Her fire. She remembered. She’d set it, and lit it, and now there was a thin column of sooty smoke marking its place. She wheeled away. She didn’t want boiled grain any more, if she ever wanted it in the first place. Meat. Raw meat, running with blood, hot and vital. Only that would satisfy her. But she was huge. The crows she had flown with were like flies to her. She could crush them by the handful and still not be satisfied, and they were her crows, not to be slashed out of the air and broken on the ground.

She needed bigger prey.

She turned and spread her feathers wide, gliding like she had been born a bird, and started searching in the growing gloom for something to catch and kill.

Even though she spotted, and swooped low over, cattle the size of cars, they didn’t excite her or give her the same thrill that the discarded thought of catching crows had given her. Not some beast tied to the ground for her. Her quarry should be airborne, like her, so that she could dive on it from above, wings swept back and feet clenched like fists to break its wing and send it tumbling to the ground.

Where was she going to find such creatures, something worthy of the effort? She could almost taste them, the breast feathers torn out with her hooked beak, the puckered flesh beneath, the first burst of flavour.

She turned east to look across the hill country, and north towards the high plateau, south over the ocean and east to view the islands set in the darkling sea, but there was nothing. The sky was void and empty, and it would be hours before the moon rose. She turned for home, to the tiny red glow of the fire on the pavement in front of the castle.

She landed in a flurry of feathers, as disappointed as an unfired gun. Folding her wings, she strutted forward to inspect the remains of the cooking pot that was now a foul-smelling cinder on top of a whited-ash heap.

Her head turned sideways to look at it, her talons gripping the cracks in the pavement, and she was distracted by a flash of colour off to one side. She couldn’t walk – the motion was unnatural – so she hopped over, and found a circular pool. She pecked at the thing floating in the rippling water, a shed orange skin with a rent and stained back, and dragged it out to get a better look at it.

She knew it should mean something more to her than it did, because it was her skin, the one she’d worn before she’d spread her wings, and what? Jumped from the top of the tower, that tower above her, its edges ragged and unfinished, full of roosting crows.