Boreas turned some meat roasting on a spit, for he could smell burning. He laid his hand on his bow’s riser, pretending to be leaning carelessly.

‘My belongings are meagre.’ He wove a gruff, metallic thread of warning into his apparently calm tone. ‘There are a few of them. But I’m attached to them. I shall defend them to the death.’

‘I’m no bandit,’ said the man, who had pretended to be a menhir, in a deep voice. ‘I’m a pilgrim.’

The pilgrim was tall and powerfully built, easily measuring seven feet, and in order to balance him on a weighing scales Boreas would have bet anything that a weight of at least five-and-twenty stone would have been required. His pilgrim’s staff, a pole as thick as a cart shaft, looked like a walking cane in his hand. Boreas Mun was indeed amazed how such a huge clodhopper was able to steal up so agilely. He was also somewhat alarmed. His bow, a composite seventy-pounder, with which he could down an elk at four dozen paces, suddenly seemed a small, fragile child’s toy.

‘I’m a pilgrim,’ repeated the powerful man. ‘I mean no—’

‘And the other man,’ Boreas interrupted sharply. ‘Let him come out too.’

‘What oth—?’ stammered the pilgrim and broke off, seeing a slender silhouette, noiseless as a shadow, emerging from the gloom on the other side. This time Boreas Mun wasn’t at all amazed. The other man–his way of moving immediately betrayed it to the tracker’s trained eye–was an elf. And it is no disgrace to be sneaked up on by an elf.

‘I ask for forgiveness,’ said the elf in a strangely un-elven, slightly husky voice. ‘I hid from both of you gentlemen not from evil intentions, but from fear. I’d turn that spit over.’

‘Indeed,’ said the pilgrim, leaning on his staff and sniffing audibly. ‘The meat’s cooked more than enough on that side.’

Boreas turned the spit, sighed and cleared his throat. And sighed again.

‘Sit you down, gentlemen,’ he decided. ‘And wait. The animal will be done any minute. Ha, verily, he’s a fool who denies meat to travellers on the road.’

The fat dribbled onto the fire with a hiss, the fire flared up. It became brighter.

The pilgrim was wearing a felt hat with a broad brim, whose shadow quite effectively covered his face. A turban made from colourful cloth, not covering his face, served as headgear for the elf. When they saw his face in the glare of the campfire, both men–Boreas and the pilgrim–shuddered. But didn’t utter so much as a gasp, not even a soft one, at the sight of the face, once no doubt elfinly beautiful, now disfigured by a hideous scar running diagonally across his forehead, brow, nose and cheek to his chin.

Boreas Mun cleared his throat and turned the spit again.