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for miles around. Wherever I said we were going, Jee knew he could guide us there.
    I hoped that Maggie had exhausted her week's supply of hurt outrage. But I doubted it. I said, ‘We head towards the capital, Jee. But not along the river.' Along the river ran roads, villages, armies.
    Maggie said, ‘Towards Glory ? But that's where the savage army will go, to claim the princess!'
    ‘We're not going into Glory, Maggie. Just near it.'
    ‘Now she was suspicious. ‘Near it where?'
    There was no help for it. I wouldn't lie to her. ‘Tanwell.'
    ‘You ... you want to leave me and Jee with my sister.'
    I said nothing.
    ‘My miserable piss pot of a sister, who will use me like a slavey and Jee like a dog.'
    At the word dog, Shadow wagged his tail.
    ‘No,' Maggie said.
    Despite myself, I was impressed. No arguing, no crumpled face, no hurt tears. Just a simple no, smooth and hard as the stone that had inexplicably fallen down my chimney. I said nothing.
    ‘We can travel south, staying in hills and woods,' Maggie said, ‘and still reach the Unclaimed Lands by a longer route. Settle in some rough farming village on the border between The Queendom and the Unclaimed Lands – that would be safest. We can get work as labourers until we can start over. Jee, lead on.'
    Jee looked from Maggie to me and back again. Silently he picked up his pack and led off. Maggie followed him, I followed her, and Shadow followed me. For now.

    Travel in early summer. Long days of walking under the hot sun, short nights of sleeping off exhaustion. We avoided villages unless we needed supplies, and then we sent Jee to buy them, accompanied by Shadow. But we needed to purchase very little. Jee set rabbit snares each evening. Shadow too hunted small game and, surprisingly, laid it untouched at my feet. This endeared him to Maggie, who could pluck a wild partridge faster than anyone in Applebridge. Once Shadow even brought a suckling pig, stolen from some farmer's wallow. Maggie scolded him, but I think even a dog could tell that her heart wasn't in it. She roasted the pig and we ate it, the rich juices filling our bellies and the skin crackling and crisp in our mouths. Swift clear streams kept the water bag full. We slept wrapped in our cloaks, or upon them, under bright summer stars.
    We spoke only of the journey, never of the reason for it. When Jee went into a village to buy bread and cheese, he brought back little news. These remote villages heard even less than Applebridge, which at least had travellers along the river. No one mentioned an army of savages invading The Queendom, and neither did we talk of it among ourselves. It was almost as if that fortnight was detached from the rest of the world, holding the three of us in a moving bubble, transparent and softly coloured as the soap bubbles a child will make on wash day. There was no rain, no high winds, no storms. The nights were clear and warm, scented with wild thyme and woodland flowers. I did not dream. We had, however falsely, a kind of gentle peace.
    The Queendom is a vast plain, circled to north, west and south by mountains and to the east by the sea. The northern mountains are little more than hills; beyond them lies the queendom of Isabella, kin by marriage to little Princess Stephanie. The Western Mountains are high and jagged. To the south lay neither hills nor mountains but a wild country all its own: high plateaux and deep ravines and tiny valleys, rough and infertile, inhabited only by hard-scrabble farmers and hunters who barely wrested a living from the grudging earth. The Unclaimed Lands. Jee had been born there.
    And beyond the Unclaimed Lands lay Soulvine Moor.
    Maggie did not know what I planned. I was sure of it. And if I travelled this fortnight with a kind of steady easiness that rose almost to light-heartedness, I was glad to deceive her. For although I was not light-hearted, I did feel a kind of pleasure, which brought its own kind of guilt. The pleasure was at escaping