Teal studied him for a moment, and he wondered how much she knew about his fall from the Mother’s grace. Only her eyes were visible; her face was masked by a neckpiece and crowned by a fur hat, and she was muffled in her red fur coat and shod in knee-length felt boots, the kind with fur on the inside that everyone in the settlement wore in winter. The white landscape stretched all around, silent and still under a dead white sky. The maras stood hock-deep in snow, wreathed in the frozen smoke of their breath; a sudden gust of wind blew spumes of sparkling crystals from the snow-shawled trees.

‘Talk in the town has it that you killed someone,’ Teal said.

‘I hurt someone badly, but not fatally,’ Pilgrim said, meeting her gaze.

‘Fellow was trying to rob him,’ Gentle said. ‘I should know, as I was the injured party’s accomplice.’

‘Despite the circumstances, I deserve my punishment,’ Pilgrim said.

‘He asked me to come with him, rather than serve a spell of hard labour. And here we are,’ Gentle said.

‘We should go to my cabin,’ Teal said abruptly, as if she had just thought of it. ‘We can get warm, and talk more about your master’s work.’

It was in a hollow behind a drift of sand dunes, the cabin, a couple of stades to the north of the memory stone. Snow was banked to the sills of its windows; a short trench had been dug through drifts between its back door and the hummock of its latrine. Inside, roof beams were hung with bunches of dry herbs and grasses and last summer’s flowers, the beaten-earth floor was lapped with rugs, and a truckle bed was curtained off in one corner. Teal stoked up the fire in the hearth and they perched on cushions in front of it, warming their hands on bowls of silky hot chocolate, nibbling hard cakes baked from sweetroot and wild oat seeds. A tame washcat squatted warily beneath a low table, small round eyes reflecting sparks of firelight. He was shy, Teal said, because she did not get many visitors.

She had been living on the coast for two years. She had not been exiled, as the local people supposed, but had chosen to come here to study the folklore and folk medicine of the far south, supported by a small bequest from her late mother and sales of raw amber she combed from the beach. If she had stayed in her tribe’s Hearth she would no doubt have spent her life working in its lazarette, like her mother and two of her sisters, but she was too independently minded and had too much of a liking for roving. Still, she said, her training in the healing arts had given her a good grounding in pharmacology, and in the rules of analytical thinking and deduction that she applied to her work and to diagnosing her patients.