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habitations. Smoke rose from the chimneys.
    Liva felt acutely uncomfortable in this human place. Everything seemed wrong. The tehr-magic had a sour, rotten taste. She had never had to be this close to the way the humans took and corrupted the aur-magic for their own purposes.
    She called out softly to the few animals fenced in here, but they did not respond. Liva had heard stories from her father of tame animals, how they forgot their own language and learned to be more human. Her father had told her that the animals chose this, that there were benefits for them in the relationship. But Liva could not see how it was possible. She wanted to set all the animals free, even if they might die in the forest. She wanted to teach them to speak again as wild animals spoke She wanted to take their tehr-magic and make it aur-magic again, but she did not know how.
    Liva sniffed her way forward until she reached a large building in the center of the village. There were sounds inside, not just human voices, but rhythmic thumping and something like the call of birds. There was an opening, a small crack in the wood, and she peered in, then nudged her way inside.
    The humans were dancing around the stripped and smoking animal flesh. Some of the younger ones she recognized from the hunt; they wore animal skins over their shoulders, not yet cured, and they had blood smearedonto their faces. They laughed and copied different mating calls. But there was no real wildness in their eyes, only the imitations of it.
    Was this what it was to be human?
    She strained, leaning forward, then stepped away from the wall.
    Suddenly, a hand swooped down and picked her up. Liva squirmed, surprised that she had been caught so easily, without any warning through the aur-magic. She could not get away unless she used magic to change her form, and she feared the consequences of that in this human village, so she held back for the moment.
    The boy who held her did so without anger, without pain. She looked up to his face, wondering what human would treat an animal so well.
    Of course. She should have known it from the lack of any magic at all.
    It was Jens.
    Liva stopped struggling, and slowly he opened his hand. With one finger he petted her cheek. “I know you,” he whispered.
    “I know you,” Liva eeped at him in the language of the pika. He could not know what she meant, but he nodded in response.
    “What is it, Jens?” asked one of the other humans who had killed the animals in the forest.
    A human with the tehr-magic, Liva felt clearly, disliking him.
    Jens tried to close his hand around Liva again, but it was too late.
    The other human had snatched her up and held her high.
    “Stomping game!” he shouted.
    Liva heard the anger in his voice as he directed his look at Jens. It was like an animal challenging another, but without any joy of life, and far more viciousness.
    “No!” said Jens. He flung his fist into the other human’s face, and Liva felt herself falling.
    She was back in Jens’s hand in a moment, and shivered there.
    “It’s only a mouse,” said the human who was pulling himself off the floor, his face beginning to show a livid bruise where he had been struck by Jens.
    “A pika, idiot Torus,” said Jens.
    “Doesn’t matter. Just as good for stomping. It will run, won’t it?”
    A part of Liva wished she were home with her mother at that moment, that she had never thought to go after her father, and had never seen the hunting party of humans.
    But Jens was so different. He reminded her of a fierce mother bear, protecting a child. But at the same time, he was like a wolf with hackles raised, growling low, giving a snake the chance to slink away from marked territory.
    How could he have no aur-magic?
    “You’ve killed enough today, I would think,” saidJens, gesturing toward the smoking animal meats.
    “That’s meat,” said Torus. “Not fun.”
    “I’ll give you fun,” said Jens.
    Liva felt a chill run through her, and even