“So,” Joontah said after a minute. He was staring in front of him in some kind of shock. “Any idea what the fuck just happened?”

Kylara winced as she tried to get up. Her limbs were sore and stiff. She gripped the side of the bench for balance and tried to configure her feet into a somewhat normal stance. “They could still be out there,” she said. She flicked her fingers at him. “Get up.”

Joontah did not move. “Joon,” she said, holding out her hand but secretly hoping he wouldn’t take it. If he did, she might just fall down. She was that tired.

“Are you hurt?”

Joontah held a finger up. “Not too badly,” he said. “A few cuts and bruises but nothing too bad. Just… give me a minute.”

“Fine,” Kylara said. She looked down at the bench and grimaced. The seat was covered in an off-colour brown and black slime. With the back of her hand, she flicked away what looked like a part of a leg. It was wedged between the wooden slats on the back of the bench. She peeled back a bit of her glove and ran her finger over the wood. She cringed. The slime was an odd consistency. No sit-able at all.

Sighing, Kylara took off her shirt and with a few brisk motions wiped off enough of the bench to sit. The shirt had been the nicest one she owned–proper funeral clothes–but it was not like she was going to wear it again. Getting it off was a relief. It was torn and stained. Her trousers were in a similarly dire state. Her right leg was practically hanging out of one of the massive tears. They seemed irreparably ruined. Too bad. They had been her favourite. The loss stung.

“Hello!” Yalmay called, still in a nearby tree. “Are you two okay?”

Kylara was not going to answer that question. She didn’t know what would be considered a lie. Was she okay? She had no idea. Her mind just felt… blank.

“You think you can get down on your own?” she yelled up at her sister.

Yalmay glanced down, made an expression with lots of teeth, and then gave them a shaky thumbs up and started lowering herself to the next branch. “Ah, don’t worry. I can totally get down from here. Yep…”

Joontah was watching her closely. “I don’t trust her,” he said, pulling himself up.

“Ugh,” Kylara said, rubbing her eye. Something had died on the side of it. Gods, she needed a bath.

Joontah stood up. “What is she doing?” he asked.

Kylara didn’t want to move. “Yalmay might have a concussion.” Yalmay did look a bit unstable trying to climb down. She somewhat regretted putting the idea to climb down in her head in the first place. Climbing down a tree concussed did not seem like a good idea, and to be honest, Kylara would not trust Yalmay in a tree unconcussed either.

The gwiyala that had hit Yalmay had hit her hard. Hard enough to cause her to black out for a second. Kylara had been afraid she was going to collapse and be trampled by the fighting. It was lucky Kylara had been carrying the tattoo entad to give her an escape route. It had thrown her into the nearest tree.

Kylara stood up from the bench. Her muscles were already feeling better. She wondered if it was because of warding if everyone healed that fast. Some things it was hard to know the baseline for. Like, it had taken her longer to catch her breath than Joontah (and yes, Kylara had been counting–not that it was a competition) but now she seemed to be recovering faster than him.

She glanced back at their other two companions and felt a swell of unease. Lenah was curled up in a ball, head resting on her knees. She was picking at something on the ground with her fingers. She seemed mostly fine.

Multhamurra, though–Kylara was not sure what to think about him. He had said something before but Kylara had not been able to make out the words. But now he was slumped against the bench, half asleep. He looked ill. It didn’t make much sense to Kylara. Out of the five of them, he was by far the least injured. He had been shielded during the largest of the onslaughts and for some reason, the gwiyalas seemed to have targeted him less. She wondered why that was. Perhaps they didn’t see an old man as a threat?

The idea of gwiyalas seeing anyone as a threat was hilarious. It wasn’t a thought she would have entertained seriously before today.

None of it made sense.

Gwiyalas shouldn’t have been able to do this. Kylara had grown up with the creatures all her life. They were friendly, they were lazy, and they were, most of all, stupid. It was a fairly common occurrence for a gwiyala to just… wander into an open fire pit and kill itself. They didn’t seem to understand the concept of fire or danger or even pain. You had to watch them closely when opening doors because they were too slow to get out of the way and would get stepped on. They ran into their own reflections. Sometimes they ran into things that weren’t their own reflections. Yalmay’s gwiyala–Timothy (and of course she had named him with a punny name) seemed to think if he ran fast enough at the couch, he would phase through it like some sort of spirit. Timothy had been banned from inside after that. The couch had a permanent dent in it.

