Jem had always shone, with fierce life and fiercer goodness, but this was something different. The light in Jem seemed to burn now; it was a distant light and a lonely one, like the light of a star. “You don’t need me, Will.”

Will looked down at himself, at the knife at his feet, and remembered the knife he had buried at the base of the tree on the Shrewsbury-Welshpool road, stained with his blood and Jem’s.