The dark above ground had weight.

  Below, the dark was something you knew, walled in, close, a darkness you had breathed your whole life until it lost its strangeness the way all things did given long enough. Up here it pressed from every direction at once and went in every direction at once and there was nothing underneath the stars to stop it, no roof to meet it, no passage wall to say: here, this far, no further. He had been on the perimeter two hours and he was still learning how to stand in it.

  Torsten moved beside him with the ease of someone whose body was where it was supposed to be. Tall, lean, unhurried in a way that didn't read as slowness. He had said little since they took over from Ciarán, and what he had said was economical. These were not people who filled a silence because it was there.

  "What are we actually looking for," Kraken said.

  "Nothing, mostly." Torsten scanned the wood's edge with the slow, practised sweep of someone who had made the habit mindless. "First crossing, people want to feel the boundary is held. Tidgar's way. Gives the camp something to trust while it sleeps."

  "Has it ever been something."

  "Not for me. I've heard it has, for others." He paused. "Though I'll tell you what I was told, which is that if it is something, you'll know. There's apparently no uncertainty about it."

  Behind them: low fire, five tents: Uurad's, Tidgar's, three for the men, the supply tent at the camp's edge, and through the canvas of Uurad's tent the amber smear of the camp lamp. The night sounds moved around them, small things at the undergrowth's edge, the wind in the high branches above.

  "The name," Kraken said. "Torsten of the West-Warrens. Most people carry their father's name."

  Torsten walked. A few paces.

  "Most people know who their father is."

  Kraken waited.

  "My mother was a woman who made choices in the short term without thinking much about the long term." He kept his eyes on the wood's edge. "Men were one of those choices. She made several and I was the result of one she couldn't put a name to." He stopped. "She wasn't a bad woman. She just wasn't a careful one."

  "I'm sorry," Kraken said. "That's a hard thing to carry."

  "It is what it is." Torsten's jaw moved slightly. "I knew she loved me. I was angry at her for a long time anyway. Said things I shouldn't have said. Left without hugging her properly." A pause. "I've thought about that more than I'd like." He looked at the wood's edge for a long moment. "But the name. I didn't have a father's name to carry. So I took where I was from. The West-Warrens. It was mine. That much, at least."

  Kraken thought about the West-Warrens: the cold of those older passages, the noise, everyone living close enough to know the details of each other's lives whether they wanted to or not. He had walked through it a hundred times and never thought about what it meant to be from there rather than simply passing through.

  "It's a good name," he said.

  "It's a start," Torsten said, without bitterness. "The rest I intend to earn."

  They walked. Above them the night sky showed between the branches as they shifted in the wind, stars and black in equal measure.

  "My friends will be on their third mead by now," Kraken said. "Gunther will have won whatever he entered and be explaining to everyone how he won it. Coll will be making everyone near him laugh without appearing to try." He listened to the night for a moment. "And Wiglaf will be refilling cups whether or not anyone wants them refilled, which is simply what Wiglaf does at every occasion." He paused. "I had real reasons for coming up here. Good ones. But I think I was also just an idiot."

  "Probably both," Torsten said.

  "Probably both."

  The night was still. The undergrowth at the wood's edge held its small sounds and the branches held the wind and everything was as it had been for two hours, ordinary and indifferent to him. He had no word for what he was doing. Learning the voice of a place he had never been.

  Then, north. Between two trunks, perhaps twenty-five metres out, the shadows rearranged themselves in a way that had nothing to do with wind. Something large, moving slowly, with the patience of something that had no need to hurry. There for a moment. Then the darkness closed around it.

  He stopped. Torsten stopped half a step later.

  They stood. Ten seconds. The wood's edge was still again and the shadows were only shadows.

  "Deer, maybe," Torsten said quietly. "There are things that size up here that aren't—" He stopped. His eyes stayed on the trees. "We should signal the camp. The coordination horn." A pause, then quietly: "Which we don't have. When Tidgar handed out the bags, he said it was already missing from the store. Reckoned children had taken it as a toy."

