The moment Tolb spoke she’d felt the right of it. In truth, she’d known it since they arrived on this shore. Yet she had avoided it. Dreaded the final irrevocable hard choices. She rubbed her hands up her arms and held herself. ‘I must face Omtose Phellack unveiled. Something the world has not seen in tens of thousands of years.’

‘Not you,’ said Pran.

She blinked at him, a touch irritated. ‘Not I?’

‘No. Tolb and I and the remaining Bonecasters shall. As during the ancient unveilings when the Odhan was scoured clean by rivers of ice leagues thick. Or the war over the rich fields of the Gareth’eshal, which yet lay lost to us beneath the sea.’

‘Then what of me?’

‘Summoner,’ Tolb spoke gently, ‘you must bring the Kerluhm to heel. You must stand before them and deny them their war.’

‘Your war,’ she corrected. ‘You also swore the ritual.’

The Ifayle Bonecaster nodded deeply then, his neck creaking, and it seemed to Silverfox that a great exhalation of repentance shuddered from the ancient. ‘A question of interpretation. They choose to fight it. We choose to end it.’

This near confession touched her deeply and she felt an urge to console the man though he was a walking corpse to her vision. Yet, she wondered, what differences truly lie between us? Only the accidental timing of birth. I could easily have been hearthmate to him, or he born of the Rhivi. She swept an arm to Pran. ‘Gather everyone.’

‘Summoner,’ Pran said, a warning in his voice. ‘It will be a long journey.’

‘How so?’

‘We cannot move through Tellann – Omtose inhibits this. We must travel across the land. So did the Jaghut deny us tracts of land and slow our progress in the elder ages.’

Silverfox stared, speechless. Walk … on foot all the way north across this enormous continent? It would take months! Still, was she not of the Rhivi? Why let yet another migration deter her? She smoothed her layered hides down her hips. ‘Then let us go at once.’ And she headed for her tent to pack.

Behind her, Tolb Bell’al and Pran Chole shared a glance that could almost be said to contain humour. ‘You chose well, Pran,’ Tolb murmured, his breathless voice nearly lost in the wind.

‘It was she who chose to come to us,’ he answered.

* * *

When the lookouts of the Lady’s Luck sighted land in the east, Kyle counselled that they turn south to travel round the horn of the continent. Tulan Orbed, however, ordered Reuth to find their position first to see how far north the winds had taken them. That night Reuth studied the stars, their setting and rising, and determined that they had indeed been driven quite far to the north. Kyle’s advice against travelling round the northern coast was rejected.