The two women led Gentle and Pilgrim to a skiff and in the darkness rowed quietly and expertly to a windjammer anchored near the harbour mouth. Teal Leadwood was already aboard. She tended to Gentle’s cuts and bruises while Poppy and Fragrant and the windjammer’s captain unfurled the sails and raised the anchor. Teal told Pilgrim that a group of men had ridden out to her cabin, no doubt to arrest her, but they’d been carrying torches and drunkenly whooping and hollering, and she and Poppy and Fragrant had been able to slip away while they were still splashing across the marsh. She’d tried to find Pilgrim and Gentle, she said, but they had already been arrested.

‘I underestimated the constable,’ Pilgrim said.

‘Seems that Grace was spying on us,’ Gentle said.

‘Fortunately, he didn’t know about your friends,’ Pilgrim said.

After the windjammer was under way, running through the dark ahead of a stiff north-westerly breeze, Poppy had Pilgrim and Gentle swear a solemn oath of secrecy, and insisted that both were given shots that would tamp down what she called their innate arousal. Gentle submitted with weary patience; Pilgrim explained that he did not suffer from the Seasonal urge, but Teal jabbed him anyway.

‘We’ve all had similar shots,’ Poppy said.

‘It’s going to be a long voyage in close quarters,’ Fragrant said. She was older than Teal, with a calm, severe manner and mismatched eyes, one dark brown, the other light blue. ‘Best to keep everything nice and peaceful.’

They were heading north. Not to a town where Pilgrim could catch a train that would take him to Highwater Reach, as he’d hoped, but all the way to the New Territories and Ogres Grave, and then overland to Foeless Landwalker’s desert encampment. According to Poppy and Fragrant, Landwalker’s followers were cutting an outline of a flowersipper, a league across from wingtip to wingtip, in the level white salt pan where he claimed that the visitors’ sky boats would land once they were ready to reveal themselves. He held a rally there every night, preaching to his followers and leading them in communal prayers that supposedly opened a psychic pathway to the visitors, and he had recruited many new followers by exploiting the resentments of settlers in the New Territories towards the Union, which imposed laws without representation and forced them to pay tithes to fund the construction of roads and railways, and to cover the cost of policing the New Territories and keeping the northern border secure from intrusion by bears. Many wanted to break away from the Union and establish a separate confederation of tribal territories, and a secret cabal, the Night Riders, had declared themselves to be the arbitrators of law and justice in so-called liberated zones, and had taken to tarring and feathering tithe collectors and other Union officials and burning down their offices.