‘Sister Claudia, she speak of last rites,’ hissed Olga, as we gathered up our things to leave. ‘What you hiding from me?’

‘One of the sick people died,’ I said, steadily. ‘The woman beside me.’

Olga recoiled. ‘Then you might be –’

‘No, Olga,’ said Max, overhearing. ‘None of those sick people had an infectious disease. Sister Claudia told me. They had serious heart problems, cancer, that sort of thing. That poor lady – she had late-stage cancer, only they didn’t know quite how close to death she was.’ He saw Olga’s stubborn expression and snapped, ‘For heaven’s sake, cancer’s not contagious!’

‘I know that,’ said Olga, ‘and if you –’

‘Oh, stop wasting time arguing about nothing, the pair of you,’ I said, more sharply than was warranted, for I was still oppressed by my earlier thoughts. ‘We’ll never get anywhere at this rate,’ and without waiting for an answer I scrambled out of the ditch and into the field.

‘Selena! Wait!’ called Max, but I didn’t answer. When he caught me up, he said, ‘What’s the matter, Selena?’

‘Nothing, nothing at all.’

‘Something’s upset you,’ he persisted. ‘Please tell me.’

‘It’s nothing,’ I said, biting my lip. ‘Nothing that can be helped and, anyway, I don’t need to tell you everything. You don’t.’

He looked as though I’d slapped him.

I went on, harshly, ‘You said it wasn’t to do with me, what happened to you. Then what was it?’

‘I can’t tell you,’ he said bleakly. ‘You must . . . you must trust me on this, please, Selena.’

My throat felt thick. I wanted more than anything to take him in my arms, to hold him close, to say that yes, of course I trusted him; yes, of course I understood, yes, of course it didn’t matter, that I would follow him to the ends of the earth if that’s what it took. But with the encounter with the moon-sister still fresh in my mind, and the certain knowledge of how his feelings about me would change if he knew my secret, I could not with a whole heart do what I so much longed to do. Instead, I said, tightly, ‘I didn’t say I don’t trust you, only that we do not . . . have to tell each other everything. And you must trust me on that too.’

He sighed and took my hand. ‘Fair enough. But you will tell me, won’t you, if there is anything – anything – I can do?’

I swallowed. Tears pricked at my eyes. ‘Of . . . of course.’

‘Then I am glad,’ he said simply, and kissed my hand. The words as much as the kiss nearly undid my resolve and I am not sure what would have happened next if Olga and Tomi hadn’t caught up with us at that very moment.

But they did, and the dangerous moment passed. Max took a complaining Tomi on his back and set off up the hill, with Olga loping on after, while I brought up the rear. We kept to the hedgerow, walking rapidly in single file up the hill towards the woodland. It was all uphill and the path, or rather the faint track, was rough with clods of dirt and I was quite out of breath by the time we finally reached the summit of the hill and plunged into the woods.

We stopped a moment then, much to Olga’s impatience, to rest and have a drink of ginger beer. Unlike Max and me, she seemed as fresh as when we’d started. It must have been the werewolf blood in her.

The woods were much bigger and denser than they’d seemed from the road and at times the going was pretty tough. It was hours before we got to the other side, stopping only once, briefly, to finish the rest of the sandwiches and the ginger beer. But what we discovered when we reached the edge of the woods was that there wasn’t just one road – if you could dignify the rough tracks not much better than cart-ruts as such – leading out of it, but three, and not one had a signpost.

But we had the compass Andel had given us. Neither Olga nor I was entirely sure of the direction of Silver Harbour, but Max was.

‘North,’ he said. ‘We have to go north. Silver Harbour is probably no more than two or three hours’ walk down the northern track,’ Max said, confidently, and led the way.

The track was what my Mama used to call a rocking-horse road; it wound up and down, up and down. But at least we didn’t have to fight our way through vegetation, like we did in the woods. We passed no other traffic on foot, wheels or horseback, and the country through which we were passing soon changed from patchy woodland to scrubby heathland with precious little sign of habitation. The day stayed grim and grey without the threatened rain materialising. An hour passed. Two hours. Three hours. Four hours. And still no sign of Silver Harbour. The track was getting narrower and heading into woodland again when Olga stopped and said, firmly, ‘We go wrong way.’

‘No,’ said Max, sliding Tomi off his back and pulling out the compass. ‘Look at this. See, we’re still going north, heading in the right direction. We just haven’t gone far enough yet.’

