Chapter 107

The first frost found us on the last pass, the morning we came down out of the hills to the lake.

We had left Mirefold with the hay still standing in the river meadows. Now the bracken had gone the colour of rust, the birches were yellow, and every dawn there was white on the grass that the sun took an hour to lift. I had written to my father every Sunday, as I had promised, from whatever roof we were under. The last letter I had written in a drover’s hut, and the ink had been slow to dry for the cold.

Winter comes early here, my wolf said. It smells of it.

It smelled of pine, and wet stone, and something under both that I did not like.

The lake lay in the bottom of the valley like a blade put down and forgotten. It was long and narrow and so dark that it gave back no colour at all, only a sheen, like slate in rain. At the edges, in the shadow of the reeds, there was a skin of ice so thin that a falling leaf would have gone through it. By noon i