  Kraken said nothing.

  The wood's edge was still.

  Then the screaming started from the direction of the camp.

  Not one voice. Two at once, one cutting off in the middle of a syllable, the other climbing past where voices were meant to go, and underneath both a sound that had no human element in it at all: rhythmic, heavy, wet, something working at a task with the patience of something that had done this before and would do it again. They were running before the information had finished arriving.

  ~

  She had fallen asleep thinking about the fire.

  It had still been going when Uurad drifted off, low and steady, ringed with flat stones, the way the Tairseach always managed their fires. Through the tent flap before she closed her eyes: Ciarán and young Thelon still up, backs against the supply tent, a skin of something passing between them, talking at the volume people used up here when they remembered where they were. Thelon said something and Ciarán tipped his head back and laughed softly, the sound contained and private, a careful thing. The camp lamp throwing amber through the canvas. Everything settled and ordinary and alive.

  She fell asleep to the sound of their voices.

  What pulled her upright was a sound she had no frame for at all, something that bypassed understanding entirely and went straight to the body, and her body had her hand on the tent pole before her mind had finished receiving it.

  The lamp still burned. Uurad was awake. He lay on his back with his eyes open toward the canvas, the way she realised he must have been lying since long before she woke, not sleeping, not close to it, just listening in the dark with the patience of a man who had already concluded something she hadn't reached yet.

  Outside: voices. Then sounds that were not voices.

  She moved toward the entrance.

  "Wait," Uurad said.

  She waited. Through the canvas the firelight lurched in a way firelight did not lurch on its own, swelling and shrinking as something enormous passed between it and the tent, blocking it in a way no man's silhouette would block it. Then from outside the fire's circle came Ciarán's voice, a short cut-off sound with no warning before it, and then a heavy impact, close, the kind that came up through the ground, and then a long and low sound from Ciarán's direction that she did not want to understand and understood anyway.

  She moved to the entrance. She put her eye to the gap in the canvas.

  The fire still burned. In its orange circle the camp was unrecognisable.

  There were three of them.

  The nearest had its back to her, ten metres out, crouched over something on the ground. Nine feet at least, the height of it wrong in the way a moving building would be wrong, the body built past every scale she knew, leathery skin the grey-brown of old stone stretched over mass that had no right to exist. Its limbs were too long. Its skull extended backward from the face in the mantle shape, the bone looping out and curving down to connect at the base of the neck, and in the gap between the loop something glinted: a ring of dark metal threaded through the bone there, turning slowly as the thing moved. Its eyes were set wide on the sides of its head, horizontal pupils catching the firelight and throwing it back the wrong colour. It was crouched over what had been Ciarán. It was working.

  That was the word her mind found, because her mind needed a word that was not the true one: working. Patient, focussed, without any hurry whatsoever.

  It reached down. It took hold of Ciarán's hand.

  She watched it grip two fingers at once, the index and the middle, and bent them backward with the slow, even pressure of something testing a material to find its limits. She heard the joints resist. She heard them pass resistance. Ciarán made a sound that started in the register of screaming and moved beyond it into something she had not known a person's voice could reach, a register she had no word for, and the Grolg tilted its enormous head with the quality of something listening with real attention, and it kept bending, and the joints broke wet and audible one after the other, the fingers folding past ninety degrees and then further still, and then the tendons gave and the fingers tore away and the Grolg set them down on the ground beside it, neat as a man setting aside his tools, and reached for the next hand.

  She pulled her eyes away.

  She made herself look at the rest of the camp.

  The second was at the far end of the clearing, standing at its full height. Anselm had told her about his daughter that evening at the fire, three years old, recently walking, deploying the new skill at every opportunity with the pride of someone who had discovered a power and intended to use it. He had described it with the expression of a man who could not believe his luck. What the Grolg was standing over was now two halves of Anselm, separated at a diagonal across the torso and distributed across the grass in a radius, his face still intact on the upper half, eyes open and looking upward at nothing. The thing crouched and worked its jaw at the open cavity of his chest for a moment, then rose again and looked around the camp with its horizontal eyes, interested in what else was available, a man surveying a table.

