I’m flung straight back into the storm, sucked down under the water like I’m sucked down a drain. A wave crashes over me with bone-breaking force, all the air expelled from my lungs as surely as if I’d been punched in the stomach.

I flail my way towards the surface, trying to kick up – which way is up? – but another wave crashes down on me, flips me over, flings me deeper. A current catches me, and I’m trying to swim, to kick, anything to breathe, anything, but it rips me away, as fast as a waterskier behind a boat.

The opposing current hitting me is like smashing into a brick wall.

I’m climbing. The wall is smooth and high, the black stones as slick as if they’d been painted with oil, but I keep climbing. I wedge my toes into the tiniest of cracks to find purchase, scrabble with my fingers to find the barest of indentations.

There are vines climbing the wall, and it would be so easy to use them: to let them coil around my feet into footholds, lever myself up by closing my hands around their clinging tendrils. But the vines are covered in roses, and I won’t. I can’t.

The breeze wafts through, and the smell of the roses is strong, so, so strong, sleep, Valentine, sleep, and I lose my grip with my left hand, and my right is slipping, and –

And I’m being torn away again, pulled out of the crushing pressure and stillness of the crossroads of the two opposing currents, and oh my God something’s got me something’s got me and Pearl it’s all right Pearl it’s just me!

‘It’s just me!’ Cardy says, dodging my thrashing arms. ‘Pearl, it’s all right, it’s just me!’

‘… Cardy?’ I try to say, but it comes out as a hacking wheeze. Water bubbles from my throat.

‘Are you okay?’ he says.

He’s treading water and holding me up, my own personal life-raft. It’s pouring down rain – a summer squall – and the water is oily and purple and luminescent around us, the swell churning.

‘Can you make it to shore?’ he asks, shouting to be heard over the storm. ‘I have to find Holly!’

He gestures. Dimly, through the curtain of the sheeting rain, I can make out the grey line of a beach.

‘Pearl!’ he yells. ‘Can you make it?’

I nod. He dives away from me like a fish.

Jenny’s powers, I register, in the tiny part of my brain that isn’t consumed with the desperate need to keep my head above water. I was so worried about who’d get what Seelie powers that we never even thought about the Unseelie ones Cardy would get.

Unseelie.

Something niggles at the corners of my consciousness.

I’m shaking when I finally make it to the beach. It might be from fear or it might be exhaustion – even when I was working at the pool, I never swam quite so far – but there’s one thing it’s definitely not from, which is cold. Even though the sun has almost totally set now, the last scarlet rays reach up into the sky like bloody fingers and the air is warm and dry.

Despite this, Phil is huddled into a ball on the beach, chin pressed to her knees, arms wrapped so tightly around her legs that they’re white from the strain.

‘Are you all right?’

‘No,’ she says. ‘Look where we are.’

I do. We’re on an island, I think. Maybe a peninsula. The sand on the beach is pale under the twilight sky, giving way to long, purplish grass. Beyond that, there are trees, silvery trunks, dark green leaves, and –

And fat, rich, ripe purple berries.

I swear.

Stay calm, Linford. It’s entirely possible there’s more than one forest like this in fairyland.

But I know in my heart we’re back at the beginning.

We’ve traipsed through this place all day – burned fields, lost Julian, jumped off cliffs, nearly drowned, haven’t even come close to finding what we came for – and now we’re back at the beginning, in the very last hours of Misrule. Back at the Summer Door, a door we can’t even open to escape.

I’m going to kill Holly. If Cardy manages to save her, anyway. God, how much different would be this have been if we’d had Tam? Someone who could actually control Emily’s powers?

‘Did you see Finn?’ Phil asks.

I blink. ‘Did you see him too?’

She shakes her head.

‘Who did you see?’

‘My mum.’

I sit down beside her. ‘Oh, Phil,’ I say softly.

‘She told me it wasn’t my fault that she died,’ she says hollowly.

‘Phil, look at me.’

She stares resolutely ahead, eyes on the horizon.

‘For God’s sake, don’t make me do the Kath and Kim voice. Look at me.’

She does.

‘It’s not your fault your mother died.’

‘If I wasn’t so angry,’ she says hoarsely. ‘If I’d just listened to you when you tried to talk to me. If I’d just calmed down. If I’d done any of that, the Riders wouldn’t have come for me, and she would have been fine.’

‘It’s not your fault,’ I insist. ‘It’s not even the Riders’ fault, not really. It’s the fault of the people that unleashed them. The Unseelie arseholes who didn’t care who got caught in the crossfire, as long as they got to kill Finn. Not you.’

She hugs her knees tighter. ‘There’s one good thing about being trapped here for eternity,’ she says numbly. ‘I’ll never have to explain why I skipped her burial.’