‘He might still have it, if you’re lucky,’ Mistress Ash said. ‘Things that end up here and other places like it are orphans seeking a home. Some speak to people and some don’t. I’ve been more than thirty years in the trade, and I still don’t know which is which. If I did I’d buy less and sell more.’

Pilgrim wrote down the name and address of the dealer and thanked the old woman and walked through the cold muddy streets to the railway station. This was turning out to be a frustrating venture. He had travelled first to Stonehaven, where he discovered that Noble Seatree had drowned at sea at the beginning of the summer past, his crab boat foundering in a sudden storm just three moonspans after Pilgrim and Gentle had escaped. The constable’s widow, who’d had little good to say about him and expected payment for it, had told Pilgrim that she had been forced to sell the confiscated items because the town still owed her husband’s back pay and recompense for the meals she had cooked for the people he’d arrested.

‘You broke the law and then you ran off,’ she’d said, ‘so don’t expect restitution for what was rightly taken from you. I didn’t get much for it anyway.’

‘Then you were cheated,’ Pilgrim had told her, more disappointed than angry. ‘The pendant alone was worth a year of your husband’s salary.’

Before he left Stonehaven, he had paid a visit to the Hearth’s library. After only a year, its chambers had taken on the musty air of a mausoleum. Water stains had bloomed on the plaster of a wall under a broken window and there was a scatter of mouse droppings on papers he’d left behind, including the catalogue he had laboured over.

A fellow he’d hired at the chandler’s helped him to carry the boxes of books he had selected for the archives of his tribe to the harbour and the coastal trader, and after reaching Fortunate Valley Pilgrim had arranged for the boxes to be sent north before tracking down Mistress Ash’s Emporium. Now, he caught a train to Circle Bay, where he discovered that the dealer who had purchased Mistress Ash’s consignment had sold it on to a scout from Concord, and that was where the trail went cold. The scout had sold the books to another dealer, and the map had gone to a barter house and had been snapped up by someone who had paid cash and left no name or address.

‘If it’s still in Concord, I’ll find it,’ Swift Singletree told Pilgrim.

‘I’m not even sure if it is worth anything,’ Pilgrim said. ‘The visitors told me it had nothing to do with them, since they arrived long after the bears destroyed themselves.’