Pilgrim, wanting to escape the scene of the bear’s execution and his own mortification, refused to wait. He sat quietly between Gentle and Grace as the sled rattled over hardpack snow towards the Hearth. He wanted to explain that the spectacle had disgusted rather than excited him, that the people hooting and whistling around the pit had seemed more feral than the bear, but knew that it would sound prissy and hypocritical. After all, he’d been exiled for violating one of the central tenets of the Mother’s grace and harmony, and this was the edge of the civilised world, where bears were still a threat to lives and livelihoods and, as Gentle had once said, hard living made for hard-shelled people.

Even so, he was haunted by images of the brutal ceremony, and the troubling thought that the bear might have been trying to plead with its captors. The fall of the bears had allowed people to shake off the chains of slavery and claim rightful dominion over the Mother’s bountiful creation, and it was universally agreed that it was a regrettable necessity, a pardonable sin, to trap and transport bears to the far north, or even to kill them when they were an immediate danger to people and livestock. But if people were more like bears than people supposed, or bears were more like people, then their deportation and slaughter would be little better than a systematic programme of extermination, and the customs and laws that regulated the peaceful co-operation of the ninety-three tribes might not have flowed naturally from a blessed, unfallen state, but were instead necessary constraints on bestial instincts that might one day overmaster those who believed that they were the Mother’s chosen children, as they had overmastered the bears six hundred years ago, and ogres before them.

Pilgrim put these thoughts in a note to Teal Leadwood, trying to explain why he had been overcome, formally thanking her for coming to his aid and assuring her of his complete recovery, and had Gentle deliver it with a book he had chosen, after some thought, from the library: a slim volume of old stories and fables, with several good plates depicting people confronted by miscreations, revenants and apparitions. If Teal Leadwood really was a serious scholar of folk tales she might already own a copy, but it was the thought that counted.

Gentle reported that she had accepted the book and the note without comment, and although he was disappointed, Pilgrim told himself that he did not deserve a reply.