He agrees to let them share his fire, but he has no news, not of Tudor or Riven, or any of the battle of which the Brecon innkeeper told them. He has not even heard that there are any wars, and is only able to tell them that they are still on the right road to Leominster, and that they are in for cold weather. He guts the fish on the floor without much care, throwing the entrails to seethe in the flames. Then he boils the fish in water in a blackened pot that hangs from a bar above the fire. He has no interest in whence they’ve come or whither they are going and once he’s eaten his share of the fish, he falls asleep where he sits by his fire, keeling over on to the hard-packed ground and snoring glutinously through the night.

Thomas spreads his blanket awkwardly over them both, and offers her the ledger on which to rest her head, but she refuses, and in the morning, when they rise the carpenter is outside among low mounds of chipped wood, splitting a log with his froe. Overhead the sky is like milk and the cold fiercer than ever and the carpenter’s body is steaming. Within a moment Katherine is shivering in her cloak and her face is burning in the wind. The horses stumble on the iron-hard mud as they cross a low plateau and descend to find another hamlet, also deserted.

‘They must have heard Tudor is coming,’ Thomas says.

The same is true of the next village. And the next.

‘We shall starve if we don’t eat soon,’ Thomas tells her.

‘Is it just us?’ she asks. ‘Or does everybody travel so uncertainly?’

‘Perhaps we ought to return to the man with the fish? We can buy some from him.’

She turns in her saddle just as they crest the next low rise.

‘Thomas!’

He turns and stands in his stirrups and peers back over her head. The road behind them, not three leagues distant, is now a line of horsemen.

‘Dear God!’ he says. ‘They have moved up fast. It can only be the vanguard.’

They kick their horses and crest the hill, but the animals are too tired and cold and hungry and they can manage no more than a trot.

‘We must not stop until we reach Leominster,’ Thomas says. ‘The town will shut their gates on Tudor, and the army will pass them by. That’s what the innkeeper said.’

‘Then let us pray for that,’ Katherine says. ‘But how far is it?’

‘He said no more than two days. We have already ridden one, so . . .’

‘Can we outrun them?’

‘I don’t know.’