The horse’s head was talking.  Every minute, Jeanette had to remind herself not to freak out about that.

“I think people must have known that this place existed for thousands of years.  There’s evidence, you see- local stories about what you should do if you found yourself lost on the paths. But people preferred to stay away from it.  The first people to build on this site arrived around two hundred years ago.  I don’t know much about them.  I don’t know if they planned to be in the middle of the paths and find out as much as they could about them, or if they just found an empty space to build on and got more than they bargained for.  But that was the start of what is now Dovecote Gardens.  It was another hundred years before it was called that, though.

“There’s an old folk tale you might have heard at some point.  An elderly midwife is called out in the middle of the night to deliver a baby.  She is taken to a mysterious grove, and it gradually becomes clear that the expectant parents aren’t human.  The midwife is shocked, but remains professional and successfully delivers the baby, earning the parents’ eternal gratitude.  Something similar happened here, two hundred years ago, but I don’t think it involved delivering a baby.  I think it was more to do with communication.”

They had a plan.  They’d pack some lunch, some toiletries and a couple of changes of clothes, and then they’d go off to Wallfruit Cove to tell Kai what was going on.  After that, on to Opal Hill to break Colwyn out of prison.  Somehow.  Supposedly, this information he was giving them was going to help, but Jeanette couldn’t see how.

“You see, the people of the paths- there really isn’t any other collective term for them- they can’t visit each other.  They can come to our world, if they want to, but they can’t go to each other’s.  Dovecote Gardens is the hub- if they want to pass on a message to each other, they have to go through us.”

“Which is why Sleet and Comet couldn’t do anything about the Iridescence family, right?” asked Rube.

“Sleet from Wallfruit Cove?  Yes, exactly.  All they could do was offer Kai shelter when he got there.”

“Why do they need to pass on messages?” asked Rube, “What kind of thing do they talk about?”

The horse’s head raised its chin for a moment, then looked back down at Rube.  “They exchange knowledge.  That’s the only thing they can exchange, you see.  They can’t trade with each other, and they definitely can’t declare war on each other, so they’ve got no choice but to be interested in each other’s point of view.”

“They probably could trade with each other,” said Jeanette, “They’d just have had to go through you.”

“That would be a lot of trust to put in one person.  And far too much work for me.”  The horse… smiled?  It was hard to tell.  “I’m their messenger.  Their ambassador to each other, I suppose.  The job comes with the house.”

Something occurred to Rube.  “If Mum grew up here, then she’d have known about all this, right?”

“She did,” said the horse, “That’s how she knew you’d be safe here.”

“Kai wasn’t,” said Jeanette.  The words seemed to come out on their own, without consulting her first.

Rube gave her a pointed look, but the horse just looked sad.  “Kai’s parents didn’t know where to look,” he told them, “I would have.”

“Then why didn’t you look for him at the time?  When he first went missing?”

The horse… shrugged?  Its neck seemed to go up and down, anyway.  “I didn’t know,” he said, “I didn’t know anything about him until two weeks ago.  His parents never reported him missing.”

(To be continued)