‘I know it isn’t much to look at,’ Walks In Mist said as the others settled. And she was right; the floor was rough, the walls unfinished growstone. ‘But that’s what I like about it. That and the view.’

They turned to look out over Northland, a tremendous plain that stretched to the horizon. The sun was low now, the sky a rich deep blue. The marshes and canals shone like ribbons of sky, the old flood mounds cast long shadows, and fires sparked everywhere. At the foot of the Wall itself were tremendous warehouses where even in the gathering dark a steady stream of traffic came and went, and rows of brightly lit shops provided their customers with food, drink, pilgrimage tokens and Giving-day souvenirs.

Walks In Mist leaned from her chair and ran a hand over the lip of the growstone balcony. ‘Think how old this stuff must be. Think what it’s seen, how much history. And now here we are.’

‘Cradled like an eagle chick in the palm of an old man’s hand,’ said Sabela.

Xipuhl laughed, and the dancing mirror on her chest cast reflections from the candle. ‘You are always the poet of our little gang,’ she said to Sabela. Xipuhl was a little older than the others, and was prone to be the one who did the teasing.

But Sabela was right, Walks In Mist thought. She did feel cradled here. She always felt safe in Northland, with its antiquity and stability and the obvious physical strength of its great Wall. Why, here they were, three women from across the lands Northlanders called the Western Continents, all of them comfortably speaking in the only tongue they shared – the liquid language of Northland, a tongue that had nothing in common with their own native speech at all.

The three of them had found each other during the long sea crossing on a huge Northlander ship. Every three years the elders of Etxelur sent a flotilla across the Western Ocean to the Land of the Jaguar to pick up a selection of especially honoured, or especially well-paying, guests from the Western Continents to come to the midsummer Giving. Walks In Mist herself was here for trade; she was one of a delegation from Sky Wolf seeking to expand cotton exports. Xipuhl was part of a formal diplomatic legation from the Land of the Jaguar, and much of her midsummer had been taken up with ‘stuffy meetings with old men in airless rooms’, she had said.

Sabela was the only one without a job during the trip. It was her husband who was in the business of exporting llama and alpaca wool and other High Country textiles to Northland. Sabela’s people were always honoured in Northland because of historic links; the High Country had given Northlanders the potato, a precious crop which, they said, had enabled their unique culture to survive on the fringe of a continent full of farmers. Of the three of them Sabela was the junior partner, Walks In Mist supposed, and she was a rather vague young woman – her head in the clouds, Xipuhl said, just like the pretty country she came from – but on the ship, she had been the one who had brought them together.