“How exactly have you kept your ear to the ground?” Arran asks.

Deborah hesitates but then holds her chin up and says, “I’ve made friends with Niall.”

Arran shakes his head.

“I just hang on his every word and tell him how handsome and clever he is and . . . he tells me things.”

Arran leans toward Deborah to warn her, I think, but before he can say anything she insists, “I’ve done nothing wrong. I talk to him and listen to him. What’s wrong with that?”

“And when he says bad things about Nathan? What do you say then?”

Deborah looks at me. “I never agree.”

“Do you disagree?” Arran is as close to sneering as he can get.

“Arran! I think it’s a great idea,” I interrupt. “The Council uses spies all the time, Gran says. It’s okay to use their own tactics against them. Besides, Deborah’s right, she’s not doing anything wrong.”

“She’s not doing anything right.”

I go to Deborah, kiss her shoulder, and say, “Thank you, Deborah.”

She hugs me.

“So, Deborah, what did you find out?” Gran asks.

Deborah takes a breath. “Niall said that Marcus killed a family last week, a man, woman, and their teenage son. Niall’s father had been called to an emergency Council meeting about it.”

“I can’t believe he told you all this.” Arran is shaking his head again.

“Niall loves bragging about his family. He must have told me ten times that Kieran is training to be a Hunter and coming out on top all the time in the trials they have—unless Jessica is beating him, of course. Apparently Kieran is desperate to be sent on this investigation as his first assignment.”

“Who were the family?” Gran asks.

“Niall said they were called Grey. She was a Hunter and he did something for the Council. Do you know them?”

Gran says, “I’ve heard the name.”

“Niall said that the Greys were custodians of something called the Fairborn, and the Fairborn was what Marcus was after. I don’t know what the Fairborn is; I’m not even sure Niall knows. When I asked him, I think he realized that he’d said too much, and he’s hardly said a word to me since.”

I don’t say anything. For whatever reason, my father has just killed three more people, including a boy only a few years older than me. Was this a misunderstanding? He was trying to explain to them that he wasn’t really evil, he didn’t want to hurt them . . . He just wanted the Fairborn. Maybe he needed the Fairborn, whatever it is, but they wouldn’t give it to him, they wouldn’t listen . . . They attacked him and he was defending himself and . . .

Gran says, “I’ll write to the Council and request permission for you to travel to Wales.”

“What?” I’d not really been paying attention.

“The notification says you’ll need approval to travel. I’ll write to the Council and get permission.”

“No. I don’t want them to know where I go. I don’t want their permission.”

“You intend to go without me informing them?”

“Please, Gran. Just ask for permission for me to go to the local woods and the shops and stuff like that. Stuff that I don’t really care about.”

“But Nathan, it says”—Gran looks at the parchment— “‘Any Half Code found in a place that has not been approved will have all movements restricted.’”

“I know what it says. And I know what I want to do.”

“You’re twelve, Nathan. You don’t understand that they—”

“Gran, I understand. I understand it all.”

Later that night, when I am getting undressed, Arran has a go at talking to me. I guess Gran has asked him to try. He says I should “rethink,” “perhaps ask permission to go to one place in Wales,” and some other stuff like that. Adult stuff. Gran’s stuff.

I just say, “Can I have permission to go to the bathroom, please?”

He doesn’t say anything, so I throw my jeans on the floor, get on my knees, and say, “Can I have permission to go to the bathroom? Please?”

He doesn’t say anything but drops to his knees with me and hugs me. We stay like that. Him hugging me and me still stiff with anger at him, wanting to hurt him too.

After a long time I hug him back, just a little.

My First Kiss

The Council grants me permission to go to places within a few miles of our home, including not much more than some local shops and our woods. A year goes by and then another. My thirteenth and fourteenth birthdays are the only blots on the landscape, but I get through the assessments and still have the Not ascertained Designation Code. Gran continues to teach me about potions and plants. And I continue to go to Wales on my own. I learn how to survive outdoors in the winter, how to read the weather, and how to cope with the rain. I never stay away from home for more than three days, and I am always careful to move around discreetly. I leave and return by different routes, always on the lookout for potential spies sent to watch me.

My thoughts are often of my father, but my plans to join him remain vague. My thoughts are also more and more of Annalise. I have never stopped thinking of her, her hair, her skin, and her smile, but after my fourteenth birthday these thoughts become more persistent. I want to look at her again for real, and my plans to see her rapidly become less vague.

I’m not stupid enough to go near her house or school, but between them is Edge Hill, the place where we had said we would meet one day.

I go there.

The hill is shaped like an upturned bowl, flat on top with steep sides and a path round the base. On its south side is an outcrop, from the top of which is a view out across the plain, a green expanse of farmland broken up by a network of hedge-lined country roads and spotted with a few houses. The hill is wooded, and the trees are straight and tall and widely spaced. The outcrop is coarse sandstone cut by deep horizontal and vertical clefts. At the cliff’s base is a flat patch of bare earth. It is brick-red and sandy and dusts my shoes as I walk across it.

Climbing the outcrop is simple, as the handholds and footholds are large and open. When I sit at the top on a flat slab of the sandstone I can’t see the path at the bottom for the slope of the hill but I can hear the voices of occasional dog-walkers and the shouts and calls of a few children making their slow way home after school. If anyone other than Annalise were to approach the outcrop, I’d have plenty of time to disappear up and over the hill.

I wait every school day on the outcrop. I once think that I hear her voice talking to one of her brothers, so I climb over the hill and make my way home.

It’s late autumn when the shine of Annalise’s blonde hair appears over the curve of the slope.

I concentrate on making my legs swing casually over the edge of the outcrop.

Annalise doesn’t look up until she is over the steepest part of the hill. She slows when she sees me and looks around but carries on walking until she is almost directly below me. She looks up, smiles, and blushes.

I have waited so long to see her and I know what I want to say, but everything that I have thought of opening with seems wrong. I realize my legs have stopped swinging, and I concentrate on them again. My breathing has gone funny too.

Annalise climbs up the rock face. She does even this elegantly and in a few seconds is sitting next to me, swinging her legs in unison with mine.

After a minute I manage to speak. “You’ll have to inform the Council that you’ve had contact with me.”

Her legs stop swinging.

I remind her, “According to the Resolution of the Council of White Witches any contact between Half Codes and White Whets is to be reported to the Council by all concerned.”

Annalise’s legs start to swing again. “I haven’t had contact.”

I can now feel each thud of my heart; each beat seems like it is going to break open my chest.