Guff’s wounds were deep. The spears had pierced the thinner hide beneath. Gouts of black blood marked their trail to the riverbank where they now rested. They would make fine trophy scars when they had their revenge.

But would they? It was the second time in days they had been forced to contemplate their position. But this was no fight for their freedom any more.

It was a fight for existence.

“The master of the Green surely escaped,” said Venn. “We need to find some way of summoning all the elders of all the clans. We need a wave hunt.” The older ones remembered the wave hunts, where prey had become so plentiful that the skern of different burrows marched together to trap as many as they could for more frugal seasons. And when they’d finally come to their senses in the gorge, whole hordes of levin were still no match for two yearlings. Whatever the mouse-men were capable of, it could still be stopped.

Guff groaned. Venn took no notice. If he had got this far, he would recover.

“We were made to hunt them. It has never been different. Nor will it ever be.” But he didn’t sound sure, and that roused Guff from his semi-consciousness.

“What of us? Exiles... in unknown land....hungry and wounded. Hunted.”

The word stung Venn. “No. We hunt.” And he went stalking off down the river to collect cullerpedes.

By the time he returned, Guff was already better. He’d propped himself up on a warm stone, and eagerly snapped up the crispy flesh of the creatures Venn brought back for him. And with fresh physical strength came memory.

“When... in the valley. We were dead. How... you release us?”

Venn had been sitting in awe of what had transpired as soon as he could be sure the ambush party had not followed them away from the stone towers. He now had the disguise of fruit to check for as well as their stinking pelts.

“I didn’t. Not really. The shelled one did it.”

Guff grinned, a long line of razor teeth against the sand. “But you commanded it! I remember now.”

Venn blinked his denial. “I found a pattern. That word it said over and over. Mikrin.” He said it slyly, but they both knew it was a last resort.

“And it was afraid! They ran then. You saved us.”

Venn stayed silent. If that was what Guff wanted to believe, then so be it. But the reality was, even then, the balance lay with the levin. It chose to free them.

Guff was babbling on. He would never admit to being relieved, but they were lucky to be alive. “And so that’s how we take up the hunt again. We speak! Show them that there is no use in resistance. It is their place to lay down and die, like it’s always been.”

But Venn was troubled. “You mean to stoop to their level?” In truth, he had used the word in desperation and shame. Better, he had thought, that they had died with honour. Deception and trickery were not their weapons, but the shields of prey.

“I mean to use what we can against them, as they do to us,” Guff replied quickly. “We listen, and learn.”

Listen, and learn. Venn paused. It was one of their first lessons from the free-hunters. Observe and prepare. So would they follow the laws of the hunt. He flashed teeth. “But first, friend, we rest.”

He was at best unsure by the proposition as they raked out a makeshift hollow in the soft earth of the bank that night. But by the next morning, he felt lighter of tail.

There was a balance to it, at least. Already, the levin had used their tongue to avoid death, as was their goal. What better way, then, to rise to dominance by doing the opposite? They were not doing the same, but pushing back, the same scale of life and death that had always bound the two kinds together.

And a hunter, it was known, had only measure of honour in the end. The meat of crawling, slippery morsels could not sustain them for long.

“Do you think you killed a great leader?” Guff mused as they paddled across the river. Soon, that awful land would be out of sight. “We may have struck a terrible blow against their pretensions today.”

Venn thought not, by what they had seen. But that was not the measure, was it?

At long last, he had killed again. And soon, so soon, they would taste.