I wondered what he saw with his spirit-eyes, and then I wondered about Fey, who had vanished at some point during our journey from the hollow where she had attacked Moss. Was her attachment to the enthraller so potent that she would try to fly across the Blacklands to rejoin us later, and if so, how would she manage to locate Gavyn? She was not a dog to sniff a trail, even if that had been possible on tainted ground, yet birds had eyes that could see very far and they flew in patterns and returned season after season to the same nesting place at the same time of year, so perhaps, just as the wolves saw clean earth amidst tainted, birds could see trails in the air that humans and other beasts did not.

I noticed that Dameon was standing close to Rasial and Gavyn, and it struck me that the boy was probably the most peaceful company the empath could have, since he appeared not to experience emotions as other people did. I understood now the reason for Gavyn’s inability to relate to other people, yet it seemed to me the knowledge had roused a whole new thorny crop of questions. Perhaps it was always so with true knowledge.

‘This is a queer sort of storm,’ Swallow muttered, and I turned to see him gazing up at the low ceiling of black cloud, arms folded across his chest. Lightning had begun to play and shimmer over the underside of the clouds and I heard a low muffled rumble of thunder. The gypsy looked at me. ‘It looms and mutters but does not break.’

‘It seems to me the weather is always strange where the earth has been tainted,’ I said, shrugging. ‘Look at the pass up to the valley where Obernewtyn stands, how it often rains there when it rains nowhere else.’

‘It was worse when I came to Obernewtyn,’ Dameon said. ‘There were constant storms in the pass, and yet travel a little way either side of it and the sun was shining.’

‘I remember there was a storm the night I arrived at Obernewtyn,’ I murmured. ‘I was so afraid, and yet I did not know that I was going to a place where I would eventually find everything I ever wanted in life.’ Until I had to leave it, I thought. But the ache that usually accompanied thoughts of Obernewtyn was tempered by the knowledge that I had left to ensure that it and all of the other green sweet places left in the battered world would not be reduced to this bleak deadness.

‘The ground is very wet over here,’ Ahmedri observed. The tribesman was now standing in a dip in the ground where the wolves had initially clustered.