“That baby was Johnny,” I said. Ardal looked at me in surprise. “Yes, the same Johnny who now leads the community here, and who’s come to speak to you once or twice. He is the eldest of Bran’s sons.”

“Bran being the Chief,” Gull explained, “though Bran was not his real name, but one Liadan gave him, since she wouldn’t use the other. Well, we found him, and a sorry state he was in, unconscious and cramped from being stuffed into a hole not big enough to house a scrap of a dog like Fang there, let alone a fully grown man. Liadan couldn’t carry him. I was hardly better placed, my arms aching, my hands in bloody rags. But I was all the help she had.

“It so happened that the fortress in question was located in the middle of a swamp, a place where one wrong step meant sinking into mud over your head. There was a causeway, but we weren’t offered the use of that. Instead we had to make our way from one clump of foliage to the next, a stride, a leap, an act of blind faith. Liadan had the child on her back; I had the Chief across my shoulders. Our captor was a man who enjoyed games. To be fair, he said, he planned to let us progress a certain distance before his archers began using us for target practice.”

Ardal murmured something that sounded like an Armorican oath.

“It was late in the day,” Gull went on, his eyes going distant as if still, so many years later, he saw the scene with terrible clarity. “The light was fading. Liadan was a slight girl, not tall; it was hard for her to jump from one safe purchase to the next. I was nearly spent. If ever there was a time to abandon hope, that was it. But he’d always given us hope, each one of us in our own darkest moment; he’d always told us that it was worth going on, that we could find a solution, that we simply needed to be the best we could. And there was this girl, with her little child, who’d shown the courage of a seasoned warrior. I’d no choice but to match that. Still, things were looking grim.