‘Cabin, please.’

The clerk checked the gold and silver with her teeth, weighed it on a small pair of scales, then wrote out a ticket in beautiful handwriting full of swirls and flourishes. ‘Where are you going?’ she asked casually as she worked.

‘What? Oh, Tatusti.’ She named a town upstream from Flaha, unwilling to divulge her true destination.

‘Tatusti?’ The clerk sounded incredulous.

‘The man I am betrothed to is there.’ Tiaan flushed at the sound of those words, often thought about but never before uttered.

The clerk melted green wax onto the paper and stamped it with a seal.

‘Thank you!’ Tiaan took the ticket. ‘What time is the tide tomorrow?’

‘No tides in Tallallamel. Where is your home town? You must have come a long way.’

A common enough question. Tiaan had said ‘Tiksi, over the mountains,’ before she realised.

The clerk nodded. ‘I thought so, from your speech, We see many travellers here, though few from that land. The Norwhal leaves at nine in the morning. Or ten. Or even eleven if the captain gets drunk again, which she usually does. Best be here at eight, to be certain.’

Tiaan thanked her, then turned back. ‘Can you name a good inn, not too far away?’

‘Go to The Mussel Gatherer, a few hundred steps back toward the town, that way. Ask for Pwym the porter. He’s my little brother and he’ll fix you up nicely.’

A most courteous young man, he did just that. In under an hour Tiaan and Haani were set up in a small but pleasant room on the third floor, overlooking the waterfront. A metal bath was brought up and filled with buckets of hot water. They scrubbed away the grime of weeks.

In the evening they went to the markets, purchasing clothes for the journey. Haani looked like a hillbilly child in her dirty furs. Tiaan bought a needle, strong thread and various other things she might need on the journey, then spent an entirely unnatural amount of silver on a special outfit, the one she planned to wear when she met Minis.

In the morning they arrived early and were shown to their cabin. It was tiny, airless but clean and neat. The captain had stayed sober, evidently, for the boat unfurled her sails and left on the gong of nine.

The trip to Flaha took fifteen days. They did not stop for the first week, but after that visited one port after another, sometimes only sailing for half a day before docking again.

Tiaan and Haani kept to themselves, occasionally walking on the cramped deck, which was cold and windy. Haani was clinging now – she was shy in crowds and would not answer when people spoke to her. Tiaan understood that, though she found it confining.

On the third day, through a gap in the clouds, she glimpsed a familiar flying shape, just for a second. Was the lyrinx hunting her or was it just a coincidence? She could not think so. After that she kept to their cabin, busying herself in making a new pair of boots to replace Haani’s worn-out ones. Tiaan enjoyed the work, using her artisan’s skills for the first time in ages. It was helping to prepare her fingers for another job, one she planned to begin as soon as the boots were complete.

Whenever she needed a hand, Haani was there and seemed to know instinctively what to do. Tiaan appreciated that, though she would as soon have done it herself. She was so used to working alone that having to share a room made her feel uncomfortable. Besides, Haani was being helpful because she had been brought up that way. It did not mean the child liked her. Tiaan was sure she did not.

Haani never asked for anything. She hardly spoke apart from please, thank you, yes and no, and gave the briefest possible response to Tiaan’s increasingly infrequent overtures. Tiaan felt guilty, but more and more she found the child a burden. Perhaps Haani realised that. When the boots were ready she said ‘Thank you!’ but continued wearing the old ones.

Tiaan’s second job was a gift for Minis, a ring of woven silver and gold made from the precious metal in Joeyn’s belt. First she formed the yellow metal, and the silver, into threads, tapping away with her little hammers for hours. She did not care how arduous the work was, or how long it took, as long as it was ready before she reached the mountain. It left less gold and silver than she would have liked, and that bothered her, for there was a long way to go. But she had to have a betrothal gift, even though every attempt to contact Minis had failed. More and more she felt that her journey was a fool’s errand.

After the second day Haani grew bored, for there was nothing she could do to help with the ring. Tiaan began to teach the child her letters, using the copy of Nunar’s treatise she had carried all this way. It was hard work. Haani did not see the point of reading and Tiaan discovered that as a teacher she had many inadequacies, not least of them being impatience. Haani proved to be a good listener though, picking up the language quickly. Each time she spoke the common language her accent was better and her command more fluent.

Accustomed to spending the daylight hours out of doors, the child was practically climbing the walls by the time they pulled up at the wharves of Flaha, a rambling, unattractive town built of grey timber.

Mount Tirthrax lay north of Flaha, another hundred and fifty leagues away. Tiaan had been prepared to spend what remained of the winter in Flaha, until she learned that, in this surprisingly well-populated land, it was possible to travel up the frozen rivers by iceboat if she left soon. The thaw was not far away.

‘You want to go to Itsipitsi?’ her informant asked. It was a good-sized town on the northern end of an extensive lake of the same name, little more than ten leagues from the great mountain. ‘That’s easy! There’s an iceboat every third day, if the weather is good, and the winds usually blow from the south at this time of year. You can do ten leagues a day in good conditions; some days fifteen. But be prepared for a blizzard, and then you might not go anywhere for a week.’

Blizzards did hit more than once, though not for long. In three weeks they were disembarking in Itsipitsi, a frontier town built of logs chinked with mud. The place was bigger than Tiaan had expected though it had a temporary look. Thousands of prospectors would appear in the thaw to pan the rivers for sapphires and zircons washed down from the mountains, but in the winter there were few people on the dismal, windblown streets.

Tiaan’s gold was exhausted but she still had silver enough to outfit them for the Great Mountains. Once at Tirthrax, she would be among the Aachim of Santhenar, those who had been brought here as slaves by Rulke the Charon, thousands of years ago, in the search for the Golden Flute. That was one of the Great Tales of the Histories.

It did not bother Tiaan that she was down to a few threads of silver by the time they were equipped and provisioned. The Aachim would provide. However, she thought of Joeyn every time she went to the belt. Poor Joeyn. His memory still brought tears to her eyes.

Of course, it would take time to find the Aachim. Tirthrax was enormous. But when she neared the mountain, surely a potent node, the amplimet would light up and she could call her lover. Minis would tell her where to go. If … if he was still alive. If he wasn’t, she would never find the way in. The food would run out and she would be stuck up a mountain, a week from any place where she could get more.