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Claire cups her hand around the flame. ‘Thank you,’ she says to him, and the lion rises to its feet.

They run. The lion is silent and strong and so fast that all the world is a blur around them. Claire tightens her legs around the marble and tells herself she will not fall, she will not, as the wind claws at her hair and the meagre heat of the candle bats against her palm. They run westwards, away from the sunrise. The Château gives way to trees, and the trees grow thicker and thicker, the sky darker and darker, until Claire can see almost nothing at all.

They stop in a place Claire has never seen before, a small clearing in which the season appears to be autumn, not spring: the trees are half naked, and the ground beneath her feet is marshy, a carpet of bronze leaves softened by rain. Before them, a bower of knotted branches and tangled vines makes a tunnel farther into the forest, the darkness within as complete as an inkblot.

The lion waits patiently until she slips off its back. She stumbles slightly, and it moves to support her.

‘Thank you,’ she says, laying a hesitant hand on its marble back. The candle still burns, blessedly, but the darkness before them seems impossible to lighten. Claire gestures warily to the bower. ‘In there?’

The lion inclines its head.

She takes a hesitant step forward. When she glances back, it is still watching her with its blind white eyes; there is a chip in its forearm and an algae stain on its left foot.

‘I want to help him,’ she tells it. ‘That is all I want.’

The lion closes its eyes as if in affirmation.

Claire cups her hand around the candle and walks into the bower.

There is nothing here but the dark and Leander’s breathing.

The air smells overpoweringly of soil and damp. He is in the bowels of the earth, he thinks. Yet another grave his mother is punishing him with, although this one seems crueller than any other he can recall. She has left him alone in the black, and in that darkness, he hears voices: his mother laughing, a child singing a song he doesn’t recognise, the rush of water and the low hum of a woman’s voice. His mouth tastes of salt, and he is cold, very cold. He wonders if Lady Reverie will let him die here, entombed somewhere beneath the Château. But dying would be a mercy, and she would never allow him that. She’ll keep him here until he goes mad, and once he does, she’ll dig him out of the earth again. She’ll make him into a bird that flies out of its cage every night, then flies back again in the morning.

Leander scrabbles blindly at the ground for his mandolin, but he cannot find it. He can’t remember when Lady Reverie first gave it to him, nor does he remember when or how he learnt to play it. But it’s one of the only ways he can reclaim some sense of memory, a sense of self. When all else fails, songs remain, lullabies and hymns and snatches of old ballads. He whispers some lyrics to himself instead. His voice croaks with suppressed panic. ‘My days have been so wondrous free,’ he sings, ‘the little birds that fly. . .’

Something slithers over his foot. He holds still, as still as he can muster, and then continues softly, ‘With careless ease from tree to tree were but as blessed as I. . .’

The ground rumbles beneath his feet.

‘Ask gliding waters if a tear of mine increased their stream!’ he yells, because why shouldn’t he yell? Who is he trying to appease? He digs his fingers into the soft wall of earth beside him, deeply enough that stones embed themselves painfully beneath his nails. ‘And ask the breathing gales—’

Leander pauses. He can’t remember the next line.

‘And ask the breathing gales,’ he says. ‘And ask. . . And ask. . .’

His voice fades. Now he can hear only his breathing, half gasped. The air feels thin. He wonders if the Château would rather he suffocate than hear him sing off-key.

Leander falls to the ground and buries his head in his hands.

Allow Claire to escape, he thinks. Let her forget. If you have ever loved me, Mother, you will take her away from me.

And then, suddenly—a light.

A candle.

He looks up. Stands. It is Claire, holding his mother’s patience in her cupped palms, her white dress covered in mud, her hair unbrushed, half stumbling over uneven soil. She is illuminated more brightly by the candle than should be possible, the shadows liquid around her, shifting as if in a dance. She is so lovely that Leander is certain, for a moment, that she isn’t real. That he is dying down here in the dark, and his mind has been kind enough to show him something beautiful in its final moments.

Then she says, ‘Leander,’ and she is real, she is real.

Claire lurches forward to meet him. He opens his arms for her—but the candle is between them, guttering, trembling, and Claire pulls herself to a stop.

Leander drops his arms and looks at the candle. ‘How did you find that?’

‘Orestes gave it to me.’

‘Orestes. . .?’ Leander feels his stomach flip. ‘You know.’

‘Yes.’