  The third Grolg stood at the far edge of the clearing, its back to most of the camp. Between it and the tree line, Ranulf was moving, in the sideways shuffling way of a man who has decided on his direction and is hoping nothing notices him do it, his eyes tracking between the nearest Grolg and the dark of the trees behind him, every muscle in him pulled taut with the effort of appearing to do nothing while doing the most important thing he had ever done.

  At the camp’s edge, near the base of the supply tent, something small moved through the grass, low to the ground, red in the firelight, there for a moment and then gone. Too small for a Grolg. Too deliberate for an animal. She could not have said what it was.

  Tidgar was still standing.

  She did not know how. He had his blade out and he was bleeding from his side and his face had the quality she had already learned in one day of watching him: a man in whom everything available had been immediately converted to the problem in front of him, no remainder, no waste. He was reading the Grolg before him the way her father read a room: total, rapid, already two steps ahead of what the next information would be. The Grolg in front of him stood at its full height and watched him with its wide-set eyes and did not rush, because it had no reason at all to rush.

  Then from the shadows of the tent line: Fergal. Breaking cover, running hard for the far wood's edge.

  The nearest Grolg didn't turn to pursue. It simply reached, with no more urgency than a man reaching across a table, and Fergal was running and then the hand had him and then what happened to Fergal in the next two seconds was not a thing she could make her eyes receive and file properly, a sound like something structural becoming separate from itself, and she turned away from the entrance and pressed her back against the tent pole.

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  Tidgar's voice from outside. Two words. She could not hear them through the canvas but she heard him move, quick, precise, covering ground fast. Then he ran at it.

  She heard him close the distance, heard the blade swing, heard the Grolg register it with the sound a man might make finding a pebble in his boot, a flat momentary irritation, nothing more, and then the Grolg's arm came around at a height that was not the height of a man's arm, and Tidgar's head left his shoulders with a sound like green wood splitting under a maul, sudden and total, and then his body fell in two separate moments with blood spraying from the neck in an arc across the firelit grass, the second fall heavier than the first, and then Tidgar was finished.

  "Down," Uurad said, from across the tent. Low, absolute. "Far corner, into the angle where the canvas meets the ground. Pull the blanket over you. Don't come out."

  "Uurad—"

  "Go." The voice of a man who has spent everything on making one thing happen and has nothing left for discussion. "Whatever is in you right now, it can live there for now. Go."

  The tent wall bellied inward. Something enormous moving along the outside of it, close enough that the displacement of air came through the canvas against her face, close enough to smell: iron, heated stone, something older and deeper than either, something that had no referent in anything underground or above. It passed. She was already in the corner with the blanket over her and her face pressed against the cold earth before she had consciously chosen to move.

  She listened.

  Outside: Thelon's voice, she knew it, the particular quality of it, the warmth of it, the laugh that had started in his chest and gone all the way down when Ciarán said something earlier. She heard him shout once, a single word, and then the Grolg was at him and what it did next she heard through the canvas in full detail whether she wanted to or not. It took hold of him and she heard the specific crack of his arm at the shoulder, the joint forced backward out of its housing with a grinding wet report, and Thelon screaming at the new information his body was sending him, and then the grip changed and the next sound was ribs, not one but several in sequence, each with its own pitch, like something moving down a rack, and Thelon's voice broke somewhere in the middle of it and came back changed, higher and thinner, and then the Grolg seemed to find what it was looking for because the sounds became rhythmic and effortful and Thelon's voice was underneath all of it losing its shape, and she pressed her hands flat against the ground and held herself in the corner and breathed in fractions and she did not make a sound.

  After a long while: footsteps. Moving past the tent now, the heavy, widely-spaced footfall of something that was not a man and had never been. Not stopping.

  The canvas moved.

