She ducked inside an office built into the slant of the wall’s inner side to send a tapcode message to the bastion, and Pilgrim climbed down from his mara and hitched it to a post and brushed road dust from his clothes and leaned on his cane and waited for his escort. Presently, a mara and rider came up the straight white road that cut through the strip fields and stands of fruit trees beyond the gate. Pilgrim’s sister, Willow, come to meet her errant brother.

5.

After Willow alighted from her mara she and Pilgrim moved together and clasped forearms and swayed in the slow, blissful comity of blood on blood, immersed in each other’s scent and touch. His sister wore plain work clothes and there were blue dot tattoos under her eyes and in the stripe shaved into her pelt from her forehead to the nape of her neck – tribal signifiers of her status. She had barely been a stripling when Pilgrim had left, was grown into a woman now. Handfasted, with a son. Amazing to think of it.

‘Look at you,’ she said, stepping back. ‘Got up in your finery.’

Pilgrim had dressed carefully to meet his mother. The white mourning shirt, short-legged grey felt trews, their cuffs fastened by horn buttons just below his knees, his good yellow stockings for a touch of colour, long-toed side-laced pike boots.

‘It’s nothing out of the ordinary in Highwater Reach,’ he said. ‘Apart from the shirt, of course.’

Willow told him how sorry she was for his loss. ‘Your letters made it clear how much you admired and respected your master.’

Pilgrim had a clear sharp picture of the old scholar bent over his desk, studying a document through his magnifying glass while his left hand, like an independent animal, scratched notes on a scrap of paper.

He swallowed something hard and said, ‘He was the finest, cleverest person I have ever known.’

‘And you haven’t yet finished serving him.’

‘That isn’t the only reason why I came back. I wanted to see you, and to meet my new nephew.’

‘And ask Thorn for help. You had better see her straight away. She let me know that she expected you to arrive much earlier.’

‘I paid a visit to Bearbane before I came here.’

‘I hope that was not too much of a shock.’

‘He mistook me for our father,’ Pilgrim said. ‘It was as if I had been erased from his mind.’

‘He is often confused now,’ Willow said. ‘You mustn’t take it personally.’

‘I wrote to him faithfully, but he hardly ever replied.’

‘He was never much good with letters. Do you remember the story about how, when he was trapping bears in the far north, Thorn didn’t hear from him for five years? Didn’t know if he was dead or alive until one of his cousins ran into him in a frontier camp.’