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them. The hostess told them that a healer had just arrived in Alebu: he had cured the town’s richest merchant of an ague, and word had spread. She had not seennor heard of any party of boatmen who arrived three days ago, but assured Cluaran that there was nowhere else in the town where so large a group could have stayed together. ‘They could have gone for work inland, with one of the farmers, maybe,’ she said doubtfully. ‘Though there’s not much work to be had this time of year.’
    Elspeth suddenly realised that the woman’s voice was becoming fainter, as if the speaker had moved away from them. Her head felt heavy and her legs weak; she reached out to Edmund for support.
    ‘Your young one looks all in!’ the woman cried. ‘Let her lie down – you can search for your friends later.’
    They found her a pallet by the fire in the smaller of the inn’s two rooms, and she slept almost at once. She woke only once before the next day: it was dark, lit by nothing more than the fire’s embers, and other guests were sleeping around her. On the pallet next to her lay Eolande, but the Fay woman was not asleep: she had pulled herself up on her elbow, and Elspeth caught the dark glitter of her eyes, as if the woman were watching her. She must have stirred, for Eolande turned away at once, and Elspeth was quickly asleep again.
    Next morning, her head was still heavy, and Edmund gave her an anxious look as they sat round the hostess’s table eating her barley bread.
    ‘You’re still not well,’ he said. ‘We could rest here today, perhaps, before moving on.’
    ‘There’s nothing wrong with me,’ Elspeth insisted, alarmed at the thought of any delay.
    ‘You should take her to the
grethari
,’ the hostess said, ladling water into cups. ‘The healer. They say he has great skill: he goes from place to place, and cures all that he touches.’
    ‘Let’s seek him out!’ Edmund said eagerly.
    Cathbar looked at Elspeth. ‘Maybe we should, at that,’ he said.
    ‘I’m fine!’ Elspeth said, trying to keep the irritation out of her voice. She
could not
be ill; couldn’t they see that? ‘We need to get moving!’
    But for now, there was no trail for them to follow. Speaking to the inn’s other guests, they learned that today was market day, and the usual influx of traders to the town had been swelled by people hoping to see the
grethari
. But there was no word of a party of strangers from the north; nor even of one man, handsome and commanding, with the bearing of a hero. It seemed that both Loki and his fellow travellers had vanished into the air.
    ‘We need supplies,’ Cathbar said. ‘Maybe we’ll learn something in the market.’
    The market was small even by the standards of Elspeth’s home town of Dubris. They bought bread, dried fish and blankets for the journey, and Cathbar spent a long time in discussion with a smith, and came away with a narrow package. Then, passing by a Frankish pedlar’s stall with Edmund, Elspeth heard the news she needed.
    ‘No word of a lie, mistress,’ the man was saying to a customer, as he carefully detached a tin brooch and two needles from his hoard. ‘A forest fire, not ten leagues from here, and in weather as cold as it is today! I saw it with my own eyes.’
    He repeated his story to Edmund and Elspeth after the woman had gone, and asking around the other traders confirmed it. It had happened only the day before yesterday, they said, in the great forest to the south: lightning must have struck a tree, as sometimes happens in the winter storms, but there had been no storm, and the fire had spread till the smoke could be seen for leagues. Several traders had seen it, or smelt the smoke, as they made their way to Alebu for the market, but no one could guess what had made it spread so disastrously, particularly in winter.
    ‘It’s still burning, as far as I know,’ said a farmer. ‘I heard that lightning had nothing to do with it and that bandits may be to