They were all waiting for Pyxeas.

At last Alxa’s great-uncle came bustling into the Hall, with slates and scrolls of paper under his arm. He wasn’t in the stylised wolf-fur cloak he should have been wearing to mark his membership of his own House of scholars and priests; instead he wore smelly-looking furs that seemed as if they were still crusted with seawater. And he was accompanied by a young man, short, stocky, plump-looking, with a flat, sketchy face and short dark hair. He too was bundled up in a fur jacket and trousers, and he looked uncomfortably hot. He was a Coldlander, Alxa realised; he must have travelled back across the ocean with Pyxeas. The scholar glanced around, squinting, short-sighted, comical with his ruddy face and shock of snow-white hair sticking up around a bald pate. Alxa hadn’t seen him for three years; he seemed a lot older than she remembered.

Everybody was staring. One of the foreigners laughed behind her hand.

‘Oh,’ Pyxeas said at last. ‘Am I late? You should have started without me.’

Ywa stood, her black owl cloak rustling, and indicated empty seats on the stage close to her. ‘Please sit, Uncle. And your, umm, companion.’

‘Where’s the delegation from Cathay? My colleague Bolghai promised me his collated information on the changing mix of atmospheric gases which, which— Well, we won’t achieve full understanding without that. But if he’s not here, he’s not here.’ He looked up at Ywa. ‘Carry on, child, carry on!’

Alxa admired Ywa’s calm in the face of such provocation. She glanced around the room. ‘Welcome to the Distribution of the Giving Bounty. Who would like to approach the Council first?’

The visiting parties each sent up a delegate to speak before the Annids, one after another.

A Frank, from northern Gaira, was the first to speak. He wore a woollen tunic over thick leather leggings, his greying blond hair was worn long, and he had a carefully shaped and combed moustache. He was old for a farmer – more than forty, at least – and Alxa thought his face was oddly slack, like an empty sack, the face of a man once plump. ‘It began with the years of rain,’ he said. ‘Five years back for us, it was – I know it’s been different for some of you, the detail of it anyhow. That first summer we got hailstones the size of your fist that just smashed down our crops . . .’ As he spoke, translators from the House of the Jackdaws, the traders and negotiators, murmured into the ears of the Annids. ‘We tried harvesting the grain but it was wet and soft. Even the hay was too wet to be cured. Animals stuck in the mud or drowned, cattle, sheep. Come the next summer our reserves were exhausted, and it rained so hard we couldn’t get the planting done. That was the year the rest of the animals were slaughtered.’ He was a proud man, Alxa could see that. He hated to be standing here begging for help. Yet here he was.