Book One – Chapter 18

The borman bent low over the cod. His paws moved awkwardly as he worked the towels off the tairan figure. His sheer size made every movement clumsy. His claws were far too large for the gentleness he attempted on a being not half his size. The tairan looked impossibly fragile under his bulk.

Bubs, by contrast, had just finished unwrapping the beastkin on the other cot. This figure was even smaller. Lighter. Limp in the wrong way. Slim and soft where there should be muscle, slack where there should be tension. Not like a humanoid child, yet not with pronounced beastkin proportions either. Something in between; a body not resolved into one shape or the other.

It took Yu a long moment to realise what he was seeing. It was a selder. One of the slim, long-limbed mountain wanderers that came and went across the Albweiss ridges west of the Barnstream Harbour Guild. People desperately sought to hire their kind as guides for the Snowtrail. Yu had never seen a young one, a selder without horns. This one’s features, too, were disarmingly clean, without any discernible signs of age or hardship. It was the ears that gave it away nonetheless, even from the distance. They were enormous, expressive even in unconsciousness, their inner flesh of a light pink and frayed from the wind. His or her eyelids twitched faintly, but did not open.

He is weak, the borman had said. So it is a He.

Yu was not good at telling beastkin apart. He could not with the bormen and borminna. He was not even sure with the krynn traveller, even though he had seen both males and females on his way to Emery Thurm. With selders, he had never had the occasion to look closely, and he had never bothered enough to learn anything about them.