The ferrymen on the Déynáir route never put in at the castle bank. They say the river does not like to be crossed by anything that has not chosen it for itself.

A ferryman's logbook, the library of Déynáir

Chapter 2

The Keeper

I put my phone on the family tree.

It lay in the middle of the sheet, black and still, so that only the last d of Godrand stuck out from under its edge. There were four numbers in it: Hanne, the office at Fjordly, the school and my caseworker. It couldn't stand getting wet anyway. That was the reason I gave myself.

The radiator under the window ticked. The smell of boiled potatoes and fried onions came up the stairs from the kitchen, and from the new wing I could hear the television and two of the little ones arguing about the remote. I slung the bag over my shoulder and went down the stairs, and nobody looked up.

Out in the yard the gravel was frozen solid. I wheeled my bike out of the shed, and the chain rattled as I pushed it across the yard. The gate shut behind me with a click that was too small to mean so much. Thirteen years, and the gate just said click.

I turned round.

There was a light in the kitchen window, yellow and warm against the blue dusk, and Hanne was standing at the table peeling potatoes. She peeled them in one long, unbroken spiral, the way she always said you should. She looked up. She saw me with the bag over my shoulder and the bike beside me on the road down to the fjord, and her hands went still.

She raised one hand. The knife was still in the other.

She didn't come out.

I stood with my hands on the handlebars and felt it in my stomach before I understood it with my head. She didn't ask where I was going. She didn't knock on the glass. She just stood there looking at me, the way you look at a train that is leaving on time, and that was the moment I knew she had known. Maybe not when. But that this evening would come.

I raised my own hand.

Then I got on the bike and rode.

The road out to Løverodde ran along the fjord, a couple of kilometres, and I had run it every morning for as long as I could remember. I had never cycled it with everything I owned on my back.

The cold settled in my lungs with every breath. The water slapped against the stones below in short, heavy strokes, and over on the other side of the fjord the lights in the houses grew more numerous. Ahead of me the fjord opened out towards the Little Belt, and out there the dark had already begun.

I had never really been anywhere before. One class trip to Copenhagen in class eight. Otherwise Fjordly, the school and the water. It wasn't the same as going away on your own. Walking out of a gate without anyone asking who was picking you up on the other side.

Nobody was picking me up. I carried that knowledge in my chest the whole way, not as pain, but as weight.

Løverodde was empty. It always was in November. The café was closed for the winter, and the playground lay deserted. The rosehip bushes stood black along the grass with the last red hips still on them. Across the water the red lights on the chimney of the Skærbæk power station blinked, slowly, like a heart falling asleep.

I leant the bike against the wall of the café without locking it. Somebody would find it.

The bathing jetty ran a long way out into the dark water, and at the end of it someone was sitting.

I smelt him before I saw him properly.

It made no sense. It was November, and the wind came off the water with seaweed and salt and cold in it, but under that there was something else. Warm bark. Freshly cut grass. Something like honey, only greener. It smelt of spring, and it was coming from a boy at the end of a bathing jetty in the dark.

He was sitting hunched up on the wet planks with his arms round his knees. He was wearing a long, dark coat that came almost to his ankles and looked as if it had been sewn for another age, and under it only something thin and pale that flapped in the wind. His hair was long and fair and blew into his face, and he was shaking so hard that I could hear his teeth.

When he heard my footsteps on the planks, he jumped up so fast that a bundle of papers slid out of his hands. He grabbed at them. Two were saved. A third flew off, and I stepped on it before it reached the edge.

"Thank you," he said. "Thank you ever so much. Forgive me. Pray, are you from these parts?"

"Pray?" I said.

"Is that wrong?" He looked worried. "That is how it is written in the book."

I picked up the paper. It looked like a ticket, but the letters on it were moving. They changed shape while I watched, as if the text were slowly deciding what it wanted to say. For one second it said Ahra Retonk. Then it said something else, in letters I didn't know. Then it said Borgsted Banke.

I stared.

He took the ticket back without noticing that for the first half-second I had forgotten to let go of it. "I am to go there," he said, and pointed at the words as if they were standing still. "To Borgsted Banke. Tonight. I have passed the whole afternoon in Kolding, and I took an omnibus that went the wrong way round the entire fjord, and a woman at a stopping place said it lay in the woods behind Løverodde, and so I walked out here, and then it grew dark." He took a breath. "I tried to buy a hot drink from a grocer in the town. The man would not take my money. He said it was toys." He rummaged in his coat pocket and held a coin up against the last of the light. It was shiny silver and thick, with a mark on it I didn't recognise. "It is a silver talent," he said, offended. "It is a great deal of money."

"Not here," I said.

"No. That I have understood." He put the coin away again. "One ought not to have to do this alone. Nor was I meant to. I was to have crossed at one of the great crossings with a great many others, but Kalmin exchanged my ticket at the last moment, and I have no notion why."

