‘Stand down!’ Santiren snapped, and Marcantor scowled at her. She was nobody he should need to take orders from. Paladrya was gone.

‘Marcantor,’ the boy heard his own voice shake, ‘please, stand down.’

The tall Dart-kinden regarded him archly for a moment, seeing in the boy only the cause of his banishment to this alien place, then something broke inside him. He grounded his spear, its tip rattling branches, and for a moment his long face held nothing but an exhausted sadness.

‘Cynthaen,’ Santiren interrupted. ‘You know me.’

The knife was gone from the strange woman’s hand. Dismissing Marcantor entirely, she focused again on the Dart-kinden woman. ‘You I know – these others, not so much.’ The boy had to pass her words back and forth in his head before he could interpret them.

‘We have our compact,’ Santiren said, ‘and you understand what I mean. We call upon you.’

The boy watched curiously. This was something he knew nothing of, this touching of fingers across the shoreline. Santiren’s kin, though, had come from strange places before her mother made a home within the colony. Paladryra had known. Paladrya always knew.

The land-kinden woman’s harsh stare turned suddenly towards the boy. ‘You, I know,’ she repeated. ‘This other, he’s like your brother, so I know him, but not this child. Not the woman who was with you. You cannot think I’d help Spider-kinden. No compact binds me to that.’

The boy just stared at her, and he was thinking, To be all the time in this cold and tangled place? All the time, and never once to step into the waters? How can she live? How can anything live here, exposed to this awful openness?

‘What is Spider-kinden?’ Santiren asked. ‘We know of no Spider-kinden.’