It was only fair to have one day of doing nothing, after walking for a month without pause, and I needed to get my bearings, and plan our next move. We'd gathered so many rumours and tidbits of information. I needed to sit down and let my brain sift through them, to let my instincts figure out what to follow and what to discard. Jane was terribly homesick but this was a one-direction run. No one else wanted to go back to England, and she was too invested in us now.

We were somewhere in the south of France, where there are mountains that are so pure and perfect, you're sure that other humans haven't found them yet. But you get to the peak of a mountain cluster and find a glassy clear miracle lake, clear by meters and meters, so if you're at its center, at its deepest, you can see the darting fish and multi-toned stones at the bottom as clearly as if they were in your hands, and then you see a small group of travellers in the distance, going their own way. The mountains aren't undiscovered, but they are well loved. The remnants of campsites are faint smears of charcoal left by safe fires.

We let Jane choose what to do, where to go, on our day of rest. My lovely girl opted to walk a little bit further, in our original direction, and she selected a modestly tall mountainside, with an icy cold stream of fresh water trailing down its front, glacial water, and multitudinous clumps of wild flowers sharing our path in a background of green. Violet bells, red floppy cheerful arrangements, sharp yellow spikes, baby white explosions of petal. We set up camp where the air was still comfortable enough to breathe in. Jane sat between my legs, warming her hands on a thermos, while I watched our wards play or nap or argue their theories about whether there'd be trouble at the border, all rugged up in mittens and beanies and ski jackets and snow boots.