‘It’s not that simple,’ said Lug, stepping aside as a stormsinger lady and her child barged past, noses in the air. ‘The kind of magic you do is in your blood. Sometimes people from different circles get married and move, but mostly we just stick to our own.’

‘Us shapewalkers are a bit like that too.’ Liska swished her cloak, showing off the scales and folded wings. ‘I’m of the griffyx clan, and we keep to the Noon Fort. If I was a simurgh, I’d live in Cliffside to the south. I’d probably think having a peacock body and a wolf’s head was the best, and I wouldn’t dream of swapping my skin. And I’d definitely never want to be a flightless mage.’

‘Not even if you could be a powerful arbomancer?’ Lug’s voice held just the tiniest trace of envy.

‘Not even,’ said Liska with certainty. ‘Why, would you like to be one? Are you fed up of being looked down on the whole time?’

Lug was quiet for a few steps before he replied. ‘A bit,’ he said. ‘I suppose. I wouldn’t really want to change . . . I do love worms . . . but I’d like to show all the others just how powerful vermispexes can be. I’d like to . . .’

‘Go on,’ Liska urged. ‘You’d like to what?’

‘To summon the god worm,’ Lug mumbled under his breath.

‘The what?’

‘Nematus,’ said Lug, blushing crimson. ‘The god worm. He’s an earthworm the size of a mountain. Us vermispexes believe he exists somewhere beneath the ground. If one of us could just summon him . . . then the other mages would have to think again about us being the weakest. I know it’s just a stupid daydream, really, but . . .’

Liska slapped him on the back, knocking him into a tree. ‘It’s not stupid, Lug. Everyone should have a dream. Nobody should just bumble along because that’s the way “things have always been done”. How would the world ever change?’

‘What’s yours, then?’ Lug asked, rubbing his head where it had just bounced off a branch. ‘What’s your dream?’

‘That’s easy,’ said Liska, grinning. ‘To have an incredible adventure and earn a stripe. And then another and another, until I have the most ever.’

Lug’s face was blank so Liska explained to him all about shapewalkers and how they could win stripes of coloured fur by doing great deeds. She told him how her mother had gained hers, and about all the other shapewalker families and their quirks. She was just describing the ceremony in which shapewalkers first receive their skin when they walked out from the final circle of elm trees.