‘You’ve been given a chance to redeem yourself,’ his sister said. ‘Work on that. Don’t waste time wallowing in self-pity.’

‘Will you thank Thorn for me? Tell her that I do not deserve her kindness, and that I understand why she doesn’t want to see me.’

‘Sending you away has nothing to do with sympathy or kindness,’ Willow said. ‘Creed isn’t the first in his immediate family to get into trouble. They’re a chancy crew, scraping a living by trapping and hunting on the northern edge of the territory, and hiring out as caravanners. Thorn suggested you should be sent south because she is worried that they might cause further disharmony by trying to take revenge. She reckons that they won’t be able to reach you where you’re going, and hopes tempers will have cooled by the time you return.’

‘It might be better for everyone if I was sent into permanent exile.’

‘What did I say about self-pity? While I was bound to the Hearth, like every other woman in the tribe, you were able to leave for the capital, to make a new and better life for yourself. And now you’ve been given the chance to restore your honour and start afresh. Don’t throw that away.’

‘You should take up my idea about the fossil-selling business,’ Pilgrim said. ‘It really could make a profit. Anything you want or need to know about it, write to me. I’ll help as best I can. Tell you how to clean fossils, give you my contacts in Highwater Reach and Concord … Who knows? You might even get to travel there.’

‘I hoped making and selling new kinds of teas might allow me to do that one day.’

‘Why not do both?’

Willow said that she would think about it, told him that he had already made a good start on the path to redemption by volunteering to look after Creed’s accomplice.

‘That’s more for my own self-interest. Considering where I am going.’

‘It shows that you are capable of forgiveness and contrition. Continue to follow that path, and it will lead you back home soon enough.’

12.

The albino, Gentle, had been caught hiding in a covert up in the foothills, two days after the failed robbery attempt. His brief testimony confirmed Pilgrim’s account of the attempted robbery, and Pilgrim, impressed by the man’s honesty, asked the aunties if he could make use of him.

When Gentle was brought to Blessed’s lodge, Pilgrim took him for a walk across one of the pastures and explained about his sentence and exile. ‘I would like it very much if you would come with me,’ he said.

‘I thought your people were aiming to send me off to a Union camp and a spell of hard labour,’ Gentle said.

‘That’s the alternative.’

‘Aren’t you worried that I might turn on you?’