‘Funny, isn’t it?’ said Trueheart, or rather the furry creature said it that spoke with Trueheart’s voice. ‘We call it David’s Path, yet it was John Redlantern who first found it.’

And that was weird because I’d said the same thing last time I’d come this way. I’d been with Mary, of course. It had been some eight years before, when I was only five years or so older than Trueheart was now. I’d changed since then, so many things had changed, but the stone looked just the same now as it did then, exactly the same, almost as if the time in between had never really happened. The darkguide had read out the words to us, and straight away I’d turned to Mary and said exactly the same thing as Trueheart had just said now.

It was the same place, the same stone, the same feeling of dread at the thought of snowleopards and getting lost, and at the thought of wakings of coldness and darkness ahead. And this time, just as last time, there was a young batfaced woman to speak those same words. It felt to me as if two separate streams of time had somehow come together and were flowing in a single bed.

‘Hey! Look round!’ said Clare suddenly, and we turned and saw far far below us the hundred thousand lights of Wide Forest, stretching away alpway and rockway, to our left and right, and peckway ahead of us, until they met the soft soft glow of Worldpool.

Eighteen

There were five of us altogether back then, the darkguide, two guards and me and Mary. The guide and the guards all rode their own woollybucks. Me and Mary shared the same big smoothbuck, with a woollybuck skin draped over it to keep it warm. She was riding in front.

‘It’s funny when you think about it,’ I said, ‘that it’s called David’s Path, yet it was John Redlantern who first found it.’

Mary was silent for some time. She was silent for so long, in fact, that when she did finally speak, I assumed at first she was talking about something completely different.