The horsemen, when she sees them, are obvious enough. They aren’t trying to hide. They are riding fast, flashing through the trees, racing to catch them.

‘Look!’ she cries. ‘Thomas!’

Thomas whips around. Walter too.

‘Can you see him? Is he there?’ Thomas asks.

They are still too far away to know.

‘I don’t know.’

‘How many?’

‘Five? Ten?’

The pollaxe is already in Thomas’s hands.

‘Not here,’ Walter says. ‘There’ll be a better place up there.’

He points ahead to a couple of cottages on the side of the road. Behind them is the suggestion of a path cutting up into the wooded hills behind. They turn and ride hard. Even Margaret jabs her heels and her horse starts a trot. They ride until they reach the cottages and then find the cut through to the trees behind them. It is another drovers’ path, though this one is paved here and there with larger stones as if it might have been one of the old Roman roads. The boy burbles something.

‘This path leads up to something he is calling Sarn Helen,’ Margaret reports. ‘He says it takes you to Brecon, but it goes through the hills, which he fears on account of the weather.’

‘We’ll worry about the weather later. Is Brecon good?’

Margaret talks to the boy and tells them that Brecon is one way to England.

‘Come on then,’ Walter says. He forces his horse through a ford. They all follow and ride up into the trees, tall, silver-barked, with pale leaf mould on the ground and snow whispering through the naked branches above. They follow the path as it cuts across the slope and then doubles back again.

‘Here,’ Walter says, getting off his horse where the path turns. It is narrow here, cinched by tall earth banks. Walter steps aside to let them pass.

Thomas gets off his horse.

‘Give me your arrows, Walter,’ he says.

Walter turns to him, his face oddly placid.

‘No,’ he says, in a voice to match. ‘You give me yours. I’ll stay. You two go. You take the girl, understand? It’s her he wants dead, isn’t it? You saw what they did to Dafydd’s Gwen – can you imagine what they’ll do to her? So whatever happens, she has to live. Understand? Otherwise, all this is a waste, isn’t it?’ He gestures vaguely to take in everything.

‘No, Walter,’ Thomas argues. ‘You always say it yourself. This isn’t your fight.’

‘And it’s yours? A couple of servants from Lincoln?’

‘We were never servants,’ Katherine tells him. She’s dismounted and walks up to where they are talking. She feels her lack of size now, standing downhill from them, but she knows the time has come. Both are looking at her. Walter frowns, curls his lip.

‘What were you then?’ he asks.

‘We were ecclesiastics,’ she says. ‘Thomas is a canon of the Order of St Gilbert.’