The thing started to move, freeing its hand from the broken branch and swatting feebly at its tormentors. Alice directed the swarmers to pin it to the ground, driving their beaks into it and holding it fast with their combined weight. Soon they had it spread-eagled, face-down, and Alice herself cautiously approached.

‘It’s over,’ she said. ‘Can you understand me? You’ve lost, all right?’

Something was happening to the creature. Its skin seemed to be drying out, cracking and hardening into old, dead bark, while in the chest of its ape-like body something continued to twist and writhe. Alice watched, still tense, as a great plate of bark cracked in half and fell away. A mop of pale green hair emerged, straight up out of the tree-sprite’s back, like a shoot growing out of a fallen timber. It was followed by two slender hands, their skin the colour of fresh buds in spring.

They scrabbled on the bark armour until they found a handhold, and then a child-like creature no taller than Alice’s knee levered itself out. It was naked, genderless as an undressed doll, with a painfully thin body and slender, delicate limbs. All it shared with the ape-like armoured thing were its eyes, which were the same brilliant, burning green. Alice had a sudden image of this fragile little thing sitting cocooned in bark and wood like a medieval knight in his plate-mail, looking out at the world from a slit in its visor.

It was trying to get away, clambering over the wreckage of its bark-suit, but when it reached the edge it lost its footing and slid heavily to the ground. One of the swarmers ran up to it and took a tentative peck at its leg, and its beak left a curving, ugly wound that leaked thick, sticky sap. The tree-sprite’s mouth gaped in a silent scream, showing teeth the pale colour of birch wood.

‘Stop,’ Alice said aloud.

A ring of swarmers halted, all around the little creature, which clutched at the cut just like a human in pain. It rolled over, face-down, knees pulled up under it, and huddled there like a child awaiting punishment. The swarmers surrounded it, razor beaks gleaming and dangerous.

She tried to think back to what Geryon had told her. He’d mentioned, offhandedly, that a creature could surrender rather than fight to the death, but he’d never said how.

‘You have to . . . submit,’ Alice said uncertainly. ‘Then I can go away and leave you alone. Do you understand me? I don’t want to hurt you. But otherwise I have no way to get out of here.’

Was this enough? The fight was clearly over. But she was still here. She tried to remember what had happened when she’d escaped the world of the Swarm, but she’d been freezing and nearly unconscious at the time, and recalled only waking up in bed.