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they’re just human-shaped animals, basically. They call it the Bloodmind. And the Nhemish men do a similar sort of thing,
too, to their women. Makes them no better than breeding-cattle.’
    Glyn Apt, still unreadable, nodded.
    I went on, ‘Release a geno-virus, wait for a while, then walk in and enslave us. The Nhemish women might be docile enough. But the Mondhaith weren’t – not in this state, Glyn
Apt. They turned into predators.’ I shivered, thinking of that town turned to nightmare, in which I had become trapped. ‘But they were engineered for that, and so, presumably, were the
selk, unless it was some kind of side effect. If the vitki could create a geno-virus that would make the rest of us no more than half-alive, to be used as slaves – I can see where their
research is going. I’d have said that makes these experiments a critical part of their war effort. And we don’t know how far they’ve come.’
    Glyn Apt shifted position.
    ‘Let’s assume that Frey went to Mondhile to try and find an answer to this issue of sentience. Say he was sent there as part of the war effort. Yet the vitki I spoke to – Thorn
Eld – he wanted Frey dead. Why so, if Frey was doing the vitki’s own work?’
    ‘Perhaps he wasn’t,’ the Morrighanu said, after a moment. ‘Perhaps he was working for himself, against the rest.’
    We stared at one another, frustrated, in what felt like a sudden, odd alliance. ‘We might never know,’ Glyn Apt added. ‘The politics of your own Skald are bad enough. Imagine
how much back-stabbing goes on in the Darkland sects.’
    I sighed. Coming from Glyn Apt, that amounted almost to a girlish confession. If the Morrighanu commander had been telling the truth, the thought of sitting here while Idhunn’s killer
roamed free was chafing at me. ‘And what about the selk that came here?’
    ‘I’ll go and speak with the selk, if it returns,’ Glyn Apt said. She spoke grudgingly, as if she was sparing me some social burden. ‘I will tell it that
we’re in no position to assist others. And now, I have to go.’
    ‘You said you’d tell me your thoughts about Idhunn’s murder.’
    ‘Did I?’ The Morrighanu commander gave a thin smile. ‘Maybe later.’
    And later for the selk, too. But the selk were to prove more insistent than either of us knew.
     
FIVE
P LANET : M ONDILE (S EDRA )
    It was on one of the coldest days of the year that I left the clan house forever. I’d insisted on taking the parting ceremony the night before, with the moon Elowen
hanging over the eaves of the house and the frost crackling and snapping like a live thing as I walked across the courtyard. I said goodbye to all of them in turn: from the next oldest man to the
youngest girl, only recently returned to the world. She turned her face away: she hadn’t yet felt the pull back. Some of them miss it and never adjust, but she wasn’t one of those. To
her, the outside meant beasts and nothingness, hunger and cold and constant danger, without words to describe it all. She could not understand yet why I had to go and why I wouldn’t be coming
home again.
    ‘It’s the way things are done,’ I told her. ‘Winter’s coming. Too many mouths to feed. What, would you have me die in my bed? As though I was cursed with sickness,
a weak old thing? You wouldn’t want that for me, would you?’
    But she just stared into the fire and wouldn’t answer. The others took it well, of course.
    ‘So,’ Rhane said. ‘You’re off, then?’
    ‘Off and not coming back.’
    ‘Well, that’s as it should be.’ She gave an approving nod. I’d always got on well with her. I remembered her birth, her mother gritting her teeth against the pain and not
making a sound, as befits a huntress. I remembered, too, the day we’d put the infant out onto the hillside and left her to fend for herself for the next thirteen years. And the day
she’d returned, stumbling in out of the howl of the wind, a fierce small thing.