If Thomas can just keep up this rhythm with the boat pole, and if he can stay on the right-hand side of the river, then he need think of nothing else, need think of nothing that has happened and of nothing that might yet happen. His feet throb with the cold and his head rings from Riven’s blow, but he goes on, letting the water run down his arm as he pushes and lifts, pushes and lifts, and all the while the giant crashes along the riverbank beside them.

Then, suddenly, the giant stops. He stands in the bulrushes and the sedge where the wind makes a tuneless song among the sodden seed spikes. But now Thomas can hear something else. The giant points ahead and shouts. There is something almost sorrowful in his expression. He shouts again and waves his arms.

‘Brother?’ the sister says. She is turning and pointing ahead. ‘Have you seen?’

Ahead of them the banks of reeds part, and the river on which they have been travelling meets another, and this new water is broad, swollen with rainwater and snowmelt, heading south in spate. The lighter joins it and they are sucked into its turbid current. Water laps over the lighter’s sides, pooling under their feet. The sister begins trying to scoop it out with her hands.

‘We’re sinking,’ she says. ‘We must reach the other side.’

But the river pulls them on and the farther they go, the wider apart the riverbanks become. They pass fishponds and eel farms and all along the banks the rushes have been clubbed and harvested. Two men in russet hoods stop digging in a field with a mattock and watch them as they go, as does a third on horseback, who turns and stares, a hunting bird perched on his wrist.