3

Eio discovered quickly that Bon was a female, watching the sloth roll on her back enmeshed in the delirium of the afternoon, her limbs splayed, scratching a deep itch in the moss or algae that ran along her spine. From the musk that washed over her Eio knew Bon had been the one to frighten her down the cliff. She sighed. Among the Auye it wasn’t usually polite to wish vengeance upon an animal, and such a placid, aloof animal at that, but the pain biting at her ankle and running across her back pushed her thoughts into dark waters. She shivered under the longleaf pine that night, passing into nightmares for murky swathes of time before jolting awake, her whole body gnawing at itself coyotelike. Mere paces away Bon, silent and phantasmal, slithered through shadows and moonbeams. Eio’s trembling fingers found a flat rock in the roots beside her, wedge shaped, and she dreamily promised herself to bloody it before the sun rose, though whether with the sloth’s or her own she was unsure.

“Going to find it,” she muttered to where she thought Bon was lurking, imagining the frigid blue night glinting off the sloth’s claws, her weak meat too tempting a meal to forgo. “We’re going to find it. You and me.”

Day broke abruptly. Eio blinked through darkness and instantly shafts of midmorning sunlight had pierced the wooded halls of the forest at hard angles, flies flitting between its warm, gentle beams and columns. The high green ceiling murmured here and there, shaking off sleep, chiding me. Eio’s gaze dropped down to the sloth. She was seated on her haunches, lightly dozing, facing her.

At first glance, or from a considerable distance, she could have been a bear. Eio knew better. She and Merah had stumbled across a black bear on a game trail one spring. They had been entranced by the birdsong as they foraged outside Pama, the warmth that came with pauses between the wind’s cool breaths, verdant buds and shoots, the gentle emergence and awakening of things. So deep was their reverie Eio actually walked backwards into the bear. That shock and their shrieks of terror spooked the bear; it shot like lightning across the trail and up a tree, glaring down at the sisters, fearful and offended. A light had glimmered in its eyes, a light that could cast all manner of shadows: vengeful, curious, mothering, cruel. Bon’s eyes could not have been more different, Eio thought at first. Hers would be the dull, placid gaze of the herbivore, colored occasionally by omnivorous, opportunistic greed.

Then again, here she was, awakening and staring at her, far from dull, definitely curious. Something else was stirring behind her eyes. She had waited for Eio all morning. Half-eaten pinecones and an old piece of honeycomb, a little sour from the look of it, lay at her paws, spoils taken during my ramblings in the dark. Eio took a deep, chest-heaving breath in through her nose, letting her eyes flutter shut, Bon yawning contagiously, and remembered the last time she had taken her herbs was before her last hunt with Merah. Her cycle was off.

“So much for what I know,” Eio grumbled, her throat parched.

Bon snorted.

Eio knew she could limp fairly well despite her ankle’s protests, and she would die if she neglected her thirst and hunger any longer, so she hauled herself up against the pine and continued north.

A shy stream presented itself to her a few minutes later, trickling down through green tufts, tumbling here and there over a rock. She sank to her knees and drank, keeping an eye open. Bon was drinking, too, a few paces downstream. Up a squat outcropping on the far bank she stopped to strip some bark off yet another juniper. She didn’t have the time or the energy to process the fibers correctly and resorted to crudely weaving them into some footwraps.

For the rest of the day Eio shook and panted, wounded, up a gentle slope that would not end, past possumhaw and aloes and pockmarked boulders, the floor of each tiny crater caked with wet dirt, moss clinging blindly in random configurations. She had hoped to have an easy enough trek to weave some more juniper fibers into a sturdier kit as she went but found herself trapped in the effort to climb; she had no strength to double back down and no remaining wits to find a better trail. She could only walk. Bon proved slow, as she figured a sloth would. Her despair only deepened seeing Bon ahead of her on the trail, turning back every so often to ensure Eio was alive, or maybe to mock her. I cannot believe this sloth is outpacing me. In her delirium she interrogated herself endlessly. When will the harrier find me? How am I changing, and why? When will I change next? Why would a sloth actually bother listening to me?

