Ill Will. Michael Stewart

      ‘The roads aren’t safe. They’ll be on horseback. This is the only way we can be sure they won’t find us.’

      ‘Horses can travel across country, you know. We used to do it all the time, me and my dad.’

      ‘But not by choice,’ I said. ‘They won’t want to risk laming them.’

      ‘They could take it steady. They won’t lame them if they take it steady, not even on this route. I’m telling you, me and my dad travelled loads of miles over worse than this without laming the horses. You’ve just got to be careful how you go.’

      Past birch, beech, bracken and bog, black mounds of molehills. We saw a long wire between two posts and hanging from the wire were the moldwarp corpses, their velvet grey fur wet with mizzle. Their huge white teeth and claws, glittering. Waiting to be skinned.

      ‘My dad had a jerkin made from fifty moleskins. He got it off a nobleman. Lord so-and-so. Though he didn’t look noble standing in a ditch.’

      We walked through more fields until the moor opened out again and below us the river snaked and frothed.

      ‘You a gypsy?’ Emily said.

      ‘No.’

      ‘You look like a fucking gypsy to me.’

      ‘Well, I’m not.’

      ‘My dad said that gypsies were thieves.’

      ‘Did he?’

      ‘And that they kidnap girls and eat babies.’

      ‘You’d better watch your step then.’

      ‘Thought you weren’t a gypsy?’

      ‘Look, just keep your mouth shut, right?’

      A white linnet settled on a prominent stoop about ten yards ahead of us. As we walked on, it took flight again, flitting down the path where it settled, bobbed its tail and watched us approach. As soon as we got within ten yards it flew onwards, and so on for half a mile or more.

      ‘What’s that bird doing?’ she said.

      ‘Showing us the way.’

      ‘No, it’s not. You don’t half talk some tiff.’

      We passed a post that a goshawk must have used as a plucking place. Beneath a scattering of feathers was the flesh and elastic of the meat membrane.