‘Yes,’ Luke said, pulling his headwrap back on again, ‘and we try to be true to Gela who’s always helped us so much right from the beginning, and true to her father, President. My own mother wears Gela’s ring on her finger, and teaches the small people what Gela wants from them. I don’t think you guys even know that Gela led us to the ring not just once but two different times? John found it first, after it had been lost for generations. But not so long ago it was stolen from us by a woman from this side of the Pool. She took it right across Worldpool but still Gela brought it back to us. I mean, think about it! How could you explain that if Gela wasn’t on our side? What other explanation could there be? And yet now she’s come to your people and not to us. I just don’t understand it.’

He took out the smooth black linkup from the pocket in his bodywrap and turned it over in his hand, his eyes glinting in the bucklight as he looked down at it through the holes in his headwrap. He’d figured out by now which part of it he had to touch if he wanted to make it speak, and he carefully avoided that part. The thing itself was proof enough that the Earth people were really here, without his having to listen to Gela’s voice. And each time he heard her it felt like a reproach, not just for Harry’s death but for many other things too.

He thought about the people they’d met on the Dark before Harry appeared. The guards his men had spiked up on their own spears, the little groups of desperate people whose bucks they’d chased away, and whose pots of embers they’d scattered across the snow. There was one group in particular that his men had told to run away. One of Luke’s men had counted to fifty, while those poor terrified folk blundered off through the snow: old women, kids, newhairs, trying their best to run and help one another, with snow right up to their knees. Luke’s ringmen had laughed loudly as they readied their arrows on their bows.