Surprised and not quite clear about her meaning, I projected myself into the memory. I was startled to find that Iriny had entered it as well, and so there were two of her; the rememberer who stood by me, and the younger Iriny who was the subject of the memory. We were standing in a moonlit garden and the younger Iriny was looking about her with a frown of deep concentration. She had never been beautiful but she had an animal vitality and strength and a vividness of expression that made her compelling to watch. She could not see us for we were not part of the memory, and yet the memory itself was so vivid and visceral that I might truly have been standing in a somewhat neglected and overgrown garden.

‘Where is the statue?’ I whispered.

‘There is no need to whisper,’ the gypsy said, though in fact she spoke more softly than usual, too. ‘This is a memory of the first time I saw the statue and I did not know exactly where it was. I thought this would be a better memory than later visits to the statue, because I did not look so closely ever again. See.’

Her younger self seemed suddenly to make up her mind which way to go, and when she pushed her way through some raggedy-looking clumps of may bushes, we followed. I felt the prickle of sharp-edged leaves through my clothes and a fine spray of tiny cold drops splattered against my cheek when a branch sprang back after Iriny released it, and I wondered how we could interact with the environment of the memory when its subject could not see us.

The younger Iriny reached a little clearing and my heart leapt at the sight of a white statue in its midst, half overgrown with coiling creeper. A single glimpse was all I needed to identify it as Cassy’s handiwork, but as I came closer, I saw that it was finer work than the glass statue that she had created in the Beforetime, yet less refined than the wall friezes she had created inside the Earthtemple. This fitted with the statue being created during Cassandra’s final days in the Land, before she came to Sador.

I glanced at Iriny, who was watching with a curiously blank expression as her younger self approached the statue with evident reverence. It was of a powerful, broad-shouldered man of middle years with a hawkish nose, high cheekbones and eyes that slanted up at the outer edges. His was not a beautiful or handsome face but one full of strength and character. He was hunkered down as Khuria had once described, gazing away into the distance as if contemplating which trail to take. There was a deep scar etched in one cheek and a good deal of pride in his expression and in the tilt of his head.