'Jeff, I'm trying to put lunch together. Do you mind?' Meg Highsmith protested as Jeff started turning drawers out onto the kitchen table.
'It's urgent,' was all he said and continued pulling things out.
Ben went into the room with the dogs, amid much snuffling and a low growl from the big dog at us. Ben emerged with a wooden box filled with bits of rusty broken tools, orphaned cutlery and old keys. He spilled the lot out onto the table. Meg folded her arms and sighed as they began sorting through the oddments.
'If you tell me what you're looking for I might be able to help,' she offered.
They carried on sorting, but explained the dilemma of the missing key. There was a growing pile of old keys in the centre of the table, but none looked likely.
'It has to be quite large,' I told her, picking up an ornate brass key. 'The keyhole is square and about a quarter of an inch on each side. The thing is, it didn't look as if the lock turned.'
'No, it didn't did it?' agreed Blackbird. 'How do you turn a square key in a square hole?'
'Maybe it's a round key that goes in a square hole?' remarked Jeff.
'Maybe, but then where do the 'key' bits go; the bits that trip the levers?'
James Highsmith had watched all this from the far end of the kitchen table, but now he stood up and started talking in low tones to his mother.
'I don't know, James. Ask them,' she told him.
He turned to us, glancing at his father. 'There's this PlayStation game…' he started.
'James, not now!' The disappointment in Jeff's voice at the change of subject to his son's passion was palpable.
'Jeff. Hear him out.' Meg Highsmith stood behind her son. This was clearly a point of friction between the man and the teenager and it looked like Meg had had to stand between them more than once.
James hesitated, but at a nudge from his mother he started speaking again.
'In the game you collect an ornate dagger, early on in the game. I thought it must be a magic one; you know, effective against certain types of monster? But after a while, you stop using it because it's useless. It's much more effective to use the bigger weapons.'
Jeff sighed, but subsided at a look from Meg.
'Then, when you get into the later levels there are people that try and buy it off you, or steal it, or trade it for something. It got so I kept it just because everyone wanted it. Anyway, you get to the big castle at the end and the drawbridge is up, the gates are locked, but you need to get inside to fight the big boss.'
He paused, but found only blank faces. I don't think any of us had ever played on a PlayStation.
'The thing is, there's a little gate which you can get to by climbing around, but when you get there it's locked. The keyhole is a funny shape, like a thin diamond. The only way of opening the gate is to put the dagger into the keyhole. Then you're in.'
'And?' said his father.
'I think what James is telling us is that while we are all looking for something shaped like a key, that may not be what we need,' said Blackbird.
'You said the keyhole didn't turn,' James pointed out. 'Maybe it doesn't need to, if you have the proper- shaped thing to put into it?'
'So we're looking for something that could push into a square hole about so big.' Blackbird held her thumb and forefinger apart to show them the size.
Everyone looked blank.
'That makes it worse,' I said. 'We were looking for a needle in a haystack. Now we don't even know if it's a needle.' James looked crestfallen so I added, 'But James may be right. A literal key may not be what we're searching for.' That brought back a hesitant smile.
Jeff and his father started putting things back into the drawers and boxes they had come from, much to the relief of Meg. They cleared away the mess and James wiped the table and began laying out cutlery for lunch.
James looked at his mother and she turned to us. 'Will you stay for some lunch after all?' she offered.
It was rather unfair to change our minds two minutes before it was served, so we made excuses and said we would go and sit in the sunshine while they had their meal. We walked around the back of the farm, past where the forge still smoked, and sat upwind on a low wall looking out across the fields.
'It could be anywhere,' I said to her.
'Actually, I don't think it could.'
She glanced sideways at me.
'I think the hammer was locked away to prevent the Seventh Court from hiding or damaging it, but there would be no point in keeping it safe if you couldn't get to it when it was needed, and no one knew when that might happen. If you think about it, everything has been left in place if you knew where to look.'
'What about the anvil? That was pretty well hidden.'
'But you knew where it was because of the vision. And I knew where to find you because Kareesh sent me her message.'
'So you still think Kareesh is behind all this.'
'Yes. She is the link that ties it all together. I still don't know why she didn't just tell us what to do, but I'm sure she has her reasons.'
'Well, there's nothing in the vision to tell us where the key might be. There's nothing small enough to fit. And I've found all the pieces now, even if they're not quite right in my head. I know where to find the silhouette of the cat. We've found the anvil in the hall of water and we've been to Australia House. The vaulted roof is the crypt of the church where the Way started and the green twig is the mistletoe on Meg Highsmith's kitchen wall. The whirling leaves were on the way where we stopped in the copse, and the closing door was in the tunnels under Covent Garden. The only missing piece was the wrecked bedroom, striped in sunlight, and I woke to that this morning.'
She shuffled along the wall slightly so she was next to me and she could slip her arm through mine. 'It was a bit wrecked, wasn't it?' she reminded me.
'Yes, it was.' I clasped her hand into mine and we watched the changing light over the fields as the clouds rolled across the sky, comfortable in silence.
My mind drifted with the clouds, sifting through the memories of the last few days. It amazed me how quickly I had adjusted to all of the changes in my life, but with Blackbird leaning against my side I had the inescapable feeling that it would be OK. We would find a way.
'If you are right,' I said to her, 'then Kareesh has given us all that we need. We have the anvil and the knives. We think we know where the hammer is. We have a smith who can work the metal and enough time to finish the job. We just need the key. James had the right of it when he said it might not literally be a key, but we're thinking about this in the wrong way. We're thinking of all the things that could potentially be keys when actually we only need to look at what we've been given.'
'We haven't been given a key,' she pointed out.
'We know it would have to be kept somewhere safe from the Seventh Court. We know the Seventh Court doesn't have any humans. If you didn't want the Seventh Court to have the key, but you did want the other courts to be able to access it, where would you put it?'
As I talked, I realised where the key was and how we would get it.
'You would hide it somewhere only a human would find it or give it to a human who was protected in some way?' she speculated.
'But the Feyre don't regard humanity as reliable. Humans don't have long enough memories and they don't live long enough. So what do you do?' I was leading her through my logic now, to see if it was flawed.
'They've already solved that problem, by embedding the knives in a legal ceremony that will survive the death of any one individual.'
'So what do we end up with that we haven't already found a purpose for? What is the thing that stands out like a loose end with no purpose we have yet discovered.'
She thought for a moment. 'The horse shoes? The nails? The sixty-first nail! That's it!' She jumped down from the wall. 'The sixty-first nail is different from all the rest. It's made from the same metal as the Dead Knife. It's just the right size and the right shape.'
'And it's kept with sixty iron nails and six huge iron horseshoes, one for each court, to ward off unwanted