She took a small break as the soft tufts of grass receded into scree. She envisioned rippling muscle and fur overtaking her hands, animal power coiling like springs in her legs, dropping to all fours like Bon, letting her howling gut and desperation force her all the way up the hill or mountain until it ended in the sky. She gritted her teeth and her breath seethed out of her mouth in short, choppy grunts, growing to screams.

No change came. She was even more exhausted than before. Her head was pounding again.

Hours later, as the afternoon fell into an uneasy evening, Bon suddenly vanished. Eio had fallen far behind. The path had grown steeper and steeper until Eio was crawling. She glanced up, sweat pouring off her greasy face, and saw the sloth break into a fat lope, disappearing into a juniper thicket.

Panic seized her and she collapsed, chest heaving, legs weakly kicking into the dirt, churning up cold, wet earth. Her walking stick tumbled away. Two crows began gossiping to one another across the woods. Eio presumed herself to be the topic of conversation.

Panic seized her and she collapsed, chest heaving, legs weakly kicking into the dirt, churning up cold, wet earth. Her walking stick tumbled away. Two crows began gossiping to one another across the woods. Eio presumed herself to be the topic of conversation.

“Bon,” she gasped. “Come back.”

The last rays of sunlight were fading. Her skin prickled.

“Please, Bon!”

Nothing but crows cawing and cawing. Her groan grew into a scream and she slammed her head into the ground and kicked, yelling, thrashing, coughing. Gravelly cracks opened in her throat.

The crows grew louder, agitated, and from somewhere close an animal chuffed loudly. She raised her throbbing head and saw Bon tensing her forelimbs. The sloth pushed off the ground onto her hind legs, taking a toddling step to balance herself, and barked up at the crows. She sounded a little like I had, screaming into the dirt. She heard the shuffling of feathers, wings alighting, and they were gone.

Bon thudded back down and prodded Eio with her wet nose. Her breath reeked.

“Okay,” she sighed. “Okay, enough, please, enough.”

Rolling onto her back proved useless. Bon stood directly over her and licked from her chin to her nostrils. The thick drool weighed her down, stinging her eyes, greasing up her forehead even worse than before. She spat and sputtered and shielded her face to no avail.

After she had clawed her way the last hundred paces up the rise, Bon chuffing and snorting and flinging drool at her side all the while, Eio managed to wedge herself supine under an oak log, long since fallen, its insides crumbly and mealy from rot. Bon yawned and nestled into a shaggy hump beside her, flooding their hollow with the warm stink of moldy skin, snoring almost immediately.

Eio’s left arm went numb underneath her. In fitful shrugs and pained jerksshe rearranged herself, no longer pinned half beneath the tree and half beneath Bon. She took her first painless breath in hours and felt her steady pulse in her calf, a quiet thrumming in the arrow wound Sudha had given her, the gash no longer teetering on the edge of infection, its anger somewhat placated. She craned her neck and beheld the hill they had climbed, mostly dark now and viewed from upside-down. If Sudha was following me he would have found me by now. The sun had fallen into the lowlands. Stars spilled drops of light across the inky sky.

She felt Bon’s heartbeat suddenly. It thrummed slower than her own and heavier. Eio realized it was beginning to beat in time with her snoring, thump-thump, wheeze, wheeze, wheeze, thump-thump, wheeze, wheeze, wheeze. Then the sloth’s snoring and heartbeat each marched off time, careening wildly into the night, thump-wheeze-thump-wheeze, wheeze, wheeze-thump-thump, dancing crazy steps around one another in a wide circle, eventually finding their way back to each other again.

Despite her best efforts Eio’s own breaths began to keep up. She did not stay awake long enough to count her heartbeats. When they left in the morning, both of them soaked with dew, a sliver of her fear stayed there, nestled under the dead oak.

Eio stretched for the first time in days, feeling her tortured muscles ease by just the slightest degree. The land opened itself to them as they walked down the hill, not so daunting in this new direction, and a low fog rose to meet their steps.

“I’ll tell you a story, Bon, while we walk. You have to stay close or else you won’t hear it, and it’s an important story.”

Bon waded into the river after her and sneezed from the cold. Eio bit her lip to stop her teeth from chattering, unwinding her kit from across her shoulders and holding it aloft above the water. A fish, invisible through the swift foam, brushed past her ribs.

