‘Old Grace, up in the Hearth, knows all kinds of stories, and not just about the small folk,’ Gentle said. ‘Children who stray into the forest and vanish, and come back years later, unchanged since they disappeared and with no memory of where they’ve been. Creatures half woman, half seal, who sing fisherfolk to their doom on rocks. Talking fish that bargain with the people who catch them, promising to grant wishes in exchange for being returned to the sea, cursing those who decide to keep and kill them. I already had a version of that last one, being born into a fisherfolk tribe, but Grace knows plenty of others besides, including some she swears are true. Like the one about a boat driven south by storms and caught fast in ice for more than a year, its crew surviving by catching seals and broiling their meat over fires fuelled by blubber.’

‘She told those stories to me, too,’ Teal said. ‘And the secret stories that women here pass down. Stories that men never hear concerning matters they know nothing about.’

That last was directed at Pilgrim, like a challenge.

‘They do like telling stories hereabouts,’ Gentle said. ‘Comes from having to hunker down with little else to do during the long winters, no doubt.’

‘Wild landscapes are like blank pages,’ Teal said. ‘People make up stories that give meaning to them. Often populating them with imaginary creatures like the small folk to make them more familiar, more comforting.’

‘Master Able thought that some of the stories about sightings of visitors had similarities to certain folk tales,’ Pilgrim said. ‘Abductions, lost travellers stumbling into a place of refuge where a strange kind of people live, never to be found again, and so on. One of his more eccentric correspondents claimed that stories about the visitors are shadows cast by a world-changing event in the near future. The great day when they will reveal themselves to be supernatural agents come to save us from ourselves. A kind of shared race memory, but working backwards. That certainly fits the definition of a comforting fantasy.’

Teal said, ‘Had Master Able ever seen one of these visitors? Have you?’

‘My master was too ill to travel, and because I was looking after him I could not travel in his stead. But several witnesses reported finding footprints, and scribbles etched in stones that somewhat resemble the outline of a flowersipper. I myself have seen a patch of burnt ground left by a fire that flew away into the sky,’ Pilgrim said.

‘And do you think that they are real?’ Teal said.

‘I think that I don’t yet know enough to be certain one way or the other.’

Teal seemed to like that answer. ‘But you hope to prove it, one way or the other,’ she said.