“You’ll never find them at something like this,” Chloë says when I ask her.

I’m walking beside her, the two of us making up the last of Raven’s entourage.

“Why not?” I ask.

“It’s too depressing for them. I know they can be serious—deadly serious—but they try to avoid being so as much as possible.”

I know just how they feel. I’ve never seen so many grim faces all in one place before, and it’s pretty obvious how this is going to go. But I feel I have to be here. I was there at the beginning, I owe it to my dead to be a witness at the end.

“I’m with them on that,” I say.

“I suppose,” Chloë says. “But we all have responsibilities to the greater good.”

“Maybe theirs is to make the world seem a little less grim than it is. Or at least to remind us that it can be.”

Chloë gives me a small smile. “Maybe it is.”

Once everyone’s settled, there’s an immediate argument raised by the salmon clan, that this is a blood feud and so no one’s business but that of those involved. Waninin, the chief of the salmon clan, makes the point that if anyone should be on trial, it’s me, since I struck the first blow.

I’m willing to take the judgment on that, but there are too many predators present for the argument to go unchallenged. Lazy Lightning, an orca from a pod near the shores of my home forests, stands to glare at Waninin with an unblinking gaze. He stands tall—taller than any of the buffalo clans—and his shoulders strain against the fabric of his shirt.

“Since when does a hunt for food become a feud?” he demands. “We are predators. Or are you saying that we should forsake our natures?”

“Cousins don’t hunt cousins.”

“No,” Lazy Lightning agrees. “And that was not the case here, either. Odawa himself has admitted that Grey only blinded him because he thought he’d come upon a dead salmon, half frozen in a stream. There was no malicious intent upon Grey’s part. Odawa’s retribution—that’s an entirely different matter.”

Tall and grave, a dark-haired woman I recognize as Moon Song of a Wave Upon the Coral, a rootwife of the dolphin clan, rises and waits for silence. She’s dressed in a long dress the colour of the sea, which brings out the blue highlights in her own dark skin. I’ve seen her at councils such as this, back home, and while I know she can be patient, she doesn’t suffer fools.

“Deciding the wrong or right of Odawa’s blinding isn’t our business today,” she says. “We’re here because of his dealing with fairy and the impact that has had—and could still have—on all of us.”