A party of hunters quickly formed up. Wielding their spears, tightening their skin jackets around their bodies, they jogged across the growstone shore towards the west, where the bear padded cautiously over a bit of sea ice, silhouetted by the lowering sun.

78

The Fourth Year of the Longwinter: Autumn Equinox

At last word came that ships had been seen, on the eastern horizon.

The three women stood in the shade of Xipuhl’s house, here at the heart of the city called the Altar of the Jaguar. Xipuhl took Sabela’s hand, and Walks In Mist’s, and the three of them stood together as they had that night in the growstone bar in the Wall, three summers ago. Three women, two of them widows now, for Walks In Mist had lost her husband in the flood that had driven her and her children out of the River City, and Xipuhl’s husband had succumbed to the plague last year – and Sabela might as well have been a widow, for Deraj had been dead to her since his betrayal of her with the nestspill girl.

Sabela, a guest here, had already called the twins and packed her bags. And when Walks In Mist arrived she’d had only one question. ‘Are they Northlander ships?’

‘We don’t know yet,’ Xipuhl said gently. ‘They are too far away. And they are very late, if it’s them – midsummer has long gone—’

‘They have come,’ Sabela said firmly. ‘I knew they would, late or not. Come, let’s go to the shore.’

Walks In Mist glanced at Xipuhl, and they shrugged, and made ready.

Sabela would not be sorry to see the last of the Altar of the Jaguar, thankful though she had been for Xipuhl’s hospitality when she had fled north from Tiwanaku with the twins.