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?’