“Learning that will burn weeks,” Corvus protested. “Think hours.”

Edda didn’t seem to hear the giant talking raven. She turned her attention to the others, each in their turn. She remembered Burr as a warrior who had once passed on gloriously in single combat with an angel. This revelation certainly caused Lyne and Mard to look at the spearman in a new light.

Those two Bufrect boys came in for examination next. Their clan lived round the edges of a steep rocky peninsula projecting from the southern end of Calla. It pointed into a broad, short Shiver that connected straight to the ocean. So they were seagoing folk. They’d joined the Quest on a lark, not without one or two swift kicks in the arse from their matriarch Paralonda. Since then, during wetter, colder, duller moments, they’d made no secret of regretting it. But by the time Edda was done talking to them it was clear there’d be no more second thoughts.

“You make Questing sound grand,” Corvus pointed out. “Perhaps setting foot out of this valley every few centuries would do you good!”

Brindle was the only one of the visitors Edda had not chatted with yet, and so it seemed natural he’d be next. But instead he and Edda merely looked at each other, arriving at some wordless understanding.

Food had made them all sleepy and so at Edda’s invitation they spread out into various rooms of the cottage. For a small place, it had an extraordinary number of nooks and, as it were, backwaters, always surprising the visitor as she came round a corner. Before long Prim had found the perfect one for her, curled up in it, and fallen asleep. She rose once in the middle of the night to go outside and empty her bladder, and as she went in and out she overheard Edda and Brindle conversing in low tones, but could make out only a single word, which was “Spring.” After that she slept very soundly.

She had a dream in which radiant light was shining down from the Palace, and she could not escape its glare, which penetrated even her closed eyelids. She was down on the ground far below, prostrate, but through the earth she could feel, more than hear, a deep grinding, as though the underpinnings of the Land itself were being invisibly reshaped. This was not the pick-and-shovel work of Beedles toiling under the lash, but something that hearkened to the Before Times and the doings of Thingor. Standing up and turning her back to the light, she found herself gazing up into mountains, black at the base, white with snow above that, but hidden at the top behind storm clouds that reached up into the sky as high as El’s Pinnacle, wreathed at the top with blue lightning.