“During the Long Before everything was dark, and everything was frozen. When Grandmother Owl opened a hole in the night the sun melted all the ice, creating all the rivers and lakes and oceans. It’s all the same water, going up into the clouds and then falling back as rain, over and over again forever. The water filled up the world, and all the plants and animals were able to settle down and live. Woman and her children were grateful, too.” Upriver, past a sharp elbow bend, beyond where it slid violently down a smooth limestone ridge into bubbling, frothing falls, an eagle dove and silently dipped its talons into the water. It flapped hard for an instant, wet from the spray of the falls, before coming up empty.

“The problem was there was something trapped in the ice, something Grandmother Owl didn’t know about, or had forgotten. They had been frozen so long ago, further back than the Long Before, when there were no nights, no world, nothing. And when they woke up, they were hungry.”

Eio’s foot snagged on something sharp. Red heat spilled from her big toe to her heel.

“Shit! Mother Gar! Come on!”

Bon bleated behind her. Eio turned, stumbling in the current, and her other foot landed on the same sharpness. She shifted her weight just in time and tripped yelping under the water. River stink flooded her nose.

She surfaced gasping, her foot throbbing, and when she had cleared the water out of her head Bon was already on the far bank, the wet pebbles squelching under her paws. Eio limped ashore. “Just when my ankle was feeling better,” she winced, slowly lowering herself on her good leg. She was starting to make the same pained noises sitting down as Ahi and Engo would standing up. “Same foot. Can you believe this?”

Bon nipped at a little plant growing at the edge of the shore. A few bites and all that remained was a nub of a shoot, wet with drool. Eio reached her hand out and patted the sloth’s soaked haunches, running her fingers through the slick fur. Bon’s skin was oily and rough. Her fingers came out tinted green from the algae in her coat.

Just as she turned her attention back to the river she saw her juniper bark kit floating away. The water slowed downstream as the banks grew farther apart. Reeds and rushes and little canebrakes teetered nervously into the water, taking tentative steps from the pines on either side. Bugs, too distant and small to discern in detail, flitted from stalk to stalk. Eio’s kit bobbed once near the far bank, dodging some cattails, then promptly disappeared. She sighed, hanging her head, and laid back, keeping her right arm out to hold Bon’s licks and sneezes at bay.

Two days had passed and they were no closer to the monster, or monsters, who had split the world with their voices. There had been no birdslaves, either; no sign of other human beings at all. Even the animals seemed to be avoiding them. Bon was to blame for some of that, and the strangeness of Eio’s affliction likely made up for the rest. She had survived for a while on what I could forage, and there was still plenty to forage, but as time went on my hunger had begun aching, moaning up and into my brain, first from a distinct lack of the herbs she took to keep herself as a woman, then growing deeper, baser, growling with want. She craved meat. If she thought about meat she would go mad. She couldn’t allow herself to picture meat, seared and smoky, fat dripping into a sizzling fire or cooked for hours and hours under the dirt, wrapped in leaves, so tender it fell away perfectly from the bone, or even charred, charred beyond recognition, the flesh curled and bones scorched, a mountain of burnt meat, all piled in the center of the village, all aflame, and astride the ruins a demon with cold eyes and a hand extending down from the fiery sky towards her cheek—

She squeezed her eyes shut and slapped herself in the face with both hands. The rushed conversations of the river and falls bubbled back into existence. Her shivering was no longer from the cold bite of the water. A cloud shaped like a camel ambled across the sky, and between her and it the eagle rose on an updraft, a slain trout tucked neatly in its talons.

An old lesson of Ahi’s ran across the parched landscape of Eio’s mind. She had no spear, nor a net, nor any line with which to cast, but she was suddenly sure, standing now, limping yet again, that she would eat fish today.

Following the river downstream she eventually came to an impressive yet placid black willow hanging just over the water. The fragrance of warm mud welcomed her; the current was calm here, reserved even, unlikely to be troubled to pick up any sort of pace or disturb the scenery. Her footwraps dissolved in the sloppy mire of the bank as she waded up to her waist in the shadow of the willow. The muddy shore was broken up here and there by flat rock outcroppings, too slick to stand on but just right for her quarry to hide beneath. Eio guided herself through the water like a heron, each step deliberate and tested for potential slips or stabs. Bon watched nervously from the bank.

