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when
they had made love beneath the cedar. And somewhere in the darkness of the ship Pazel could feel the Nilstone, throbbing, pumping death through the ship and the storm and the world like a malignant
spirit, like a great black heart.
    Myett had climbed three hundred feet before she realised that she did not wish to die.
    She knew the difference between flirting with death and hungering for it, wanting it with her soul. She had known the latter condition, and once, very nearly, succumbed. This was different. The
impulse to destroy herself weakened with every yard she ascended.
    She’d been in earnest that other time, however. Sealed in the
Chathrand
’s flooding hold, blind drunk, heartbroken. It was luck that had saved her: luck and the Masalym
shipwrights. If the draining of the ship had been delayed another quarter-hour, they’d have found her body clogging the pumps.
    Three hundred feet brought her to the level of the bottom-most leaf-layer, where the wind began. She held tight, feeling the still-pleasant burning in her muscles, the strength in arms, fingers,
ankles no giant could ever attain. She was wedged in a crack that ran like inverse lightning up the tower wall. The strange birds wheeled around her, crying. Afraid she’d come for what was
left of their brood.
    The alternative to death had been this expedition, this crossing of battle-lines. She had spent most of the voyage fighting Ensyl and Diadrelu and their giant friends. Myett had been as
committed as any ixchel to the hatred of human beings, and heaven knew there was reason for it. But loyalty to her lover had been the bedrock of that hate. She had cleaved to Taliktrum,
Diadrelu’s nephew, before and after his rise to power. After he became a visionary, Myett had argued with the doubters, rabidly insistent that he was all that he claimed. Too funny. All along
the debate had been with herself.
    She could not pinpoint when the change had come. After the flame-trolls, surely, and before the catastrophe in the forest. Was it the night she dreamed her grandfather’s death, and woke
sobbing, bewildered, unable to recall for nearly half a minute that she’d left him safe and sound on the
Chathrand
? Was it when the giants wept for their dead, and she had nowhere to
be but right there beside them, witnessing grief that looked and sounded for all the world like ixchel grief? Or the night she saw Thasha and Pazel Pathkendle slip away to make love, and followed
them, unseen of course, and vaguely disappointed to learn that this, too, was not a thing her people did better than giants.
    Four hundred feet, and the rim of the crater was in sight. A tearing wind broke around her, trying her grip. The crack had narrowed, too: Myett found fewer places to wedge her body, rest her
weight. She could see the large, shaggy nests atop the pinnacle, now, and one grey wing, spread wide to bask in the sun.
    Whenever it had happened, the change was real. She stood with Ensyl, now – and heaven help her, the giants. The humans. She would have to remember to hate them, secretly, remind herself of
what they were. Or else become one. That was Diadrelu’s choice, and Ensyl’s. Myett would never go that far, never risk becoming a mascot. But the quest was hers now, and she would give
more than they did, more than they ever could. It had become a cause to live for, rather than a slower, grander way to die.
    She stopped. Her muscles twitching, her fingers raw. She was a hundred feet above the highest leaf-layer, seeing the wider world for the first time in days. She knew that the descent would take
all her strength, if indeed she had not gone too far already. The wind tore at her, but she would not retreat without the view she’d come for. Aching, she leaned out from the wall.
    The ruins stood almost exactly at the Forest’s centre. To the south, dark hills pressed close to the crater’s rim. A shimmer of reflected sunlight marked the place where the mighty