‘I knew it the first time I saw you!’ he shouted. ‘Knew you are no kind of man!’

Pilgrim rode on without looking back. The upset of the encounter quickly bled away and he discovered a little sympathy for Creed’s desperation. Pilgrim loved Willow and his new nephew, loved Thorn and Bearbane and Blessed and all the rest, and felt an unconditional loyalty to his tribe and a deep cellular connection with its territory, but like Creed he knew that it was no longer where he wanted to live. He had moved on, had found a new home and new friends in Highwater Reach. The community of pures, and the people who shared his love of knowledge and books and of exploring and explaining the hidden machineries of the world. He had returned to his tribe only because he hoped it would give him what he needed to finish Master Able’s work, and find a way back to the life he had made for himself.

The last of the sunset was fading above the mountains to the west and dusk was deepening across the marshes and water meadows on either side of the road. The flat dark countryside and the cries and shrieks of night birds, the croaks and whistles of frogs, the secretive rustling of unseen creatures, made him nervous. The muffled footsteps of his mara seemed overloud. Every pocket of deep shadow under the trees alongside the road harboured a potential ambush. At last he sighted a distant glimmer of lights, and urged the mara into an ambling trot and was relieved when the gateway of the Lodge of the Eastern Shore appeared, a lantern hung from the apex of its arch.

The lodge was strung along a rise above a long arm of the lake. When Pilgrim woke early the next morning men were already setting out in flat-bottomed skiffs to trawl for shrimp or fish for perch, striped eels, toothfish and the big mudfish that lurked in the lake bottom. He broke his fast alone in the commons and the cook made up a packed lunch for him and he rode on towards the old quarry in the low hills at the southern end of the lake, following a track that switchbacked up stony slopes to a half-circle of steeply terraced limestone cliffs where stone had been quarried for the construction of the Hearth’s inner wall, and watchtowers and animal pens built when bears still prowled the territory.