She put the evil eye on Tom Perrill and on his younger brother, Robert, but old mother Perrill must have used a counter-spell because neither fell ill. The two goats that Hook kept on the common disappeared, and the village reckoned it had to be wolves, but Hook knew it was the Perrills. He killed their cow in revenge, but it was not the same as killing them. “It’s your job to kill them,” his grandmother insisted to Nick, but he had never found the opportunity. “May the devil make you spit shit,” she cursed him, “and then take you to hell.” She threw him from her home when he was sixteen. “Go and starve, you bastard,” she snarled. She was going mad by then and there was no arguing with her, so Nick Hook left home and might well have starved except that was the year he came first in the six villages’ competition, putting arrow after arrow into the distant mark.

Lord Slayton made Nick a forester, which meant he had to keep his lordship’s table heavy with venison. “Better you kill them legally,” Lord Slayton had remarked, “than be hanged for poaching.”

Now, on Saint Winebald’s Day, just before Christmas, Nick Hook watched his arrow fly toward Tom Perrill.

It would kill, he knew it.

The arrow flew true, dipping slightly between the high, frost-bright hedges. Tom Perrill had no idea it was coming. Nick Hook smiled.

Then the arrow fluttered.

A fledging had come loose, its glue and binding must have given way and the arrow veered leftward to slice down the horse’s flank and lodge in its shoulder. The horse whinnied, reared and lunged forward, jerking the great elm trunk loose from the frozen ruts.

Tom Perrill turned and stared up at the high wood, then understood a second arrow could follow the first and so turned again and ran after the horse.

Nick Hook had failed again. He was cursed.

Lord Slayton slumped in his chair. He was in his forties, a bitter man who had been crippled at Shrewsbury by a sword thrust in the spine and so would never fight another battle. He stared sourly at Nick Hook. “Where were you on Saint Winebald’s Day?”