Then she went down on her knees, and grabbed him, and pulled him into her arms, and hugged him so hard that his red armour creaked.
Alex looked away. It seemed like the polite thing to do.
Kanos didn't. Kanos sat down in the road with his chin on his fists and watched the whole thing with great interest, and his tail thumped happily on the stones.
"Brother," he whispered in Spinner. "She hit him and then she held him. Is that a human custom?"
"Kind of. It's a Selina custom."
"I like it." Kanos thought about it. "When we go home, I will do it to my father."
"Please don't."
**********
They didn't stay in the road. Up on the wall, nobody was watching any more, and that was worse than if they had been.
They dragged the sleeping reds into the bushes, so that nobody would step on them, and went down the hill the back way, through gorse and rocks, until they reached the reeds at the edge of the lake. There they sat down in the mud and nobody said anything for a while.
