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though he walks ahead of her.
    The land spreads to every part of the horizon with such power and presence the sight of it overwhelms her. The land is no different, though. Her eyes are merely seeing it anew; all her senses hum with lush, deep perceptions. Colours and sounds combine so that the landscape sings a song of savage passion at the very edge of her hearing. Smells burst from the feeling of a breeze on her face or the impact of her boots on the path. The air itself has subtle flavours that change each time the wind shifts. The sky is so vast and unfathomable it pulls at her, threatening to snatch her away from the ground. Every rule is broken. Blades of grass are tiny cutlasses of green threat, glimpsed foxes with their jaws clamped over slack prey send her messages of benevolence. A distant dove is a swooping raptor, patches of thorn and bramble promise the sweetest rest.
    All the while Megan watches for shadows cast from overhead, listens for the hush of huge wings. She expects a dark figure to step out from behind every tree they pass, his black weeds trailing to the ground or spread wide and sleek, ready to enfold her. And, though she fears his power more than ever, more than the day on which she first laid eyes upon him, Megan knows with profound certainty that the Crowman represents both the darkness of endings and reavings and the darkness of chaos from which births and unions are manifested.
    She tries to distract herself with memories of home and the times before she first saw the Crowman; the days of her childhood which she knows are behind her forever. She can visit them now only in reverie or in the weave; those long days spent idly and in wonder, with a trust of things so deep and total there was no space for unhappiness.
    On a day like this, so tired and so far away from anything familiar, it feels as though she has lost everything of value. That part of her, the little girl who once ran through the meadows and swam in the Usky river, who danced and sang with the other children of the village, that Megan Maurice has been left far behind. Somewhere, she still sings and still skips, her blonde hair as yet untouched by the feathers of the Crowman; but she is lost to this world and this time, and thinking of her brings Megan only sadness. Even Amu and Apa are closed to her for the moment, and her childhood friends Tom Frewin and Sally Balston seem so distant as to be strangers.
    She thinks instead of the old man who arrived in his tiny, almost circular boat – a vessel made of skin stretched over woven slats of split ash – and how he left earlier that day the very same way he had come. He and Mr Keeper had embraced; a long, heartfelt clasping, before Carrick Rowntree had thrown his pack into his boat, pushed it down the sandbank and hopped in like a little boy who couldn’t wait to go fishing.
    They’d watched him with his single oar, paddling against the current and making headway with no apparent effort. He hadn’t looked back and Megan, feeling every nuance of intent and emotion in everything she saw, experienced waves of sadness and longing burst from Mr Keeper. This man, usually so inscrutable it was easy to forget he was her sworn guardian and teacher, loved Carrick Rowntree, would miss him and feel alone without his leadership, knew he might not see the old man again. As suddenly as these pulses of melancholia had begun, Mr Keeper stopped them. It had seemed to Megan like an act of will. They were replaced with a simple joy that came from the inevitably of death and separation, and from the certainty of the cycles of the Earthwalk. They came from the knowledge that in every ending was a beginning and that to be cut away was to be reunited elsewhere. Carrick Rowntree is gone. That neither of them will see the old man again is another certainty living in Megan’s water.
    What does she have that she can rely on? What does she have that is certain and that can protect her as her abilities increase