‘God give you prosperity!’ Hastings calls after her, and she does not know if he is laughing at her. She hurries back to the inn, suddenly and completely terrified, so that even the sight of four canons rushing to compline unsettles her, and she arrives back at the inn folded in on herself and consumed with dread.

But where is Thomas?

As night falls her panic only increases. She sits on a chest and waits. She eats supper alone at the end of the table. Hours pass. The innkeeper, gaunt as a gallows, comes to cover the fire and Thomas is still not back. She sits for a while in the bloom of a spitting tallow candle and she hears without listening to them the fearful conversations of those at the table where all the talk is of the viciousness of the Queen’s Scottish troops.

‘She cannot afford to pay them in anything but booty,’ one man says.

Eventually the innkeeper draws the bar across the door and she retires upstairs to the room she’s shared with two others, a married couple who sometimes sigh in the night and do so that night while she lies there, listening to the ropes of their bed strain like the timbers of a ship at sea. She misses the heft of Thomas, his curious dusty smell and his arm across her in the night, and she wishes she were plain Kit again, and able to sleep with the others by the fire in the hall.

The next morning he is still not back. She eats in silence, aware of the grey-faced innkeeper studying her from under his heavy brows. Nor is he alone. It seems women do not travel unaccompanied, even in such strange times. She wonders if Thomas will ever come back and for a moment she has another long pang of panic.

What if something has happened to him, some stupid accident? Or can it be something worse? Can Riven or the giant have slipped into town and seen him before he saw them? Can he now be lying in a midden somewhere with his throat cut? His head smashed in? She puts on her cloak and cap and hurries back out into the town. It has started snowing again, heavy flakes from a scudding grey sky that melt on her face, and the streets are full of men in their travelling cloaks, grim-faced, gathered huddled at street corners with weapons over their shoulders and heavy canvas bags on the ground by their feet. Finally the army is on the move. Teams of oxen are being lashed towards the east gate through the mash of straw and dung that covers the road, each pair hauling a high-sided cart loaded with barrels and sacks of beans, spoiling in the snow. Stone-faced men on horseback ride in troops and everywhere they have put on their livery coats and helmets.