She also wasn’t tired despite her very short sleep of the night before. But as they flew faster and higher, and the cold gripped her more tightly, Clariel found herself drifting into a kind of fugue, where she was neither asleep nor awake. She knew where she was, in the iron chair on the back of a dragon. But at the same time she imagined herself to be in the Great Forest. In the wintertime, when the Forest canopy above was sparse, snow covered the greensward, and ice glazed the edges of the stream where she liked to fish. It was too cold to tickle trout in winter, but there were rabbits to snare, and wild honey to be gathered from sleepy bees without competition from even sleepier bears. She would have a snug forester’s hut, with a stove bought from the town red-hot upon its rough-fired clay plinth, a stack of wood as high as the turf-covered roof outside, a larder full of autumn’s harvest; winter in the Forest could be comfortable indeed …

‘We are ready to descend, Mistress,’ whispered the dragon. ‘On your command …’

Clariel awoke fully, the wintry forest landscape banished in an instant. They were in the high waft of the smoke, not so thick that it choked, but enough to cause half-waking dreams of comfortable stoves. As the smoke swirled beneath them, Clariel caught glimpses of the Palace far below, and the sea next to it. There were some people on the walls, but she could not make out whether they were fighting, or who they were.

‘Brace yourself, Mogget,’ she said. Crouching down herself, she set her shoulders against the back of the chair, and her feet hard on the footrest. She placed the sword between her knees and gripped it there, her hands tight on the metal arms of the chair, which for the first time she noticed were lightly rimed with ice.

‘Take care not to harm me or throw me out,’ she said sternly to the dragon. ‘But descend as fast as you can!’

The dragon pushed its head down, its body following, and folded its wings. Clariel slid down the chair a fraction and her stomach flipped up towards her throat in a moment of fear. She pressed herself even flatter into the iron seat and gripped harder. Mogget was somewhere under her legs. She felt his claws cutting through the overshoes around her ankles, but she couldn’t look. The dragon was nearly vertical now, and they were plummeting to the earth, the wind howling past so that their previous speed paled in comparison, as if they had been sauntering across the sky and now were sprinting.