The Viletails moved fast, and the cocoon did not slow them.
Three of them carried it slung in their tails, the white shadow-thread bundle swinging beneath their bodies as they crossed the canopy, and the weight of a grown woman wrapped in her own craft was nothing to limbs built to haul prey through the high dark. The fourth ran rear-guard, its head turning, watching the way they had come. And behind all four, at a distance that opened and closed and opened again, came the three who followed.
Kei went through the branches on the strength of his new Deftness, the twenty-two of it expressing itself as a body that found its holds before his eye had finished choosing them, swift and economical, no motion wasted. Asp kept pace without trouble — better than pace; her spirit-naga build was made for exactly this, deft and agile and low to the wood, and she did not so much climb as pour herself along the branches, gliding the gaps the way water finds the fastest line down a slope.
