The inn has a stock pond, and they eat fish soup and bread and yet more roasted cheese and despite the brackish ale no one says much. The innkeeper has heard of Tudor’s landing, but knows nothing of Riven’s party. Katherine sits by the fire watching the steam rise from her clothes and now she misses the solid presence of Owen, the constant jabber of Dafydd.

That night Margaret sleeps on her back, breathing reedily and coughing in her sleep, and Katherine can’t sleep because of it. At length Thomas places an arm around her shoulders to calm her, and it is still there the next morning when they wake before dawn.

‘More bloody snow,’ Walter says.

Outside the snow is a hard crust and as they move off a woman shouts something from the doorway of her house.

‘She says we’re wrong to be taking this road,’ Margaret tells them through her wheezing. ‘She says there’s bad weather on the way.’

But there seems to be nothing they can do. They ride on out of the village, under the church where the doors are closed and the bell is silent and through the gatehouse beyond which the river flows swiftly under a wooden bridge. Plates of frosted ice spin on its surface.

All that morning they ride north with the river at their side, the snow on their backs. The road gets worse the farther they go, rising into the hills. Bushes grow undisturbed in the middle of the track now, and sections seem to have slipped into the river below. The valley sides rise up around them. It gets steeper and they pass waterfalls where brown water churns in peat-coloured pools and mist rises into the air. Icicles hang from the rocks.

‘How much farther, Margaret?’ Katherine asks.

‘Why do you imagine that I should I know?’

‘Ask the boy.’

She does so.

‘He says we ought to reach a place he calls Merthyr tonight,’ Margaret tells them. ‘He says he’s only been this way before, once, with my father when he was going to Ludlow, that last time.’

There is silence and after a while they stop for bread in a village and buy warm cheese from a woman who’ll only part with it for two of Walter’s coins.

‘Daylight bloody robbery,’ Walter mutters, but he pays because they will collapse without it. They feed the horses and then mount up again. It is too cold to linger.

As they are riding out, with the promise of only a few leagues before they stop for the night, Katherine looks back. Her gaze travels from the village where snow lies thick on the thatch, and all the way along the valley side, back along the dark thread of the road down which they’ve travelled.