Sophie had helped him come to terms with it at Salisbury, and for a while he thought he had put it behind him. But in recent weeks it had returned in force, the ghost that refused to let him forget but would not let him remember, either.

Fire in the dark, and death. What did it mean? Why wouldn’t it leave him alone to enjoy Sophie’s love and his life with her? What was the terrible secret that he knew lay just behind that unsettling image?

In the late afternoon sun, Cadbury Hill cast an enormous shadow across the Somerset lowlands. Majestic in scale, the terraces and cuttings of the Iron Age hill-fort hinted at hidden mysteries, artificiality layered over the natural so that it was impossible to see where one ended and the other began. Mallory and Sophie stood on the edge of the umbra and surveyed the wooded slopes where birdsong echoed pleasingly. Wild flowers grew all around — wood spurge and spurge laurel — the scent of summer promise.

‘It’s bigger than I thought it would be,’ Mallory said.

‘You can see why it’s been identified with Camelot for more than six hundred years,’ Sophie replied. ‘It inspired the medieval romances of Lancelot and Guinevere, Galahad and the Holy Grail. Can’t you feel it? There’s something in the air itself, as if it’s radiating out of the heart of the hill.’

‘So it’s the right place?’

‘It has to be.’ Sophie took a deep, soothing breath, finally happy to be at the destination that had plagued her ever since they had left Salisbury at Christmas. The first hint had come in a dream, an imposing hill in a green landscape, a crow telling her to take heed. It had all the hallmarks of a communication from the Invisible World and the image had stayed with her potently for days. When she had used her Craft to commune with the Higher Powers for answers, the response had been cryptic and teasing, as always. But as the weeks and months passed, the clues had mounted, finally leading them here.