“It’s alright, girl,” said Eio, navigating slowly to the nearest rock. She flinched as a wasp shot past her ear, then inhaled and dove under the water.

Murk engulfed her. Her outstretched hands probed the bank where mud and rock met, searching for holes. She resurfaced after a minute, wiping the hair out of her eyes. Bon was starting to fall asleep beneath the willow. Eio dove again, praying to Mother Gar, desperately conjuring Ahi’s voice, ignoring the pressure building in her lungs to breathe, feeling sightlessly around the bank until her left hand disappeared into a hole. Back to the surface, a few seconds to regulate her breathing, then a deep inhale, back to the hole. Eio snaked her arm inside, her fingers dancing a tantalizing imitation.

A sudden surge of pain wrenched her hand further into the hole, jamming her shoulder against the rock. She braced with her feet and hoisted back, then shot her right hand down the hole, just barely missing a spiny dorsal fin, hooking my fingers deep into gills. With all her strength she heaved.

Eio laughed all the way back to the bank, even as all twenty pounds of the flathead thrashed against her, cutting happy rivulets of blood across her bare arms, chest, and hips. After dropping the catfish in the grass to find a stone sharp enough to kill it, she turned to find Bon, her claws slick with blood, fish brains spilled in a neat spot. She laughed even harder.

It didn’t take her long to start a fire on the pebble beach. She planned a filet for herself and left the rest for Bon; whatever the sloth didn’t finish, she would scavenge. As the fish cooked she carefully gathered some aloe nearby to work into medicine for the bites and scrapes she had accumulated in her hogging. Another flake of fear had been left behind in that water.

The sun had traced a small, neat arc across its zenith by the end of their meal. Eio rested against Bon’s flank, the sloth’s contented sighing winding down towards sleep as the fire died.

“We shouldn’t stay here for the night,” she said. “It’s too exposed. We don’t wanna be where food has been, either.”

Bon snorted.

“Hey, I never finished my story. Once it’s over we’ll start moving again.” Eio stood up, grimacing, and began gently kicking wet pebbles over the fire and catfish bones. “So the ice melted, and what had been asleep was now awake. They were huge, and ravenous, and they crawled across the earth, gouging it up and tearing the land apart. They spilled poison when they swam in the new waters. They ate everything they came across, whole herds of mammoth and rhino and bison, flocks of birds, schools of fish, even whales. They trampled Woman’s gardens and fields, causing the people to starve. Some of them, massive though they were, could even fly, and in doing so spread all over the world. When they were angered, they belched even more poison, and fire. No corner of the planet was safe. They set it all aflame.”

She turned her head and found Bon seated up, transfixed, gawking at her in much the same way Eio had when Merah had told her this story around the bonfire in Pama, late one autumn night. There was something remarkably unslothlike in her eyes. A wicked grin crept across Eio’s face as she leaned in close. Her voice sank to a conspiratorial murmur.

“You know what they were called, Bon?”

There was her own face through her sister’s eyes, firelight dancing between them, the odd ember wheeling across the darkness, the night itself trembling. Little Merah must have been so proud of herself, rearing up with her hands splayed like fearsome claws, the fire surging before her, roaring as only a little kid can roar:

“They were dragons!”

Bon barked and scrambled backwards, slipping on the wet pebbles and flinging mud into Eio’s open mouth. She wasn’t able to get the taste out until they made camp that night, after the possumhaw she had mistaken for holly and brewed into a tea made her puke.

They had put a few days between themselves and the pine tree when they found the next sign of the monster: a three-toed footprint wider across than Eio was tall, sunk deep into the forest loam. Near the ends of the toes the unmistakable impressions of talons dug wet wounds into the earth, and the faintest hint of a dewclaw, balancing some unimaginable weight, had kissed the dirt at the footprint’s heel. The top half of a sapling bent awkwardly down into the depression. Eio stepped gingerly, mindful of her newest hurt, into the footprint. From within the confines of the dirt the noises of the world seemed to shrink away, and she was for a moment lost in the immensity of the footprint. For weeks the only mark of the monster’s existence had been the memory of its call across the forest, ringing endlessly in her mind until it became so warped it was unrecognizable. She would measure the call against her pulse, against the rhythm of the wind, against Bon’s snoring at night. If only Merah were here. She staggered where she stood. A fistful of beetles scurried out from under her shadow.

