‘There you go again. Answering a question with another question. No, they didn’t tell us, and we didn’t ask. Used to be, when the traffic in captured bears was regular, we’d make good coin tending them and helping to release them into bear country. That trade has long gone, but people in the camp – our people, not yours – would sometimes buy deer meat and fish from us. And pay over the odds, too. So, not wishing to lose that business, we didn’t ask too many questions about theirs. They told us they were studying bears. Finding new ways of controlling them, keeping them in check. And that, as I told your friends in Special Operations, was all we wanted or needed to know. But we didn’t realise back then that your people had something to do with that camp, so I’ll ask again. What was it they were doing there?’

‘They were making the bears into what they once were,’ Ysbel said, and tried to ignore the stir and chorus of whispers behind her.

‘What they once were,’ the arbiter said. ‘And how did they go about doing that?’

‘How do you treat anyone with an illness? They captured some bear cubs and cured them.’

‘Cured them how? With ogre magic?’ the arbiter said, eliciting several sardonic hoots from her crew.

‘I don’t yet know,’ Ysbel said. ‘Whatever it was, it rid the cubs of their madness. Turned them into peaceable intelligent creatures no different to you and me.’

‘Bears were never like us. Not when they kept us as slaves, and not now. And none here would contradict me, since all have experience of them,’ the arbiter said, and pointed at one of the people around the fire. ‘Tell them what happened to you, Makepeace.’

Makepeace was a rheumy-eyed, swag-bellied person dressed in a ragged shift stitched from sacking, but he met Ysbel’s gaze when he stood up and spoke with fierce dignity. ‘It was my son,’ he said. ‘My eldest. Hopestill. Out in the forest, picking mushrooms with his friends when a bear surprised them. They scattered and ran, but Hopestill was taken. We searched for him, found what was left of his clothes. Part of his arm was still in a sleeve of his jerkin, but we found no other trace of him.’

‘That’s what bears are,’ the arbiter told Ysbel. ‘That’s what they do, those that manage to cross the river and slip past the border patrol, like the one that took poor Hopestill. Your people could have helped us keep them where they belong, but instead it seems that without a by-your-leave they’ve been meddling where they oughten’t.’

Someone in her crew shouted, ‘Exactly so!’ and another, ‘Shame!’