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grew colder and colder, stiffer and stiffer, and less and less capable of thinking clearly. Instead, hideous images filled my mind: Belladonna laughing as she held a torn and bloody heart inher hand; Drago staring at me with stony eyes; Belladonna again, stepping out of the dummy on the stage at the Ladies’ Fair spring show, but this time with her face and clawed hands covered in blood. Why? Why? I wept, but there was no answer in the air or in my heart or in my foggy thoughts.
    Father … Father … Oh, Father … What had happened to him? Was he really sick, far away in Aurisola, or had Belladonna lied about that, too? Could it be possible that she had …? No, I told myself. No. He was lying far away, sick but waiting for me. That must be true. She would not have killed my father – I knew that Belladonna really did love him. I remembered her pale, set face as she pointed out that Father had asked for me – for me, not for her. Was that why she hated me? Because my father wanted me by his side, not her? Was she jealous of his love for me? Did she want him all to herself?
    My thoughts jumped. How would Belladonna explain away the fact that I had disappeared? And then I realised that she wouldn’t need to. I had gone on a journey to Aurisola to see Father. As far as anyone knew, that’s where I was. Drago would go back with the horses and he would tell anyone who asked that he’d accompanied me to the steamer at Mormest. As far as anyone was concerned, I was safely on my way to Aurisola. But journeys are dangerous. Anything can happen. A steamer accident. An attack by bandits. Anything. In due course, Belladonna would ‘discover’ that I was missing, presumed dead. No-one but Belladonna, with a deer’s heart in her hands, and Drago, who let me live, would know the truth.
    I was alone, completely alone. And even if I somehow found my way out of this forest alive, where was I to go? I couldn’t go home. I’d have to try to get a message to myfather. If he lived. Stop it, I told myself. He will live! He must! And so must I. Clasping my hands together, I prayed desperately for his safety, for mine, for all this to be just a terrible nightmare from which I’d awake in my own bed.
    The night wore on. The waxing moon rose, silver-white above the trees. It was the time we call ‘hunter’s moon’ in Noricia, the time just before full moon. It was the best time to go on hunting trips, for it was said there was a special magic at this time that gave hunters extra luck. Hunter’s moon … And I was the prey on which it shone, deep in the dark heart of the forest.
    Despite my cramped position and my whirling thoughts, the shock of what had happened had made me exhausted and I was beginning to feel drowsy, my limbs feeling heavier and heavier. I fought against sleep, but my eyes kept drooping. Every time they did, horrible images rose up from under my eyelids and I forced them open again. I do not know how long I continued in this cycle of jagged, nightmare-haunted sleep, my visions of creatures prowling around the tree being interrupted when I jerked awake upon hearing the night sounds of the forest – rustlings and callings and faint howls and snarls. Eventually, I could fight sleep no longer. I fell into a deep black unconscious where neither nightmare nor night rustlings could wake me. I did not wake when my grip loosened and I slid sideways out of my precarious shelter and fell. I did not even wake when I hit the ground, for I fell on a soft deep carpet of dead leaves. I slept and slept and slept.
    I slept the sleep of the dead, for to all intents and purposes, that’s what I was. My world had ended, and with it the life I had known.

Eight
    There was red light creeping under my closed eyelids and a delicious savoury smell in my nostrils. I tried to open my eyes but they were stuck down fast. I tried to move but my bruised body wouldn’t obey