‘Here.’ Ontin handed Thaxa a mug of heady Gairan beer. ‘I feel like I need it, though it’s not yet noon.’ He took a deep draught himself. ‘What brings you here, my friend?’

Thaxa drank gratefully. ‘Fishermen. A party came in last night. The frost got to them.’ The sea before the Wall had been frozen solid for a long while, few boats had made it out since Crimm had lost the Sabet before the autumn equinox, but the fishermen were going out anyhow, walking out to try their luck at ice fishing.

Ontin nodded. ‘I’ll come.’

Thaxa glanced at the family. ‘They’re from your estate?’

‘Yes, from a wet-house.’ A house on stilts, built on a foundation of boulders and logs sunk into a wetland. ‘You should see it, looks very odd now, stranded high above ground that’s dried out and then frozen – you have to use a ladder to get to the door. When the cold set in, their eel catch died off . . .’

In Northland landholding was frowned on as a disreputable practice of farming kingdoms. Here, most of the land was held in common trust, for it was a shared larder for a people who still at bottom relied on an economy of gathering and hunting. But there were instances of temporary landholding for management purposes, for example when a stretch of land needed leadership in developing. After the rainy years had flooded swathes of Northland, some land had been allowed to revert to ancestral wetland, and the people who lived there, like this family, had needed investment and guidance in a way of life that was very ancient, but new to them. That was the job of Ontin, as much a duty as a privilege, for which he was paid a proportion of the land’s bounty. The family would be expected to give up the land on his and his wife’s death; there was no inherited property. But no guidance had been enough for this poor family, it seemed.

‘We had to take them in,’ Ontin murmured. ‘What else could we do? I can treat that one for her hunger, and the other has diarrhoea I’m treating with salt and honey. Thaxa, I’ve seen it before, all over my estate and beyond. The growing season was just too short, just a month or so between the last frosts of spring and the first of autumn.’

‘The dole of salted fish—’

‘Gone in a flash. And all this, Thaxa, within a morning’s walk of Etxelur itself. What is happening deeper in the country? We may never even know.’

Thaxa touched his shoulder. ‘We must do what we can. As you are helping these poor people. Come with me to my house at the Wall this afternoon; I’m having the fishermen brought there for you to see to. And there’s to be a discussion this afternoon on how to cope with the winter.’

Ontin laughed hollowly. ‘Cope?’