He didn’t believe her, but at least he pretended he did. ‘Okay. I’ll leave you alone.’ He pointed towards the river and slightly upstream. ‘I’ll be over there. Call if you find anything.’

He left her, moving off between the trees, every so often slowing and examining the ground by his feet. She leant back against the tree again, the back of her head resting against the bark. She started to realise that freedom for her meant freedom for everyone and everything. She was at their mercy, and they were at hers.

It wasn’t that no one could tell her what to do anymore. It was that she couldn’t tell anyone what to do anymore; that all she could rely on now was either trust and friendship, or fear and coercion.

She weighed the axe in her hand, and wondered what to do.

10

10

Whatever the reason for the village’s abandonment, they found so very little of use. No crops growing wild in the undergrowth, no feral chickens scratching their way through the dirt. They did find what Stanislav thought might be an old orchard, but the fruits were barely swellings behind the hairy remains of the blossom.

Dalip realised that the presence of a farm meant that they couldn’t just rely on foraging for food, or if they did, that their existence would that of a nomad, chasing calories around, always in that delicate balance of food burned against food earned. Plenty and famine were precarious states to sit between.

Perhaps the geomancer could help after all. If the name suggested anything, it was a close connection with nature: they’d be someone who watched the way the seasons turned and how the land reacted. He was keenly hungry – he was certain they all were – but he wasn’t going to complain, because what would be the point?

When he was younger, he’d always tried to wheedle something from the kitchen, no matter what time of day it was. But food was always there, and his mother was the gatekeeper. Occasionally she would relent. Most times she would not. Here, there was no food, no morsel being kept back. Only finding or catching something would change that.

They started upriver again, heading for the notch between the two peaks ahead. There were no more houses, at least that they could see. It felt like they were walking through forests so ancient that no one had ever walked that way before, and though Grace must have passed that way only the day before, there was no sign of her passing.