .

She quickly stepped back over the same spot. Her wrist vibrated again. This time the device was ecstatic with the news that she’d trebled her target. If she did it again, the thing would probably give her the number of the nearest hospital. Whatever else happened to her today, she could die happy in the knowledge that she’d almost certainly beaten every other vicar in the weekly Diocesan Steps League. “Here,” she said. “There’s something wrong with space just here. I think this is the way out.”

They all gathered round, eager and hopeful. But, given that she hadn’t immediately vanished home, what could she do with that knowledge?

* * *

Judith suddenly realised someone was talking to her, talking to her like she was a bloody idiot. It was Rory Holt. He was staring into her face. “My wife went like this. Couple of years before she passed on. I know there’s no getting through to you, but I have to try. Now’s not the time for you to be away with the fairies.”

Judith bridled at the expression, grabbed his shoulder, and hauled herself to her feet. It wasn’t his words that had brought her back; her brain chemistry had just happened to sway in the right direction. She fought down a tremendous surge of panic. How much smaller had the bubble become? Oh no. Now it was like standing in a greenhouse. The sprites were clustered near them; soon they’d all be crushed into each other. What was the spell she needed to recite to get them out? She was so stressed she still couldn’t think how it started. She reached into the pocket of her cardigan for some more of that dust that would at least let her see the threads here, but she’d thrown it all at Autumn. “Stupid woman,” she whispered. “I’m so stupid!”

“It’s not your fault. It’s that girl who sent us here.” The sprites reacted with sudden light as the wall lurched in on them and Rory followed that with the nastiest words about Autumn that Judith could possibly imagine, all about her colour. “All her fault!” he spat again as the sprites rushed in fear around him. Heaven knew what he could see of them. Judith didn’t want to know.

If it was the end now, Judith realised, she wanted to say summat true. Summat she’d only just started in this moment admitting to herself. “It’s not her fault,” she said, “it’s mine. Mine a long time back. She made one mistake, I did exactly the same, and I was cursed for it, cursed for it so I suffered so long it took its toll on my noggin, and that’s why you’re stuck here, Rory Holt, because I made one mistake, and maybe you made a few too!”

The sprites cried out in light as the roof of the world fell in on them all.

* * *

Autumn had tried to think as the material that made the borders of the worlds . . . what this place was pretending was that material in order to scare her . . . had flooded over her. But she’d quickly become lost under it, her world just chaos, nothing her flailing hands could grab hold of. No baseline to put her feet on, no rules.

But, she realised, that was what this place was trying to tell her, to scare her with, wasn’t it? There were rules, she just had to dig deep and find them. For the sake not only of herself, but for helpless Marcin, who she could feel as if at a distance, shaking with his own fears. She even had to do it for the sake of that thing that had followed them. She had to do it for the sake of Luke, for everyone who . . . cared about her.

How could she get past the fear? What was her experience telling her to do?

Bloody bite it. Chew it. Rip it up.

She snatched at the material with her teeth, grabbed it and held on, wrenched it from side to side. Was this achieving anything? Only satisfaction, but . . . there was a taste here . . . what was that? Taste, like every other sense she had, had been changed by exposure to the water from the well in the woods, but it wasn’t often she got to make use of it. There was a kind of . . . meaningfulness under the emptiness she had in her mouth, a sense that . . . yeah, put her tongue on it, get more of it . . . a sense that something real was here underneath.

Okay, what had she got to lose? She grabbed a handful of what was turning into a void of meaninglessness around her and started to gulp it down. Started to take it like it was a drug. Come on, let her body and brain process this stuff, let it poison her, let her actually start to see what was . . .

She realised she’d started to see the real fibres again. That now they were leading right into her body, that she’d actually managed to randomly pull some of them into her. What if she went beyond being able to pull on them, actually got . . . ? She grabbed a great handful of them and shoved them into her mouth, and into her brain, and it pulled her open, and she pulled them open in turn, and she forced her way inside. She abandoned the idea of her brain making sense of what she was visualising, and went with the impossibility. She reached a hand out of the impossible knot that was impossible to get out of and grabbed Marcin and the white being and hauled them in after her.

Suddenly all three of them were in a sort of kaleidoscopic rollercoaster, colours rushing past at an impossible speed. Marcin was yelling, his hands trying to find purchase on something, but at least now he was reacting to the same thing she was. The being had just curled in a ball. But she herself . . . she was surfing this now. She had no control, but she could stand, and face forward, and see what was coming, ready to deal . . .

