His hands were wrapped in gauze that needed changing a dozen times a day. Mother Dark’s eyes saw through red tears and blotted linen, or, as was increasingly the case, they saw nothing at all, as he had taken to sliding his hands into the thick sleeves of his woollen robe, a habit the other priests now copied.

Behind him, in the Citadel, a plague had come, a kind of fever. In a body with nothing to do, the mind will dance. But that was the least of it. Some dances mapped steps into madness, with ferocious momentum. He was weary of the spies, the small groups huddled whispering in corners, the strange glances and guarded expressions. Even more tiring, beneath all that he was witness to roiled an undercurrent of fear, and that was difficult to swim against.

The future was a place of uncertain promise in the best of times, where hope and optimism warred with doubt and despair, and there were those who fought such battles in the streets, or in the home, with the enemy no longer the shadow in one’s own soul, but someone else – a neighbour, a wife or a husband, a liege or a peasant. Doubt is the enemy. Despair a weakness, and hope becomes not something to strive for, but a virtue eager to draw blood from every sceptic.

‘Turn me away from the unsightly!’ the optimists cry. ‘Yield this dream to joy, to revelry and laughter. Enough confabulation and noise to drown the distant cries of the suffering, to blind me to the world’s woes! What care I for tragedies not of my own making? Such things are beyond my control, anyway, and indeed beyond my ability to change.’

In many ways, Endest had no argument with such views. The heart’s capacity was finite. So people explained, again and again, to justify all that had grown cold and lifeless within them. If imagination had no limits, surely the soul did.

And yet, what thing of certain limit can in turn create something limitless? This seems a breaking of some fundamental law. The unbound from the bound, the infinite from the finite. How can such things be?

Eyes in his hands, to make witness to all that he did. He had set out in search of decency, and now, striding into the Winter Market, his own eyes watering to the sudden heat beneath the cloth roof, the redolent odours of myriad people, foodstuffs and animals. The first thing his gaze found was a wall of tiny wooden cages, stacked high, each cage home to a songbird.

There was no song in their voices. Instead, a cacophony of terrible stress and fear assailed him. As if of their own accord, his hands slid out from his sleeves.