Eio looked up. The canopy seemed to have exploded. Scattered about the newly-made clearing she noticed fresh splintered branches and trunks, scattered leaves, and countless broken twigs.

“It came through here recently,” she said.

Bon chuffed and slid into the footprint after her, inhaling the beetles.

The forest was no longer as dense as it was closer to the foot of the escarpment, nor were the trees as tall. Their trail had cleared considerably. Tangled undergrowth and vines had given way to short, hardy grasses that wormed their way out from between hefty limestone slabs.

Another footprint presented itself twenty paces down the trail. Here, too, the forest had burst open above them, and the scar in the canopy went on and on. Eio broke into a limping jog, Bon huffing behind her. It was massive, and it walked on two legs. Nothing in or around Auye lands grew even close to that monstrous size; mammoths preferred the open steppe far away, and even then there were very few of them; the tallest of terror birds, where they could still be found, would only barely crest the head of a grown human; even a giant sloth rearing up to reach a pawpaw or avocado could have fit comfortably inside the footprint.

They followed the trail of footprints as it carved a scar through the forest. In one footprint a small spring burbled; in another a great and old live oak had been felled, reduced to splinters, completely collapsed in on itself from above. Eio found a wide grin scrawled across her face, a wild laugh bubbling within her. It was real, it was here, and she was on her way. The sensation of wings fluttering towards flight burst to life in her chest. She ran heedlessly, Bon falling farther and farther behind, her walking stick cast aside and forgotten.

Without warning the forest ended and Eio stumbled to a halt. Before her, in a wide swathe nearly a quarter of a league across, were the ruins of hundreds of trees, dirt and stones churned and upturned all around the shattered stumps and logs. A swarm of crows and vultures wheeled overhead, filling the air with their congress. She recognized, following the swathe of destruction as it swept from left to right, horror and wonder rising in her gut together, the distinct pattern of a tail swipe.

Bon ambled out of the shadows of the trees behind her, wetting her limp hand with the snot and saliva on her cold black nose. Eio absentmindedly scritched the fur on the sloth’s head and looked down at her. “This is it,” she said. “We found it.”

The footprints continued through the devastation. The monster’s stride had changed, taking long steps then pivoting, repositioning, knocking down the forest in all directions. Eio wondered at what could have caused its path to change so drastically when Bon stopped, her nose scenting hard. Eio paused midstep. A faint cry gurgled out from under a massive oak, completely uprooted. She looked around for any kind of weapon before she approached, settling on another stick, and followed Bon to the felled tree.

A man’s entire right side lay crushed beneath the oak. Blood oozed out of his remaining orifices, staining his dark leathers. He twitched all over. Eio squatted down over him. He coughed as Bon took his boot in her mouth, chewing on months of caked dirt.

“Not you,” he said. Eio was surprised he was able to say even that with so much of the skin on his face shorn away. Her fear ebbed but her pulse remained quick.

“You look like one of the harrier’s men,” said Eio. She gestured with her stick at the felled tree. “What did this? Is it nearby?”

The man’s breath hitched. He reached his arm out to Eio, feebly brushing his trembling fingers against her shin. She swallowed the bile rising in her throat and nudged him away. “I need to know where it is. Are there more of you? Are you after it? Are you still after me?”

He coughed and blood sputtered over his cracked lips. “Too late for… you… harrier coming… take… kill it…”

Eio sprang to her feet and took off running after the footprints. Around her the stains of corpses rose out of the debris, the fluttering of crows and the hopping of vultures unperturbed by her presence. She stumbled over something wet, pinned down by the still-green canopy of an ash tree, and fell hands first into the gore of a carrier bird, its enormous wings folded and broken, its ribs inverted, bloodless yet oozing a bright, creamy sludge from where its repurposed organs used to be. More bodies lay crushed and ruined beneath its weight. A rattle whirred from its beak, and it raised its head, weak and blind. Eio tried to rise, slipped once, and ran on.

