Sun Mote Copse You can stand me up at the gates of hell

The hinterlands, Peregrine repeated in his head, cataloging that in a dusty filing cabinet in there somewhere. If he had been here for about a month, that meant he had arrived nearly simultaneously with the locusts. Was that just bad luck, a coincidence or...? He wanted to ask but the stranger kept talking a moment longer, so he held his peace until the other wolf was finished.

He didn't see any reason not to answer the question straightforwardly. "Yeah, I'm scoping out the place to see if it's faring any better than the lands to the... east of here." He hesitated only for a second as he recollected the direction from which he had come, along with the one where he was going. "Do you know how things are even further west of here? Did you come here because of the locusts?" he asked in the next breath, since conditions didn't seem particularly better or worse here as far as he could tell.