The bear is sitting on a stool behind the door, the cutlass resting on her lap. Her teeth are bared and her eyes are round and staring. Scars cover her patchy fur and a gold hoop dangles from one ear. Rather unusually for a bear she’s wearing a dress covered in rosebuds with a filthy apron tied over the top.

Rose gasps and says, “Carol Brocklebank?” The bear nods and Rose turns to glare at me. “Arthur, did you put my Sylvanian bear in your stupid pirate village?”

I shrug. “I guess so,” I say, although, honestly, I can’t remember.

“Rose . . . Arthur,” says Win, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but that bear looks angry!”

“Arrrrrggghhh!” growls Carol. Then she hops off the stool, ducks under the bar, and reappears a moment later. She raises a dirty clawed finger and beckons me closer.

“Who? Me?” I say, but Rose is already pushing me forward.

Carol runs the tip of her saber over the bottles behind the bar, making them clink. Then she looks at me and raises a bushy eyebrow.

“She wants to know what we’re having to drink,” says Rose.

Win bangs his fist on the bar. “Hot glögg!”

It seems like the safest choice. “Three pints of hot muskot glögg, please,” I say to the bear.

She nods, like I’ve made an excellent choice, then lifts the lid off a steaming cauldron and ladles something thick and brown into mugs. Then she holds out a paw.

Win nudges me. “Go on, Arthur, pay her.”

I feel in my pockets, but except for the map, they’re empty. “I haven’t got anything to pay her with. Give her the light bottle, Rose, or the compass.”

“No!” Rose clutches Mitch’s bag to her. “We must have something else she’d like. What would you have paid with when you were little?”

“I don’t know. Leaves . . . stones? Imaginary money?”

“Try that,” she says.

Feeling a bit stupid I pull a handful of invisible coins out of my pocket. “One,” I say and I mime dropping the coin into her paw, “two, three.”

The bear stares at her paw and scowls.

“Don’t be so stingy,” says Rose. “Give her more.”

So I drop the whole handful of invisible coins into her paw and even pick one up that’s rolled onto the floor. The bear nods, satisfied, and we take our brimming mugs over to a table by the fire.

The drink tastes a bit like hot-cross buns and it gives me a warm glow inside. For a while we sip in silence, then the bear picks up an accordion and starts to play a sinister tune.

“Really one of us should be on watch,” says Rose. “When Hati and the wolves get out of the mountain they’re going to come straight across the plain. If we know they’re coming we’ll have time to escape.”