And behind that thought came legions of other, darker thoughts. They marched like invincible armies at her uppermost mind, and she refused to receive them. Instead, she checked the hang of her unfamiliar sword belt and walked out onto the springy turf of an alien world, where Jon Gang stood with her fine Ifriquy’an charger, who was milk white from tail to nose. Gang gave her a leg up.

She felt like an imposter. She was a laundress. She was certainly no knight.

Gang was wearing a light half-armour. He chuckled. “Cap’n said you’d be riding,” the man said.

Blanche felt herself flush. But Gang’s words gave her heart, and she took the reins. She had been riding for a year; she was competent enough, although she couldn’t imagine riding and fighting, too. Her gauntlets restricted her wrist movements. Everything felt odd.

Her baby kicked.

I am a fool, she thought, and then she rode through the gates and into her own world. She had time to savour the odd violet light of the moment that the portal was crossed, and to feel the disassociation as she entered into Alba, and the baby squirmed and kicked so that for a moment she bent double as if she’d been kicked in the gut.

“Hello in there,” she said calmly. “That’s enough o’ that.”

Jon Gang looked at her.

“The baby,” she said. Her small unborn son or daughter had just crossed all the worlds . . .

She had a flash of vision, and she retched.

She’d never had a waking dream quite so vivid, and it disturbed her, made her doubt things, so that she looked back through the gate and wondered what . . .

She took a deep breath and steadied herself, as she always did. She thought for a moment of the laundry in the palace in Harndon. She wondered where the queen was, and whether her sheets were ironed.

“The casa is over here,” Press said. “Top of the ridge.”

They began to ride up slowly. As she passed through the archers, who were lying on their backs or sitting, men and women pointed, and then they began to cheer.

“The empress!” Oak Pew shouted, and they were all coming to their feet.

Off to the west, a wall of black seemed to carry all of the ill-omen that the world could provide. Tall, slate-coloured clouds pregnant with snow rolled toward them, a blanket of cloud and snow that gradually cut off the sun and seemed to cover the world beyond Lissen Carak in a whirl of darkness.

Blanche turned and looked up into the clouds.

The wave front of Ash’s terror rolled down the plain of Albinkirk, but it passed her by; and as she rode up the last of the hill, the company’s archers were closing up and forming their lines, and the lines were coming up the hill behind her like waves crashing on a beach.