They rode on then. After several miles, Sparhawk began to have a vague sense of unease. Although he had been travelling the road between Demos and Cimmura since he had been a young man, it suddenly began to look strange to him. There were hills in places where there should not have been hills, and they passed a large, prosperous-looking farmstead Sparhawk had never seen before. He began to check his map.

‘What’s the matter?’ Kalten asked him.

‘Is there any way we could have made a wrong turn? I’ve been travelling this road back and forth for over twenty years now, and suddenly the usual landmarks aren’t there any more.’

‘Oh, that’s fine, Sparhawk,’ Kalten said sarcastically. He turned and looked back over his shoulder at the others. ‘Our glorious leader here has managed to get us lost,’ he announced. ‘We blindly followed him half-way across the world, and now he manages to lose his way not five leagues from home. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m beginning to experience a severe erosion of confidence here.’

‘Do you want to do this?’ Sparhawk asked him flatly.

‘And lose this opportunity to sit back and carp and criticize? Don’t be silly.’

They were obviously not going to reach any recognizable destination before dark, and they had not come prepared for camping out in the open. Sparhawk began to grow alarmed.

Flute thrust her head out of one of the windows of the carriage. ‘What’s the matter, Sparhawk?’ she asked.

‘We’re going to have to find some place to stay the night,’ he told her, ‘and we haven’t passed any kind of house for the last ten miles.’

‘Just keep going, Sparhawk,’ she instructed.

‘It’s going to start getting dark before long, Flute.’

‘Then we’d better hurry, hadn’t we?’ She disappeared back inside the carriage.

They reached a hilltop just at dusk and looked out over a valley that absolutely could not have been where it was. The land below was grassy and gently rolling, dotted here and there with copses of white-trunked birch trees. About half-way down the hill was a low, sprawling, thatch-roofed house with golden candlelight streaming from its windows.

‘Maybe they’ll put us up for the night,’ Stragen suggested.

‘Hurry right along now, gentlemen,’ Flute instructed from the carriage. ‘Supper’s waiting, and we don’t want it to get cold.’

‘She enjoys doing that to people, doesn’t she?’ Stragen said.

‘Oh, yes,’ Sparhawk agreed, ‘probably more than anything else she gets to do.’