They had been aware for some time that the howling of the wolves had been noted by other, larger, more solitary beasts; but they were not afraid of those. Several members of the expedition appeared to know that Prim could kill anything. Even if she elected for some reason to withhold that power, it was difficult to imagine anything standing up to Burr. So Prim was inclined for a moment to suppose it was only Corvus’s sense of humor at work. But only for a moment. His startling pronouncement had caused everyone to go still. And in that stillness they sensed the approach of something that seemed to come on like rain, in that it affected the whole of the forest instead of being in any one place. Supposing it was even alive, it must have been too numerous and spread out for even Death to be of much use against it.

“Mard can’t exactly run,” Lyne objected. For his kinsman had suffered bites to his legs as well as the cut to his arm. But Edda was already knotting a bandage over her unfinished seam. She slung Mard over her back as if he weighed approximately as much as a chicken, and in a few long strides vanished into the forest southbound.

The threat consisted of insects. From any distance greater than a stone’s throw—not that stones would have been any use—they simply looked like smoke. As Prim saw when they were overtaken by a lobe of that “smoke,” they could take to the air in an ungainly combination of leaping and fluttering, and the wind was their friend. As she learned when one landed on her arm, they could bite off freckle-sized scoops of flesh.

Corvus had insisted that they carry nothing but weapons (useless now, important later?) and firebrands, and that they run upwind. They did not have to run for more than an hour before they encountered a rising slope where going was difficult because of undergrowth and low branches. There the insects caught up with them and did damage and made going very disagreeable indeed with their propensity for attacking eyes, ears, noses, and mouths. But before panic consumed them they got deep enough in that Corvus deemed it time to set fires. Those spread downwind with great speed. But upwind the flames advanced slowly enough that outrunning them was possible. That was the good news. The bad news was that they had to run more. This time, at least, they were not inhaling bugs. At length they passed into more open territory that had evidently been burned in the past, so that the flames could not follow in their wake. There they stopped and were rained on all through the night as the storm, having apparently replenished its energies, returned at full strength.