I slept. I dreamed. I wandered through a forest. Everywhere I looked, there were objects lying on the ground: stones, fruitskins, fallen branches, dead starflowers, broken seedgrinders, buckbones, ratshells, feathers, leopards’ teeth, coloured beads, lumps of stumpcandy, old stone spearheads. I was searching searching but, however hard I tried, I couldn’t remember what I’d been sent to find.

‘I want to show you something,’ Mary said, when we’d both woken again.

We bathed in that pool again, to wash away the sweat of the night, and then she led me along a path into forest beyond the fence of Old Family cluster. The fug still hadn’t lifted. The ground was wet with its moisture, the mist still made rings of colour round the lanterns, and everything further away than twenty thirty feet was a blurry shape that didn’t seem quite real.

We came to a place where the trees opened out. It was another clearing like the one where the Circle was, but this one wasn’t empty. From one side of it to the other and even under the trees all round it, dark shapes loomed up in the fug like silent, watching creatures, some no higher than my knee, some much taller than I was. Actually, they were simply piles of fist-sized stone. When one of them was near enough, I could see that perfectly well. Yet I still couldn’t quite get the idea out of my head that the other ones, the hundreds of others that I couldn’t clearly see, disappearing into the fug, were something more than that, something alive and listening. Even when we’d walked up to one, touched its stones, felt their hardness and coldness, it still seemed to change back into one of those silent, listening beings when we’d moved on and I looked back at its blurry shape.

Mary didn’t need to tell me what this place was, because I knew it from stories. I recognized at once that it was Burial Grounds, where everyone who died in Circle Valley was buried, along with high people from across the whole of Davidfolk Ground.

‘Tom’s dick,’ I said. ‘There must be more dead people here than there are people still alive in Veeklehouse and Davidstand together.’

‘But this isn’t anything like the true number of dead people,’ Mary said. ‘When no one remembers or cares any more about one of them, they take the stones to use again and bury the bones in a pit. Most people only lie here for a generation, or two at most. There are only a few who never stop being remembered and loved, so that their piles just get bigger and bigger.’