And as for the sticks and presents, well, she traded them for food for us, and for things we needed, but how else could she keep herself going? It wasn’t like she had a big shelter, or coloured wraps, or lots of helpers to run round after her. I was her only helper and she treated me as a friend.

We travelled to Davidstand, and then along the little clusters along the bottom edge of Snowy Dark, where the paths go up to the High Valleys. All the way Mary talked about what she’d learned in her years of shadowspeaking, and answered my questions, and probed me again and again with questions of her own about my life among the Kneefolk. What was it like, she wanted to know, to be among people who pretended to themselves that they had everything they needed already, and that they didn’t need a mother or a home, except for the mothers they already had, and the little patch of sand they lived on?

‘So many people are like that,’ she said. ‘Not just your Kneefolk, but people all over the Davidfolk Ground. They’ve stopped believing there’s anything in the world but the things they see round them every waking. But those Kneefolk of yours – those Jeffsfolk – are the only ones who’ve made that into a story in its own right.’

‘It’s not quite like that,’ I tried to tell her. ‘I know you don’t like the idea, but we had the Watcher.’

She wouldn’t have that, though.

‘But the Watcher was just something inside you,’ she’d say. ‘That’s the story you were told, isn’t it? Just something in your head. It was like you were trying to be mothers to yourselves.’

We turned peckway about a waking short of the so-called White Streams that mark the end of the Davidfolk Ground and the beginning of the Brown River Ground, making our way through forest to the Pool, and then heading slowly slowly up rockway towards Veeklehouse, sometimes along poolside, sometimes turning away from it so as to take in tiny clusters back in forest, so that we wandered back and forth, blueway and peckway, blueway and peckway, while gradually moving rockway all the while. Guards always rode with us to keep us safe, but when we stopped to rest, they made their fire apart from us, and me and Mary were alone.

‘You and me are two of a kind, Angie,’ she told me again and again, as we cooked up our meat and flowercakes at the end of a waking, though I still had no idea how someone like her, so strong and certain and afraid of no one, could see any of herself in me. And then she’d put an arm round me as we lay down to sleep, so we’d lie together looking up at Starry Swirl and listening to the sounds of Eden.