There was ahead a jumble of infinite threads, all colours, which she couldn’t make sense of. The point where all the boundaries met, where all the borders were pulled tight. This was what someone had made, centuries ago, around Lychford. It connected the worlds as well as holding them apart. It wasn’t a great work of art, it was an organic mess of compromises and solutions and traps.

Autumn fell into it yelling.

* * *

“What the bloody hell,” said Judith, “are you doing in my head?”

Judith hadn’t actually expected to be alive. She was annoyed to find that she’d grabbed hold of Rory Holt as if to shield him from the collapse, just as he’d grabbed hold of whatever he could see of the sprites. They were all curled together in a tiny preserved bubble of a world, light flickering around them.

“Holding the roof up,” said Autumn, from where Judith normally had an internal voice telling her to remember she’d put the kettle on or that Gardeners’ Question Time would be on soon, “and hey, you’re welcome.”

“Just . . . don’t look around, now you’re in there!”

“I can’t help it. I can . . . see . . . no, I’m feeling, I’m experiencing, like they’re my memories too . . . oh . . . oh no, oh Judith, I’m so—”

Judith wouldn’t have been able to stand her pity if they’d been in the same room, never mind when it was coming from between her own ears. “Get out!” she whispered.

“If I do that, there goes the roof. I didn’t choose to be in here, I just landed in the centre of . . . I think it’s where all the boundaries are attached . . . and I saw you here and I threw my . . . my sort of hand . . . out to save you and here’s where I ended up.”

“How the hell . . . ? No, never mind that. Can you get us out of here?”

Judith felt Autumn’s presence sort of . . . shifting in her head, like she was now looking at summat else apart from every intimacy of Judith’s life. The other thing Judith didn’t like was . . . oh, yes, she could feel Autumn’s existence too. There was an outsiderness that Judith recognised, but that with Autumn was both of long standing and recently, sharply, deepened. Judith found they were suddenly thinking a thought in both their inner voices at once. It was that if she wanted to, Judith could move to another town and fit in, while Autumn would always have a certain number of people who stood between her and that release.

To share a thought . . . when she was younger, that would have been so good. But now it hurt so much. That outsider feeling was something Judith so did not want for Autumn, and she saw with great guilt how she had contributed to it. That guilt was reflected back by Autumn’s thoughts about how she’d treated Judith, given how Judith . . . was now.

Oh. Oh no. What could be worse than this shared pity?

What could be better?

Judith bellowed internally. “Can you stop being so bloody soft and just find what you need to—?!”

“You don’t get to order me around while we’re the same person.”

“I order myself around all the bloody time, you stupid woman!”

“We are going to have a talk about this, when . . . if I can get us home.”

“What are you going to do about this one?” Judith mentally pointed to Rory, still curled up, holding on to the sprites like they were soft toys. “He’s in your power now.”

“So I can’t just save you and the . . . sprites?” She’d found what they were called inside Judith’s knowledge. She hadn’t wanted to think that harsh a thought, but there were no barriers between the two women now.

“Oh, don’t lie to yourself when someone’s sharing your brain. You won’t leave him here to be crushed.”

“I just wanted him to know I had the option. I’m in his head too.”

Rory looked up, suddenly furious. “Get out!” he bellowed. “Don’t touch me!” And he started to scream every epithet he knew. Everything about race, everything about gender, everything about anything he was not.

There was a long pause. Then, without another word inside Judith’s head, something changed.

* * *

The three fairies had suddenly reacted to something Lizzie didn’t understand. As one, they’d shouted something guttural, and crouched. Then they had charged.

Lizzie hadn’t hesitated. She’d grabbed the nearest kid and shoved them at the point where she’d encountered the anomaly, praying fervently as she did so, trying to push emotion into the act of pushing physically. The kid went straight past the anomalous space, and so Lizzie shoved her hands into it, calling out to anyone and anything who could help her in that instant, giving all her emotion to that in a way which she was used to in prayer.

She didn’t have more than a moment. Then she’d have to get herself between the others, who were already starting to scream, run, push forward, and the danger that was coming for them. She’d wave her arms and try to look powerful, she decided. Oh God, she was going to die here.

“It’s okay, Lizzie, I see you now!” a familiar voice shouted. In the centre of her own head. Kind of where she was used to God being. “Thanks for calling me. The fairies had put some sort of . . . curtain . . . in the way.”

“Autumn?!” said Lizzie, boggled.

But in that second the shadows of the fairies hit them all, and the screams of panic turned to sheer terror, as Lizzie felt rather than saw the swing of three swords—

* * *

The swords passed over her.

