They arranged to meet with Teal Leadwood the day after the Daughter Moon next showed her full face. High tides had washed the beach at Windy Bay clean of snow up to the strandline and Pilgrim and Gentle were scratching for sea coal amongst pebbles frozen in lacy matrices of ice when Teal arrived, somewhat later than their noon appointment. She led them across the marsh, their maras wading through snowdrifts up to their hocks and crunching across frozen lagoons and ponds, to a low rise at the margin of the forest where a slab of black rock stood, its flat face etched with horizontal lines of script on either side of a deep, vertical incision. It was one of the memory stones of the First People, Teal told Pilgrim and Gentle, its ‘bent-branch’ alphabet as yet still untranslated, the people or places or events it commemorated unknown. This part of the coast had been one of the last holdouts of the First People, who had survived here long after bears had begun to build their mound cities. When bear slaver parties came raiding from the north they had defaced ancient petroglyphs, broken into burial mounds and removed the remains of the dead and smashed most of the memory stones; this one was a rare survivor, and seemed to have escaped destruction because it had been buried in the marsh, either deliberately or by a storm.

‘It was dug up and set in place here shortly before your family moved north,’ Teal said. ‘I found a description of its discovery and restoration in one of the year journals in the library. They mostly record the weather, harvests and fish catches, management of goat and mara herds, and so on. But there are also accounts of unusual events, including the discovery of this stone. There are some good drawings of it, too. I sent copies to a colleague, and she confirmed that the inscriptions are in the late style.’

Pilgrim said that he would look it up and also search for similar records.

‘I looked through the rest of the year journals, but couldn’t find mention of any other stones,’ Teal said. ‘But perhaps you will have better luck.’

Gentle said, ‘Are these First People like the small folk in old Grace’s stories?’