I forced myself to look at the others, and to remember that they had even greater cause for fear than I, wondering if this was the moment they would baulk. Truly I would not have blamed them.

Analivia had dismounted when I did and she was standing beside me. Her yellow hair had a strange greenish tinge from the fading sunset behind her but her face was shadowed so that it was hard to see her expression. Ahmedri stood on the other side of her, turned side on so that the bronze light of the fading dusk showed his grim expression, and that of Swallow’s, beyond him.

‘It must be very bad,’ Dameon said softly, and I turned the other way to see he was swaying beside me, his face grey. With a cry of remorse, I took his arm and made him sit down on the ground. This broke the stunned and dreadful silence of the others.

‘He feels what we feel; all of us,’ I reminded them, knowing that none of them had the ability to shield their feelings to spare him. Even I had only a rough emotional shield that I had never properly mastered.

Dameon said shakily, ‘I ought to have shielded myself but I wasn’t expecting anything.’

‘I fear none of us was expecting this,’ Swallow said. He laid a hand on Dameon’s shoulder. ‘I am sorry, my friend.’

‘Don’t be concerned for me,’ Dameon said. ‘Tell me what you see, if you can bear it.’

It was Analivia who answered. She was again staring out to the east. ‘This is what I saw in my dream,’ she said. ‘This dead, awful blackness, not just beyond the mountains as we see now, but forever and everywhere. This is what will happen to the Land and to Sador and all the other places if we don’t make sure Sentinel can never be used. The worst of it is that I have seen how the world is trying to recover from what was done to it. I always heard that these mountains were utterly barren and full of tainted ground, but we have found trees and grass and clean water. The mountains are trying hard to heal and maybe even down there on the plain there are places where the taint grows thin and life is struggling back. But what is the use of it if the Great White happens again?’ she demanded, rounding on us fiercely. Her voice and face were determined, though I now saw that there were tears running down her cheeks.

‘I am terrified to go down there and to walk over that and I fear what it will mean for all of us, even if the wolves can find a cleaner path some of the way,’ she went on urgently. ‘But if that is what it takes to keep the world safe, I will do it.’

I stared at her, struck dumb by her courage.