Then the forest returned, the bloodsoaked ruin behind her. Eio panted, clutching at herself. Bon appeared at her side, holding the dying soldier’s boot in her mouth. Eio groaned and smacked it from the sloth's grasp with her stick.

The footprints smeared themselves through the soil, churning up rocks where they had stumbled, and as Eio followed them she realized they were becoming smaller quickly, less deep, less distinct, bearing less weight. The air grew sickly humid. The trees cleared around them as they stepped into a village.

Twenty small, squat domes of roughly chiseled stone lay in a rough circle around the remains of a recently smothered fire. Moss and lichen clung to the little buildings in patches, cascading vinelike over windows and doorframes, most shut haphazardly with skins. Woven tapestries and banners, painting geometric scenes in earthen and sunset hues, hung from wooden poles. Eio stopped to inspect one: two black glaciers opened across a crimson wasteland, the shadows of people traveling downslope from the ice to a great lake. Nothing stirred in the houses. Cooking utensils, reed baskets, ornate clay bowls and jugs, tools half-finished, and meals half-eaten littered the ground. Goat and bird pens lay open; human and animal tracks surged north out of the circle. The monster’s trail followed them, stopping ahead of a house on the edge of the circle, somehow even smaller than all the rest.

Just a few paces from the final footprint, more a ragged crater than anything, still steaming, a woman sat kneeling, her left hand crossing her body to clutch her right arm, her head hung low. Eio, crouched low, circled slowly around her, putting her back to the last house, her stick raised in front of her. The woman was naked, sweat plastering her warm umber skin, shorter by a hand than Eio and fatter, the low crest of her belly eclipsing her groin, her shoulders gently falling into soft, hairy arms. Her skin bunched and rolled at her neck and her wrists, and her hands were raw and sore. Cruel burns wound their way up her legs, scabs and blisters peppering her knees. Short, shaggy brown locs framed her face wolfishly. Her eyes were closed.

Hot pinpricks of danger needled Eio’s neck. She tried to step away but found her feet held fast. Behind her Bon scented hard, then made a panicked bark and disappeared into the brush. The woman began to stir and Eio remembered her eyes. She searched around for anything to cover her face with, scrambling in the dirt, finally squeezing her eyes shut hard as the woman blinked awake.

“Don’t look,” Eio said, blind. She heard nothing at first. Then, a soft voice like the moon falling into the night, still groggy:

“What happened to your hands?”

Eio looked down at herself: coated in mud up to her thighs, sick gashes and scabs writhing across her skin, her hair matted with sweat and dried blood and twigs, the slick gore of the carrier bird’s carcass staining her hands and now her face. She nearly made eye contact with the woman and whipped her head back down.

“The bird,” she said. “I tripped. You speak Auyecha.”

“I speak Auyecha, woman who won’t look at me. I speak Nema and Istrelan too. You tripped into a bird?”

Eio blinked. “Well, yes, it was dead, or it was already dead. The carrier bird, in the clearing, it leveled part of the forest, the bodies—”

“A bird leveled the forest?” Eio heard the hint of a smile in the woman’s voice. She inhaled through her nose.

“The monster did,” she said. “With its tail, I think, it whipped its tail around. I’ve seen alligators do it, only this time it swept the trees away.” Eio crouched down, keeping her eyes away from the woman, scanning everything around them but her. A cloud moved swiftly in front of the sun, and a strong breeze pushed through the village, dispersing the humidity. “Where are all the people?”

“I told them trouble was coming,” said the woman. Out of the corner of her eye Eio saw her sit down fully, slowly stretching her legs out. “That was an hour ago.”

“Aren’t you going to follow them?”

“Do you hear that?”

Eio paused. Huge wings thrummed against the flat slate sky.

“I didn’t think they’d be here so quickly,” she said. Eio stood and strode to the edge of the village; the land tumbled away, mossy stones and rivulets of clear water running between verdant columns of green ash and loblolly pine, dark between the trees now that the sun had been sequestered away. She turned to face the woman, still averting her eyes. “You should find someplace to hide, somewhere outside the village. They’ll search the houses and burn what they can.”

