‘Soon. One night, the whole settlement was kept awake by strange noises coming from the forest. There was buzzing and shrieking and cracking, and it sounded like the trees themselves were fighting. It got so bad that in the end our elders roused the whole of Veren and led us to the Godroad. We stayed there till dawn and returned to find our homes untouched, and the forest looking much like it had the day before. Most were happy to accept this apparent good fortune and return to their beds, but I wasn’t.

‘I crept out of Veren and into the trees. It was much quieter than I’d ever known it before. The strangeness of it scared me.’

Sa-at nodded. The Wild was only quiet for blood and bad things.

‘There was one tree that had a knot like a frowning eye. We called it the Stern Tree. I noticed that the Stern Tree had a new scar on its trunk, four feet long and jagged. It wasn’t autumn but there were leaves everywhere, enough that I could kick flurries of them in the air when I walked. Several trees had fallen in the night, leaving patches in the canopy above. After a while, I began to smell death.’

‘Did you run away?’

‘No, I went deeper. Where the forest had been silent I started to hear sounds of activity. While I was trying to listen, my foot came down on a pile of leaves that crunched like an eggshell. When I cleared the leaves away, I saw the carapace of a giant Flykin. I cleared more leaves and found another, then another, all broken up. Black legs with single-toed feet that jutted into the air. Bodies with the heads bitten off, shreds of glittering wings impaled on branches. Too many to count. And not just Flykin corpses. There were Dogkin too, and other creatures I didn’t recognize.

‘All these bodies had brought scavengers. An army of them, big and small: Roachkin, Ratkin, Birdkin. Hundreds of them, crawling over the corpses and each other. As I watched, severed limbs began to disintegrate, eyes were sucked out of sockets, tongues nibbled out of slack mouths.’

‘Was that when you ran away?’

‘No. Maybe I should have, but I ventured further. Carefully at first, then more confidently. I realized the scavengers were too busy with dead meat to worry about the living. As I walked, I could see how the fighting had moved through the forest, getting more intense as it went.

‘I’d never before seen Flykin like these corpses. Parts of their carapace were covered in pale skin. Human skin, like Tal’s. At first I thought they were wearing the patches like trophies but as I probed the bodies with my hands—’ he paused to look at Sa-at, who had gasped. ‘What is it?’

‘Don’t you know that you should never touch dead Flykin?’