Lim gave a soft moan and Little Fur went to kneel beside him. She was glad to have something to distract her from their plight. But her spirits plummeted at once, for although the lemming’s eyes were open, they had lost their shining brightness, and when she leaned over him and called his name, Lim seemed unable to see her.

Frightened, Little Fur again put her hands around his head and closed her eyes. She bent all her will on the shadowy place under the cut, but her mind felt clumsy. She could not make it small enough to get inside and heal whatever was wrong. For the first time in her life, she felt utterly helpless.

I must concentrate, she told herself fiercely. She must forget the pain in her head, the locked door and the fact that trolls or humans might come at any moment. She must think only of Lim, who had been entrusted to her care.

‘Teta …’ the lemming moaned softly.

Little Fur sent her mind deeper into him, seeking his spirit. She felt it struggling against an immense weariness that flowed from the shadow she could not enter. Lim was like a little beast caught in a swift-flowing stream, too exhausted to do more than fight to keep his head above the water and hope to be swept ashore. She tried to pour strength into him, but it seemed to her that the sinister shadow in his mind was growing. I will sing to make his spirit stronger, she told herself, but before she could begin, the lemming’s eyes flickered open.

‘I have to sleep …’ he murmured, and then his eyes fell closed.

And the pulse of his life winked out.

Little Fur stared down at him, shocked. She looked at her hands and saw that they were trembling. She reached for Lim’s small body, but could not bring herself to touch him and feel the warmth of life fading away.

It was a long time before she heard Nobody calling her through the roaring confusion in her mind. Lacking the will to stand, she crawled to the vixen. Her eyes fell on the healing pouches and all at once her carefully chosen selection of seeds and herbs and her little nut gourds of potion seemed no more than a muddle of leaves and sticks and seeds blown together by the wind.

‘Little Fur, hear me!’ Nobody urged. ‘I can smell a human coming.’

‘The door is locked,’ Little Fur said dully.

‘I know,’ Nobody said. ‘But the human will open it. You must hide!’

‘I can’t leave Lim,’ she murmured.

‘You cannot help him any more!’ the injured vixen insisted. ‘Hide yourself or the human will catch you!’

The urgency in her voice drove Little Fur to obey. She groped her way to the fissure and half tumbled into it, but rather than climbing down, she drew the elven cloak over her head and waited to see what the human would do.

There was a rattling sound then the door opened and something filled the sunlit opening, a bulky human-shaped darkness with sunlight streaming all around it. It stood in the doorway for a long time, and Little Fur could smell that it was trying to see into the shadowy round house with its weak eyes. At length it uttered a grunt of surprise and stooped to enter. Little Fur held her breath as light flooded in, revealing the bodies of Lim and the white fox. The human went first to Lim’s body. It bent down and touched the lemming gently and then it picked him up, muttering words that smelled of pity and puzzlement, stroking the soft fur. Finally it straightened and glanced around.

Nobody gave a low whine to draw the human’s attention. It began at once to give off the stink of fear, but Nobody gave another soft moan and its fear gave way to the scent of compassion and kindly concern. The human gently laid Lim’s body in a bag it carried over its shoulder and moved cautiously towards the fox. It knelt close beside her and held out its hand, palm down. It gave off a smell of anxiety, but Nobody did not bite, and very slowly and carefully, the human slid its big hands under her. The vixen whined in pain, but still she did not bite, and as the human straightened, holding her, Little Fur smelled that she had fainted. The human carried her out of the round house, stooping again to pass through the low door, and Little Fur climbed out and crept through the door. The dew-spangled grass sparkled in the blaze of sunlight, but Little Fur did not take her eyes away from the human. It had reached the base of one of the high houses, and even as she watched, it passed through a door and out of sight, carrying Nobody.

Little Fur took a deep breath and hurried across to the ivy-clad wall. She felt as if a thousand humans were watching her from the high houses looming on all sides. But she did not falter because she knew that her father’s elven cloak would prevent any human from seeing her, and she must get help for Nobody. If only she had not been so quick to send Crow away. And where had he got to? Surely time enough had passed for him to have found Sorrow. She knew Ginger would be harder to find because he was away from the wilderness seeking the one-eyed cat, Sly, who had failed to return from yet another attempt to free the panther, Danger, from the human zoo.