“What are you going to do?” the woman asked.

“I’m leaving.”

“They won’t stop until they find you.”

Something huge passed just beyond the canopy overhead. Eio pressed herself against the wall of the nearest hut, eyes cast up. “I’m as swift as they come.”

The woman shook her head. “No one can outrun the harriers of Istrel. They spot you on the wing and run you down on foot. Their soldiers are like dogs, keen on a trail, loyal to the end. When they catch you, they skewer you if you’re lucky, and they burn what’s left.”

“If you’re unlucky,” Eio said. “They shut you in a coffin and wait for you to go mad.”

“You can look at me.”

Eio looked. Behind the woman’s eyes thundered footsteps, each spanning leagues across the world, titanic beneath stormclouds, ruinous upon waters. They were dark brown, nearly gold, dressed in ribbons of cream like sunlight glinting off the thousandfold surface of a lake. She beheld, at last, herself.

“If you’re at all what I think you might be,” the woman said. “We wouldn’t have to run. The birds only carry so many, and you and I are far more than two naked girls.” Shouts rang out from the direction of the clearing and the woman rose to her feet. “Stay with me, and we’ll teach them they can no longer hunt as they please.”

The world began to spin away from Eio. She swallowed her fear, letting it pass through her body and out the bottom of her feet, diffusing into the warm earth. The warm aroma of flatbread tingled the back of her throat; the stale reek of the medicine Merah had tried to perfect but could never manage to keep from rotting, the laughter of the elders as they waded lazily in the creek, Ahi’s sour face when the weather turned gloomy, all floating into and out of her. She thought she had sublimated herself, was just a trace of particles now, a whisper of a person. When she opened her eyes the woman was still there.

“Yes,” she said.

When they had settled on the briefest of plans she said: “I’m Eio.”

The woman smiled urgently. “Nadra.”

Their pursuers filed into the village in two columns of five, diverging at the first hut like a stream cut by a rock. They flowed like shadows, spears in forward guard, knives drawn and tucked close to their chests, bucklers strapped to their forearms. As they passed through the village a soldier in the rear would fall away, ducking into the huts weapons first only to find them abandoned. One smashed a delicate table to pieces with a swift kick, sending shards of pottery and uneaten corn meal flying; another stood motionless over an empty hearth, still warm, staring expressionless at the ashes of the parchment that had fed the flames. The soldiers in the van had just reached the communal fire in the center of the village when the first of their number came sprawling out of a hut, unarmed, clutching at the gash in her throat.

Almost instantly a half-ring of four formed around the hut. Eio burst from the door a heartbeat later, crouched low, almost crawling. She thrust up and her pilfered spear glanced off a second soldier’s forehead, sending his helmet flying. The others closed in. A knife swung just short of her chest; a powerful grip closed around her left arm; a spear slid through the meat of her thigh.

Eio heard a scream and a sick crunch. A soldier in front of her fell, a stone adze lodged in his back. Nadra wrenched the adze free along with a spray of blood. Two more soldiers tackled her, slamming into the dirt.

Growling, fear biting at her ribcage to be free, Eio jammed her spear to her left. She heard a gurgle and the grip on her arm relaxed. Her hand found her opponent’s spear and pulled, slicing her leg even deeper and yanking the soldier off balance. She ran forward, trampling over the soldier, now wielding both spears over her head, dashing towards Nadra. The soldiers who had tackled her turned; Eio threw her knee into the face of one and gouged the other’s eye with a deft thrust.

“Back to me, keep your back to me,” Eio said breathlessly, pulling her off the ground. Behind them the remaining rearguard approached, knives drawn. The soldiers in the van regrouped, arrayed in two prongs of three around a mountain of a woman, her broad axe slung across her shoulder.

“Form up on the kestrel!”

“Don’t let them escape—”

Eio threw her first spear towards the kestrel, who sidestepped, the spear sailing away into the forest.

“Could’ve used that,” said Nadra.

