“Don’t think it’s possible, for humans,” Mal replied from the corner of her mouth. “But they can make all kinds of noises, natural mimics, and they pick things up really quick. This one’s Wakkatsy, or that’s what its name sounds like. Except that’s only the root, because they add all sorts of qualifiers, build up words like Lego. I do understand some of their words, some of the time, but a dozen of them picked up English within my first year here. Not conversational, exactly. But given it’s a language from a species that doesn’t even exist in this timeline, it’s pretty damn impressive.” And as she spoke she was approaching Wakkatsy, holding her hands out with the thumbs up. This prompted a ferocious hissing display, as though the creature was about to tear her limb from limb.

Or it was laughing, Lee suddenly thought. Mal has an in-joke that excludes me. It’s the Oxford lot all over again. A weirdly petty thought, but it helped to ground her psychologically, keeping the terror and disjunction at bay. She had Mal, at least, and an alien world with Mal felt at least equal to her own world without.

Under the massed regard of thirty noisy archosaurs, they walked into the territory notionally claimed by the huts. The sound of conversation was as deafening as an aviary. And Lee took it on faith that there was complex meaning in every whistle and chirp, yet she could pick nothing out of it, save the name “Mal”—which she assumed applied to them both equally. Or, she realized, there was “Mal-Mal,” perhaps the plural. After all, they wouldn’t have needed to distinguish between Mal and other humans until now.

She tried to cast them as aggressive, threatening, even alarmed. Instead she couldn’t see them as anything other than glad to see their visitors, perhaps due to Mal’s calm and her cheery thumbs-up gestures.

Then the “villagers” were quieting, and parted to make way for a delegation. If most of the dinosaurs were brightly cloaked and adorned, these were even more splendid: she saw polished stone and metal about throats, chests and backs. One even had a wooden framework of wings on its back, like a Polish cavalryman. They did not have the formal pomp of the rodent lords she had seen, though. Indeed, the other dinosaurs were jostling the group, and one was still having its seashell crown hastily set in place about the back of its skull.

“Return, Mal,” said the lead dinosaur, who was a hand’s breadth taller than the rest. It had a bronze sickle strung around its neck that looked functionally sharp and heavy. “Mal-Mal.”

“I’ve returned with a friend,” Mal agreed. “This is Lee. We’re here for all the seasons, maybe. If you will have us.”