They ride on through the morning, the road passing through water meadows skimmed with grey ice, and stands of naked trees. Katherine’s muscles ache from unfamiliar exertions of the saddle and she is feverish, half frozen, half broiled. But they must not stop. They ride a league, then another, and all the while Tudor’s army seems to gain on them, his scurriers stretching forward along the road towards them, then sliding back, only to come up again.

A mile later she looks around and a riding party is setting out more purposefully along the road towards them. They have been seen, she thinks, two lone dots on the horizon, and someone has given the order that they be hunted down. Ten men she guesses, pale in their livery coats, long spears in their stirrups. There is something about them that draws her up short. A big man, riding what looks like a carthorse.

‘Thomas!’ she shouts again.

Thomas flinches at her shout and turns to squint into the distance where she is pointing.

‘It can’t be,’ he says. ‘It’s just another big man.’

‘We must get off the road now,’ she says. ‘There is a turning. Look.’

Half a league ahead is a clutch of cottages at a crossroads, smokeless and deserted like everywhere else in this county. If they can reach them they may be able to leave this road and cut away up into the hills and let the army pass. She hopes that she is wrong about Riven and the giant being among them.

They use their heels hard and though they are done in, the horses are tough, and manage an extra turn of speed. They reach the crossroads between the cottages and strike off to the left, northwards. The path is barely that, but it serves, and takes them through an orchard of crouched apple trees and past a watermill where the wheel creaks and thumps, creaks and thumps above the flare of water in the rill below.

Katherine is numb with cold now, sick with hunger and fatigue, her pony near halt, near dead perhaps. She feels likely to fall from the saddle again, but still they don’t stop. Their path runs along the river’s bank and then through its water meadows. Hills rise up either side. Ahead is a wood.

‘What should we do if they come this way?’ she calls.

‘I’m trying to think what Walter would do,’ Thomas says.

She supposes he will stop and volunteer to hold the road while she rides on. It is the sort of thing he might suggest, just as he had on the other side of the hills in Wales, and suddenly the thought terrifies her. Without Thomas, there is nothing.