They each kept a hand on the other’s thigh, turning in place as the soldiers surrounded them. Eio snarled and pierced the lung of the soldier she had kicked as he crawled moaning on the ground. The kestrel hefted her monstrous axe and crashed forward.

Nadra lunged forward, taking Eio with her, and the axe bit the dirt at her feet. She flailed her adze as she lunged, her opponent feinting right, catching her across the collarbone with his knife. Nadra stumbled.

The kestrel freed her axe in a shower of dirt and stones, thrusting with the wicked spike at the end of the haft, catching Eio in the ribs. Her legs gave out and she collapsed over Nadra.

Soldiers crowded her bleeding vision like crows. Time crawled. The kestrel laughed and raised her axe, her eyes gleaming, spittle flying. A vision of blood glinted off the ceramic head, curved downward in homage to the condor. Drums pounded in Eio’s skull, beckoning her to dance. Merah was crawling away and one of her legs was gone, lost in a demon’s jaws, swallowed by her own sister. Rippling shadows crossed the sand beneath a shallow sea. Fear clutched her brain with ice. Bile climbed through her throat, and heat rose stiffening between her legs. Eio felt her skin changing.

Roaring with laughter, the kestrel brought her axe down. Eio snarled and caught it with a heavy paw, blood screaming as the blade chewed through her. She wrapped her claws around the axe and yanked the kestrel off her feet. Her laugh sputtered into a rattle as her face fell into Eio’s maw, her fangs sinking into skull and brain and tongue.

“Shit, shit—”

“Kestrel!”

“Stop, you cowards!”

The unit collapsed as Eio launched the kestrel’s corpse into them. She leapt to her feet and rushed the nearest soldier, goring him with her claws, ripping a hole in him, and through him she leapt again, biting, squeezing screams of terror from her prey.

Searing hot teeth lanced through her back. Eio roared, whirling, and knocked the head off one soldier, sending it soaring through an open window. The other soldier withdrew and thrust again, opening Eio across her chest and flank. She wobbled, breathing hard, blood-tinged drool pouring from her wolfish maw, and dropped to one knee, now eye level with her opponent. The soldier sneered and thrust his spear at Eio’s face. Her hands, shrinking, becoming human again, weakly stopped the weapon short where they gripped the haft. They pushed back at one another. Eio’s hands slipped, slick with sweat and gore, and the spear nicked her fangs, pushing into her mouth.

Nausea overwhelmed her. Eio’s eyes rolled back and she gagged, a sound like death, and the soldier mistook it for death, relief breaking desperately across his face. Eio retched once and coughed, spewing a fine mist over the soldier, who began to scream silently, her vomit sizzling where it singed his skin, the corrosion consuming heedlessly.

Eio blinked, sinking fully to her knees, gasping shallow breaths, and searched for Nadra. One soldier remained; he straddled her, his knife struggling past her outstretched hands.

With her remaining strength Eio loped to Nadra and tackled the soldier, knocking his knife away, pinning him by the throat with her right foot, her last clawed appendage. His face contorted in revulsion as Eio’s snout and fangs receded into the bloodstained visage of a human possessed by murder.

He couldn’t have been older than sixteen. Eio scanned the village; most of the soldiers lay eviscerated, the others fled. The soldier—the boy—struggled in vain.

“Kill me or release me,” he choked. “Death awaits me at the end of either path.” He closed his eyes, blood leaking out of a cut on his scalp, staining his short-shorn amber hair. “I’m ready. Godsless monster. I’m ready.”

Eio felt him shaking under her foot. After a moment the boy opened his eyes and she punched him square on the nose, his head bouncing off the dirt. Eio stood, stumbling, and the boy remained sprawled on the ground, unconscious.

She turned to where Nadra was pulling herself up out of the mire. The women locked eyes among the carnage. The far-off chorus of crows was growing nearer.

“In Pama,” said Eio. “We thank the animals we kill. We do not waste them. We ask them for their lives, for our lives. This, here, is unforgivable.” Tears rolled down her cheeks, taking blood with them. “Unforgivable.”

Nadra smiled again, hopeless and wry, and though she vowed in her heart to never allow herself atonement for the men and women she had slaughtered, Eio felt she had been forgiven anyway.

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