The boy called upon his Art. That took a few moments, in this unfamiliar place, but he found it calmed him, as the colours rose within his skin, flowing over his arms and legs, matching themselves to the plantlife around him – at first awkwardly, then more and more naturally. He let out a long, calm sigh.
The night forest around them was full of noises. It was another jarring, alien aspect of this place. Things rustled and buzzed and creaked all around him, a constant patter of small life, and some not so small. The boy’s eyes, and his companions’ eyes, were well used to darkness – there was darkness far greater than this where they came from, places where the limn-lights had never shone – but their darkness was near-silent, not this constant chatter.
Something large moved there, between the trees. They all spotted it at once and he saw the two warriors grow tense, spears levelled. It was tall and slender, and the boy tried hard to make it out, seeing the glint of eyes, the thin spindles of legs, one hooked forearm held close, the other extended forward to aid the thing’s careful progress. It regarded them.
Some kind of claw-kinden thing, but moved to the land. He knew, without thinking, that this must be the heraldic beast of Cynthaen’s kinden. It was close enough to the shrimp they called the swiftclaw, and she herself was close enough to that thing’s kinden. The creature was larger than a man, and he guessed it shared a swiftclaw’s temper and hunger. Marcantor and Santiren held their spears now in both hands, the thin barbed heads barely moving. The land monster regarded them impassively, huge eyes aglitter in the moonlight.
Cynthaen was there beside it, without warning, putting a hand up to touch its armoured flank. The triangular head cocked to look at her, mouthparts circling, and then it began to creep off, one deliberate move after the next, sometimes solely on the ground and sometimes reaching from tree to tree.
‘Now,’ she said, and then enquired: ‘Where’s the little one?’
The boy let his Art flow from him, the dark colours running like paint until he had recovered his pale skin. Cynthaen watched cautiously. This was obviously Art she had never witnessed before.
The land-kinden woman now dropped something at their feet, pieces of a strange material, crawling with straps. When she realized they did not know what to do with them she uttered a tired sound and took the boy’s feet in her hands, heedless of Marcantor’s twitch at such presumption. The heavier piece went under his sole, and the straps held it to his foot. It felt exceedingly strange. He saw that Cynthaen herself wore something different, an enclosing sheath of skin that went almost to her knee.
The two Dart-kinden copied the arrangement, with varying success, so that Cynthaen had to correct their crossed and twisted strapping. Marcantor sat very still as she attended to him, but the boy saw his hands constantly clenching, the palms rough with the teeth of his Art. She saw it, too, and grinned up at him wickedly.
‘Don’t spoil too much for a fight, tall one,’ she advised him. ‘For my kind, that’s wooing.’
Once she was done, she took out something else, a hood of stiff skin. She passed it to the boy. ‘Wear it – in case of my people. Now we’d best move. Dawn’s getting close.’
‘The sun?’ the boy asked.
She gave him a look. ‘That’s what we mean when we say dawn, boy.’
She led them faster this time, although they kept slipping and skidding in their new footwear. They saw no sign of her mysterious, hostile people, but the boy had the sense that she was forever on the lookout for them, deliberately choosing a path to avoid them. All was not peace and harmony amongst the land-kinden.
When the sun came, it was a slow brightening through the trees, first on one side only, and then on all sides. The harsh chill slunk resentfully away, and gradually the night noises gave place to more and different sounds made by the beasts of the day. The boy spotted almost none as large as the swiftclaw-thing of the night, only heard them go quiet as he and the Dart-kinden passed, and then pick up their lives behind them. Once or twice there was the shape of an armoured thing clattering between the plants, or hanging off them. Of smaller things there were legion, and mostly creatures of the air, darting and diving and swarming, glittering in the first light, or clinging to twigs to soak up the sun’s warmth.
Cynthaen picked up the pace yet again, until there was a noticeable thinning of the plants around them, a brightening of the light. The heat, where it fell on cloth and skin, was beginning to swelter. The boy saw ahead of them shapes that were obviously not made by nature but by man.
They broke from the trees and were immediately within a gathering of structures that had clearly been put up by some craft or labour, but the boy could not understand how. They appeared so crude as to be the work of halfwits: everything was flat, angular, glaringly ugly, made of blocks and beams that seemed barely finished. He looked on them with horror and could not stop himself from asking, ‘Is this where your kinden live?’
‘Mine?’ Cynthaen glanced back at him. ‘Oh, this is none of mine. Don’t like it, eh? Then maybe there’s some hope for you. They call this place Arvandine. They have built it as close as they dare without risking our wrath.’ She led them down paths running between the blocky buildings, ignoring those few residents they met on the way. The denizens of Arvandine were of a quite different kind to Cynthaen: most seemed burly and dark, heavy-bodied men and women bearing burdens of various kinds. One other was almost as dark, but as tiny as a Smallclaw, his head barely reaching to the height of the boy’s chest, barely to the Dart-kinden’s waists. In a moment this little man, seeing Cynthaen striding straight towards him, had flashed a blur of dancing Art from his back and thrown himself into the air. The boy gasped at this prodigy, staring upwards, watching the man vanish over the rooftops.
The land-kinden are also air-kinden. That great unbounded void above them, that had gone from freezing cold to throbbing heat with the coming of the sun, was a slave to these strange and terrible people.
‘Here.’
The shabby-looking place they had fetched up beside was a little bigger than most, but no lovelier to look on. Cynthaen banged at a door, while the boy could only think, How can they live in such ugliness? Even the forest would be better. Cynthaen’s kinden have the right idea.
On the eighth rattling bang, the door was jerked open. A squat, slope-shouldered, dark-skinned man stood there, wearing a sleeved robe that he clasped tight about his broad waist.
‘What?’ he roared. ‘What is it that can’t wait for a civilized hour?’ His speech was different to the land-kinden woman, a little slower, with the vowels dragged out, but no easier to follow.
‘Master Panhandle.’ Cynthaen addressed him with obvious scorn.
‘Penhold,’ he corrected her. He had not even spared a look at her companions. ‘What is it, fishwife?’
‘I have a gift for you,’ Cynthaen told him. ‘Your luck has come in with the tide this morning.’
The dark man scowled at her. ‘Make sense,’ he said.
‘I bring three new members for your household,’ she told him. ‘Rejoice, therefore.’
He stared at her, and the boy wanted to feel sorry for him, but the fact that he himself was being palmed off onto this huge stranger, who obviously bore Cynthaen no love, eclipsed all other considerations.
‘Who…?’ Penhold glanced past the woman, to see the two Dart-kinden, and then the boy. His face froze, hiding anything that might move behind it. ‘Since when did the Mantis-kinden traffic in people?’ he enquired slowly, but it was clear that his mind was more concerned with the problem of what this boy and his escort might be.
‘You will take them in,’ Cynthaen told him. ‘Give them a home. Feed them. Work them, if you will. The two tall ones look like they could carry a load.’
The Dart-kinden bristled at that comment, but even Marcantor could tell how everything now hung in the balance.