It had been a long day, a lot to take in, but they weren’t quite done. Swift wanted to tell her what he had found, and began by handing her a small volume bound in dark-red pebbly leather.

‘Open it at the frontispiece,’ he said. ‘You may find it interesting.’

Native books began at the back, and their pages were read right to left, bottom to top. When Ysbel cracked the little book open at the back cover, it released a pungent musty odour: if time had a smell, that was what it might well smell like. After the title page, printed on heavier parchment with a sheet of translucent paper laid over it for protection, was a map. The map. The map that Goodwill had found and lost. A reproduction drawn from memory of a copy of the original. Ysbel, not knowing what else to say, told Swift that it was a handsome volume.

‘It is the copy Pilgrim presented to me. He spent a small fortune on his little monograph. Nothing but the best. The best leather for the covers, the best grass paper bound with silk. Notice that the top edges are tinted with silver, and the initial words of each section are hand-drawn and hand-coloured. All that trouble and expense, and hardly anyone read it. No one cared.’

‘I care,’ Ysbel said.

There was a short silence. The feeling that for a moment another presence had been kindled in the small lamp-lit room. The moment passed, and Ysbel handed the book back to Swift, asked him if the monograph was what had led him to this new discovery.

‘Oh no. No. I just thought that you would like to see it,’ Swift said. ‘Although my discovery is related to it, for it came about while I was attempting to establish the provenance of the map. Pilgrim found it in the Hearth of the original territory of his tribe. It was confiscated by a local lawkeeper, and soon afterwards Pilgrim was caught up in events which led to the day when your people revealed themselves. When all the fuss about that had died down, he returned to the old Hearth, hoping to confront the lawkeeper, but the man had died. His widow had sold the map to a dealer in secondhand goods who failed to recognise its value and sold it on as part of a job lot. Pilgrim could not trace it any further, and despite my best efforts, neither could I.’

‘Solomon Firststar claimed that he had purchased it from an itinerant picker,’ Goodwill said. ‘Supposedly, it had been found in a box of miscellaneous documents purchased when the possessions of an itinerant mara herder were auctioned off after his death.’

‘Through one of my contacts, I discovered where the auction had taken place,’ Swift said. ‘Unfortunately, there is no record of who purchased the box. And I was not able to find the picker who sold the map to Solomon Firststar, either.’