“No,” I said. “I’m me. I’m Bettina Scott and I—I won’t be told what to do.”

Behind me, Gary talked urgently to Trish. I heard him say, “Self-defence. Or defence, anyway. It’ll be okay, Trish.”

It wouldn’t. Not if we went on like this, huddled in this filthy shed. I had seen so much sky, all day.

I put one hand on Chris’s forehead and stretched to brush the other against Mitch. He didn’t stir, but where my fingers touched his neck I felt the thready jump of a pulse.

I had no idea what I was doing. Even my mother, who knew things, couldn’t have known how to do this. She’d have done it long before, otherwise. Beaks and claws, that’s what little boys are made of.

I could almost hear her. You’re in shock, Bettina. You need to rest, and settle your imagination. No excitement. That’s what you need, isn’t it?

“You were born to be birds,” I said. Chris sighed. Mitch didn’t make a sound. Gary watched me while he talked to Trish, but I couldn’t read his face. Damsons, everyone said, didn’t approve of Scotts.

“I don’t know what sort of birds,” I went on. “There isn’t time for me to find out; I don’t think I can talk you into living much longer as you are. But in your bones you must know. I’m counting on you. You’re going to be brave again, aren’t you?”

“You probably don’t need to force them to agree,” said Gary wearily. “I’m starting to think—as far as I can tell—it’s your saying it that’s important.”

I would ask later how Gary guessed, why he wasn’t surprised by what I was doing, why exactly Damsons looked askance at Scotts. For now, I whispered to my brothers. “You are brave. You’re wild. You need to be. It’s not monstrous. It’s because you were meant to be birds.”

Both Mitch and Chris were motionless.

Far as we had come from home today, we were still within Inglewell. The web of Runagate, Woodwild, Carter’s Crossing. The circle of my father’s laughter and my mother’s words. Whatever my brothers ought to be, whatever I was, we were trapped by our history. I bit my lip, gathered all my will, the thorny memories I’d been given or had forced upon me. I had my father’s blood but his heart as well, and something of my mother, surely: the catechism of spoken power that had hidden my past—that, more, had healed my arm where it had been scratched, and bruised, and broken. Under my collarbone a tendril snapped, like heartbreak.

“Be birds,” I whispered. “Be birds.”