needed them to sell if they wanted to eat through the winter.
The palisaded walls of Kergard loomed higher the closer they came to the new town sitting upon the rim of the Starstone Lake. Noise and activity rolled off it like heat from a dung heap.
‘It looks bigger,’ Drem said, and that was because it was. Bigger than when he had last seen it, six moons ago. Fresh-built holds and houses of timber and stone, roofed with thatch and sod, spilt down the slope and into the meadow and woodland about Kergard’s walls.
Olin didn’t respond, just stared with a frown upon his face. Without a word, he led their lead-pony off the main road to Kergard and onto a rolling meadow, skirting the town and heading north-east, towards their home. He had been like this since their discovery in the foothills three days ago. Drem saw his da reach out and put a hand upon the lump of black iron they’d hauled from the elk pit, wrapped and hidden now within half a dozen skins.
He is convinced it is starstone metal. And it is strange: twice as heavy as it should be, and a black that seems to suck light into it. I’ve never seen anything like it. But starstone … ?
The more Drem thought about it, though, he had to admit that there was a slim possibility that his da was correct, regardless of how farfetched the likelihood seemed. Besides, his da was a practical man, not given to wild theories or flights of fancy. Local legends told how the lake beyond Kergard was supposedly a crater formed by the original Starstone as it crashed to earth. He looked back over his shoulder at the foothills they had only recently left, one hand coming up absently to stroke the bear claw that he had tied to a strip of leather about his neck.
Behind those hills reared the jagged teeth of the Bonefells, looking as if they were holding up the sky. He squinted his eyes and tried to imagine the Starstone coursing over those mountain peaks, spitting great gobs of fire and smoke and blazing a trail of flames.
He blinked and nodded to himself.
Who is to say that part of the Starstone did not crack and fall away as it plummeted to earth.
He frowned, unsure of what it meant if what they carried hidden in their pack was indeed a piece of the fabled stone.
‘No time to stop, we’re almost home,’ his da called back to him.
I hope it’s not a piece of the Starstone. Look what happened last time – blood, war and death throughout the Banished Lands.
With a sense of unease seeping through him, Drem hobbled on.
Drem smiled to see their homestead appear, the rooftop of their barn visible beyond a copse of oak and alder. It was not as isolated as it had been when he and Olin had left. A handful of fresh-built homes were running along the line of a stream that curled out of thickening woodland to the north and fed into the lake. They passed a fence line belonging to the last of these new homes and turned onto the grass-choked path that led to their homestead. A dog barked and a voice called out. Drem saw a big hound standing in their path, lips curled back in a snarling growl. He was old, scars criss-crossing his dun coat, one ear half-chewed. A voice called out, an old man was hurrying from the porch of a timber house, a hobbling run using a long staff for help. A younger woman appeared a dozen steps behind him. The old man reached his fence, gasping for breath and leaned upon the timber rail for a moment, though he still managed to wave the tip of the spear he was carrying in Drem’s direction. Drem had thought it a walking staff, but the old man seemed to have other ideas as he pointed it at Drem and his da.
‘That your hound?’ Olin asked, keeping one eye on the snapping, snarling creature.
‘It is,’ the woman said as she reached them. She was of an age with Drem, as far as he could tell, hair as yellow as the sun, tied and pinned tight to her head, blue eyes creased with worry as she reached a hand out to the old man.
He snatched his arm away and tutted at her.
‘I’d be grateful if you’d call him off.’ Olin nodded at the hound.
‘Maybe I will, and maybe I