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.’