‘We’ve got some woollybuck skins,’ Clare said. ‘We can make some bodywraps and headwraps and footwraps. I know how. I made them for Tom when he was a guard. We just need some grease for the footwraps.’

‘What about snowleopards?’ asked Trueheart, who’d been standing on the edge of this talk between the grownups, not quite part of it, but not quite outside of it with the kids either. She came to stand beside me. She had a cut in the corner of her mouth where her dad had hit, a big dark bruise round her left eye, and an ugly weal on her arm, with the skin split open along most of its length.

‘Honestly, Trueheart,’ I said, ‘they’re hardly any danger.’ As I spoke I was aware of my Fox’s big scared eyes, waiting desperately to be told why he should not be scared of snowleopards. Gela’s heart, if only it was just snowleopards he had to fear, I thought, and not ringmen with metal knives and heads full of hate. ‘I never saw even one leopard when I crossed with Mary. She’d been that way many times herself and she told me she’d never seen one once.’

‘Yes, they keep out of people’s way these wakings,’ Tom said, ‘now there are men up there who trap them and hunt them for their—’

‘And anyway, they’re afraid of loud noises, aren’t they, Mum?’ Fox interrupted in that funny false shouting voice he put on when he wanted to show he wasn’t scared. ‘If I see one, I’ll just chase it away!’

‘Okay.’ Kate frowned. ‘So the leopards don’t do for us, and nor does the cold. But suppose we get to Circle Valley, and then the Johnfolk follow us there as well? They wanted the Veekle. Won’t they want the Circle too?’

‘John didn’t like the Circle, though, did he?’ began Dave. ‘He destroyed it, remember, and Lucy Lu had to—’

‘Oh Gela’s heart,’ muttered Trueheart, ‘not more old stories.’

No matter how often her dad hit her, she would not give up.

‘Perhaps we should wait here for the Johnfolk,’ Little Harry said. No one had yet spoken that thought among us, though I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who’d had it before. Yes, the ringmen had been cruel, but wasn’t that only to people who tried to stand up to them? ‘Or even go back to Michael’s Place and accept that Headmanson Luke as our new leader. They can’t do for all of us, can they? And at least we’d have enough to eat.’

Several people had tried to interrupt him angrily while he was still speaking, and now they began talking all at once.

‘Have you gone mad, Harry?’ shouted Davidson. ‘Have you ­forgotten we’re Davidfolk?’

‘No way!’ growled Tom. ‘No way will I ever live among ring-stealers!’