The meeting was half a moonspan away. Pilgrim visited Grandfather Bearbane again, and they shared a bath in one of the wooden tubs set outside the lodge and filled with sulphur-scented water from the hot spring. Bearbane bent over his knees, humming happily as Pilgrim scrubbed the threadbare pelt of his humped back, but afterwards, as they bonelessly relaxed in the warm water, he asked after people whose names Pilgrim either didn’t recognise or knew were dead, and repeated the story about how he had earned the right to adopt a new name. Pilgrim tried his best to sound cheerful and engaged, but was reminded again of how much he had lost. His master, his comfortable life in Highwater Reach, and now the person who had been such a strong and vital presence when he had been growing up.

He gave Amity a fossil shark tooth and told the story of how it had ended up in a quarry far from the ocean, and went riding with two of his cousins, answering their questions about life in the capital as best he could, rediscovering old haunts and places which had once seemed to him more important than anywhere else in the world, and hunting for rock conies. Although he had been lent one of the brand-new windup crossbows that could fire half a dozen bolts before reloading, he missed with every shot, and took to practising his marksmanship in the yard of the lodge, using an old straw target he’d found in one of the barns. When Blessed commented that he might better improve his skill by trying to reduce the numbers of coneys that infested the western pasture, Pilgrim promised that he would, once he could hit the target regularly.

Blessed pushed up his broad-brimmed straw hat and scratched his forehead. The hat band was sweat-stained and his clothes were dusty from a long day’s work and his rawhide gloves were tucked in his belt. ‘Are you planning to take down these visitors?’

‘Some of the places I intend to visit are fairly remote. I want to be sure that I can live off the land should I need to.’

‘Running out of supplies might be the least of your problems. You ought maybe to think of hiring a guide. Even the best rover can get into trouble if he’s riding on his own.’

‘I have to keep expenses to the minimum,’ Pilgrim said, thinking of Creed, knowing that he been right to refuse that desperate and dubious offer. Travelling with someone convicted of a violent offence against the great harmony would most likely be more dangerous than riding alone.