‘We’re sorry,’ said Deep. Right behind him, their veekle stood in the Circle of Stones that the Davidfolk had kept in readiness for it all these years. How many hundreds of copies of that Circle were there, I wondered, across whole of the Davidfolk Ground? How many times these last four hundred years had Davidfolk stood beside those circles and sang ‘Come Tree Home’?

‘You’re sorry, are you?’ a woman screamed out, her voice harsh with anger and loneliness and cold cold grief. I recognized her face. It was the woman called Treelight I’d stood next to in the line for dry meat, the one who’d lost eight of her nine sons to the ringmen’s metal-tipped arrows. I remembered that brightness in her voice then as she told me she knew she’d see her boys again on Earth, that particular kind of brightness that people put in their voice when they’re determined that they’re going to be cheerful, no matter what, determined to believe that what they’re saying is true.

Eight sons and their dad, all dead! But Treelight had told me how she’d made herself hold all that grief inside as she’d crossed Wide Forest and climbed up onto the Dark, so as to be able to look after the little kids, and comfort the oldies, and keep things going, along with the other women who’d lost their men as well. All the way across the Dark, she’d told me, she’d made herself push her dead boys out of her mind every time she began to think about them. But when she was coming down far side of the Dark into Circle Valley, she began to feel that she wasn’t going to be able to manage it any more, that her grief would come bursting out of her no matter what. I can’t carry on doing this, she thought. I’ve reached the end of it. I’ve got no strength left.

And just then, so she’d told me, right at the exact moment she was thinking she couldn’t hold on any longer, Leader Harry and his eight men had come riding by on his way up to the Dark, calling out the news about the veekle that had come down in the Circle and the people inside it from Earth. Treelight had laughed with happiness, the other women too. They’d all laughed and shouted and sang. There was no need for grief any more, no need for loneliness! Hungry and tired as they were, they’d come down into forest of Circle Valley with cheerful cheerful hearts.

But now this! The end of hope. The end of those few precious wakings when she’d thought she might never have to face that huge awful icy grief that had been welling up inside of her.