  Something came through the entrance, not with a hand but with its mass, the whole flap failing to accommodate it, the stitching pulling taut at the top. The lamp threw amber light across the interior and she was in the corner with her eyes shut and her face pressed into the earth and she was still in the way the body knew how to be still when still was all it had.

  The weight of it on the ground. The sound of its breathing: deep, wet, close.

  Uurad's voice.

  Unhurried. Dry. Spending the words exactly where they needed to go, no more than that.

  "Here, then."

  She did not move. She kept her face in the earth and her eyes shut and her hand pressed flat against the ground and she breathed in fractions and she heard everything, every second of it, and when it was finished she was still in the corner and she would not make a sound.

  The warmth found her slowly.

  It moved across the ground beneath the blanket, finding the low points, spreading. It reached her leg and soaked through the fabric and she understood what it was, understood at once and completely whose it was, and the shaking that came through her had no outward expression, a trembling held entirely inside, and she pressed her mouth against the earth and breathed in fractions. Uurad's blood spread in the dark beneath the blanket and the shaking went on and on inside her and she held herself in the corner and she did not make a sound.

  The footsteps. The canvas. The night outside.

  She lay in the angle of canvas and earth and did not move for a long time.

  ~

  They came through the wood's edge at a run and the camp stopped Kraken's legs before any instruction to stop had reached them.

  Torsten hit him from behind. They pressed back into the tree cover and the camp opened in front of Kraken and he looked at it and something in his chest tore loose from whatever had been holding it.

  The other tents had been pulled open, the canvas dragged and split, nothing left standing but Uurad's at the far end. The rest was a field of what the night had made: bodies taken apart with an indifference that was worse than cruelty, limbs scattered across the wet dark grass, things that had been men that were now pieces of men, the fire burning in the middle of all of it with complete unconcern. Near the supply tent: fingers in the grass, half a dozen at least, dark at the torn ends. The ground itself was saturated. His boots were wet before he knew he had stepped in it.

  Kraken's chest was doing something he could not control. His hands were not working. He was looking at the camp and something in him had found the edge of what it could hold and was beginning to come apart and he could not stop it and he did not know what he would do when it—

  Torsten's hands found his shoulders and turned him.

  Torsten's face in the dark, close. He was shaking, Kraken could feel it in the hands gripping him, the fine tremor of a man fighting his own body hard, and his jaw was set and his eyes were clear and whatever was in his own chest he had made a decision about.

  "Look at me," Torsten said, very quiet. "Look at me. Breathe. There might be survivors. We go in, we get anyone we can, we go. Are you with me."

  Kraken breathed.

  "Are you with me."

  "Yes."

  "Tawny's tent is still standing. Only one left."

  Torsten looked at the clearing. One Grolg crouched near the fire over what remained of Ciarán. One standing at the tent line, its jaw working at something it held by one leg, chewing with the incurious expression of something eating from habit rather than hunger, barely looking at it. One at the far edge where Ranulf had been, but Ranulf was gone now, into the far darkness, the tree line having swallowed him and his terror with it.

  The one at the tent line lifted its head. Looked at what it was holding. Dropped it. Began to move toward the far edge of the clearing.

  The camp between them opened.

  Torsten said: "Now."

  He went. Across the clearing at a dead run, low, out of the fire’s direct light, refusing everything his peripheral vision was trying to give him. Behind him he heard Torsten move south along the tree cover, and then he hit the tent entrance and went through.

  The lamp still burned.

  Uurad was on his back with his eyes open and looking at the canvas above him and there was nothing looking out of them now and Kraken held that for one second and then found the far corner, the angle of canvas and earth, the shape beneath the blanket.

  He crouched. He whispered her name.

  The blanket moved. She came out of it slowly, face-first from the earth, and when her eyes found him the shaking in her, invisible and contained, not a muscle of her face giving it away, was there in her arms when he put his hands on them. He felt it and kept his hands there.

  "I've got you," he breathed. "Right here."

  She looked at him. She looked at what was behind him. He watched her receive it and compress it into somewhere she could not afford to have open right now, watched her do it by force of will alone. Then her eyes came back to his.

