‘In my experience, people who feel they have to prove themselves aren’t always as dependable as they want you to believe,’ Gentle said. ‘Do you reckon you should put your trust in her?’

‘I believe that I already have,’ Pilgrim said.

20.

Teal Leadwood rode through the gateway of the Hearth, unheralded and unannounced, a handful of days after Pilgrim and Gentle first met with her. Her fur coat bright as a drop of blood in the snowy courtyard as she reined in her mara and hallooed the towers, her voice echoing off the stone walls and startling a small bird into flight.

Gentle steeped a flask of teabark and fried sweet beancakes in coney grease, and after the small meal Pilgrim took Teal to the second floor of the library, where he had been working when she had arrived. While he revived the fire with scraps of birchbark and splits of driftwood, Teal admired the mosaic floor and walked slowly along the shelves of books. After asking Pilgrim’s permission, she pulled out a slender accounts book bound in pebbled black leather and opened it and bent her head to the pages and breathed in their odour before studying one of the columns, her finger moving down it as she read.

‘You could reconstruct entire lives from this,’ she said.

‘The parts involving making and spending money, at least,’ Pilgrim said, watching as she slotted the accounts book back into its place and took out another book from the shelf above it, a record of the pedigrees of riding maras.

‘Are they all like this?’ she said.

‘Mostly,’ Pilgrim said. ‘There are sheaves of receipts and bills of lading, and rolls of household accounts, too. I have boxed up the few volumes of value or historical interest, for dispatch to my tribe.’

He told her that he had found the book containing the account of the discovery of the memory stones and added it to the small collection awaiting dispatch, and she asked about the famous map he had found. Was that boxed up too?

‘It is too important to be buried in the tribe’s archives.’

‘So you plan to keep it.’

‘I plan to donate it to the Library of All People after I have completed and published Master Able’s work.’

Teal smiled. ‘Are you going to make me beg to see it?’

Pilgrim fetched it from its hiding place and unrolled it on the worktable and weighed down its corners with pebbles collected from the beach. Stood beside Teal as she sat in the chair and leaned over it, studying every part with fierce concentration.

‘All of these are bear cities,’ she said.

‘I think so. If I had a contemporary map of ruins, I might be able to identify them.’

‘And this must be the mysterious guest,’ she said, pointing to the small white figure, with its spherical, eyeless head and lightning stick.