His words gave me pause. I had never considered the possibility that Miryum might have brought Straaka’s body into the mountains. It was just possible she could have managed it, for the coercer was prodigiously strong and she would have been able to use a travois some of the time, but it would have been a gruesome journey with a decomposing body. And how would she then have been taken captive? There were no humans in the mountains, other than us, and no beast took captives.

I noticed Swallow and Analivia watching me expectantly, and felt an uneasy surge of anxiety at the knowledge that, although all of them had come into the mountains after having struggled separately and alone with doubt and fear and disbelief, they were now looking to me to guide them. Yet how was I to guide them when they seemed to know all I knew?

I thought of a Beforetime phrase that Garth sometimes used – The blind leading the blind – but I did not say it aloud out of courtesy to Dameon.

‘Have any of you dreamed of where I will go from this valley?’ I asked evenly.

They looked at one another and then Swallow said slowly, ‘You do not know where to go?’

A crucial question, I thought. ‘Up until recently I was convinced that Sentinel was in the Red Land, and the fact that I was supposed to travel there with Dragon and the others seemed a confirmation of this. But I was summoned to the high mountains at the last minute and told I would never return to the Land, and the ships left without me. It may be that I will come to the Red Land in some guise, ere the end, but I do not know how. What I do know is that the same voice that summoned all of you bade me come here to the mountains to seek out a pack of winter wolves so that I might convince them to accompany me. I know not why I need them, nor where I am to go with them, and yet I have been told that my quest will fail if they refuse me. I spoke to the pack leader yesterday and he bade me come here to await his answer. I think he meant to seek a vision that would give him guidance, and it may be that he will vision of where we are to go. Indeed, it must be so, for the voice in my dreams promised that I would have the answers I needed from those I met here in this valley.’

I sighed and shrugged. ‘I thought when I found all of you here that you must have the answers I sought. But having heard your tales, I am back to pinning my hopes on the wolves.’

‘Maybe the voice from our dreams now speaks to the wolf,’ Dameon suggested. I said nothing for the moment, incapable of imparting the news that the dream speaker – my guide and theirs – was dead and we were on our own.