We waited and waited. The night drew closer and closer to the windows, and still the householders did not return. All the while the warmth of the fire seeped into our tired limbs while the appetising smell of stew tortured our nostrils and made our bellies rumble.

At one point, Max said we should go and see if we could see the people coming, but when he opened the door, such a cold wind blew in, and the night was so pitch-black, that he closed it again in a hurry. Then the rain that had threatened all day began to fall, and fall with a vengeance, pounding at the shutters and the roof, while the wind howled. We sat in the cosy, warm kitchen, knowing that we could not go out again into that foul night. We all knew, by this time, that there was no family living here. The table had been laid for four because there were four of us. We were in an enchanted place. What we were yet to know was whether the enchantment was good or bad.

It was hard to believe in its being bad, though. Not in this cosy, warm atmosphere, with the food smelling so good. I could certainly not feel any evil intent here. But who said that evil magic must look evil?

Tomi’s instinct as a Mancer hadn’t trusted this place at first. But that instinct was trained to sniff out illegal magic, and illegal magic wasn’t the same as evil magic. It could be good, like the magic of the hazel tree. Or bad, like the magic of a curse. One had to know who had made the enchantment to know for sure whether it was good or bad. I’d known the hazel-tree magic was good because it was my mother’s. But I had no idea who had brought us here, for we had been brought here. There was no doubt of that, I thought. Max was probably right; going north should have brought us to Silver Harbour. And yet it had not. But how could that be?

It had been a very overcast day, I thought. Impossible to get a bearing from the sun. So Max had had to rely on the compass. The compass, which had definitely pointed north. We’d all seen it. The answer was so absurdly simple, yet so stunning a thought, that I gasped out loud.

‘The compass. It’s the compass!’

‘What?’ said Max.

‘We didn’t go north, Max. We went . . . in some other direction. East, I think.’

‘East! But that’s going inland, towards the forest lands, not towards the coast at all!’

I swallowed. ‘Yes.’

‘It’s impossible,’ he said, sharply. ‘I can read a compass, you know. And it was definitely pointing –’

‘North, I know. It wasn’t your fault.’ I took a deep breath. ‘You see, I think the compass had a spell on it.’

Olga’s mouth dropped open. ‘Surely you do not say Andel –’

‘No, no, it wasn’t Andel, of course not. It was that lady who died. She – she had it in her hand when I woke up.’

Three pairs of eyes stared at me. ‘What are you talking about?’ said Max, confused.

‘You see, she was a m– that is, she was a witch,’ I corrected, hastily, nobody seeming to notice my slip.

‘She told you that?’ said Olga, warily.

‘Not in so many words, but – yes, now I come to think of it, that’s what she meant.’

‘But why would she put a spell on this?’ Max said, taking the compass from the bag and staring at it as though it would give him a clue.

‘She must have known that we were in trouble,’ I improvised, rapidly. ‘She wanted to help us, wanted us to be safe.’ With a little tremor, I remembered her last words, Then you will be on the right path, little sister . . . ‘She must have thought Silver Harbour wouldn’t be safe so she put a spell on the compass to bring us here instead.’

Tomi’s eyes bulged. He jumped up from his chair and yelled, ‘Oh, we are doomed! We are in the house of a wicked witch and she will turn us all into frogs and I will never, ever see my home or my mother and father again!’ He burst into loud, frightened sobs.

We all moved towards him, but it was Olga who reached him first. She put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Don’t be afraid, little man. Don’t be afraid.’

‘Don’t touch me! I hate you, I hate you all! I wish I had never seen you in my whole life! Oh I don’t want to be a frog; I hate frogs, I hate them, horrible, slimy things they are!’ He was screaming hysterically by this time.

‘It’s all right, Tomi, it’s all right,’ said Olga, gently, as she knelt down beside him and put an arm around him. She held him till his screams died down and his sobs quietened, till he hardly even struggled against her. Then she stroked his hair and said, firmly, ‘You will not be a frog, Tomi, I swear it. Not a frog, nor a toad, nor anything but Tomi, not while I am here, for no wicked witch or wizard get past werewolf, that I promise you!’

