A strong, healthy man with a good mind for navigating the wilderness, who knew where he was going and had an abundance of food to hand could have made the journey to the Filel mountain range in a little less than a day.

  Their group took almost two weeks.

  Lenore couldn’t really complain, when she felt like half of the reason that they were taking so long was because of her. Tristan assured her that she was wrong of course, endlessly supportive as he always was, but she knew it was true. Having a baby in her stomach didn’t make her the best person for a hike – if the rest stops she begged to take weren’t bad enough, she was also having to stop to piss every time she settled into a walking rhythm.

  At least she wasn’t the only reason. They walked at half speed to avoid attracting any large animals or warring bands of soldiers, and so that they could forage for food as they walked. Most of them wore clothes that were barely more than rags, and many had no shoes, which just made the journey slower. The three children in the group, all of whom were under ten years old and couldn’t walk for too long, couldn’t walk for as long as the adults, especially considering that they were almost skeleton thin.

  Their actual skeleton, Warren, was an absolute lifesaver. Every time they made camp, and Lenore was finally able to rest her feet, he would emerge from the trees with the carcass of a deer or a boar, and they would fill their bellies for the night. She had no idea how he was bringing them down all by themselves, but she suspected it was the same reason that no dangerous animals had approached them, even though she herself would probably have made quite a decent meal. She didn’t know if he actively fought them off, or if they just avoided him – Warren made her more than a little uneasy, and not just because he was a skeleton. There was something other about him.

  As well as the meat, they ate berries, nuts, and any fruits that they could find. Root, for all his flaws, knew which of the berries could be safely eaten, and thus they managed to avoid any poisonings once he had been coaxed into demonstrating the safe nature of the berries he picked out.

  The days when the weather was clear were hard. The days when the weather turned were worse. When it rained, it truly rained – thundering sheets of rain that dropped down on them, the trees providing almost no cover against the deluge. They would huddle together in packs, holding onto one another to conserve warmth and praying to various rain gods to move on and leave them be.

  At least the rain was a source of water. They had little to collect it in, but after the rain had fallen the leaves were full of moisture, and sometimes enough drops would pool in the leaf itself that they could take a drink from it. While Lenore did feel a little undignified kneeling down to drink the water from a leaf, it was well worth the effort to feel the water on her tongue.

  After a week, the land around them began to change. Though it was subtle at first, it soon became clear that the ground was sloping upwards, as they reached the lowest parts of the Filel range. The forest still grew at this level, and so for now they had their bountiful sources of food, but it soon became clear that they wouldn’t have their convenient cover forever. As they climbed, the trees began to thin. The sounds of the birds calling one another became less frequent, going from an unending concert to a series of solos and duets. The temperature dropped a little as well.

  Zacharias reminded them the first time that they woke up shivering that winter was growing over closer and was less than four months away, but Nial argued that it was just a result of being higher up, where the air was naturally cooler. The two young men looked like they were about to come to blows over it, before Gerry pulled them both aside and gave them a thorough scolding for fighting.

  Lenore couldn’t have been much prouder of her mother. The woman who had raised her had somehow become the leader of this whole group of refugees, all of whom hung on her words like they were driftwood in the middle of the ocean, and would run to do as she told them as soon as she said it. Although she did also feel a little jealous that Gerry now had things to worry about other than her – it was now left to Tristan, and sometimes Midge, to help her when she felt too tired to walk or was dealing with baby sickness.

  When the day came when they left the forest behind, she was almost too scared to go on. The forest had provided for them for more than a week; leaving it felt like pulling away from a warm embrace, even though she still had the arms of her husband and her mother to look after her. She also had a very personable skeleton, but she guessed that he wasn’t so much of a hugger as them.

  They were well and truly on the mountainside by now, and the air was definitely colder. Fortunately, all of Warren’s hunting had come with a side effect, in the form of a number of furs, crude coats that nevertheless shielded them from the harshness of the winds. There wasn’t enough for everyone, so aside from the children they passed them around so that no-one would go cold for too long. Another idea of Gerry’s, one that people were all eager to follow. That was the strength of her leadership, Lenore thought. They had built this idea of being a community that looked out for one another, one that went all the way back to when they were still prisoners and resolving that as many people should stay alive as possible. As long as what they were asked to do coincided with that idea, people were all too willing to go along with it.

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  The thought made Lenore smile. Her child would certainly have a good number of aunts and uncles, if she lived long enough to bring it into the world.

  “I think that it’s a girl,” she told Tristan one night. They held each other close by the fire, inside the cave that someone had found for the night. Now that they were in the open, fires were dangerous, but the danger they brought was lesser than the danger of going without warmth at all. A mountain goat, Warren’s latest catch, was being prepared now. Her stomach was rumbling looking at it.