  He cut the tent's side, three strokes of the masonry knife, the canvas opening clean, and they were through and in the dark behind the tent. He put one hand briefly on her sternum. She was shaking beneath his hand and he felt her take one breath and hold it and the shaking stopped for the length of that breath.

  He looked out.

  Across the clearing the tree line was still. Ranulf would be in the forest by now, running hard, he had seen the man's face as he backed away, that particular expression of someone coming undone from the inside, the terror that had no room left for anything else. He would not stop until the Stair.

  At the clearing's near edge the Grolg by the fire raised its head. The horizontal pupils swept the dark in a slow arc.

  Kraken went still. Tawny went still against him.

  Then from the north edge of the camp, movement. Leofric, hiding somewhere in the camp’s dark since the attack began, and now he broke, running hard for the far tree line. He did not make three steps. The Grolg came out of its crouch and crossed the distance and caught him mid-stride, and what happened then was complete and immediate: Leofric’s momentum and the Grolg’s meeting each other, a sound like something structural becoming something else, and then the Grolg was crouching again with the same patient attention it had given Ciarán, and Kraken turned Tawny’s face into his shoulder and pressed it there with his hand at the back of her head and moved them into the trees.

  The forest closed around them. The sounds from the camp still reached them, the mind filling the silence between sounds with whatever it could find. He kept the camp behind his eyes and focused on the ground and the dark between trunks and the sound of Tawny’s breathing beside him.

  She was keeping pace. She had not spoken since the tent.

  After a few minutes she said, without looking at him: "Uurad."

  "I know."

  She didn't say anything else. He didn't either. There wasn't anything else.

  Something moved ahead.

  Too small and too still for a Grolg. He held up his hand and they stopped and waited and the shape resolved into a man pressed against a wide trunk: Madoc, nineteen, one of the quiet Tairseach, who had sat at the camp's edge during the watch change and observed everything without contributing much, the kind of person you noticed only in retrospect when you tried to picture where everyone had been. He had something wrong below his left knee. He was bearing all his weight on the right and the left hung at an angle that meant something in it was no longer doing what it had been built to do, and he was not looking at it, which was the correct decision.

  "Can you move," Kraken said.

  "Moving." His voice was barely sound. His eyes went to Tawny briefly and came back.

  Then from the south, the sound of something coming through undergrowth, and for one second, before the weight of it resolved into a man's weight, Kraken's body did what it was going to do regardless of his mind, and then Torsten came through the tree cover and stopped when he saw them.

  "I had you from the treeline," he said, by way of explanation, and then he looked at Tawny, at Madoc's leg, at the direction they had come from, and took it all in.

  "We need to move," he said. He went to Madoc's side without ceremony, ducked under his arm, took the weight onto his shoulder. "North?"

  "North," Madoc said. "Five hundred metres. Deadfall, pale stone behind it. I marked it on the first night. It'll hold four people."

  They moved. Madoc and Torsten together, Torsten absorbing the uneven gait without complaint, Tawny ahead finding the openings in the undergrowth the way she always found them, Kraken last.

  "This is—" Tawny said, and stopped. The words didn't arrive. She tried again: "None of them deserved this."

  "No," Madoc said, from behind her, quiet and flat. "They didn't."

  Then silence, and the forest holding the wrong kind of quiet around them, not safe quiet, but the quiet that came when something large had stopped moving.

  "Kraken." Torsten's voice at his shoulder, very low. His eyes were on the darkness to the south. "If this goes wrong."

  "It won't."

  "If it does." The sound of Madoc's leg being managed over a root. "Tell my mother I'm sorry. That I was too harsh on her for too long. She did what she did and she had her reasons and I knew that and I was still too harsh." A pause. "Tell her I loved her. That even without knowing who my father was, I still had her, and that was enough, and I should have said so more." His voice was level, spending the words the way he spent all his words. "Tell her I'm sorry I didn't hug her properly when I left. Tell her that was the worst thing I ever did."

  Kraken said nothing for a few paces.

