Astrid sighed. “This all looks so different from when Signe and Mike and Dad and I came through in the first Change Year,” she said, gesturing at their surroundings. “Most of this was plowed land, winter wheat and black fallow, with gravel roads every mile. See where the dimpled lines run, with more sagebrush and less grass? That’s the old roadbeds.”

“The ironic thing,” Alleyne said, his eyes still on the map, “is that there are probably more people living here now than then. There wasn’t any famine here, and this Lewiston place over a bit west was a substantial city and the ranchers here must have taken in some of them. And of course everyone’s been breeding like rabbits since.”

That’s an odd thing for him to say, Ritva thought absently. Uncle Alleyne and Aunt Astrid only have three themselves. That’s not many at all.

“There was black plague in Lewiston,” Astrid said, her weirdly beautiful face looking stark for an instant. “Pneumonic form. It came in with refugees from Spokane; we heard about it, and Mike turned us back when we saw the smoke from where they burned the bodies. Saw it. And . . . we could smell it. But I know what you mean.”

It took a moment for Ritva to follow the thought; she was distracted by the casual mention of a journey that had become a legend in itself, and hearing her father—whom she barely remembered herself—referred to so humanly as Mike. It had been Astrid who coined the great title of Bear Lord for him, much against Michael Havel’s liking, from what she’d heard.

But I’ve been on a longer trip, and one that will be more of a tale! she thought suddenly. All the way to Nantucket and . . . well, not quite back, for me, not yet. Dad would have been so proud!

Ian nodded agreement.

“It’s the same where I come from, sir, ma’am,” he said, in English—he’d been following the Sindarin conversation fairly well after a spell of total immersion and a lot of saddle-time studying a borrowed phrasebook. “We have more people now than before the Change in the Peace River country too, but there are abandoned fields and big grain elevators and such all over. We only need . . . oh, about one twentieth the tilled land. Less, maybe. I guess it must be like that in a lot of places.”

“Lot o’ people fed from these fields,” Hordle said. Unspoken: And they all died when food couldn’t travel far anymore. “No need to farm most of it now, loik the lad says.”