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To Bitterleaf's lasting shame, the plains had been too much for her. The pain had come as she and Jasper had ventured outwards, and it had been Bitterleaf, not her son, who had faltered first. "In the stories they say there are places like the plains but covered in snow. And they say that is where the Totoma went. I would dearly love to meet a Totoma, if they exist. Or ever did." This is quite in line with expectations: the stories have the Totoma as a warlike race bent on proving their worth and testing adversity. The statement is, however, rather obviously an attempt to change the subject.

"You don't know the stories?" Bitterleaf is mildly surprised; she had grown up on the warm and lovely northern edges of the swamp, in a large tribe that had shared stories. All of the elders had been renowned lorekeepers; Bitterleaf herself, though no talented songstress, knows by heart many of the Black Dog stories. "The Totoma went to a place covered in stones and snow and ice. They were the strongest of the Crane's children, and the most determined to test themselves. They were like me--they found a place that challenged themselves. And a place, so the stories say, where their spilled blood was brightest, on the snow. And the Acha to the plains to sing their songs and dance their bright steps."

She pauses for a moment, eyeing Longstride sideways. "I had heard of the Kiokote. I hardly suspected they were real until the word began trickling in that they'd returned. Are they as fast as the stories say?"

Silence stretches for a long moment. Bitterleaf turns over the ache of the plains in her head, the homesickness, the strongest moment of weakness she has ever experienced. But what is her purpose, if not to challenge herself?

"Perhaps, when next I find someone willing to join my tribe, I will lead the patrol, and go North, and try to find the Kiokote myself. Perhaps it will be soon, before you have taken leave of my home here, and you could act as a guide for us. There is a stag I know of whose home I could find--an elder, as you say. A silly thing," she adds, uncharacteristically irritated. She shakes her ears as if doing so could toss Swan's unwelcome flirtations out of her memory.

"Swan," says Bitterleaf. Her voice is unimaginably dry. Clearly something about this Swan fellow does not sit well with her. "I stop to see him on patrol. To pay my respects to his kind and to receive his blessings on our journeys. He would be interested to hear of the Kiokote--if he has not already. The stag and the mare hear things in dreams long before the rumors reach our lips, so I am told."

Flicking a salt-coarsened strand of hair from her eyes, she clicks her tongue at the wandering mongoose to join her, more to keep Longstride from replying than anything else, and then: "I would enjoy a journey--a chance to spread the word of this place, to enlarge our family here. I have others who would watch the borders and welcome guests."

"And I've been an old woman since before you were Dreaming," she warns--gently, for her. "Swan would be part and parcel of the journey, I suppose. Interesting to see what the old pervert's up to nowadays, and whether that flimsy doe of his has dropped a litter on him. But I don't believe in the idea of destinations, not exactly."

Their wanderings are taking them past more and more signs of habitation and life, although so far no Kimeti are in view save the two of them. Just trees scrawled with the signs of the Tidewalkers, and old hoofprints where the sand gives way briefly to mud, and lines and curling swirls of arranged stones, the sort you often see around inhabited areas--partly art, partly a marking out of home. For a doe who doesn't believe in destinations, Bitterleaf--or perhaps her tribe--has done plenty to make the beach seem like a place to settle down for a while, despite its savage nature.

"I wouldn't think, with your wanderlust, you'd care whether you were welcome back anywhere. But we do not bar entry here, if anyone is able-bodied and willing, and proves his worth. Perhaps we should plan this journey, then--if you would be willing to enjoy our hospitality for an evening before we departed."

As Bitterleaf speaks, a shape breaks away from the tide far in front of them. It is difficult, at first, to see, being as it is the same colour as the wave and surf. But emerge it does, gleaming in the low-lying sun and pacing out of the water across the sand in the distance. Even with so much space between the pair and the distant doe, it is clear that she takes after Bitterleaf. But whereas Bitterleaf's straight lines are unforgiving and cold, the body of the stranger is a young and jaunty hardness, alluring in an unconventional sort of way, and the sleek lines of her skull are uninterrupted by a mane like Bitterleaf's. Every elegant plane of her stands out in clear definition. Perhaps this is what Bitterleaf looked like when she was younger--or then, perhaps, Bitterleaf has always been too flinty to be truly beautiful. The slim young doe passes across the beach and disappears behind a shelf of sand, seemingly oblivious to the pair, and Bitterleaf does not acknowledge her presence.