Olga shook her head. ‘I think you make mistake, Max. Maybe you think of direction of Silver Harbour from road where Sister Claudia leave us and not from top of hill.’

‘I most certainly did not,’ he said crossly. ‘What kind of fool do you take me for?’

Olga raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

‘Look, I factored all that in when I took the compass bearing. It’s north we should be going. It’s just further than I thought.’

‘Very well,’ I said, placatingly, ‘but if we don’t get to Silver Harbour soon, we’re going to have to stop for the night somewhere. It’ll be dark in a couple of hours and there’s no moon so we won’t be able to keep going.’

‘We’ll be in Silver Harbour long before nightfall,’ said Max crossly, and strode off down the track with Tomi on his back. Olga and I looked at each other and shrugged. There was nothing else to do but follow him. After all, we were hardly going to retrace our steps at this stage; the junction of the three roads lay way back in the distance, hours back, and this road had to end somewhere . . .

It did, an hour later, but not at Silver Harbour. Not in a town or village or even a hamlet, but at an isolated farm. There were a series of outbuildings clustered around a small farmhouse made of pearl-grey timber, with a sloping shingled roof pulled down around its eaves like a hat, as well as a vegetable garden and small orchard on one side, and a barn full of hay. Smoke was rising from the farmhouse chimney, but no-one was to be seen.

Max said, helplessly, ‘I don’t understand how it happened. I really don’t. North should definitely have led us to Silver Harbour.’

Olga and I looked at each other and said nothing. There was no need to rub it in now.

‘I’m sorry,’ he went on. ‘Truly sorry. We’re quite lost and it’s all my fault.’

‘It’s not as bad as all that,’ I said. ‘We’re all exhausted and we can at least get some shelter here in their barn or something. Maybe they can even sell us some food. We’ve still got that money Andel gave us. And they can tell us where we are, too.’

All at once Tomi, who had been standing silently looking around him, burst out with, ‘I don’t like it here.’

‘What do you mean, Tomi?’ Max said.

‘There is . . . a funny smell,’ the boy said, uneasily.

We sniffed. I couldn’t smell anything out of the ordinary, nothing one wouldn’t expect. Max couldn’t either, and more to the point, neither could Olga, and a werewolf’s sense of smell is much more acute than a human’s.

‘There is only the smell of smoke and hay and the smell of animals,’ she said. Her nostrils flared, and her eyes lit up. ‘Oh, and something like stew cooking inside. All good smells. You are from city,’ she added, kindly. ‘You are not used to country smells, that is all.’

‘No,’ said Tomi, stubbornly, ‘There is a funny smell.’

‘It’s that or sleep in the open, Tomi,’ I said. ‘You don’t want that, do you?’

He swallowed and shook his head. He didn’t say anything more but kept very close to Max as we walked in through the gate and up the path that led to the house.

Max knocked on the door. No answer. He knocked again and still there was no answer. Trying the door, the handle turned easily, and we walked into a most cheerful, big room with a table laid for four, and a cookpot bubbling away on an old-fashioned wood stove, a fire burning merrily beneath it. I could feel my mouth watering and I know I wasn’t the only one. Even Tomi had considerably brightened up. There was no talk of ‘funny smells’ now, not surprisingly, as the smell coming from that cookpot could in no way be considered peculiar, only rich and meaty and almost unbearably appetising.

There was more food on the sideboard: bread, cheese and jam, a jug of milk and one of ginger beer. There were pictures on the walls, colourful rugs on the floor, and bedrolls and blankets were neatly stacked on a shelf along one wall. Everything spoke of a busy family life, and of ordinary activities only just interrupted; but there was nobody there, not a soul. Where were the householders?

We went to look in the outbuildings. The barn was full of hay but empty of people. In the stables, two horses and a cow looked up from their mangers and regarded us incuriously, but there were still no people to be seen. We even looked in the henhouse, where the drowsy chickens rustled on their perches. But when we went around the back of the house, we saw a meadow sloping down to a stream. On the other side of it were fields full of some kind of late crop stretching as far as the eye could see.

Max said, with a relief we all shared, ‘Ah, that’s what it must be, the men have been working in the fields and the lady of the house has gone to fetch them in for dinner.’

‘Then we’ll wait inside for them to come back. I’m sure they won’t mind,’ I said firmly, and no-one made any protest at all, for it was getting darker and colder, and the thought of that bright, warm house was very tempting indeed.