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“Not on stone. Not with two of us.” He sets the foot down. “Trevern has a farrier.”

Trevern is there. Roofs, a church, smoke, perhaps half a mile off. And my master is seven miles past Morlac with that thing coming to his door, and I am sitting on a horse with a shoe off, looking at a town.

“Get down,” he says. “We walk her in.”

So that is how we come into Trevern, which is three streets and a lot of mud with a square and an ash tree in the middle of it. The Ankou leading a grey horse with a shoe off, by the bridle, and a woman in a travelling dress walking on the other side of it with her hand on its neck, talking to it, because talking to things that cannot answer me is what I do when there is nothing to hit.

The farrier’s shop is at the fen end of the town, before the square, and the forge is lit. The farrier is a man with a leather apron and forearms like mine. He looks at the foot. He looks, once, at who is holding the bridle, and then he does not look there again.

“Two hours,” he says, to the foot.

“We can pay,” I say. “Please, go faster”

“Two hours, mistress.” He has not looked above the height of the horse’s knee. “She’s a big mare and I’ve nothing on the wall that’ll fit her. I have to make one. There is no making it faster.”

“Yes, there is,” I say. “Where’s your bellows?”

He looks at me then.

“I’ve worked bronze since I was eleven. I can pump a bellows and I can hold a tong and I can tell you when your iron’s the right color from across the shop. I’ll be more use to you than standing in your yard, and I cannot stand in your yard for two hours. I’ll go mad.”

He looks at Riwal. Riwal says nothing at all.

“Bellows is there,” the farrier says.

The forge is hot and the shop is small and the iron comes up through red into orange under my hands on the lever, and the farrier works it on the horn without a word, and for the length of it I am a person in a shop with a job to do.

The farrier says “Hold,” and I hold. He says “Now,” and I pump. He does not ask who I am. He knows who I am. Every soul in this town knows who I am by now.

Riwal stands in the doorway with the horse and does not come in, because the farrier would not have worked with him in the room, and he knows it, and I know it, and the farrier knows it, and nobody says it.

The shoe goes on hot and the horse stands for it.

“There,” the farrier says. “She’ll do.” He takes the money from my hand, not from Riwal’s, and goes to the back of his shop. “Lead her for a bit, I would,” he calls over his shoulder.

Then we have a horse, and a square to cross to get to the road out.

I take the bridle, because I would rather be the one leading, and we go into the square from the fen end, the horse between us. Stalls all round, geese in wicker, onions in ropes, and the eel-trap man in the spot he has had since I was a child coming through on the cart with Corentin.

I was braced for the noise to stop when they see us arrive. I could understand that.

Instead, it moves. Everybody keeps talking and everybody keeps trading and all of it slides sideways ten feet, away from him, like water going round a stone, and a space opens up around us that nobody chose to open and nobody will admit to.

A woman with a baby on her hip turns her back and keeps turning it.

The eel-trap man finds something to do under his table.

Two lads by the tree take their caps off, and keep them off, and do not look up, and when Riwal walks past them one of them puts his hand on the other’s arm and they both go still until he has gone by.

Nobody is rude. I wish somebody would spit. They are polite to him so that he will not look at them.

He has crossed this square ten thousand times with people doing this, and his face does nothing at all.

I am so angry I can taste it, and for once it is not at him.

Halfway across the square an old woman comes out of the crowd straight at us.

She is seventy, in black, with a basket, and she plants herself in front of him with her chin up and her hands shaking on the handle.