Multhamurra had something to do with this. Kylara knew that.

He had translated only a minute before the gwiyalas had attacked from the trees. It shouldn’t have been possible to translate in the first place–the butterfly warren was closed–but Kylara had eavesdropped on his and Wawiriya’s conversation and knew that Multhamurra could get into the warren. Had he somehow triggered the attack? It was too particular to be ignored.

Kylara glanced at him, eager to ask questions, but hesitated. He looked like he desperately needed rest, and getting Yalmay out of the tree before she fell out was the first priority.

Kylara made her way to the base of the tree Yalmay was clinging to. “You good?” she called up.

“Oh very,” Yalmay answered.

Kylara raised an eyebrow at the lie. Yalmay had made… absolutely no progress. She was still standing on the same bough, about ten and a half metres from Kylara’s feet.

Joontah limped up next to Kylara. “She can use that entad to get down, right?” he whispered.

“She should be able to,” Kylara said.

“You think she forgot?”

“Er…”

“Use the entad!” Joontah shouted up. “We’ll spot you.”

“Much appreciated,” Yalmay said, “definitely will do that. Just need to er, position myself better…”

Yalmay slowly lifted her left foot while maintaining her white-knuckled grip on the trunk of the tree. She lowered her foot infinitesimally as if probing the air for another branch. There wasn’t one. Or at least, there wasn’t one in the few centimetres Yalmay dared to reach.

“Maybe sit down first?” Joontah suggested. “Then lower yourself down?”

Yalmay chuckled nervously, “Right.” She put both feet firmly back on the bough she was standing on. She put more of her weight against the tree and seemed to change her mind and reached over to grip a small branch that was within arm’s reach.

“Not that one,” Joontah said. “That’ll break on you.”

“Just double checking,” Yalmay said. “Got to test all my options here…”

“You remember what I told you?” Kylara called up. “The entad pulls you towards the flowers a specific butterfly species likes. But you control the species so you can control the direction of the pull.”

“I know that,” Yalmay said.

“Well, that’s creeping mistletoe right above you. Grows on eucalyptus, sort of looks like one too. Hanging yellow and red flowers in the summer. Lots of butterflies like it. Common Jezebel, imperial white, dark purple azures–change the entad into one of them.”

“And then I’ll get pulled up. I’d rather be closer to the ground, thanks.”

“No,” Kylara shook her head. “Use it to sort of abseil down. The entad will try to pull you up but you can ease off it.”

Yalmay nodded slowly and looked up. “That it?” she pointed at the plant.

“That’s it,” Kylara confirmed.

“Great. Great.” She sucked in a breath.

Joontah exchanged a look with Kylara. “She’s a lot less confident than she was a few minutes ago, isn’t she?” he grinned. All the worry on his face had disappeared, replaced with amusement.

“Maybe I should go up there and get her?”

“Nah, I’m enjoying this,” Joontah said, crossing his arms. “Blackmail material. Whoever knew my girlfriend was afraid of heights?”

Suddenly, Yalmay yelped.

Kylara looked up. She was still gripping onto the tree truck but much more fiercely, with her face pressed against the bark and her eyes squeezed tight. It took Kylara a second to see why: her lower body was floating, raising up slowly a few centimetres at a time.

“You doing it too much,” Kylara shouted. “Pull back a little.”

“I’m not good with entads like you are,” Yalmay shouted back, “how do I turn it off?”

Joontah sighed. “You should just go up there,” he said.

Kylara bit her lip. It tasted odd. “Fine,” she said. To Yalmay, she shouted, “throw it down!”

Yalmay nodded, then grabbed the folded piece of paper she had been holding and threw it. The moment she released it, the mark on Yalmay’s hand seemed to pull away and the paper turned black with ink. The force disappeared and Yalmay slammed chest-first into the tree trunk. She then gave a ragged thumbs-up. Joontah smiled back.

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“You okay?” Joontah shouted.

Yalmay rubbed her shoulder then her chest. “Ugh,” she said, “I think I crushed my boob.”

“Left or right?” Joontah said.

“Left, your favourite one.”

“Aw really?”

Kylara picked up the paper Yalmay had thrown from the ground. The ink seeped onto her skin almost immediately. “Gross, you two. Not the time,” she said, dusting off the entad. How anyone could be thinking of sex when covered in this much gore completely baffled her.

