Pilgrim knew about the build-up towards the opening of the Season only from Gentle’s accounts. He was lying low in the Hearth, trying to keep his mind off futile speculations about everything that could go wrong, but on the night of the Season’s official opening he watched the celebratory fireworks from the window where he and Gentle had seen the doomed bear stalk through snowdrifts. Showers of red and green sparks flowering small and distant in the night, the laggard sound of the explosions arriving as they fell and faded. He and his friends had not been affected by the tidal heat of the Season, but had liked to visit the open parties in the poorer quarters of Concord, enjoying the spectacle and the carnival crowds, the music and the food and drink, as much as anyone else. Now, alone in the half-ruined tower, he felt a forlorn pang of something deeper than mere loneliness. Felt as he had in those Seasons in his tribe’s territory when he had been old enough to realise that he was different. He had been exiled twice over, first by Master Able’s death and then by his well-deserved punishment. Even if the Invisible College agreed to everything he asked, even if he was able to find out everything he wanted to know, he could never return to his cozy little life in Highwater Reach.

Grace Wren Saltmire, dressed in a tattered finery of blood-red wormsilk, had locked up her charges and left for Stonehaven at sunset. Gentle was in town too, with his widow. She still wasn’t quite willing, he told Pilgrim the next morning, but it had been a hot night all the same. He had come in while Pilgrim was eating breakfast, reeking of beer and smoke, his pink eyes inflamed, saying that he didn’t need anything to eat, wanted only to sleep so that he would be ready for the night ahead.

‘Don’t forget that we meet with the Invisible College the day after tomorrow,’ Pilgrim said.

‘It’s why I want to look my best tonight, it being my last chance. Hers too,’ Gentle said, and lumbered bedwards.

The next morning, Pilgrim found that Gentle had already returned from the carnival, sitting in the kitchen in his best clothes and eating fried oatcakes with a kind of absent-minded melancholy.

‘Turned out she wasn’t willing after all,’ he told Pilgrim.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘But she swore it would be today. Said she could feel it in her blood and bones.’

‘You can’t,’ Pilgrim said, realising what Gentle meant.

‘There’s time,’ Gentle said, around a mouthful of oatcake. ‘We don’t meet with the people from the Invisible College until nightfall. And they haven’t arrived yet. Or if they have, Teal hasn’t left the sign. I checked on my way back, not an hour ago.’

‘They’ll be here,’ Pilgrim said. ‘And we’re going with them.’