She watched shadows duck and bob as a trio of bees, bigger than she was, bumbled over the rough ground. ‘Where are the people?’ she asked. The land was green enough, but wild and devoid of human life.

‘Commonweal’s a big place, girl,’ Allanbridge told her. ‘Galltree told me that the locals reckon it drives you mad to live too close to the edge. Given most of ’em can fly, seems strange to me. Maybe the lords and princes and what have you spread that word, to stop people getting ideas about heading off elsewhere, eh?’

Soon after, the Windlass was making her leisurely way over irregular fields ribbed by the plough. Some were deformed by the contours of the land, but a little further on the land had been cut to fit them, each hill stepped and tiered so that, from their lofty perspective, the land appeared as a series of concentric rings.

‘There,’ Allanbridge prompted. ‘See there?’

‘What’s that?’ She spotted a little arrangement of buildings ahead, though still nothing much that she would call civilization.

‘It’s Suon Ren, girl.’

‘That’s a village.’

‘It’s Suon Ren,’ Allanbridge repeated. ‘Round these parts, that kind of place qualifies as a centre of trade and culture.’

At this distance it was hard to tell, but there were just three stone-built structures that looked like civilization to her. Beyond that, there stood some absolute fantasy of a building on a hill overlooking the rest, four floors high, but most of it either wooden-walled or with no walls at all, and crowned with an overflowing roof garden that cascaded trailing vines and creepers halfway to the ground. All the rest of the place was a loose-knit circle of small dwellings around a central space, nothing but little slant-roofed wooden buildings, and each far enough from its neighbours that the community seemed a collection of hermits. North of it all, the sun caught two silver lines that must be rivers, save that they were too straight to be natural. On one, a long boat of some kind was making a slow, sail-less progress.