‘Are you upset because I rejected your idea about adding an overwrought account of my struggle to the proposal?’

‘I’m disappointed that I can’t make you understand how thinly stretched things are, here.’

‘But I do understand. That’s why, if the council can’t or won’t support me, I’ll ask it to take up my idea of selling fossils.’

‘You mean coilshells? I thought you were joking when you told me about that,’ Willow said.

‘It’s a serious idea,’ Pilgrim said. ‘And one that could turn the kind of profit you’re so keen on.’

They were sitting in Willow’s tea-packing workshop. She had given Pilgrim a short tour, showing him where bark, leaves and flowers from plants picked in the wild or grown in the Hearth’s strip fields were sorted and cleaned, the racks where the material was dried, the tables where it was weighed and packaged, and the neat little handpress that printed the colourful labels. Pilgrim told his sister that he was impressed, and meant it. Now, as they lounged on cushions and sipped redbark tea, he explained about the old quarry where he had once hunted for fossils, and the shops in Concord that specialised in the sale of fossils and the relics of ogres and bears.

‘Is this what you did with the fossils you took with you, when you left?’ Willow said.

‘Those were a gift for Master Able. One was a small fish that turned out to be unknown to naturalists. He wrote an article about it, naming me as co-author, and donated the fossil to the Library. The rest he kept.’

They had been the best specimens from Pilgrim’s childhood collection. The fish, the mostly intact shell of a young sea turtle, a slab bearing some particularly fine sea flowers, a coilshell and a coneshell. The fish was in a drawer in the Library’s Hall of Stones and Bones; the rest, hard to think about it, were now in the possession of Able’s kin.

Willow said, ‘So you hope to dig up more, and sell them to the Library.’

‘The Library accepts donations, and by law has to be given two copies of every book, monograph and pamphlet published in the Union. It doesn’t have to pay for anything. But there’s a fashion amongst wealthy people in Concord to use fossils as decorations in their homes. Fossils of fish and sea flowers and coilshells in washrooms, and so on. And there are some serious collectors, too. One merchant built a special chamber to house his collection, including the articulated skeletons of two thunder lizards.’