The source of the snoring was almost as frightening as the skin itself: a whole troop of vervet monkeys were lounging around the clearing, some up in the trees, but many of them snoozing in nests made from the coils of the skin. Was it noticeably larger than the one Bramble had found, or was that Pranceâs imagination? Sheâd seen the one Bramble had found in the tunnel, but it was a different thing altogether to come upon this one lying where itâd been shed. The whole floor of the clearing was covered with a huge, freshly shed snakeskin. She stepped into the clearing and gasped. There was almost no sound, except for a very faint snoring coming from a clearing just up ahead.
She slipped between them, her hooves not quite disturbing the leaves underfoot, her shadow-ears twitching as she listened for hissing or growling. The early morning light among the trees cast shadows almost as sharp and black as her own.
Would they have circled around, not wanting to be slowed by the obstacle, or would they have gone through, welcoming the shelter from the open plain around it? Even once the scree had ended, she could follow the path that they must have taken, trusting her instincts and her birdâs-eye view as she hopped from the high branches of a baobab down to slipping through disturbed, head-high grasses. Prance leaped from the mountain, following the trail, flashing from one side of it to the other. The pattern of a huge snakeâs body slithering down the mountain. A sinuous pattern of stones piling up, first on one side, then the other. From high above, perched on a tall rock, she looked down at the slope and saw a pattern in the scree. She found the trail on a long, gravelly slope, close enough to the route she had taken to the elephant graveyard that Prance felt a shiver pass through her shadow-self. She wandered over the mountainside, leaping lightly from boulder to boulder at the speed of shadow, searching for any sign of the snake and the leopard whoâd been with her. There was nothing she could do for them, not now, except find Grandmother and make her pay before she did something even worse. She stood among them, her shadow-form wavering with emotion, for as long as she could bear, and then she left. It was as if they had shrunk to nothing more than sad piles of feathers when theyâd been killed. They were nothing like the intimidating birds she remembered from her travels across the plains with Runningherd. The corpses all looked so small, in the flood of orange light from the dawn. Prance could barely make herself look at the carnage of the vulture pool, but she felt that it was her duty to bear witness, so that someone apart from Stormriderâand the shadow-flockâwould remember.
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