Kylara looked up at the spot Yalmay was standing. Twelve metres from her. She aimed–or tried to predict the trajectory, aiming didn’t do much good–then activated the entad as a mistletoe emperor moth quickly. She felt it pull in the right direction and then deactivated it again. It was always good to check there were not any other plants in the radius. They threw off the direction. Kylara had learnt her lesson after falling on her face one too many times.

Positioning herself near the base of the trunk, she activated it and pulled on the connection. The force pulled her upward. She deliberately pulled back, forcing her body to be as unstreamlined as possible. She flew upward, towards a point about a metre above Yalmay, pushing off the tree trunk once or twice to avoid knocking into branches. Yalmay’s eyes widened. Just before they were about to collide, Kylara kicked off the trunk with her legs, deactivated the entad just enough to get some horizontal movement, and reactivated it again. She landed on the same bough as her sister, a bit further from the trunk.

“Wow,” Yalmay said. “You’re good at that.”

“I had plenty of practice.”

Kylara wrapped one lean arm firmly around Yalmay’s waist. Keeping their bodies pressed together, Kylara shifted partway towards the trunk and gestured at Yalmay to turn around so her back was facing Kylara.

Kylara had never carried someone with the entad and she had no idea how it would work. The entad was clumsy and she often needed to use her body to shift and compensate for it. Yalmay was mostly dead weight. But it was only ten metres. She figured it would be fine.

She glanced down, making sure Joontah had shifted out of their way. Then, maintaining her hold on Yalmay, Kylara stepped out into open air. They fell together for several metres. Kylara reactivated the entad about halfway down. They slowed. For a second, Kylara thought their combined weight would be too much. Then they started to pull up again. Kylara deactivated it. They fell. It took several cycles of the same thing to get safely to the ground, but with Yalmay’s apparent fear of heights, Kylara figured a more controlled pace was best. They landed at the base of the trunk and Joontah immediately ran to pull Yalmay into an embrace.

“Okay,” Yalmay said, pulling out of the hug and addressing Kylara, “what the fuck was that?”

Why Yalmay was addressing her specifically, Kylara had no idea. In fact, she was a bit offended.

“We don’t know,” Joontah said.

“Were they rabid or something?”

“I don’t think so,” Kylara said. “It was too coordinated.”

Yalmay looked around. “You think this was coordinated?” she asked.

“They attacked at the exact same time,” Kylara said. “The ones on the ground waited until the ones in the trees finished before rushing in. They used each other as springboards to jump higher and claw at our faces. Yeah, I would say it was coordinated.”

“I was hoping they were just rabid,” Yalmay slumped. She ran her hands through her hair, noticed how dirty it was, then wiped off her hand on Joontah’s shirt.

“Yal!” he exclaimed, recoiling slightly.

“Sorry, but bug guts. Ew.”

Joontah locked eyes with her defiantly and flicked a curl out of his eyes with a flourish. Then he wiped the same hand on Yalmay’s shirt.

“Oh my gods, Joontah!”

“You started a dangerous precedent. I’ve got more bug guts in my hair than you. You were stuck in that tree half the battle. You missed most of it.”

“Not my fault,” Yalmay puffed.

“And then you couldn’t get down from the tree because you were scared.”

Yalmay glared at him. “Okay, I’ll admit the tree was a bit scary, but did you see me when I was down here?” She mimed stopping on an invisible gwiyala. “I was incredible! Killed like two dozen of them. And I’m basically wearing thongs,” she pointed at her feet, which were in a rather fancy pair of sandals. Kylara thought they looked pretty badly scratched up, but Yalmay did not seem to mind. She grinned as she wiggled her toes. “Look at them!”

Kylara met her sister’s eyes. “I am not going to admire your feet,” she enunciated carefully. “We need to find out why this happened. Let’s go talk to Multhamurra.”

“Right.”

“Speaking of which, he isn’t looking so good,” Joontah said.

“No,” Kylara said. The magsman really looked terrible. His dark skin had an odd grey tone to it.

“Kylara?” Yalmay asked.

“Hm?”

“What he did before, that was a warbler thing, right?”

Kylara froze. She had missed that. No wonder Yalmay was so excited. It was mundane for Kylara–she had seen warblers translate hundreds of times before on her warding exhibitions–but for Yalmay it was a first. And a big first too. Yalmay was obsessed with the University, but she had never been to the warrens before. She had never seen a warbler in action. Did she even know Multhamurra had the ability? Did she recognise it?

