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especially. She waved self-consciously as she turned to go, and everyone waved back. Even the smith, whose name was Narl, came to the front of his yard and lifted the sledge he was carrying in acknowledgement of her adventure.
    The long green tree-tunnel the herald hadn’t liked was pleasant to her; when she came upon the first highway at the end of the Gig and the beginning of the great sprawl of her native land, she was amazed. The plains before her seemed to stretch out forever, or almost forever, for there were mountains at one end of them, and she had never seen mountains before. Nor had she ever seen anything like the meandering muddle of buildings and yards that made up the towns she passed through. She had been too young to remember the journey to her aunt in the Gig after her parents died, but she would have sworn she had never seen anything like what she saw now in her life.
    She met other people on their way to the name-day, although she was the only one she saw who went alone, a fact that gave her a certain dubious satisfaction; some people seemed to have brought their entire villages with them, or at least their entire families. Many people were well hung round with charms from their own fairies; she began to suspect that first-time travellers were recognisable by the number and elaborateness of their charms.
    Katriona made good time. She was a quick walker, and deft, and easily wove her way through slower, larger, and clumsier processions. When the high roads were too crowded she took to the fields and forests; animals never troubled her, and she was too well-bred a country girl to tread on anyone’s crop. At first she foraged for her food, but the closer she came to the royal city the fewer wild lands there were; she was not sorry for the excuse to buy herself the occasional hot cooked meal at a pub or inn, but mostly she fed herself from market stalls. One of her aunt’s charms let her know which stall-keepers were honest.
    Another of her aunt’s charms let her sleep in trees without rolling out, so when she could find no haystack nor barn nor hedgerow she liked the look of, she found a tree instead. Sleeping in trees always gave her a stiff neck, but she preferred this to sleeping unhidden on the ground, marauder-charms notwithstanding.
    It took her fifty-one days to reach the royal city, where, possibly on account of the excellence of another of her aunt’s charms, she found herself a tiny cubby of a private room at a pub on the outskirts of the royal city, and prepared to wait the nine remaining days till the name-day.
    The cubby gave her claustrophobia, but the swarming streets were worse; she was by turns glad she was alone, and longed for a familiar face. She thought oftenest of Barder and Flora as companions, but she missed her aunt the worst. The noise of the crowd went on even at night. Every street performer in the entire country seemed to be here: tumblers, actors and singers; and the constant rising excitement of holiday with the known culmination of the royal name-day meant that more and more people got drunk and lively every night as well. Katriona took to sleeping with a pillow over her head, but it wasn’t enough. The pub gave her a special rate on her cubby in exchange for dish-washing and assisting the cook, and this helped to preserve her tiny stock of cash and to pass the time.
    But it was still a long, edgy nine days.

CHAPTER 3
    Katriona was up at dawn on the name-day, feeling as anxious as if she were a crucial part of the day’s events instead of a small undistinguished member of an audience of thousands. She was determined to be through the gates as soon as the gates opened, and to get as near to—to whatever—as she could. She kept remembering her aunt saying, “I think you’ll like the little princess,” and while she was sure that what she had replied to her aunt at the time was the truth, it also felt as if a geas had been laid upon her, and that she must try as she