Then she saw one string of panels, halfway down a wall, which dragged at her eyes. There were other figures there amongst the Birdmen: recognizably bipedal and tailless. However, they weren’t depicted in any way she’d have thought to draw a human being. Was that Mal? Or perhaps one of Stig’s people? Abruptly she wondered whether this hut was special. A place devoted to recording events—not just of a mystic past, but of recent living history. Perhaps a proto-historian’s attempt to shoehorn in a category of time between “now” and “all seasons.”

“So.” Mal loomed aggressively over the visitor for a while, making a point before she sat down. Stig didn’t seem keen to start talking. He looked everywhere but at Mal, poking at the fire, picking at his big square fingernails.

“You need us, I’m guessing,” Mal filled in when he wouldn’t say anything. “You’re not here for a rescue. But you need us.”

Stig grunted, still apparently absorbed by the dirt beneath his nails. He could have broken the pair of them like a bundle of dry sticks, but instead he was flinching from the browbeating like a child. Lee realized how easy it must be for them to harm one another, with those absurdly heavy, muscular frames. Maybe that had made them averse to any serious confrontation, always looking for another way.

“Say something,” Mal challenged. Stig sighed hugely and rolled his shoulders, as though about to attempt some great feat of strength.

“We have been hunting Kay’mal Khan,” he muttered. “We have been…fighting the builders. Our machines are better, but the city-builders are many and do not care about how many they lose attacking us. They keep us out of their world. They know to scent for us with their clever noses. You, touched by your world and this one, they do not expect. So yes. We need you. And, after Kay’mal Khan is returned—if any of us live and if any world still remains—we will bring you where we can that you want to be. Here, there, wherever.” He held his hands out, palms up, as though carrying or offering an invisible burden. “You do not do as you are told, and you are trouble. But of all those who are not us, you we trust most to do this thing.”

“High praise,” Mal said. Though Lee knew that particular tone was “Mal trying to be cool and distant while actually being deeply touched and/or impressed.” “You can take Lee home—” she started, but Lee wasn’t having any of that.

“Both of us,” she said. “No more four-year gaps. It has to be both of us.”