Lee collapsed at Mal’s feet and tried to wrangle coats out of their packs—flimsy cagoules because they’d packed for rain, not for Scott of the Antarctic. The temperature had gone through the floor and her fingers were already numb. She managed to hook the hood of one coat over Mal’s head and fell over into the nearest stone trying to get her own on.

The stones…That was what no amount of keep-calm-and-carry-on could handle. Before, there had been three wide-spaced stones in a field. Now there were suddenly six. Six Brothers, like the locals said. The stones were having a family reunion.

The one Lee was leaning against, a new one, had something painted on the inner face. The snow was doing a good job of washing off the redness it had been daubed with, but the artist had been following lines ground deep. She saw a curved sign—then she reinterpreted it as a figure, leaping high with tail and beak pointed downwards and one leg extended, all depicted in a few elegant lines.

“Lee,” said Mal.

“Mal, have you seen this?”

“Lee.” Mal’s voice was simultaneously tight and quiet, and very insistent.

Lee looked up and there were the Birdmen.

They were in the centre of the stones. No. They were where Lee’s internal compass told her the centre of the stones ought to be, but things were…wrong—it felt somehow like a paper cut to the eye when she looked in their direction. There were at least three of them, although the whirling snow, their snow, made it hard to be sure. They were a little smaller than people, and quite a bit lower because of how they were built. She saw long legs, but a body canted forwards, counterbalanced by that sweep of tail. And that wasn’t a bird’s spray of plumage, now she saw it close-up, but an actual tail, stiff bones and all. Their heads were round, surprisingly large behind their beaks. Lee stared into almost perfectly black eyes, huge and set forwards, a predator’s.

They were impossible, like a monk’s marginalia or bestiarist’s fantasy come to life. They were closest to giant ravens or, no, jackdaws, because their plumage was a scatter of black and white spots and bands. But her mind refused to take in more detail. Because they weren’t animals at all.

They had capes: animal hides secured at the throat and under the belly, shapeless as ponchos. One had a pack, something bundled in skins and lashed down. Another had something, a rod, maybe a spear, balanced in the crook of its bird-arm. It wasn’t a wing but had a sodden sleeve of feathers to it anyway. The hand was a crook of claws, like a taxidermist’s joke.