‘Don’t let him near the cows,’ Farnor’s mother would say if she saw him wandering near the farm. ‘That face of his will sour the milk for a week.’

He had wilfully neglected the quite adequate portion of land that his father had left him and now he earned his keep by casual labouring on the valley farms and, it was generally agreed, by some judicious thieving and poaching, though he had never been caught at such.

Worse, it was rumoured that on his periodic disap-pearances from the valley he was thick with travellers and the like from over the hill.

Apart from his invariably unpleasant manner how-ever, perhaps his most damning feature was his intelligence; his considerable intelligence. In others such a gift would have been a boon, an affirmation, but in Rannick it was what truly set him apart. It gleamed with mocking scorn in his permanently narrowed eyes when they were not full of anger or malice, and it could lend a keen and vicious edge to his tongue, too subtle to provoke an immediate angry rebuke but cruel and long-lasting in its wounding nonetheless.

And, perhaps, there were other things.

Farnor remembered a soft, incomplete conversation between his mother and father overheard one night when he had crept down the stairs to eavesdrop on that mysterious world of adult life that awoke only as the children went to sleep.

‘Rannick has his grandfather in him, I’d swear. He knows and sees more than the rest of us.’ His father’s voice, muffled.

Ear close to the door, Farnor had sensed his mother nodding in agreement. ‘It’s to be hoped not,’ she said. ‘Not with that dark nature of his. It’ll do neither him nor anyone else any good.’