'I don't do

-anything. I know. And once this whole tragic nonsense is over and done with, she'll be on the mend again. But right now she's very sensitive.'

'I'll be careful.'

'Yes,' said Hugo. He returned his gaze to the gloom beyond the window. Assuming the conversation was over, Will rose. 'We should really talk more about what happened to you,' Hugo said, his distracted tone suggesting that he felt no urgency to do so. Will waited. 'When you're well,' Hugo said. 'We'll talk then.'

iii

The conversation never happened. Will's strength returned, the interviews ceased, the television crews moved on to some other corner of England, and the sightseers went soon after. By Christmas, Burnt Yarley belonged to itself again, and Will's brief moment of notoriety was over. At school, there was the inevitable gauntlet of jokes and petty cruelties to run, but he felt curiously inured against them. And once it was plain that the name-calling and the whispers were not discomfiting him, he was left alone.

There was only one real source of pain: that Frannie kept her distance from him. She spoke to him only once in that period before Christmas, and it was a short conversation.

'I've got a message for you,' she said. He asked from where, but she refused to name the source. When she told him the message, however, he didn't need the name. Nor, in fact, did he need the information. He'd already had a visit from Lord Fox. He knew he was part of the madness, for as long as he lived.

As for Sherwood, he didn't come back to school at all until the third week of January, and when he did he was in a much subdued state. It was as if something had broken in him; the part that had turned his lack of mental grasp into a strange kind of attribute. He was pale and listless. When Will tried to talk to him, he clammed up, or started to get teary. Will quickly learned his lesson, and left Sherwood to heal at his own speed. He was glad that the boy had Frannie to look after him. She protected Sherwood fiercely if anyone tried to pick on him. People soon got the message. They left brother and sister alone, just as they left Will. This slow aftermath was in its way as strange an experience as the events that had preceded it. Once all the hoopla died down (even the Yorkshire press had given up the story by early February, having nothing to report) life resumed its usual even pace, and it was as if nothing of any consequence had happened. Of course, there were occasional references made to it (mainly in the form of sick jokes passed around at school) and in a host of minor ways the village had changed (it no longer had a butcher, for one; and there were more people at church on Sundays), but the winter months, which were brutally cold that year, gave people time to either bury their sorrow or talk it through, all behind doors that were often blocked by drifts of snow. By the time the blizzards receded, folks had finished their grieving, and were ready for a fresh start.

On the twenty-sixth of February, there was a change in the weather so sudden that it had the quality of a sign. A strange balm came upon the air, and for the first night in ninety there was no frost. It wouldn't last, the naysayers at the pub predicted: any plant foolish enough to show its nose would have it nipped off soon enough. But the next day was just as warm, and the day following, and the day following that. Steadily, the sky began to clear, so that by the end of the first week of March, it was a gleaming swathe of blue above the valley, busy with birds; and the naysayers were silenced.

Spring had arrived; the gymnast season, all muscle and motion. Though Will had lived through eleven springs in the city, they were wan imitations of what he witnessed that month. More than witnessed, felt. His senses were brimming, the way they'd brimmed that first day outside the Courthouse, when he'd felt such union with the world. His spirits, which had been downcast for months, finally looked up from his feet and flew.

All was not lost. He had a head full of memories, and hidden amongst them were hints of how he had to proceed from here: things he knew nobody else in the world would have been able to teach him, and perhaps nobody else in the world would understand.

Living and dying we feed the fire.

Suppose they were the last.

Jacob in the bird. Jacob in the tree. Jacob in the wolf.

Clues to epiphanies, all of them.

From now on, he would have to look for epiphanies on his own. Find his own moments when the world spun and he stood still; when it would be as though he was seeing through the eyes of God. And until that time, he would be the careful son Hugo had asked him to be. He'd say nothing to stir up his mother; nothing to remind her of how death had followed them. But his compliance would be a pretence. He did not belong to them; not remotely. They would be from this time temporary guardians, from whose side he would slip as soon as he was able to make his way in the world.

iv

On Easter Sunday, he did something he'd been putting off since the mellowing of the weather. He retraced the journey he'd taken with Jacob, from the Courthouse to the copse where he'd killed the birds. The Courthouse itself had the previous year inspired much morbid interest amongst sightseers, and had as a consequence been fenced off, the wire hung with signs warning trespassers that they would be liable to prosecution. Will was tempted to scramble under the fence and take a look at the place, but the day was too fine to waste indoors, so he began to climb. There was a warm gusty wind blowing, herding white clouds, all innocent of rain, down the valley. On the slopes, the sheep were stupid with spring, and watched him unalarmed, only darting off if he yelled at them. The climb itself was hard (he missed Jacob's hand at his neck) but every time he paused to look around, the vista widened, the fells rolling away in every direction.

He had remembered the wood with uncanny accuracy, as though despite his sickness and fatigue - that night his sight had been preternaturally sharp. The trees were budding now, of course, every twig an arrow aiming high. And underfoot, blades of brilliant green where there'd been a frosted carpet.

He went straight to the place where he'd killed the birds. There was no trace of them. Not so much as a bone. But simply standing on the same spot, such a wave of yearning and sorrow passed through him that it made him gasp for breath. He'd been so proud of what he'd done here. (Wasn't that quick? Wasn't that beautiful?) But now he felt a bit more ambiguous about it. Burning moths to keep the darkness at bay was one thing, but killing birds just because it felt good to do so? That didn't feel so brave; not today, when the trees were budding and the sky was wide. Today it felt like a dirty memory, and he swore to himself there and then that he'd told the story for the last time. Once Faraday and Parsons had filed away their notes and forgotten them, it would be as though it had never happened.

He went down on his haunches, to check one final time for evidence of the victims, but even as he did so he knew he'd invited trouble. He felt a tiny tremor in the air as a breath was drawn, and looked up to see that the wood itself had not changed in any detail but one. There was a fox a short distance from him, watching him intently. He stood on all fours like any other fox, but there was something about the way he stared that made Will suspicious. He'd seen this defiant gaze before, from the dubious safety of his bed.

'Go away!' he shouted. The fox just looked at him, unblinking and unmoved. 'D you hear me?' Will yelled at the top of his voice. 'Shoo!' But what had worked like a charm on sheep didn't work on foxes. Or at least not this fox.