"Who's Kalmin?"

"My elder brother. The eldest. He works for the Council." He said it as if it explained everything, and then, when he saw my face, as if it explained nothing at all. "It is a tradition in my family. Before Déynáir one must spend a week over on your side and see the world one is not to live in. My grandmother says it makes one humble." He wrapped his arms round himself. "I have been here a week now. Mostly I have become cold."

He looked at the bag on my back and then up at me, and something in his face relaxed.

"You are going there too," he said. It wasn't a question.

I nodded.

Then he smiled, and it was the kind of smile that uses the whole face, not just the mouth, the kind that wrinkles the nose and lifts the cheeks and makes the eyes smaller, and it was how little he could help it that got to me: he meant it. It wasn't a smile you made because you had to. It was a smile that had decided to exist.

"Ahra," he said, and held out his hand. It was ice-cold. "Ahra Retonk."

"Chris."

"Only Chris?"

I thought of the letter in my inside pocket and the word on the envelope. I thought of the family tree back home with the phone on top of it, and of Hanne's hand in the window.

I didn't answer.

Instead I took off my bag and unzipped it. The hoodie was on top, grey and bobbly and two sizes too big, because it came from the charity shop. I held it out to him.

Ahra looked at it as if I had handed him something he didn't know the name of.

"Just take it," I said. "You're shaking."

He took his coat off with stiff fingers and pulled the hoodie over his head and put the coat back on over it, and then he stood there with the sleeves down over his hands and suddenly looked much younger.

"Thank you," he said quietly. It was the first thing he had said that was short.

We walked south along the coast, into the woods of Stenderup Nørreskov.

It was dark now. The beech trunks stood grey and smooth on both sides of the path, and the leaves lay thick and wet underfoot and smelt of earth and of something sweet that was rotting. Below us the Little Belt beat against the stones, and we could hear it the whole way, but not see it. I knew the path. I had run it so many times that my feet knew where the roots were, and I walked in front with Ahra right behind me and his hand clenched round a fold of my jacket.

"I could make a light," he said after a while. He held his other hand up in front of him in the dark, as if it itched. "But one may not, over here."

I thought of the phone on my desk and the torch in it. I said nothing.

Ahra talked the whole way. He talked about his brothers, who had both been to Déynáir, and about his grandmother, who was the strictest teacher in all of Anglia and knitted for everyone in the family whether they wanted it or not. He talked about the omnibus ("It smelt of wet dogs, and there were no dogs") and about the man in the shop and about the pedestrian crossing in Kolding, where he had stood for ten minutes because he didn't know you were supposed to press the button. He talked like a river that couldn't stop, and all you had to do was walk alongside and let him run.

The strange thing was that it wasn't annoying. It was a relief to walk in the dark in front of someone who said everything he thought, when you yourself always kept everything you thought inside.

He tripped over a root. I felt the tug on my jacket and stood still until he had got his feet under him again.

"You are good at this," he said.

"I run here."

"In the dark?"

"It's dark in the mornings too."

He thought about that. "On the other side," he said, "it is I who knows where to walk." He said it as if he were promising something.

First came the ditch.

It cut through the forest floor in front of us, wide and deep, and we had to slide down one side and climb up the other with our hands in the wet leaves. Ahra lost one shoe halfway and found it again with a small, defeated sigh. Then the bank rose up in front of us, high and dark, covered in bracken that had withered into brown, curled skeletons and rustled as we went through it. Over by the campfire spot stood the table and the barbecue, empty and cold.

But there was a fire.

Up on top of the bank, in the north-west corner, where according to Søren a round tower had once stood, a small fire was burning. It was no bigger than two hands cupped together, and it hardly crackled at all. Beside it, on a stone, sat an old woman in a bathrobe.

Her ankles were bare and she wore a pair of worn clogs, and her grey hair was pinned up in a tight knot. The bathrobe was white and thick, the kind you put on after a sauna, and it looked as out of place in a forest in November as she did.

I caught her scent as we came closer. Faint, almost impossible to make out under the woodsmoke and the wet bracken. It was like sunlight on old stone, if sunlight could have a smell. It didn't belong in November. It didn't belong anywhere I had ever been.

Ahra stepped forward first. He held his ticket out to her with both hands, the way you hand something to someone much older than yourself. She took it without a word and held it up to the fire. The letters moved. She nodded and gave it back.

Then she looked at me.

I took the letter out of my inside pocket. My fingers were stiff, and the paper rustled as I unfolded it. She took it and read it, and she read it for a long time. Longer than there was to read. The fire threw a red glow across the sheet, and as I watched, the letters of my name began to move. They slid out of their shape and into another, like writing you couldn't read, and then back again. Godrand. Something else. Godrand.

She folded the letter and gave it back to me. Then she looked up at me with eyes that were quite pale in the firelight.

"Name?" she said.

Ahra was standing beside me. I could feel him waiting.