And the others.

Lizzie felt a great sense of closeness to her old friend as they fell into darkness together, a voice and an intimate presence in her head, an astonishing embrace.

And then they were all standing there in the woods above Lychford on a late summer afternoon. Lizzie looked round and was relieved to see Judith, and Autumn, and with them Rory Holt, looking round, yelling as if he’d just been struck, and a man with a splint on his leg who was blinking, stunned, slowly getting to his feet, and all the ravers, and the DJ, and the lad who’d hugged her, and Stewie, and his bouncers, and half their generator, which was steaming and sparking where it had been cut in two, and no sign at all of the barn, which was now presumably lost somewhere in the great beyond along with the DJ’s equipment . . . and floating in the air, a group of . . . perfect, smiling, giggling cherubs.

Rory Holt looked up at the creatures and broke into a gap-toothed grin. “That’s what they really were,” he said. “Little angels. They must have saved us.”

Judith looked awkwardly at the other two. “Cherubs,” she whispered out of the corner of her mouth. “Sprites, cherubs, I knew t’were one or t’other.”

Autumn nodded in the direction of the cherubs, looking pointedly at Rory. “It looks like we brought some refugees over the border.”

“What are you talking about?” He looked angry at her. “What have they got to do with that? They’re little angels.”

Lizzie found herself remembering certain lines from scripture about the need to treat strangers as if they might be angels.

Autumn’s voice stayed calm as she addressed him again. “But you have me to thank.”

Lizzie looked to Judith, but the old woman now had her hands stuck deep in the pockets of her cardigan, her expression unreadable, her body language saying she was deliberately taking no action.

“To thank for what? You got me into whatever that was. Probably drugs in my pint or summat. I’m going to tell the police.” He looked fearful for a moment, as if Autumn might attack him. Then, reasonably certain he could turn his back on her, he started off down the hill, looking back over his shoulder from time to time, an expression on his face of valiant, infringed dignity.

“What an enormous wanker,” said Stewie. And, thought Lizzie, he should know. She looked around at the kids from the rave. They were a mixture of angry and uncomprehending. They, like her, must all have had Autumn in their heads, and knew what she’d done. To them, that was all that mattered.

She turned back to see that Judith was watching Autumn to see what she would do next. Lizzie saw that the younger witch was holding in her hand something that Lizzie could only dimly see, a handful of glowing thread. “I can do maybe one more thing with this,” she said.

“You could send him back,” said Judith.

“But then,” said Autumn, “the cherubs wouldn’t get to go home.”

And she opened her hand. In a blur of motion like released elastic, the cherubs vanished.

The man with the splint put a hand on Autumn’s shoulder. “Good witch,” he said.

Autumn turned to look at him with an expression which said she still wasn’t sure.

* * *

When the human witch had burst into the knot at the centre of the worlds, the shardling had seen the path home and seized its moment.

It had been relieved to take three steps and then find itself once again where it had been conceived, inside the long shadow that had fallen across the barrow of the court of the fairy king.

It relaxed. It had completed its mission.

It had been one of many sent out to map the disturbances of the boundaries, to swiftly bring back the information the king needed, now he was in the shadow, the information that would lead to war.

Because in the moment before it had left, it had seen the witch build a simple, single boundary. It was nothing like what had been there before. It would be easy to breach. The shardling felt a moment of satisfaction at having this information to return to its master.

The mind of the shardling only lasted for a moment longer before the king reached out and absorbed it back into himself. The knowledge was shared. The moment of satisfaction became a moment of anticipation.

The preparations for the attack began.

* * *

As the bells of the church chimed six, Autumn slowly and carefully unlocked the door of her magic shop, her two friends beside her. She felt like a different person from who she’d been the last time she was here, that morning.

Marcin had hugged her, and had thanked her profusely in English and Polish, had shown her a picture of his family, who she now felt she knew really well, having already experienced them inside his head. Now he could return to them. Even though . . . he’d made steering wheel gestures and Autumn had had to take a while to explain that his lorry was still lying there now, miles from the road in the real woods, the moment of time it had been trapped in having expired. It hadn’t been left in fairy like the barn had been. Autumn felt dimly that she’d managed to arrange that on her way out of the structure of threads. Judith had got Lizzie to call Shaun on her mobile, and had taken the phone from her and sternly told her son that the lorry driver had been found and fought off some hijackers, heroically getting injured in the process. Apparently they’d used a helicopter to lift the . . . no, she’d interrupted his incredulous outburst, this was one of her sort of things, and so was Rory Holt, who was alive and well and would by now be back at his house and ready to tell a story that nobody would or should believe, and all the ravers were fine too, and did he have any more damn fool questions?

