Chapter 1: Arrows in the Canopy

Ira

My heart slammed against my ribs as I stared at the human face metres away from us. Arrows pointed at our chests from hooded figures positioned in the branches above — silent, camouflaged in bark-brown and rust-red, as much a part of the forest as the ancient trees themselves.

Were these people friend or foe?

We'd already been betrayed by the Jaldevs. Damini was dead — dragged away by an Igknamai while her screams tore through the humid air like cloth ripping. The memory sat behind my eyes, replaying in fragments: Damini's fingers clawing at the forest floor, the wet crunch of the creature's jaw, the way her voice had cut off mid-syllable, replaced by a silence worse than any sound.

A tear slid down my cheek before I could stop it. I wiped it with the back of my hand and felt the dried Igknamai blood crack against my skin — red-black, thick, smelling of iron and something else, something organic and sour that made my stomach lurch.

The young man — human, undeniably human, with dark skin and sharp cheekbones and eyes that assessed our group with the tactical precision of someone who'd spent his life reading threats — lowered his hand. The hooded figures lowered their weapons in response, the movement synchronised, disciplined, the obedience of people who trusted their leader's judgment absolutely.

"Don't be concerned," he said, speaking our language in a smooth accent not unlike our own. "We are not your enemy."

Rudra stood near the rock edge, both hands raised. His jaw was tight — the particular angle it took when he was calculating outcomes, when the captain's mind was running scenarios faster than conversation allowed. "If you're not our enemy, why were your arrows pointed at us?"

"Precaution." The man's tone was blunt, urgent, stripped of the serene, musical quality the Jaldevs used. "I am a Vanavasi scouting leader. We live here, in the forest."

Vanavasi. The word hit me like a physical thing. I had heard Havav and Dybgo drop it into conversation dozens of times during our weeks with the Jaldevs. I'd assumed it referred to an area — a region, a landmark. Not once had I considered it could be the name of a people.

"We mustn't linger," he continued. "This area is encircled with Igknamai. No thanks to that Jaldev-Hybrid."

"You think he brought them here?" Rudra's voice was controlled, but I could hear the fracture underneath — the realisation that the Jaldevs, whom he'd trusted, whom he'd defended to the crew, had tried to kill us.

"We watched the Igknamai swarm to him. Draw your own conclusions." He gestured deeper into the trees. "Our horses are down that ridge. Follow."

Rudra and I exchanged a look. His expression was the expression of a man whose trust had been weaponised against him — the particular devastation of someone who prided himself on judgment discovering that his judgment had been catastrophically wrong. He swallowed. He nodded. We followed.

I trudged through the dry, barren soil with Damini's screams still echoing in my skull. My hands were covered in Igknamai blood. The front of my kurta was soaked in it — the fabric stiff, the colour darkened from saffron to a muddy crimson that smelled of death and rust. We were walking away from where Damini had been taken. Where she'd died. It felt like leaving her behind, and the feeling sat in my chest like a stone — heavy, angular, impossible to position comfortably.

Over the ridge, horses appeared among the enormous trees. A hooded figure was already mounted on one. He glanced back as the scouting leader called to him.

"Govind, we need to move. Take one of them."

The figure — Govind — dismounted with the fluid grace of someone whose body had been shaped by a lifetime of movement. He landed on both feet, barely disturbing the dust, and approached me with a smile that hit me like a fist to the sternum. Dark skin, pitted and weathered, friendly brown eyes, a warmth that was sincere and immediate and reminded me, with a force that made my throat close, of Sym. Of home. Of everything I'd left behind when we'd boarded the ship that had brought us to this impossible, beautiful, lethal planet.

"Need a lift up?"

I looked at the horse. No saddle. No stirrups. Only a leather strap draped around the animal's head and neck as a bridle. The horse was large — seventeen hands at least — and its flank was warm under my palm when I steadied myself against it, the heat of the animal's body radiating through the blood-stiff fabric of my kurta.

"Yes."

Govind helped me up with the practised efficiency of someone who'd done this a thousand times, then swung on behind me. His body heat pressed against my back — uncomfortable in the sweltering air, the sweat between us creating a slick, shared humidity that made the contact feel more intimate than it was.

He reached around me for the reins and we moved. I looked back. Zara was seated in front of a slighter rider, her face ashen, her medical training visible in the way her eyes kept scanning for injuries even while her hands gripped the horse's mane. Kobe was behind another rider. Oz — massive, awkward, his towering frame looking absurdly out of place on the slight horse, his pack still glued to his back — clung to a small female rider with the desperate concentration of a man who was deeply uncomfortable with the mode of transport but too frightened to complain.

