Goodwill visited her every day, bringing her share of the daily rations dropped by a cargo bot, water from the filter pump which turned salt water into fresh, and fish he caught with long lines cast into the surf. Bots patrolled tirelessly above the island, twinkling like unsleeping stars in the hot blue sky. Two or three tracked Ysbel whenever she swam; after one of Juniper’s aides was zapped by a bolt of electricity when he tried to knock down a bot with a stone shot from a homemade sling, she was careful not to swim too far.

At night, the bots spun flickering webs of green and red laser light above the treetops, reminding Ysbel of Pilgrim Saltmire’s secondhand account of ghost lights in the ruins of the bear city. She and Goodwill talked about that, whether those ghost lights had been bots dispatched by Mother, searching out and destroying incriminating carvings, or if the Other Mother had been documenting or preserving carvings against the day when evidence of the true history could be revealed.

They discussed the implications of the brief conversation with the little bot at the balloon works, too. If it had been telling the truth, Mother and her two sisters had made contact with the bears more than six hundred years ago, but something had gone wrong. Perhaps the bears had rebelled against attempts to improve their civilisation, and the retrovirus which had turned them into crazed killers was some kind of biological weapon deployed against them. In any event, their civilisation had crashed and burned, and the triune of mothers had crashed and burned too.

To begin with, Goodwill was scornfully unconvinced by this story. If Mother had not told her people her true history, he said, then how could they believe that the Other Mother was telling the truth now? Both had been got up by ogres before the Burn Line; both had once been equals, sharing the same purpose. It could be, he said, that the Other Mother was the villain, the destroyer of bears, punished and cast down by Mother, curing the bears whose ancestors she had infected not because it was the right thing to do but because she hoped it would create a fatal rift between his people and Ysbel’s, and help her to win back the power she had lost.