Gentle shrugged, said that he reckoned that they were the sort of thing women told pups everywhere. ‘Stories about Trickster Crow and his attempts to fool the Mother. How different animals come to be as they are, and so on. And they always have some kind of lesson in them.’

‘What happens,’ Pilgrim said, ‘when you don’t do what you are supposed to do?’

‘I suppose that kind of story didn’t take with me,’ Gentle said. ‘Or with you, neither.’

‘I’m trying to make amends for that.’

‘Even so, you haven’t given up on what led you here. Ever since you found it, you’ve been obsessed with that map and what it might signify. Eager to throw in with that woman’s friends despite knowing nothing about them.’

Gentle seemed to like Teal, but still didn’t trust her. Thought that Pilgrim was naive to share so much with her so readily in exchange for nothing but promises. Pilgrim hadn’t been able to disabuse him of the notion that the work on the visitors might have some monetary worth, or convince him that, at bottom, scholarship was a collaborative endeavour, but knew that Gentle was right about one thing: he’d taken a risk when he’d shown the map to Teal. He’d wanted to impress her, like a peacock fanning its tail for a peahen, wanted to prove that he had something worth sharing with her colleagues, but there was still much he hadn’t shown her – all of Master Able’s notes and interviews, to begin with – and he didn’t think of her colleagues as serious rivals. Not because they were women, but because scholars didn’t take women seriously. And because Master Able’s last work hadn’t been taken seriously either, he had some sympathy for the Invisible College and its cause, felt that they could help each other. Besides, there was nowhere else that might give him the resources he needed to finish his master’s research. He’d made a promise to himself that only others could keep.