She scaled the ivy-covered wall, her hands and feet as clumsy as if she had borrowed them from someone else. At last she stood in the cobbled lane on the other side of the wall, but immediately she began to shudder anew at the memory of how easily Lim had died under her hands.

She shook her head and told herself that she must find somewhere to hide and wait until night, when it would be safe to make her way to the wilderness. The trouble was that her mind seemed not to be working properly. She kept seeing Lim attacking the greep, or Nobody being carried away into a high house by the human. She felt overwhelmed by a despair so strong that it numbed her.

‘There is something wrong with me,’ Little Fur muttered.

Then a dreadful thought came to her.

Heart thundering, Little Fur turned and thrust her hands into the tangle of ivy hanging from the fence. Earth magic was flowing through it – she had felt it before the greep had seized her – but now she could feel nothing. She had a vision of the greep picking her up roughly at the behest of the harling and carrying her to the stone house, unwittingly severing her from the flow of earth magic. The earth dragon could not have known that, once severed, she would never be able to rejoin the flow again. Or maybe the greeps had been ordered to sever her from the flow of magic. The troll king might guess that this would be the cruellest blow he could strike against her.

Tears blurred Little Fur’s eyes and she sank down and wept.

She had been severed from the flow of earth magic!

No wonder she had not been able to save Lim! If only she had been more wary! If only she had refused the pleading of the mink!

It was the sound of human voices in the distance that reminded her of where she was, and she got to her feet, knowing she must find a place to hide until it was safe to make her way home. But this thought brought a fresh wave of despair, because of course she could not go home. The Old Ones would never allow one who was not open to the flow of earth magic to enter the secret wilderness. She stumbled to a cellar window open in the wall of one of the human dwellings lining a cobbled lane. There was no need to search for one with an earthen floor now. The cellar was damp and smelled unpleasantly of old human rubbish, but Little Fur did not care. She climbed down into it, wrapped herself in her father’s cloak and escaped into sleep.

Little Fur dreamed that she was hurrying along a tunnel leading down to the troll city of Underth. All over the walls were strange beautiful runes that had been made by trolls, and even though she knew she ought to be hurrying, she could not resist stopping to study them. She felt that if she stared at them long enough, she would know what they meant.

‘When did the trolls make these?’ she wondered. No one answered, but she sensed someone was watching her, and the feeling was so strong that she woke and opened her eyes.

A glowing green eye was looking at her. She gasped and shrank back, only to realise that she knew the scent of its owner. ‘Sly?’ she whispered, her eyes now picking out the black shape of the cat within the dense shadow of the cellar.

‘I thought it was you, Healer, but you do not smell like yourself,’ said the black cat.

‘You were looking for me?’

‘Crow saw me when he was flying to the wilderness to tell Sorrow and Ginger what happened,’ Sly said, her green eye narrowing. ‘He said greeps had caught you and were going to eat you.’

‘I do not think they meant to eat me,’ Little Fur said. She told Sly quickly about the harling that had driven off the greeps, then she explained about Lim’s death and Nobody being taken away by a human.

‘How did you escape?’ asked Sly.

‘I hid when the human came, and when it carried Nobody out of the round house, I slipped out too.’

‘That was clever,’ the black cat approved. ‘Do not worry about the vixen. The humans will not hurt her. They like things that are different.’

‘They will put her in a cage,’ Little Fur said.

Sly’s eyes glinted. ‘Humans are very fond of caging wild things, but cages can be opened.’

‘Yes,’ Little Fur said, heartened by the cat’s cool certainty. Then a thought struck her. ‘Did you free Danger from the zoo?’ She knew the black cat had done nothing since meeting the caged panther but plot to free him.

‘I will free him this very night,’ Sly said exultantly. ‘Indeed I must go now. You had better return to the wilderness.’

‘Oh Sly, I can’t,’ Little Fur said, her heart sinking again. ‘I can never go there again because the greeps severed me from the flow of earth magic. I can’t even heal properly now. That is why Lim died.’