The horses shifted into a gallop. The forest blurred — greens and reds and browns smearing into a continuous canvas of colour that my exhausted eyes couldn't fully process. The wind pushed against my face, carrying the scent of bark and soil and, occasionally, the mineral sweetness of flowing water. For a moment — a single, treacherous moment — I forgot that we were fleeing for our lives, forgot that Damini was dead, forgot that the Jaldevs had betrayed us. The rhythm of the horse beneath me, the wind in my hair, the ancient forest opening and closing around us like a living tunnel — it pulled at something deep, something buried under years of grief.

I'd ridden horses as a child. My mother had been an accomplished rider and trainer, and I had spent my childhood in the paddock with her students, learning balance and communication and the particular language that existed between a rider and a mount — a language that was not verbal but physical, conducted through weight and pressure and the subtle shifts of muscle that told the animal what you needed. Since her death, I hadn't been near a horse. Their presence crushed me. The smell of horse sweat, the rhythmic thud of hooves, the particular vibration that travelled through a horse's body into your own — it was all her. Every bit of it.

I closed my eyes. Somewhere behind them, my mother was smiling.

The trees were getting bigger. Enormous. The bark was gnarled and twisted, forming patterns in shades of red and brown that stretched upward for what seemed like miles, the canopy so thick that only fragments of blue sky were visible through the swaying leaves. The air was cooler here — the shade creating a temperature distinct from the sweltering heat of the open forest, a coolness that smelled of moss and age and the particular sweetness of wood that had been growing for centuries.

A palisade appeared — spiked wooden poles positioned at lethal defensive angles, the points sharpened to a precision that spoke of experience with the things they were designed to keep out. The horses didn't slow. My horse gathered itself beneath me and jumped, clearing the spikes with a proficiency that my body was not prepared for — my stomach dropped, my hands seized the mane, and we landed on the other side with a jolt that traveled up my spine and rattled my teeth.

Govind chuckled behind me. "You'll get used to it."

The horses slowed. I looked up. What I saw removed every word I possessed from my vocabulary and left me with nothing but the sound of my own breathing.

The trees were inhabited. Wooden structures — huts, platforms, walkways — were built into the trunks and branches, distributed at varying heights, each with wooden shutters and circular, pointed roofs that mimicked the canopy's shape. Suspension bridges linked the trees together, swaying gently in the breeze, and nets lay taut beneath them — safety nets, the lowest ten metres above the ground. The settlement extended in every direction, disappearing into the heat-haze, reaching toward a mountainous rockface in the far distance.

A city in the trees. The Vanavasins.

The logic was immediately apparent: the Igknamai couldn't climb. The entire settlement was an architectural response to the creatures that roamed the forest floor — a civilisation that had looked at the threat and responded not by fighting it but by moving above it, building their world in the space between the ground and the sky where the monsters could not follow.

A wooden lift was being lowered inside the hollow of an enormous trunk. Govind helped me down and gestured toward it. As I approached, a hand caught mine — small, trembling, familiar. Zara. Her eyes were glassy, her composure maintained by the thinnest margin, the professional control of a doctor who was about to lose her clinical detachment and was holding on with everything she had.

I squeezed her hand. Together, we stepped onto the lift.

The darkness inside the tree trunk was complete — warm, close, smelling of resin and the particular living smell of wood that was still growing, still conducting sap and water and the slow, patient business of being a tree that had been being a tree for a thousand years. The lift jolted. We rose. Light appeared above us — the garrison platform, where a spiked iron gate was pulled open by guards whose eyes were hard and whose weapons were visible and whose bearing communicated the absolute seriousness of people who protected something worth protecting.

The scouting leader spoke to an awaiting man in leather armour. Their conversation was clipped, efficient.

"Igknamai on all sides."

"Considering the heat, they're everywhere. Are all parties back?"

"Waiting on Jayant's hunting party."

"Pull the bridges. Raise access points. Open temporarily when Jayant returns. Keep watch on all fronts — especially the grazing fields. I wouldn't be surprised if Jaldevs turn up."

"And if they do?"

The scouting leader glanced at me. His eyes held mine for a moment — assessing, categorising, filing. Whatever he saw in my blood-soaked, tear-stained, exhausted face apparently warranted his next words: "If they do, find me."