Boreas cleared his throat quietly. The barely audible note of sarcastic merriment in the elf’s voice proved he knew that the roast came from an enormous rat with bloodshot eyes and huge teeth, only the tail of which measured three ells. The tracker had by no means hunted the gigantic rodent. He had shot it in self-defence, but had decided to roast it. He was a sensible and clear-headed man. He wouldn’t have eaten a rat scavenging on rubbish heaps and eating scraps. But it was a good three hundred miles from the narrow passage of the Elskerdeg pass to the nearest community capable of generating waste. The rat–or, as the elf had said, skrekk–must have been clean and healthy. It hadn’t had any contact with civilisation. So there was nothing it could have been soiled by or infected with.

Soon the last, smallest bone, chewed and sucked clean, landed in the embers. The moon rose over the jagged range of the Fiery Mountains. The wind fed the fire and sparks shot up, dying out and fading amidst the countless twinkling stars.

‘Long on the road, gentlemen?’ Boreas Mun risked another none-too-discreet question, ‘Here, in the Wildernesses? Left the Solveiga Gate behind you long since, if you’ll pardon my asking?’

‘Long since, long since,’ said the pilgrim, ‘is a relative thing. I passed through Solveiga the second day after the September full moon.’

‘Me on the sixth day,’ said the elf.

‘Ha,’ continued Boreas Mun, encouraged by the reaction. ‘It’s a wonder we’ve only met up now, because I also walked that way, or actually rode, for I still had a horse then.’

He fell silent, driving away the unpleasant thoughts and recollections linked to the horse and its loss. He was sure his accidental companions must also have had similar adventures. If they’d been walking the whole time they never would have caught up with him here, near Elskerdeg.

‘I venture, thus,’ he continued, ‘that you set off right after the war, after the Peace of Cintra was concluded, gentlemen. It’s none of my business, naturally, but I dare suppose that you were not pleased by the order and vision of the world created and established in Cintra.’

The lengthy silence that fell by the campfire was interrupted by distant howling. A wolf, probably. Although in the vicinity of the Elskerdeg pass you could never be certain.

‘If I’m to be frank,’ the elf spoke up unexpectedly, ‘I didn’t have the grounds to be pleased with the world and its image following the Peace of Cintra. Not to mention the new order.’

‘In my case it was similar,’ said the pilgrim, crossing his powerful forearms on his chest. ‘Though I came to realise it, as a friend said, post factum.’

Silence reigned for a long time. Even whatever had been howling on the pass was silent.