  “What makes you say that?” Tristan asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe mothers just know these things.”

  “I wish it were a boy,” said Tristan. “I would name it Dorbin. I don’t know if I deserve to give my child his name, but it is the only way that I can think to honour him.”

  “Dorbin,” said Lenore slowly. “If I’m wrong, then you can call our baby Dorbin. After all, he gave his life to you so that you could be a father. I think that there’s nothing that would please him more.”

  “What about if it’s a girl?” Tristan asked. “Gerry, perhaps?”

  Lenore laughed. “If I named my daughter after mother I would never get her to shut up. She’d be utterly insufferable about it.” She smiled. “Maybe a second name. One that not everyone will hear about. No, I always thought if I had a daughter I would name her for something that always made me happy. The river that used to run through our village, do you remember it?”

  “Of course,” Tristan said. “That day when we went to the river, and the sunlight that came off the water made it seem like you were glowing while you swam backwards and forwards. I thought you might secretly be a god taken human form when I saw that.”

  “You would say that,” said Lenore. “You were already in love with me at the time.”

  “I was always in love with you,” said Tristan. “And, actually, I always will be in love with you. Is that it, then? Would you call our daughter after the river?”

  “River is a pretty name,” Lenore admitted. “But no – there was a story about our river, did you ever hear it? They said that a long time ago, there was a little girl who was very thirsty, so when she came to the river she drank very deeply from it. In fact, she was so thirsty that she drank it all, and left the river completely dry.”

  “I remember this story,” Tristan said. But he let her finish it.

  “The people of the village came to her and asked for her to return their water, because they needed some of it for themselves. The little girl agreed to give back the water, but only if she could live in the river and take a drink whenever she wanted. She would drink the most during the summer, which was why the waters would become lower, and as the seasons turned she would take less and less and the waters would rise again. She stayed there for many years, and eventually the people of the village forgot that there had ever been a day when she didn’t live in their river. They called her Hyra, the One of the Water, and she became a guardian spirit of the river, drinking it every year so that she would never be thirsty again.”

  Lenore sighed. “Now there is no-one there who needs the water, and it may have even been damned. But I think our daughter could be called Hyra.”

  “Hyra,” Tristan repeated. “It’s a beautiful name.”

  “And you know something?” asked Lenore. “When we were children, and we used to play at the river, there was this little girl who would sometimes come to play with us. But I would never see her anywhere else, besides at that river. Maybe that was Hyra coming to say hello. Perhaps, because of that, she wouldn’t mind us naming our daughter after her.”

  Tristan took her face in his hand, and leaned forwards to kiss her on the lips. “I think maybe it should be a girl,” he said. “So that she could have a name that’s as beautiful as her mother.”

  “Then how would you honour Dorbin?” Lenore asked.

  Tristan shrugged. “We can have another baby.” He kissed her again, and Lenore felt the cave around them melt away as she was pulled into his warmth. It was several seconds before she allowed him to pull away, and as soon as his lips no longer touched hers she missed them.

  “I have missed you,” she said. “Being in those cages was agony.”

  “I know,” he said. “I promise not to let us be separated like that again.”

  The world in which they lived in was a cruel one, and yet Lenore decided to believe him. She didn’t want to even consider the possibility that she wouldn’t be with Tristan forever.

  The remainder of their journey was even slower, as once they were in the Filel mountains Nial became less clear about where they should go. The range was huge, but finding the ideal place could be like finding a needle in a stack of hay. They moved in a slow group, while some of the more fit travellers broke off from them to crest ridges and find the best viewpoints, to locate where might be the best place to settle.

  At every moment Lenore feared that they would hear boots behind them, some army come to claim them as slaves again, or roving marauders ready to cut them down for anything they could scavenge.

  But then it happened. On a day when the sun was high in the sky, casting a cold light over the mountains, when Carij ran towards the group, waving his hands and shouting.

  “I have found it,” he said upon reaching them. “A valley that I think will serve our needs well.”

  They followed him up a long, sloping ridge, which eventually dropped away into the valley below. Lenore almost gasped when she saw it. It was a green valley, filled with trees whose branches still held thousands of leaves even as the autumn cold crept over them. A large river wove through the centre, leading to a small lake at one end – at the other, high stone walls would provide cover for the elements. Much of the valley was open and almost flat, perfect for growing and building. It was scarcely possible to believe what she was seeing, simply because this place was too perfect. It was as though…

  “The gods have gifted us,” Midge whispered.

  Lenore couldn’t help but agree. She knew it as soon as she saw it – this valley would be their new home.