"Chris Godrand," I said.

The words left my mouth and hung in the air above the little fire, and they were heavier than two words ought to be. My tongue had shaped the letters for the first time, and they tasted of something. Not copper. Not salt. Something older. Something that had been waiting to be said.

It was the first time I had said it out loud.

It felt like being someone.

The old woman nodded, as if it were the answer she had been expecting, and put a twig on the fire.

"The light is going now," she said.

The cliff on the far side of the bank dropped steeply down to the beach. We went down it on our heels with our hands behind us, through clay and branches and frozen grass, and the stones at the bottom were slippery with seaweed. The Little Belt lay black and wide in front of us with a narrow grey stripe above it, where the sky hadn't given up yet.

Down on the stones Ahra worked his coat free of a branch and looked up at the small glow on top of the bank. "She is the Keeper," he said quietly. "There is one at every crossing. There are thirty-seven, and the Council keeps watch over them all, and every one of them lies by something from ancient times. A barrow, a dolmen, a rampart such as this." He took a careful step towards the water. "People from your side do not see her. They walk straight past. Without your letter you would have seen nothing but bracken. It is your pass." I thought of all the mornings I had run past the bank, and that there had never been anyone there.

I walked into the water with my clothes on.

It was no colder than in the mornings. It was just different doing it in a jacket and trousers, with the bag on my back and shoes on my feet. The water soaked through the cloth, to my knees, to my hips. Ahra walked beside me and gasped at every step, and his coat spread out around him like a dark flower.

To my chest.

I didn't shiver. I never had. My hands searched for something under the water, all by themselves, for the iron rung, for the ladder, and there was nothing. Only water and darkness and the bottom, soft and cold under my shoes.

Let go.

I got ready to swim. That was what my arms wanted. It was what they always wanted.

"Don't swim," said Ahra beside me. His teeth were chattering, but his voice was completely calm, as if this were the one thing he was sure of in the whole of the ordinary world. "Just let go."

I breathed in. Then I lifted my feet off the bottom and didn't do anything at all.

I sank.

It was like diving under ice. The cold stopped being cold. It became something else, a pressure, a blanket, a hand closing round the whole of me at once. My ears hurt, the way they do when you dive too deep, and then there was a sound, far away and very close, as if something enormous were cracking. I tasted copper and salt in my mouth.

And then everything went black.

In the darkness I wasn't anything. I had no body to feel the cold with. I had no eyes not to be able to see with. I had no thoughts, not really, only a kind of vague certainty that I existed somewhere, and that the somewhere wasn't where I usually existed.

I came up with a gasp, and the first thing to come back was the sound.

Voices, lots of them, in a language I had never heard, and I understood every word. "Mind the step." "Has anyone seen my mother?" "No, Piru. No." Running water. A snarl that was too deep to belong to an ordinary cat. And under all of it a deep, steady hum that felt as if it were vibrating in the stone itself.

I was standing waist-deep in a pool of black stone. Above me a vault rose so high that I had to tip my head back, and in holders along the walls torches burned with a bluish glow. The air was dry and warm, as if someone had lit a fire somewhere close by, and it smelt of something I had never breathed before. Something metallic, but it wasn't metal. A sort of smell of warm copper and fresh rain and fire.

I was dripping. Water ran out of my sleeves and out of my bag and down my back. I put my hand in my inside pocket. The letter was dry.

At the edge of the pool a woman in a long green robe was struggling with a cat the size of an Alsatian. The cat had orange eyes and a tail so long that it swept up a little whirl of water drops behind it, and the woman was talking to it as if to a child. "No, Piru. We're not going that way. Piru."

A little further along stood an elderly man with a raven on his shoulder. The raven was looking straight at me, weighing me up, and I took half a step back in the water without meaning to. The man himself didn't notice me.

Beside me Ahra came up, coughing. His hair was plastered to his face, and my hoodie hung heavy and dark under his coat. He wiped his eyes with his sleeve and looked around, and his shoulders came down from round his ears.

"The Fonté Hall," he said, as if that explained everything.

He didn't sound like a book any more. He sounded like a boy.

He climbed up over the edge and hauled me after him, and then he swung his bag off his back and unzipped it. It was wet on the outside, but inside it was dry. He pulled out something grey and thick and held it out to me.

It was a wool jumper. Hand-knitted, with cables down the front and a small darned patch on one sleeve.

"My grandmother's," he said. "She knits for everyone. It's far too big for me." He held it a little higher when I didn't take it. "Just take it. You're dripping."

I pulled off my wet jacket and pulled the jumper on over my head. It was warm, as if it had been lying in front of a fire all day, and it smelt of wool and of a house I had never been in.

I had worn clothes from the charity shop my whole life. It was the first time anyone had given me something they had been given themselves.

Ahra looked at me with water dripping off the tip of his nose and smiled with his whole face.

"Come on," he said. "From here, I'm the one who knows where to walk."