  "Say you'll tell her."

  "I'll tell her," Kraken said.

  Torsten nodded once. He didn't look at Kraken again.

  From the south, a sound. The wrong kind of quiet ending.

  From the east, a second sound. Not the same direction, an angle to it, a geometry, the two sounds with a line running between them that ended where they were standing.

  Madoc's eyes went wide. He had heard it too.

  Torsten stopped walking.

  Not gradually. He simply stopped, mid-stride, with the completeness of a man who has finished a calculation and reached the only answer it had. Madoc stopped beside him. They stood there together and neither of them spoke.

  Kraken turned.

  "Both of you, north with us, we—"

  "One of us can't run," Torsten said. Not accusing. Just the fact of it, laid down. "And if we all go north together, they follow north, and that's on me." His jaw set. "You know this."

  He did know it. That was the worst of it.

  "Tell her," Torsten said. His eyes moved to Kraken's. Two words carrying everything: the mother, the forgiveness, the name he'd been earning. "Tell her."

  Then he turned south and Madoc turned with him.

  Madoc looked back once. His expression was the expression of someone who had been watching everything all evening and had one thing left to give. "They're coordinated," he said. "More than they look. Don't stop moving."

  Then he turned away and neither of them looked back again.

  Kraken took Tawny's hand.

  He ran.

  North. The trunks sliding past. Behind them the sound of Torsten moving deliberately south, drawing the sound toward him, and then his voice rising out of the dark, not afraid, not even close to it:

  “Have at it, bastards. You two are the most hideous things I’ve ever seen in my life. You’re an embarrassment to—

  The sound that ended it was large and fast and final, and underneath it and inside it Torsten's voice stayed for longer than it should have, still spending itself, still there, until it wasn't anymore.

  On its own, in the dark, from a different direction:

  Madoc's voice. One short sound. Then nothing.

  Kraken ran.

  He did not look back. He ran and Tawny ran beside him and the night closed around them and the sounds behind them became distance and then silence and then nothing, and he ran until nothing was all there was and then he kept running because nothing was not enough.

  Then ahead, where there had been nothing: a shape between two birch trunks. Standing. Still.

  Nine feet. Horizontal eyes catching the faint starlight through the canopy and throwing it back wrong. It had not been following them. It had gone around.

  It stepped out and looked at him. In one hand, hanging at its side, a blade, thick, crude, dark with old use, the kind of thing made for nothing but what it was.

  It raised the blade.

  Kraken went still. Tawny went still beside him.

  The Grolg looked at them both. Its horizontal pupils moved from Kraken to Tawny and back. It had all the time there was. It knew it had all the time there was.

  Neither of them moved. Neither of them breathed. The blade was raised and the Grolg was not moving and the forest was silent and there was nothing to do, no angle, no direction, no version of the next second that ended differently, and Kraken's mind went through every one of them in the space of a breath and found nothing.

  “Run,” Tawny said. Her hand found his arm, gripping hard. “Kraken. Run.”

  He dropped left, trying to pull clear of the arc—

  Tawny moved.

  She had been a step ahead of him. She came back toward him, into the path of the arm, and the flat of the blade caught her across the left side below the ribs and she made a sound and was falling and he had her before she hit the ground, both arms around her, and he looked up.

  The Grolg had already pulled the blade back. It looked down at her. Something moved behind those wide-set eyes, something settling, arriving at a conclusion. It knew exactly what it had done. It knew how deep. It stood for a moment with the stillness of something that no longer needs to hurry.

  Then it extended one long finger toward Kraken, one slow deliberate motion, a thick claw at the end of it pointing at him, holding there for a breath, for two, before it dropped its hand, turned, and walked away between the trunks and was gone.

  His legs stopped. He had not told them to stop. He stood in the dark with her in his arms and the forest silent around him and the only sound his own breathing and hers. He looked at where the blade had caught her and looked away. He looked at her face.

  She was breathing. She was here. He was holding her and she was breathing.

  "I've got you," he said. "I've got you."

  He ran.