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shiver through the thin hands that grasped his biceps, and when a wind came moaning through the streets and stirring the straw with a rattle by his feet, cold flowed down his own spine like heavy rain.
    “Every year”—Anna chuckled, though his voice was thick and rough in his throat—“we say the same things. We will stay where we always stay. It does well enough.”
    He had taken the lead now, walking cautiously through the blind dark. Leofgar followed, through the cluster of huts, out onto the narrow track that took them over dunes and down into the next bay.
    Proud as the devil, Anna had drawn ahead, his back straight and his step long, the wheeze of his breath muffled behind one hand. But he stumbled on the way down and let Leofgar catch him without a curse, and that was new this year. New this year too was the way that—when they went on—he let Leofgar take his elbow again and gradually bear more and more of his weight, until they hobbled as one creature, slowly and painfully into the fumes of the bay.
    This was a narrow inlet too shallow for ships. Instead, the folk of Uisebec had built salt pans here. Hurrying clouds parted for a moment, and the moon lit the white walls that dammed the outflow of the tide, made them glitter as though they were drifted over by snow. Pillars of steam rose silvery up to the stars, and the damp warmth enfolded them both as they limped closer.
    The air was bitter on the lips, and salt crunched underfoot as they found the first of the boarded walks along which sleds were pulled from the pans to the warehouses. A sullen red glow at the most distant pan showed where a peat fire smouldered. Slaves tended it. They looked up with faces from which life had leached all expression, even fear, as the harpers loomed out of the night. They were glad enough to exchange a place at the fire for music and news, and the promise that Leofgar would take a shift at their work, let them sleep an extra hour.
    Some of the faces were new. Some they had come to know over ten years of markets. One of these, a man called Asc, watched as Anna propped himself up against the low wall of the pan, wringing his hands over and over, trying to rub out the aches.
    “He’s too old to be out here with us.”
    “You see?” Leofgar turned to his master with a triumphant smile. It faltered and fell away as the russet light painted all the lines on Anna’s face with a light like blood. Some magic was at play—or some had been withdrawn—for it was as if he were seeing ten years of hardship fall on the old man at once.
    Time set its stamp so slowly on change, he thought, that you go for years not noticing that anything new has been wrought. Then one day the scales fall from your eyes and the world has been unmade around you. He’d jokily called Anna “the old man” for the past decade. He’d called him “ancient one” indeed, since Anna first stopped at the cot of Leofgar’s family and offered him a glimpse of a life that was not all sheep. But Leofgar had been a child in those days, and “ancient” had meant “has some grey in his beard”. He hadn’t really appreciated that ten years of sleeping in ditches had changed them both since then.
    Now he saw for the first time how haggard Anna’s face was—the way his skin hung off, creased as a linen tunic put away damp. Age spots, bruises and broken veins mottled the backs of his hands and his bald scalp. His eyelids had folded over on themselves and weighed his eyes half-closed at all times. They were fully closed now, pressed tight, and his forehead was scored deep with furrows of pain. It hit Leofgar, like an arrow through a lung, that his master looked not only old but frail, like a heathen sacrifice dredged out of a bog. A skeleton clothed in second-hand skin. Death had started to show, like a fraying edge in a garment too weak to be resewn.
    Triumph turned rapidly into ashes, but he finished his thought nevertheless. It was only truer now. “I was