On some days she was able to see both sun and moon at the same time. Like feuding cousins, they hung in two corners of the vast world-ceiling refusing to look at one another. The...

To Katie, it was as lonely and secret as any building could be; its size and grandeur meant less to her. She didn’t know or care when the place had been built or by whom,...

Katie began to draw in the secrecy of her room, in anger at first, using her mother’s pencils and whatever paper she could find. Sometimes, she had to steal from Nader’s study to replenish her...

her daughter”.

It was all changing. All of it. And it was horrible and it was lovely.

Youngsters deserve no opinions.

Grumman provided the excuse and Nader provided the pain.

He had become the sky around the sun – alive, but not really there.

Katie soon learned there was a problem with hope.

Our light will be their death.

Katie quickly learned the best way is to see another world entirely.

Shush – it’s silent time again.

Even the young can be warriors.

Too old for dolls. Too ill for tablets.

Prayer is better than pills.

For no real reason – well, perhaps because of the seriousness under the trees or Nader’s hair, which was very messy and covered in little grass seeds – Katie began to giggle. She knew it...

Nader refused to bring her the feathery dream catcher – her asabikeshiinh – with its willow-web and invisible ‘lady spider’ apparently weaving her spells – an object Bea insisted always hung above her in bed.

She heard him speak, but did not recognise the problem in his voice – only later did she realise it was that thing he’d been concealing – known as guilt.

It was all death.

I suffered my own battles. I suffer still.

A silence absorbed them both – a lack of sound so potent it blackened the place with something richer than hate.

Beyond the boundaries of herself, her parents and the enclosing garden walls, were open fields and other waiting places she still knew nothing of – lies of the land, perhaps. What Katie did know is...

The breeze around them seemed to drop – dead – like a door to the best things had just closed.

Bea stared at the pencils as if they were enemies.