An hour before midnight, the noisy tail of the Feast of Returning Gods wound its way back down the narrow lanes from the upper market square. A troupe of copper-miners on iron-shod wooden stilts came clattering along the cobbles above the chandler’s alley, banging tin kettles and blowing long horn-pipes to chase winter ghosts out of the hanging cabbage troughs.
One of the stilt-walkers stumbled against the empty lime-barrels stacked directly outside the stable wall. Three oak casks went over with a crash like a collapsing timber brace.
Inside the dark stable, Pip had been half-asleep beside the water-butt. Woken mid-breath by the violent boom of wood and iron just beyond the boards, its body reacted before its waking mind could catch hold: all six legs locked wide, its lattice antlers snapped upright, and the faint green interior lights beneath its green-and-white patchwork shell flared into a sharp, bright emerald glow that spilled straight through the two-finger crack in the warped alley shutter.
At the same instant, a small pair of mud-splattered boots stopped outside by the spilled barrels.
Through the split in the shutter-boards, less than an arm’s length from Pip’s glowing flank, stood the little girl in the lopsided badger-god mask from earlier in the evening. Her mask was pushed up on her forehead now so she could eat a sugared plum, and her round dark eyes were looking straight down through the crack at the six-legged creature with the branching antlers and the green lantern-light shining through…
