I was huddled in the straw among the peat. The kind wagoner had bought a long woollen scarf from a street-seller. I wound it round me as well as I could, but it was a poor substitute for a cloak. I didn’t dream of telling him, but the wool was very poor quality, I could put my finger through it without the slightest effort. Indeed, it is wrong to say I was uncomfortable because of the cold. I was now numb, and felt nothing. I could only bless Lei’s leather jerkin; without it I’d have been frozen stiff. The flakes fell on my shoulders and hood and knees and did not melt. The snow did not fall off, either, even when I bobbed my head to avoid hanging inn-signs. It seemed to be sticky or worse still, to have a tenacity of its own. Only when, every ten minutes, I blew upwards, did the snow on my nose melt.

I had an idea I wouldn’t find it so cold if I had a cloak and were moving about instead of having been sitting for hours in the same place. Snow is less cold to the atmosphere than the dry, uncompromising, arid cold which can spike even at your eyeballs and the marrows of your knuckle-bones. There were children playing in these streets; they were little bundles of leather, furs and wool; but their hands were bare and they took up the snow in them and laughed and poured it all over each other.

There was no wind; only the fluctuating, falling, flickering of the white snow; and up in the navy sky above the rooftops one could hardly tell which were stars and which were snowflakes.

As the mossy-textured streets became bluer, the window reflections redder, the sky darker and the stars more silver, the doors opened brief golden oblongs in the walls, shivering the icicles, and parents called the noisy bundles of leather, furs and wool in to meals and my teeth watered and I saw mirages of food and fires in the blue streets and the horses hurried ever onwards.

“What part of the town do you think to set me down in, master?” I asked.

“Peat merchant’s.”

“Oh?”

“You’ll be warmed there—given a meal along of me. Free, not like any inn. Not much money, have you?”

“No, none.”

“Well then.” He yelled as we rounded the corner, then continued in the silence of the muffled streets, then said, “Besides, he might be the man to give you that job you’ve been looking for.”