He repeated this at every lake in the burned lands that had one of the islands that the Outwallers called crannogs.
He sent other creatures to listen, and to speak, and to gather news, and he learned that the Northern Huran, having taken losses in his wars, were threatened by their southern cousins across the Great River, and from further east. And he learned that the great Etruscan ships had not come this year. He set spies to visit the distant court of the King of Alba, and to watch that blazing fire, his wife, the Queen.
He made his decisions, then. He did not help the Northern Huran simply because they had been his allies. They had been loyal. But the forests were full of potential allies and slaves and he owed the Northern Huran nothing. But now he had goals, and goals led to plans, and the Northern Huran would be his servants – willingly or unwillingly.
Thorn stopped for a day in the deep woods, and practised a new mantle – a body into which he put much skill, making it a form he could wear with ease. It was that of an old, sage Outwaller – one with clear, honest eyes and old scars. An old man with wisdom writ hard on his lined face and chose the name Speaker of Tongues, an old shaman. In that form he visited the smaller towns. He sat at the fires and listened to the matrons, healed children, made medicine. Many benefited from his powers. Word of him spread like wildfire among the Kree and the Northern Huran.
In each village he whispered a few thoughts, and pinned them to the minds of the men and women who were the deepest in greed. He left them like seeds, to grow with time.
Then he shed the semblance of Speaker of Tongues like an old snake shedding a skin, and he moved in great strides, passing through the endless forest like a light wind. He used his new powers sparingly – to contact a man in Lorica, a woman in Harndon, and a man deep in the Wild to the south. For them, he wore no semblance. He was a voice in the ear, and a thought, briefly tasted. It was exhausting, and he spent whole days in rest, standing exposed to the elements, before he would walk on. He had new powers to explore, new venues to work, and this ability to manipulate his shape so easily was disturbing.
He couldn’t remember how he’d achieved it. Nor was he quite sure who he was.
Almost seventy days had passed since he had faced the Dark Sun.
He knew that, for his next move, he needed a secure retreat and a place of power. That without such a place there was no point to his making any further plans whatsoever. The death of the great tree in the Adnacrags had changed him, he now suspected – and the advent of the great power who had left him the armoured egg was enough to prompt him to action. Or that was how he now saw his metamorphosis.
He walked along the northern shore of the Inner Sea in his own guise, and pondered war.
Ticondaga Castle – The Earl of the Westwall
Ghause was not a woman to hesitate. But the ramifications of the Queen’s pregnancy were great enough to give her pause, and she chewed on her spells for long weeks before she knew how she meant to act.
The Earl was launching his usual raids across the Great River into the Outwallers’ country. He raided for slaves and information, and sometimes for Wild honey and pelts. The Earldom of the North lacked the vast resources of Jarsay or Brogat; it had sheep, and cattle, and timber and everything else, as the Muriens liked to joke, was rock. Astute raiding did a great deal to provide agricultural labour and some coin.
This year he had a dozen knights of the Order of Saint Thomas. The order had knights in commanderies along the wall, and more in Harndon – and the latest news suggested that they intended to form a new garrison at Lissen Carrak. But their power of grammerie and their deep knowledge of the Wild allowed the Earl to plan a major raid, and she lost another week to helping plan the food and baggage for it, and in welcoming fifty knights from the south – a few hard-bitten professionals, the rest knights on errantry with girls to impress.
When his raid was all but formed and he was training his conroy in the great fields south of the castle, she was finally at leisure to consider her options and plan her own battle.
She read a great deal for a day or so – delving into texts she hadn’t touched for decades. Then she sent a careful probe south – an old working, called a ‘scent’. From then on, nothing happened as she’d intended.
She was a careful sorceress, so her scent rode south wrapped in layers of deception and cocooned in hermetical workings that would detect any attempt by the young Queen to see her. And it was one of these that triggered before her scent had even reached the Queen, when it was still fluttering through the aether. Ghause suspected that the aether worked in utterly different ways than the real, so she felt – rather than knew – that the real distance between Ticondaga and Harndon had very little to do with their distance in the aether.
But she was jolted into action moments after releasing her precious working, the fruit of weeks of work, days of research, and a dozen amorous couplings to fuel her needs.
She ran her fingers over the threads of her casting the way a bard would caress a beautiful instrument’s gut strings.
She found him immediately. She frowned.
‘Richard,’ she said out loud. ‘You are such a man – all power and no subtlety.’
Of course, Plangere didn’t answer.
If she called him Thorn he might answer, but then there’d be a fight.
She extended her sight and followed her scent as far as she could, but the aether was a roil of angry motions – there was a great deal going on beyond her sorceressly reinforced walls, and she withdrew.
She threw on a robe – she always cast naked, which made winter a daunting time to work – and fell into her favourite chair. From there she looked through her window, six storeys above the walls, so that she could see across the Great River, and feel the wonder of the forest rolling away unbroken to the north until it became the ice. She’d been there, and she knew the power of the land of ice.
She took a sip of wine. ‘Why is the Wild so active?’ she asked aloud. She looked at her cats.
They licked their paws, like cats.
‘And why exactly is Richard Plangere watching the Queen?’ she asked. And in the safety of her own head, she said his new name.
Thorn.
One Hundred Leagues West of Lissen Carrak – Bill Redmede
Tyler found his men. He found them amidst the flashing lightning by the bank of the stream. They were all gleaming bones and organic shapes – they’d been dismembered and eaten.
Bill Redmede retched and the lightning went on and on – faster and faster – and the rain fell harder, and the thunder and the rising stream covered all sound. The sight of the corpses, stripped to gristle, was like a shout inside his head.
He put his back to a tree and gripped his spear.
Tyler whirled, wild in the lightning. ‘They’re surrounding us!’ he screamed.
He began to cut at the unseen enemy.
Redmede jumped to help, but even in a long series of lightning flashes, he couldn’t see the enemy. Nat cut and hacked – Redmede had to duck, and leap, and finally shouted ‘Nat – Nat! There’s nothing there!’
Nat turned to glare at him as the thunder ended with a wild series of claps, so close that Redmede felt them like blows.
And then the thunderhead swept past, and the darkness was the more absolute for what had come before. Redmede felt Tyler step past him in the darkness, and put out a hand.
‘Sweet Jesus, we’re done!’
Redmede dropped his spear and threw his arms around Tyler. ‘Snap out of it! They’re gone. Let’s get out of here.’