“Why won’t he walk with us?”

“I think it is best that he be left on his own.”

“But no-one deserves that. I mean, everyone wants company, right?”

“Not this boy. He is strange.”

It was nearing the end of their first day on the plains. Things had been going fine so far. Zantheus felt good to actually be moving at last rather than being held up in a town. He felt optimistic. At the moment, however, he was in the middle of a conversation with Anthē about Leukos. Leukos chose to walk ahead of the rest of the group, retaining his distance, so that they were always looking ahead to follow him. He kept about thirty paces ahead of them, writing in his book as he walked along. The others followed behind diligently, including Tromo, who was at this moment feeling quite sleepy. They had been walking since early in the day, stopping only to eat, and he was showing signs of flagging.

“But surely he must get lonely?” said Anthē.

Zantheus considered this. “No, I do not think that he does.”

“But I mean surely he would prefer it if he could to talk to us?” Anthē considered this herself. On second thoughts, maybe he wouldn’t. This was the first real subject on which Zantheus had cared to engage her in proper conversation since they left Ir... He wasn’t the greatest conversation partner. Or any kind of one at all, to be honest. “I’m going to ask him why he won’t walk with us,” she said with a look of resolution. Before Zantheus could protest, Anthē ran ahead to join Leukos, leaving him with Tromo.

“Are you alright, Leukos?”

“Yes,” said Leukos flatly.

“Stop writing for a moment, I’m trying to talk to you.”

“I can’t. You can still talk to me.”

“How long are we going to be on these plains, Leukos?”

“Oh, maybe a couple of weeks. I’m not sure yet.”

Awkward silence.

“It’s a very beautiful country, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so.”

Awkward silence.

“Well, at least we’ve had good weather, right?”

“Yes.”

Awkward silence.

“It’s quite tiring walking, especially for Tromo, but I think we’ll be able to manage it, won’t we?”

“That’s right.”

Running out of small talk, Anthē tried to bring up what was on her mind. “Leukos, why do you always have to walk ahead of everybody else?” she asked.

He said nothing for a moment, then answered “How can I explain this to you? I am alone; I write. This is how I work.”

This wasn’t a good enough explanation for Anthē. “But don’t you feel lonely?”

“Yes, sometimes.”

“So…wouldn’t you like someone to talk to?”

“No, not now.”

What a rude boy. “But it makes me feel so sad, to see you walking alone all the time, in front of us. Why don’t you walk with Zantheus and Tromo and me?”

“Look, I have to stay a few steps ahead of you, so that I know where I’m taking you, alright?”

“Don’t be silly,” said Anthē, “you can see that just as well if you walk with us.” She slipped her arm into his, and felt Zantheus’s disapproving glare on the back of her neck. It was Leukos’s right arm, which made it harder for him to use his quill. For a while he let her accompany him, then he withdrew it from her, again rudely she thought, and quickened his pace. Anthē gave up. She stopped, turning round to wait for Zantheus and Tromo.

When she saw them, she giggled. Little Tromo had collapsed from exhaustion and was now snoring contently in the arms of the knight. Zantheus’s face was a wonderful mixture of perplexity and embarrassment.

“Here, let me take that off you,” said Anthē, and he was more than happy to be free of the boy, who hummed dreamily as he changed hands.

“Thank you,” whispered Zantheus, not wanting to wake him.

“You can have him back when I get tired.”

Zantheus looked confused. “But you are a woman, you should look after the child.”

This irritated Anthē no end. She hoped he was joking. But just in case, she changed the subject. She nodded towards Leukos. “He is strange, isn’t he?”

“Is it not as I told you?”

“He’s always writing in that book of his. Always. While he’s talking to us. When he’s eating. Walking. Sitting. Lying down. Writing! Scritch scratch goes that silly pen! Have you ever seen him when he wasn’t writing?”

“No.”

“I bet he even does it when he’s sleeping.”

“I have wondered about that as well.”

“We should stay up,” whispered Anthē conspiratorially. Tonight, I mean, when we stop. We could pretend to be asleep, then wait till he falls asleep. Then we’d see.”

“But…that would be a deception...”

“Fine then, I suppose we’ll never know, will we?”

She let her question linger for a while. Eventually Zantheus agreed, with reluctance, to try out this plan. They began to anticipate the moment when Leukos would decide to stop for the night. It was an odd thing following him in silence. The moon had risen, and as it was hidden, then unveiled, then hidden again by passing clouds he was cloaked in darkness, then silver, then darkness again by varying degrees. They were following a phantom. At intervals their vision would be obscured by the smoke of their own breath; where the day had been hot to the point of discomfort, the night grew almost unbearably cold. As ever, Tromo shivered in his sleep. Anthē and Zantheus had to keep realigning themselves as Anthē would draw near to Zantheus for warmth, and he would awkwardly move away from her, and for a moment they would go off at a tangent from Leukos’s path before slowly turning to face him properly again. This game went on for a long time, and as the moon climbed higher time itself seemed to stretch. They were no longer walking across the plains of Avarah, but through a strange, starlit dream.

When at last Leukos decided to stop they only knew it because his silhouette started to get bigger instead of staying roughly the same size. “We will rest here until dawn,” he said at last, when they caught up to him.

Anthē placed Tromo carefully on the ground, making sure that his cloak was wrapped well around him. When he continued to shiver, Zantheus took his own cloak and spread it out over him.

“Are you sure you want to do that?” Anthē said. “He’ll shiver anyway, right? You’ll be terribly cold.”

“I have been trained to withstand the altitudes of Awmeer,” said Zantheus in a mutter, sleep creeping up on him. “I can handle a night without a cloak on these plains.”

They lay down, Anthē next to Tromo, Zantheus about an ammah away from her. This wasn’t far away enough to escape her kicking him, which she did, saying as quietly as she could, “Hey, don’t forget the plan!”

Zantheus rolled over to look at Leukos. He had sat down with his back to a tree a short distance away from them so as not to disturb them with the sound of his quill. But Zantheus could still see it moving, the feather fluttering away, writing line after line after line after line. He lay watching it, listening to the sound of Tromo shaking and Anthē breathing quietly, and the noises seemed to coincide with the movement of the quill in a way he could not quite grasp. Now it seemed that this movement would come at the same time as this shiver or this breath, now as his mind stepped back slightly from sleep he thought he was imagining things. He smiled to himself when Anthē began to snore. Silly girl. She did not have the strength to carry out her ‘plan’. But he would. He would stay up.

The quill wrote another line. As Zantheus watched it the same thing started to happen again, his tired mind began to link its own wandering and wavering with the motion of the quill.

Soon he was dreaming about giant mirrors, endless hills, and being thrown into the sky, amongst other things.