I had no idea if that was true – but she was the only one of us here who had a good deal of experience of magic, so it rang true, and it certainly helped to calm the little boy.

He looked miserable and hung his head. ‘I . . . I am so ashamed.’

‘Of what, Tomi?’ whispered Olga.

‘I am a Mancer. Nothing should frighten me.’

Poor little Tomi, I thought. His world had turned upside down and he was still trying to live up to something he only half understood.

‘Listen to me, Tomi,’ Max said gently. ‘A very great Mancer once said to my father that is only those without honour who claim to know neither fear nor shame.’

Tomi looked at him. ‘Is that really true?’

‘It is the absolute truth,’ said Max, steadily, and as he did I saw the expression in the boy’s eyes change and soften. I knew that the young man had once again found the right words to appeal to and comfort that fierce little heart.

After that, somehow, it felt all right to help ourselves to the stew and the bread and the other good things that had been left out for us. We took the lead, and after watching us cautiously, Tomi soon joined in and ate heartily. Nothing happened to us, of course, other than our bellies becoming pleasantly full. Then we found some board games in a chest by the door and spent a pleasant hour or two playing snakes and ladders before Tomi fell asleep in a bedroll by the stove.

We talked then for quite a while about what had happened. Olga and Max asked a few questions about the dying woman, which I answered as best I could. The moon-sister hadn’t said in so many words to tell no-one about Dremda and Thalia, though I knew she had chosen a moment when everyone else was asleep. Moreover, she had not trusted to persuasion only; with the compass spell, she had ensured we would have a night of respite: safe, warm and well-fed. And I was sure it had killed her. The effort of the spell must have drained the very last of her forces, so even the small time that was left to her had been cut brutally short. I owed it to her to do what I had promised. But I couldn’t reveal the real reason why she’d so desperately wanted us off our course; and so I had to improvise and embroider on my theme of ‘the witch’ wanting to protect us.

Fortunately enough, both Olga and Max seemed to accept this. After all, there was no real reason not to. We had indeed been lucky with the kindness of strangers so far. And a secret witch would be even more likely to want to protect fugitives from the authorities than a bargeman and a nun. We discussed why she’d brought us to this particular spot and decided that this house, with its spirit of kindly magic, must once have been hers. Why she would leave such a welcoming place for the hospital in Tresholm, though, was a mystery; but perhaps she’d had no choice or been driven out. Or perhaps this place was not quite what it seemed. Remembering how the hazel tree’s magic had faded after a few hours, I wondered if this one was similar. Was that what all moon-sister magic was like – temporary? Would we wake in the morning to find ourselves in the ruins of a broken-down, old house where the moon-sister might once have lived? Still, even if the glamour faded, we’d have had a few precious hours of comfort and safety.

‘Though we might have been taken out of our way, it was for the best,’ Max said. ‘After all, we’d been told the road to Silver Harbour was being watched; so why not Silver Harbour itself? We might have been caught there.

‘What’s more,’ he said, cheerfully, ‘we could still get to Almain this way, overland. It’s a much longer way, granted, than going by boat, and there’d be a nerve-racking bit when you crossed from Ashbergia into Faustine lands proper, for the border of Almain and the empire meet there; but it is just a far-flung area of remote villages – not any place where Mancers might be likely to lurk.’

There was just one problem: what to do with Tomi now that we couldn’t leave him at Silver Harbour as planned. Of course, we’d have to let him go somewhere before we entered Almain. Quite where and when, though, we had no idea. He had to be absolutely safe where we left him and we had to be sure that he could be reunited soon with his family. There was no way now that any of us would have it otherwise. For he had stopped being ‘the Mancer brat’ or even ‘the child’ and had become a real person to all of us – even me. He was Tomi, our companion for better or worse, and that made things both easier and harder.