‘You must find the way to undo this severing,’ Sly said, and in that moment, a solution came to Little Fur like a beam of sunlight slicing through a winter sky.

‘I will ask the Sett Owl how I can rejoin the flow!’ she said.

Sly gave a scornful hiss. ‘Ginger said that I should ask the Sett Owl how to rescue Danger. I went and I asked, but the bird told me that his freedom was not mine to give, and that all was not as it seemed. She said that Danger must follow the fearful guide in order to find himself.’

‘What does that mean?’ Little Fur asked.

‘It means nothing,’ Sly said coldly, springing up onto the cellar window.

Even as the black cat vanished, Little Fur suddenly remembered what she had wanted to tell her. ‘Sly! Don’t forget that Danger said he would kill you if you let him out!’ she called, but the cat had already gone. Little Fur climbed out the cellar window into the lane. It was deep night now and the moon was hidden behind a thick bank of cloud so it was very dark, despite the false light shining from a pole nearby. The lane looked very different at night, but instead of noting the differences as she would usually have done, Little Fur could only feel the terrible silence of the mossy earth between the cobblestones. This is how it is for humans, she thought. No wonder they felt nothing for the earth or the earth spirit. Perhaps they built their roads to block out the deadness of the land.

She hesitated then set a course for the beaked house, wondering if she would ever again hear the soft, deep whispering of the Old Ones in their secret grove.

She had just reached the hedge beyond which lay the beaked house when Ginger and Sorrow found her. The red fox had grown strong and his coat sleek and thick since his return from Underth, but there was a deep sadness in his eyes. Thinking of all the trials he had endured made Little Fur ashamed of the selfishness of her grief. After all, she was not the first nor would she be the last creature in the world to suffer.

‘Crow spoke true,’ Ginger said in his low purring voice. ‘Earth magic does not flow through you.’

Little Fur nodded. ‘I am going to ask the Sett Owl if there is a way for me to repair the severing.’

Sorrow looked troubled. ‘The Sett Owl is very old. It is as if the world grows ever more complex in her eyes, and while Indyk is very skilful at explaining her words, I dinna ken if his words count as foretellings.’

Little Fur knew that Sorrow had visited the Sett Owl to ask her advice on how to become wild. Her visioning had been long and so strange that most of it had been impossible to understand, but the ancient owl had told the fox plainly he would never be as other foxes, since he had been raised by humans in a machine. From that time, Sorrow had remained in the secret wilderness of the Old Ones, helping Little Fur when he could, but some brightness had gone out of him.

Little Fur now explained all that had happened since they had been summoned by the mink. When she came to the part where the human had carried Nobody away, Sorrow’s eyes blazed yellow with outrage. ‘She must not be caged!’ he said, growling deep in his throat.

‘I do not think the human that carried her away meant to hurt her,’ Little Fur began, but the fox seemed not to hear her. He began pacing feverishly back and forth, and watching him, Little Fur felt a sudden lightening of her heart at the thought that rescuing the white vixen might crack open the shell in which the fox had encased his heart.

‘You ought to go and see if you can find where the human took her,’ she urged. ‘Did Crow tell you where it all happened?’

‘He did,’ said Sorrow. He held her gaze for a moment, taut with indecision, and then something in him seemed to give way and he bounded off. Little Fur and Ginger exchanged a look and then they crawled under the hedge. Clambering to her feet on the other side, Little Fur saw dimly the crossed sticks set at the tip of the steep roof that had given the beaked house its name. Little Fur took a deep breath and told herself that the Sett Owl had offered her good advice in the past; surely she would do so now, despite her advanced age.

Coming at last to the shadowy opening at the base of the wall of the beaked house, Little Fur hesitated.

What would the still magic do with her now, she wondered. Bar her as she would now be barred from the wilderness?

‘Have courage,’ Ginger whispered, pressing his soft forehead against hers. ‘I will wait here for you.’

Little Fur took a deep breath and tucked up her tunic, then, gathering the shreds of her courage, she crawled into the tunnel.