Legend said that giants lived in the forest once, long before the Wild Scrat had even winked into existence. As Lowen stood before the towering boulder, sunk into the soft ground and covered with thick moss, she remembered the stories her grandmother had told her as a child. Stories about how these boulders had once been giants, turned to stone by a spiteful witch aeons ago. If the light was low and golden as it was now, and if Lowen squinted hard enough, she fancied she could make out a splintered nose and lips worn smooth by centuries of rain and snow. Grandmother had insisted the rest of the giants' enormous stone bodies were hidden below the ground, long since swallowed up by the earth.

  “Would you stop staring at that rock and help me?” Jenifer called from behind her.

  Her sister was hunched on the ground, attempting to build a small fire. She never had displayed much talent for building anything. She fought and she hunted, she did not create or construct. Lowen walked towards her, bending to retrieve the bundle of sticks Jenifer had thrown to the ground in frustration.

  “You haven’t used enough kindling.”

  Jenifer ignored her. She sat back to let Lowen continue building the fire. Lowen shook her head in mild annoyance but complied, adding the dry twigs clasped in her hand to the mound of haphazardly placed firewood. She pulled a small flint rock and a dirty piece of steel from her pocket and coaxed a small fire to life, gently blowing on the flame until it spread and caught the rest of the kindling.

  “I see now why Mother asked me to bring you.” Jenifer laughed her echoing, braying laugh. “It was so I would not starve to death.”

  She reached for the large squirrel lying dead beside her—a broken-off arrow tip driven straight through its tiny heart—and slipped a jagged-edged hunting knife from a sheath on her belt as she prepared to skin their dinner.

  “I didn’t think Mother asked you to bring me,” Lowen said, “I thought she insisted you bring me. I had no idea either of us had any choice in the matter.”

  “Come now, stop this childish sulking,” Jenifer replied cheerfully. She was a different person away from the village. She smiled easily, making her eyes shine gold in the evening’s fading light.

  Lowen settled herself amongst the mossy roots of an ancient, shaggy beech, rearing from the hard-packed earth as though trying to make an extremely slow escape.

  “Why shouldn’t I behave childishly?” She held her knees to her chest. “Mother is treating us like children, sending us away to the forest in an effort to force our reconciliation. As though we have been caught fighting over a toy and need to be taught how to play nicely together.”

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  “What is the harm of Mother’s meddling if it means we get to spend more time hunting?”

  “We haven’t even caught anything to bring back.” Lowen smiled. Her sister’s enthusiasm was infectious. “Only that fat squirrel, and we’re about to eat it.”

  “I would be carrying a beautiful deer on my back if you hadn’t startled it.”

  “I lack the patience for hunting. I never excelled at fishing, either, despite the fact Cade spent the entire summer of my fourteenth year attempting to teach me.”

  “I remember. Cade persevered as long as he could stand it until eventually he marched you home, presented Mother with your empty basket and begged her to find you another occupation.”

  Jenifer laughed again but Lowen was silent. Disappointing her mother and leaving Cade exasperated had been deeply humiliating. By her fourteenth autumn, she was spending more time with Koth Conwen, finding a strange peace away from the village amongst the drying plants and tinkling glass bottles that filled her hut.

  For the umpteenth time that day, Lowen wondered about her grandmother. Koth Conwen was still weak after being pulled from the inky grip of the bitterblue, sleeping for many hours at a time and then waking dazed and glassy-eyed. A few nights previously, Lowen had been dozing at her bedside only to be startled into wakefulness by a sudden strangled sob. She rose to inspect her grandmother and found her clawing at specters only she could see, floating above her bed in the twilight. When she tried to soothe her—placing a damp cloth on her forehead and smoothing her long white hair across the pillow—Koth Conwen had gripped both her hands in hers, so tightly it hurt, and began asking for Kenever, Lowen’s long-dead grandfather.

  “Come into the light, Kenever,” she had called, her voice breaking. “Come stand by the fire where I can see you. I want to see your face.”

  Lowen pushed the memory away and watched Jenifer spear the naked, horribly pink squirrel with a sharpened stick. She held it out over the fire—roaring now beneath the canopy of trees.

  “How do you not starve on your regular hunting trips?” Lowen wondered. Jenifer looked up, her face creased in confusion. “I mean, how do you cook if you are unable to make a fire?”

  “I am Scrat,” Jenifer replied, throwing two matted locks of thick red hair back over her shoulder. “Of course, I am able to make a fire. I would have built it eventually if you had not been here. Although,” she added, “Brylen does usually tend to that sort of thing.” Brylen was Jenifer’s string-sister, a fellow Mistress of the Hunt.

  “Was Brylen angry to be left behind?”

  “No. She understood her Chieftain willed it so.”

  The sisters sat in silence for a while as the squirrel cooked, its skin splitting and blackening over the fire. They hadn’t spoken about their public argument at the Changing of the Moons but had fallen into their usual companionable, if not especially close, relationship. Lowen was grateful for it. The thought of discussing the events of that night, of perhaps letting slip her deeper worries, horrified her. The last of the day’s sunlight slipped behind the trees in a flare of brilliant gold and Lowen shielded her eyes, stretching her stiff legs in the cradle of the tree roots.