'On a night like this, we're all a little lost,' Mr. Steep said. 'There's no blame there.'

'Maybe he should come home with us,' Rosa suggested. 'You could light one of your fires for him.'

'Hush yourself,' Jacob snapped. 'I will not have talk of fires when this boy is so bitter cold. Where are your wits?'

'As you like,' the woman replied. 'It's no matter to me either way. But you should have seen him take the hare. He was on it like a tiger, he was.'

'I was lucky,' Will said, 'that's all.'

Mr. Steep drew a deep breath, and to Will's great delight descended the slope a yard or two more. 'Can you get up?' he asked Will.

'Of course I can,' Will replied, and did so.

Though Mr. Steep had halved the distance between them, the darkness had deepened a little further, and his features were just as hard to fathom. 'I wonder, looking at you, if we weren't meant to meet on this hill,' he said softly. 'I wonder if that's the luck of this night, for us all.' Will was still trying hard to get a better sense of what Steep looked like; to put a face to the voice that moved him so deeply, but his eyes weren't equal to the challenge. 'The hare, Mrs. McGee.'

'What about it?'

'We should set it free.'

'After the chase it led me?' Rosa replied. 'You're out of your mind.'

'We owe it that much, for leading us to Will.'

'I'll thank it as I skin it, Jacob, and that's my final word on the thing. My God, you're impractical. Throwing away good food. I'll not have it.' Before Steep could protest further she snatched up the sack, and was away down the slope.

Only now, watching her descend, did Will realize that the worst of the storm had blown over. The rainfall had mellowed to a drizzle, the murk was melting away; he could even see lights glimmering in the valley. He was relieved, certainly, but not as much as he thought he'd be. There was comfort in the prospect of returning home, but that meant leaving the company of the dark man at his back, who even now lay a heavy, leather-gloved hand upon his shoulder.

'Can you see your house from here?' he asked Will.

'No ... not yet.'

'But it will come clear, by and by.'

'Yes,' Will said, only now getting a sense of how the land lay. He had managed somehow to come halfway around the valley during his blind trek, and was looking down on the village from a wholly unexpected angle. There was a track not more than thirty yards down the ridge from where he stood; it would lead him, he suspected, back to the route he'd followed to get to the Courthouse. A left at that intersection would bring him back into Burnt Yarley, and then it was just a weary trudge home. 'You should go, my boy,' Jacob said. 'Doubtless a fellow as fine as you has loving guardians.' The gloved hand squeezed his shoulder. 'I envy you that, having no parents that I can remember.'

'I'm ... sorry,' Will said, hesitating because he was by no means sure a man as fine as Jacob Steep was ever in need of sympathy. He received it, however, in good part.

'Thank you, Will. It's important that a man be compassionate. It's a quality that our sex so often neglects, I think.' Will heard the soft cadence of Steep's breathing, and tried to fall in rhythm with it. 'You should go,' Jacob said. 'Your parents will be concerned for you.'

'No they won't,' Will replied.

'Surely-'

'They won't. They don't care.'

'I can't believe that.'

'It's true.'

'Then you must be a loving son in spite of them,' Steep said. 'Be grateful that you have their faces in your mind's eye. And their voices to answer when you call. Better that than emptiness, believe me. Better than silence.'

He lifted his hand from Will's shoulder, and instead touched the middle of his back, gently pushing him away. 'Go on,' he said softly. 'You'll be dead of cold if you don't go soon. Then how would we get to meet again?'

Will's spirits rose at this. 'We might do that?'

'Oh certainly, if you're hardy enough to come and find me. But Will ... understand me ... I'm not looking for a dog to perch on my lap. I need a wolf.'

'I could be a wolf,' Will said. He wanted to look back over his shoulder at Steep, but that was not, he thought, the most appropriate thing for an aspirant wolf to do.

'Then as I say: come find me,' Steep said. 'I won't be far away.' And with that he gave Will a final nudge, setting him off on his way down the slope.

Will did not look back until he reached the track, and when he did he saw nothing. At least nothing alive. The hill he saw, black against the clearing sky. And the stars, appearing between the clouds. But their splendour was nothing compared to the face of Jacob Steep; a face he had not yet seen, but which his mind had already conjured a hundred different ways by the time he reached home, each finer than the one before. Steep the nobleman, fine-boned and fancy; Steep the soldier, scarred from a dozen wars; Steep the magician, his gaze bearing power. Perhaps he was all of these. Perhaps none. Will didn't care. What mattered was to be beside him again, soon, and know him better.

Meanwhile, there was a warm light from the window of his home, and a fire in the hearth. Even a wolf might seek the comfort of the hearth now and then, Will reasoned, and knocking on the front door, was let back in.

i

He did not go up the hill the following day to look for Jacob, nor indeed the day following that. He came home to such a firestorm of accusations - his mother in racking tears, certain he was dead, his father, white with fury, just as certain he wasn't - that he dared not step over the threshold. Hugo wasn't a violent man. He prided himself on his reasonableness. But he made an exception in this case, and beat his son so hard - with a book, of all things - he reduced them both to tears: Will, of pain, his father of anguish that he'd lost so much control.

He wasn't interested in Will's explanations. He simply told his son that while he, Hugo, didn't care if Will went wandering for the rest of his damn life, Eleanor did, and hadn't she suffered enough for one lifetime?

So Will stayed at home and nursed his bruises and his rage. After forty-eight hours his mother tried to make some kind of peace, telling him how frightened she'd been that some harm had befallen him.

'Why?' he said to her sullenly.

'Whatever do you mean?'

'I mean why should you worry if something happens to me? You never cared before ...'

'Oh, William ...' she said softly. There was only a trace of accusation in her voice. It was mostly sorrow.

'You don't,' he sat flatly. 'You know you don't. All you ever think about is him.' He didn't need to name the missing member of this equation. 'I'm not important to you. You said so.' This was not strictly the case. She'd never used those precise words. But the lie sounded true enough.

'I'm sure I didn't mean it,' she said. 'It's just been so hard for me since Nathaniel died-' Her fingers went to his face as she spoke, and gently stroked his cheek. 'He was so ... so...'

He was barely listening to her. He was thinking of Rosa McGee, and how she had touched his face and spoken to him softly. Only she'd not been talking about how fine some other boy was while she did so. She'd been telling him what a treasure he was, how nimble, how useful. This woman who had barely known his name had found in him qualities his own mother could not see. It made him sad and angry at the same time.

'Why do you keep talking about him?' Will said. 'He's dead.'

Eleanor's fingers fell from Will's face, and she looked at him with tear-filled eyes. 'No,' she said, 'he'll never be dead. Not to me. I don't expect you to understand. How could you? But your brother was very special to me. Very precious. So he'll never be dead as far as I'm concerned.'