He scanned the surrounding horizons. ‘I have the feeling that they’re letting us weaken.’

‘Not very fair of them.’

He drew a fortifying breath. ‘Well, it’s our own damned fault, isn’t it?’

Dorrin arrived to peer east. ‘So that is your Sea of Dread. I don’t like the look of it.’

‘Neither do I,’ Kyle agreed. He held out a hand, inviting Lyan northward, and they started off.

The next day Kyle sucked on stones. He pinched the skin of his hand and it did not fall back at all. The moisture coming off the sea was a torment, but no matter how much he feared the Silent warriors shadowing them his instincts told him that the true threat lay to the east.

Even so, if the Silent People’s strategy was to wait until they were falling down weak, then it was working. The next day he stopped Lyan from donning her mail coat. He’d found the poles of two dead saplings that he used to build a travois. He motioned to the packs. ‘Keep only what you need.’

Lyan did not even bother answering, merely set to tossing things away. With the travois finished, the poles and cross-sticks lashed with leather straps, they loaded it with what remained of their gear: armour, wrapped dried meat, a sack of meal stuffed into a cooking pot, and the empty waterskins. Lyan hung a leather pouch around her neck and tucked it under her tunic. What remained of the lad’s royal inheritance, Kyle assumed. They set off, Kyle dragging the travois by the length of two leather belts. At noon they switched over.

In the late afternoon they came to the dried bed of a stream. Kyle clambered down among the exposed rocks and gravel and started digging with a hatchet. Lyan joined him. About an arm’s length down the mixed mud and sand became damp. Kyle pressed the cold wet sand to his face and sighed in delight.

A gasp from Dorrin brought Kyle and Lyan jumping to their feet, weapons drawn.

Across the dried stream bed five people faced them: two clan elders, male and female, and three of what must be their most senior warriors, two men and one woman. The warriors wore white face paint while their mostly naked bodies were smeared in ochre mud. The elders were draped in leather skins and furs.

‘Let me drink first,’ Kyle called.

The female elder smiled, revealing blunt nubs of teeth. ‘No pleading, Whiteblade? Good. That is as it should be.’

The old man jerked his head back towards the north. ‘You are truly headed north?’

‘I am.’

The two elders exchanged a glance that greatly troubled Kyle, for it was an uneasy one. Then the old woman stamped her staff to the ground and announced, ‘It is the Quest, then. Child of the Wind, you go to the great mountains, Joggenhome, to stand before our ancestors and prove our worth as our champion.’