So Marcin, to Autumn’s relief, had been able to go on his way with a reasonable future ahead of him. Result.

They sat down at the table in Autumn’s workroom. Which was now clean, she realised, with nothing boiling itself on the stove. “Thank you,” she said to Judith, now feeling unable to look at her. The old witch must have given some of her remaining energy to do that.

“Thank you,” Judith replied, as though the words were from a foreign language.

“Well,” said Lizzie, “this is better.”

“Isn’t anyone,” said Judith, “going to make some bloody tea?”

* * *

So Lizzie made the tea. And listened, as she did so, to Judith and Autumn continuing to thank and apologise to each other, like nations who’d been at war and didn’t quite know why. That was always, in her experience, the most wonderful sound. Judith was still an employee, Autumn still an apprentice, and who’d ever thought otherwise? Judith wanted to emphasise, Autumn having seen inside her head, that she’d been in her right mind when she’d voted, but no, she still wouldn’t say which way that’d been. If Autumn didn’t know already. Then Autumn, having moved swiftly past that, in whispers, was trying to persuade Judith to tell Lizzie something, but Judith was hesitant. That was okay. From the glimpse Lizzie had got inside her friend’s head, she could guess what sort of thing this might be.

She put the mugs and teapot and a packet of Hobnobs down between them and decided to ask about wider issues. “What about all the people who now know about magic?”

“Nobody’s going to believe those kids,” said Judith, “and the smart ones won’t try to tell anyone. Same for the lorry driver. He seems to know which side his bread’s buttered. Rory Holt’s going to tell everyone, for the rest of his days, and nobody will believe him, which sounds like the world’s worked out a curse for him. Surprising how often there are just desserts.”

“Or not,” said Lizzie. “Can we find out what’s happening in fairy?”

“I’ll send messages to Finn,” said Autumn. “I’m worried about him. What happened to you isn’t something he’d have been up for, if he knew about it.”

“If he could stop it,” said Judith. “It wouldn’t be the first time there have been ructions in fairy. If they war on each other, we’ll know about it. So will the world if we’re not careful.”

Lizzie went to point three on her short mental list. “And what are we going to do about the boundaries?”

“I tried to build a very rough one,” said Autumn. “Okay, let’s say it out loud, I ended up building a bloody wall.”

Judith actually chuckled. Autumn immediately looked angry again. Lizzie looked sharply at Judith. Her smile was as thin as the smile on a fish, but it looked genuine. “I hadn’t thought of that,” she said. “I didn’t mean it was your just desserts. Well, maybe a bit.”

“I don’t want it,” said Autumn, still clearly requiring some terms and conditions here. “I want a proper border that treats all these worlds with respect and works on a case-by-case basis. I mean it. Not joking.”

“Well, this’ll be up to you, won’t it?” said Judith. “What you put up, with what we put in place, will hold until someone has a real go at it. But we can’t leave it. And we can’t wait until I’ve got my strength back.” If, thought Lizzie, privately, she ever did. “So you two will have to sort out what you want and build it. Soon.”

Autumn looked a bit taken aback. “Okay,” she said. “Thanks for . . . trusting—”

“No, we’ve had too many thanks already,” said Judith, “soft, both of you. And of course I trust you to . . . listen, you’ve made me say it, ’cos I’m going to have to start saying a lot of things now. This was why you messing up like that hurt so much—”

Lizzie looked to Autumn, but she shook her head, she wanted to hear this.

“—you, girl, are my choice to continue when I’m gone. To be the wise woman of this town. You’ll have help from the vicar here, and maybe others’ll come along, but someone’ll have to do the lifting, and it won’t be me forever. You and your . . . science,” she let the word slip out like it was sour, “maybe that’s the shape of what’s to come. And the give and take of someone your age, that room for mercy, that’ll be needed too. I just need you to . . . to not fly off at every enormous wanker, to be strong enough to be looked at like you’re odd for the long haul.”

“I . . . think I’m qualified—” Autumn was trying hard not to cry, and failing.

“Now I’ve seen in your noggin I know that. I know that you had a head start with that. Oh my girl. My girl. I don’t know how long I got left.” And Judith had to put a hand over her mouth and close her eyes. But she left one hand on the table. Autumn and then Lizzie put theirs on top of hers. And they stayed like that for a long time.