“He translated,” Kylara said.

“But from the warren, right?” Yalmay asked.

“Yeah.” There wasn’t anywhere else to translate from as far as Kylara was aware.

“Our warren? The butterfly warren?”

“I guess so,” Kylara said.

“How’s that possible?” Yalmay asked. “I thought it was closed.”

“I did too,” Kylara said, “ but we should ask him. Something about it must have made the gwiyalas mad.”

They walked over to the magsman, putting down a few of the surviving gwiyalas on the way. Most of them were too injured to do much, but all of them thought it best to be sure. One of them tried to bite Joontah when he got near it.

The ground smelt strange, like a mix of mud and honey.

Yalmay kicked a nearby gwiyala as they approached. Instead of moving, it instead seemed to collapse inward onto her foot. “Ew,” she said, wiping her foot.

“It’s not a football,” Joontah commented.

“I regret wearing these shoes so so so much,” Yalmay said.

“The council will be halfway here by now,” Joontah said. “Then we can leave and get clean.”

That must have been a guess, but Kylara thought it was a decent one. Either way, it seemed to calm Yalmay down. She put a serious expression on her face as they approached the magsman.

“Multhamurra?” Kylara said, kneeling down.

The man was slumped to the side of the bench, eyes closed. Lenah was leaning on his shoulder like a small child.

“Multhamurra, are you awake?” She gently touched his shoulder.

The magsman blinked.

“Oh larranda-ng,” he muttered.

“What?” Kylara said.

“Boyd a la anibal bulikgi, jadh-jadh mungo mango yarikh-yarikha popogga pennungi,” he continued.

“And you thought I was concussed,” Yalmay muttered.

“Yeah, I’m not getting any of that,” Kylara said. “Can you understand us?” she asked slowly.

“Oh, lurrut-da,” Multhamurra shook his head, “nguubulyampulpa is yurritjurta a marla. Tjungu yura a men,” he sighed. “Nebe-dok Tal, yurulyarra by a boyd la-n melita dha-ng?” He shrugged. “A turlkulu le, mat ba-nanda-jan lutea tanyih. Ngamtulurruu a milijilin, a yi.”

“Why is he saying that?” Yalmay said.

Kylara knelt on the ground next to him and gently asked Lenah to move. She nodded then crawled away.

Joontah knelt over with her and examined him. “He’s not injured,” he said. “At least, not badly.”

“I think he was hurt when he translated,” Yalmay said.

“Maybe.”

“Bu-jan,” Multhamurra said. He pulled his sleeve up, revealing a deep red lesion that crawled up most of his forearm. After a second, seemingly satisfied the three of them had a good look at it, he pulled the fabric down again. He hissed when it touched his skin.

“Did the gwiyalas did that to you?” Kylara asked, pointing at the ground around them.

He twitched his lip ‘no.’

“Something in the warren?” Kylara pointed up.

“Kala nura athdonbal banga yirri, yuru ngara birkanda. Yani a yura werrh, tjuku gujirritj yura garra-yurruphen a dhanyirripayijilimagun. Tjara, a mani yala berutuu-n yirra kara.”

“Seems like our warren then,” Yalmay muttered. “Dear gods.”

“Why is he talking like that?” Kylara said.

“I mean… are we sure that is him?” Joontah asked. He had switched to Common from Koulan, Kylara noticed. Common was the language of the city of Warrung. It should have been Multhamurra’s native language, but he just continued to stare at them blankly.

“It sounds like him,” Yalmay pointed out. “Looks like him too.”

“Does it?” Joontah said. “Last I saw him, Dhaligir has broken his nose real bad. Now it’s healed.”

Kylara shook her head. “Probably a warbler thing,” she said, switching to Kadigal, “they have ways of healing things like that.” She tried to put the words to Common Sign as she spoke as well, hoping to catch a flicker of recognition in Multhamurra’s eyes. But he didn’t seem to understand that either.

“He could have a twin,” Joontah suggested.

“Seems a bit unlikely.”

“Kaninytjarra a kurra-n mangkutju jawinbiny pirra a dirdi-ni.

Yalmay let out a burst of laughter at that. “Hey, at least he can still makes jokes,” she said.

“Nuunga mali tara?” she asked him curiously.

“A wemjowl djama yani ma-bak-ga,” he muttered. He shook his head slightly, as if annoyed at himself. “Pulalala yaniyaninura murjojojo ganyimiyan mamin galan a tunga munga.”

