The bear clambered up the bank drawing long, laboured breaths. Her hind leg throbbed. She had been foolish to answer the call of the man spirit. It had been so long since her kind had heard them speak sense, though, and the sound of his voice had filled her with hope. Something had changed in the forest, and he had been part of it. But the injuries from the fight might be the end of her. That infernal piece of metal was lodged inside the wound. She had to return to her cubs. As she stumbled across the ground between them, she saw the kind old man – the silent one who grieved for his lost cub – move around her. She lay down and the noses of her young nuzzled her side. She allowed the man to do something to her leg. Sharp points of pain kept her awake for a while, as though he were poking her with thorns. Then she fell into a deep sleep.

  When she awoke, she and her cubs were alone.

  A splash from the lake made her stand and peer over, testing the strength of her leg. She felt the skin beneath her fur pull at something knotted in her flesh. Was she trapped? No, she could move and the knots seemed to hold her wound closed. She looked around the circumference of the lake. Nothing stirred.

  Another splash.

  The edge of the water rippled and drew flat, like bare skin being fussed with and pulled taut. Something took form on the surface. A paw, or hand. It did not reach out of the water. It was the water. The water formed into five human fingers, which pushed up to reveal a watery arm. The bear stepped back, closer to her cubs. The arm reached for the bank and took hold of a rock there. It pulled. Had she seen it from the corner of her eye, she would have thought that a human cub, a boy, was dragging himself out of the water, but it was not so. The water was pulling itself up into the form of a child. It took shape, heaving itself further up the bank and turning a pinkish colour, like flesh. There was the head, the torso and the waist. Finally on shimmering, transparent legs that gradually turned opaque, the human cub stood on the bank. His brown hair stood up, fluffy and dry in the sun. Of course, she thought, how could a boy made of water be wet? She shook her head and looked again and, when she did so, saw the boy staring back at her with wide, dark eyes that were dotted with tiny points of light. As she looked into his gaze, which pulled her inside, she felt as though she were looking up at the night sky.

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  “What are you?” asked the boy, in a voice that recalled sapling branches whipping back and forth in a spring breeze.

  “I am a bear,” she answered. “What are you?”

  He looked around. The place where the man had burned a body like this caught her eye. Did this one look the same? It was hard to tell. They all looked the same to her. He brought his hands in front of his face and examined them. Then he faced her, those eyes seeming to look right through the surface to touch something deep inside. A secret in her own body that even she did not know, which was as clear to him as the sun or moon.

  “I am a god,” he said.

  He spoke as a matter of fact, as though telling her that he was a fox, a bird or a bat.

  “I’ve never met a 'god' before,” said the bear, shaking her fur and settling on the ground.

  “There aren’t very many of us,” replied the boy. The bear, who had decided this creature did not present a threat, now wondered if it might be an ally.

  “There aren’t many bears, either.”

  The boy smiled and continued examining his limbs.

  “Is that the only form you can take?” she asked. “Or can you change?”

  In answer, the boy’s flesh rippled like water disturbed by a stone, then it became solid once more.

  “I can take any form, but this skin is comfortable to me at last. It felt like a prison for so long, and now it feels like home. What do you think of it?”

  “Human,” she replied approvingly. “It will command respect. Not from the sleepers, of course. You’d better watch out for them. They woke up angry this year.” She nursed a bare patch of skin on one of her front legs. “And it’s a young body. It will last you for many years.”

  “It will last me all eternity,” he said, again as though it were a matter of fact.

  The boy looked around, then turned away from the lake. He wandered into the forest, trailing his hands through the leaves that brushed across his path and looking at each thing he passed as though he saw it for the very first time.

  The bear watched him leave, remembering stories that her mother had told of a queen in the forest centuries ago. She used to play with the bears and ravens. She played with some of the humans, too. She helped to bring ghouls away from the living and into the world where they belonged. But when she played with Yurusuuru, everything changed.

  Was this boy like her? Was he the next of her kind? She opened her mouth to roar a warning after him, not to underestimate that ancient malevolence, but the boy was already out of sight.

  She hoped for his sake that he had some friends.

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