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shake of his head.
    After a while, Ian led him to the sitting room, signalling Jess to follow them.
    “Arnor wants you to tell him what happened.”
    She nodded and swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry, then began. When she got to the end of her story she waited for the inevitable questions.
    “But why would Freya get on a horse?”
    “I don’t know. I didn’t see her do it; she was just suddenly on its back. And she kept saying that she couldn’t get down.”
    “And you saw… you saw her go under the water?”
    Jess nodded mutely, close to tears now.
    “I’m sorry. I tried and tried, but…”
    Arnor looked at her properly for the first time, a look so bleak that she could hardly bear it.
    “It’s not your fault, Jess. I know you tried to help her. Whatever has happened, it’s not your fault.”
    Released from that terrible, grief-filled room a few minutes later, Jess went up to her bedroom, closed the door with shaking hands and sat on the bed staring out into the darkness.
    “It’s the shock,” said Ian when she’d gone. “She doesn’t know what she’s saying. I’m sorry you had to listen to that. Her mind must have pushed away what really happened, and put this tale in its place.”
    Arnor nodded absently.
     
    Freya was picking brambles, dropping them into a bucket behind her. Jess wanted to stop her, but she was stuck in the thorns. They even pinned her lips together so she couldn’t open her mouth to warn Freya.
    As the brambles fell into the bucket they changed, becoming part of something infinitely dark that was forming inside it, growing and pushing its way out until it was a horse, black as soot, black as midnight. It stood behind Freya, water dripping from its mane, until she turned and smiled at it and put her arms round its glossy, arched neck. And then she fell, impossibly, upwards on to its back. The horse reared and Jesssaw that it had no shoes, and managed to open her mouth and scream.
    And she woke.
    She was trapped by the twisted covers of her own bed, sweating with fear. She unravelled herself from them as best she could and fumbled to light a candle to chase the shadows back into their corners.
    Jess kept seeing the horse in her mind’s eye: the real horse, not the one from the dream. But the dream was right, the horse hadn’t been shod. It had nagged at her memory at the time and now she knew why – the hoof prints she’d seen at the edge of the pool after Donald had disappeared hadn’t had shoes either.
    There shouldn’t be any wild horses in these woods. But hadn’t she had a glimpse of one – maybe the same one – that day back in the summer?
    Why would it carry Freya – and maybe Donald too – into the pool? Horses didn’t behave like that. They threw people; they didn’t carry them off and dive underwater with them.
    Jess remade her ravaged bed, then got back in and pulled the covers up to her ears. She lay thinking. She knew what she had seen, but it didn’t make sense.
    Was she sure that the horse had gone into the pool with Freya on its back?
Yes
. That it had dived under the water and taken Freya with it?
Yes
. Was she sure that it hadn’t emerged again with Freya when she was in the pool diving to look for her friend?
Yes. No. Yes.
She’d have seen or heard it happen. There would have been a trail. The searchers would have followed it. Freya would have been found.
    So they’d never emerged. That meant that they had drowned. But why hadn’t they been found? The men had searched for hours. Weren’t bodies meant to float?
    It didn’t make sense. That was the only thing she was sure about.
     
    The search went on all the next day, but was no more successful.Jess brooded in her room, unwilling to talk to anyone if she didn’t have to, pretending to sew when her mother came in to check on her.
    Late in the afternoon, she escaped to milk the cows, glad of their reassuring warmth and bulk and smell. She leaned into them, listening to the milk hissing into the