Then, abruptly, the man froze, as if he had just realised something. He stared at Yalmay.

Both Kylara and Joontah were also staring at Yalmay.

It took her a second to realise. “Er,” she hesitated, then anxiously bit her lip. “What?” she stammered.

“You can understand him?” Joontah said.

“Yeah, I mean it’s not like he’s speaking–” Yalmay started, but then she stopped mid-sentence, her eyes widening.

“What is he speaking?” Kylara asked.

“Gi-bu-n a mirrbarnarri a ngurtulypa lek-ga-yan im warrung-un,” the man said.

“He’s saying, er, I don’t know exactly what it’s called but it’s some archaic version of Common. I can’t pick up every word but it’s really similar to what he gave me a book about. The vowels are all off but I think he’s speaking really slowly. Also, there is a lot of influence from Aeyiya which is helping. Yeah.” She took a deep breath and looked at them. “It’s like a mix of old Common and old Aeyiya.”

Kylara and Joontah exchanged glances. “Are you sure, Yalmay?” Joontah asked. “I know some Aeyiya and it doesn’t sound like that.”

“I've never heard anything like that before,” Kylara agreed.

Multhamurra regarded Yalmay curiously, head tilted. He spoke to her for much longer than he had done before, speaking in a gentle voice. Yalmay gave him a subtle shake of her head.

“What’s he saying?” Kylara asked.

“I, uh,” Yalmay closed her eyes as if trying not to cringe, “I don’t think he’s speaking old Common,” she conceded.

Joontah tilted his head at his girlfriend and crossed his arms. “Yeah, we know Yal. No one was believing that lie.”

“Really?” she looked at Kylara.

“Yeah nah,” she said. “I wasn’t.”

“But then, why can I understand him?”

“Well that’s the question. What was he saying before?”

“Well, he was mostly complaining about how no one could understand him,” Yalmay shuffled her feet awkwardly, “Looking back, that really should have given me a hint no one could understand him.”

“Did he say how he got hurt?” Kylara asked.

“No,” Yalmay said. “When you asked him, he said something like, ‘I imagine you want a response from me now’ and then he listed off a bunch of nonsense like bingle bongle dingle dongle zibberflap zimbledo bimp bomp blip.”

Joontah raised an eyebrow. Kylara felt like slapping her forehead. “That didn’t give you a hint something was up?” she asked.

“Weeell,” Yalmay seemed to debate this. “No. It didn’t.”

Joontah sighed.

“Well what was I supposed to think?” Yalmay said. “I am standing in a park, covered in the gore of what was probably my pets, with no idea what is going on. Our magsman fell out of the sky even though that is apparently impossible–but what do I know, I’ve never been in the Up Over before–and now he is speaking some strange alien language that I somehow instantly learned and no one else can understand.” She took a deep breath and crossed her arms. “Personally, I think I am freaking out in the most useful way possible right now.”

A pause.

"And I deserve some credit."

Kylara exchanged a glance with Joontah. “Maybe we can ask Wawiriya,” she said. “She might know what is going on. Do you know how they met, your grandmother and the magsman?”

“No,” Joontah replied, “but she acts different around him. I can’t place it, but there is something there. And Wawiriya is coming with the rest of the group. I assume.”

Multhamurra shook his head slightly, as if snapping himself out of a pleasant train of thought. He smiled at Yalmay, a small sad smile without teeth. “A wihya,” he said.

Yalmay drew up stiffly. “Oh,” she said quietly. She turned towards him.

“What’s he saying?” Kylara asked. This translation thing was getting annoying rather quickly. If Multhamurra had gone into the Desert–or been attacked by something from the Desert–which were currently Kylara’s only working theories–it might take weeks for him to recover. Weeks of Yalmay’s clumsy translation skills. Kylara could just about picture it. Yalmay getting distracted halfway through a sentence and forgetting to translate. Yalmay deciding to start up a tangential conversation that Kylara would never know the words to. Or worse, Yalmay interpreting things in completely in her own way and translating that instead. It was going to be a long few weeks.

The man said something else, and Yalmay leaned closer to listen.

“Hm?” she asked.

“What’s he saying?” Joontah asked.

Multhamurra's gaze fixed on him with dark, unreadable eyes. Then he muttered something else.

“Oh,” Yalmay said. “Right. Yeah. Sooo... he says he’s dying.”