Chapter 44

He took me to the boathouse.

It stood at the bottom of the long lawn where the river widened into a slow brown pool, a low old building of black timber with its feet in the water, and nobody had used it in years. Swallows went in and out under the eaves. Inside, it smelled of wet wood and moss and the river, and an upturned rowing boat lay across two trestles with its paint peeling off in long green curls.

The two wolves stopped on the bank. Saskia went in first. She walked the length of the boathouse with her hand out flat, the way the ward-witch walked the posts, murmuring under her breath in a language like water over stones. When she reached the end, she turned, and I felt it: a soft pressure in my ears, like going under in a bath. Then nothing. Not the river. Not the swallows. Not the wolves on the bank, though I could see them through the door, talking.

“Silence,” Saskia said. It was the first word I had ever heard her say to me. “Seelie. He can’t hear throug