CHAPTER ONE
Vaelin
The beauty of the forest was revealed in daylight, the sun painting an ever-changing canvas of dappled clearings and great old trees, gently flowing streams tracking to shallow waterfalls and pools of clear water. Vaelin felt the army’s fears abate somewhat as they marched, won over by the unspoiled majesty of the forest, even giving voice to a few marching songs, though the often profane content seemed out of place amongst the trees, like a curse whispered in an Alpiran temple. The blood-song had never lifted from the moment he entered the trees, soft and melodious but also carrying a graver note, not in warning but respect. So old, he wondered. Far older than the people who worship it.
Four days in and Hera Drakil advised they were about halfway through, this being the narrowest stretch of forest between the Realm and the Reaches. Vaelin had given up trying to judge just how many Seordah travelled with them, and asking their guide proved pointless as the Seordah saw little meaning in numbers. “Many,” the hawk-faced man had said with a shrug. “Many and many.”
Although his soldiers may have been growing accustomed to the forest, his other recruits proved less than enamoured. “How much longer?” demanded Lorkan, forgetting his usual effusive courtesies. There was a deep line in the centre of his youthful brow and his eyes had the sunken look brought on by constant pain. Marken and Cara seemed only marginally less discomfited, both fidgeting and restless as they sat eating their cold breakfast. Weaver alone seemed unconcerned, hands busy with the hemp the Seordah had provided. For some reason he had abandoned baskets for a tightly bound length of strong rope, already ten feet long and growing every day.
“Four days only,” Vaelin assured Lorkan.
“Faith, I don’t know if I can stand it.” He rubbed his fingers against his temples. “Can’t you feel it, my lord?”
“Feel what?”
“The weight,” Cara said, breaking her usual silence. “The weight of such a great gift.”
“Whose gift?” Vaelin asked.
The look on her face told him she wondered if any awe she may have felt might have been misplaced. “The forest, Lord Vaelin. The forest has a gift all its own, covering every tree, branch and leaf.” She clasped her hands together, forcing a faint smile. “I daresay we’ll get used to it. The Seordah seem to cope well enough.”
Why them and not me? he thought later. Why do I feel nothing but welcome?
“Because it welcomes you,” Dahrena told him that night after their reading lesson. “It knows you, sees your soul.”
“You talk as if it’s alive.”
The look she gave him was a harsher echo of Cara’s. “Of course it’s alive. Ancient life surrounds us on all sides, for hundreds of miles, nothing but life, breathing, feeling and seeing. It sees you and likes what it sees.”
“Did it see you? When you first came here.”
“I was a child then, when father found me. I thought it was a dream, the wolf, the forest’s welcome.” She fell silent, returning to binding a fletching to one of her arrows. Like the Seordah, she made her own, hands moving with unconscious skill and precision. Drakil had given her a bow some days before, much the same as his own but with pictograms etched into the stave, at first glance crude representations of the beasts of the forest but possessing an elegant clarity on closer inspection. From her reverent expression as she accepted the weapon he deduced it held some great significance for them both.
“Do you remember a time before?” he asked. “Your childhood amongst your people?”
“The Lonak are not my people. I can remember no more than a few words of their language. I recall a village, somewhere in the mountains. A number of women, harsh and quick with the back of their hands, but also kind sometimes. I recall a night of flames and screams and blood, I think they died that night. There was a man with a knife, walking slowly towards me, black against the flames . . . then there was the wolf. I think he killed the man with the knife, though I have no memory of it. He came and crouched down before me and I felt an urging to climb onto his back.
“We ran for such a long time, me clinging to his fur, the air cold on my face. I wasn’t afraid, I was joyful, and sad when it ended somewhere dark and surrounded by trees. I got down from his back and he blessed me, his tongue covering my face, banishing fear. Then he was gone. Father found me in the morning, the first time the Seordah had ever allowed a Marelim Sil to walk the forest, and I was almost the first thing he saw.”
From her tone he deduced she had long reconciled herself to the conclusion he had just drawn. This was no accident. We are both children of the wolf.
“How many times have you seen it?” he asked.
“Just twice, including the day we came here. And you?”
“Four.” Though there may have been one other time, when it was living in a statue . . . “Every time it has saved me, as it saved you.”
Her fingers became still and he saw her fear, the same tension he had seen when they first confronted Wise Bear. “For what?”
“I don’t know. For this perhaps, a war that needed us to fight it.”
“I was so young when he blessed me it’s only now I come to realise how it felt, the sense of a being so old I could never truly comprehend it. He must have seen countless petty feuds between the strange two-legged furless things that run around the earth, countless wars. Why is this one different?”
He recalled Aspect Arlyn’s words on the fate of the Realm when he had questioned the wisdom of supporting Janus’s mad war: It will certainly fall. Not to warring fiefs once more but to utter ruin, the earth scorched, the forests burned to cinder and all the people, Realm Folk, Seordah and Lonak dead. What else would you have us do?
“Because this one will claim his world as well as ours,” he said. “I think we both know we face other enemies than the Volarians.”
“Hence the good brother’s continued presence.” She glanced over at Brother Harlick, engaged in an animated conversation with Alornis. His sister seemed to find the scholar’s inexhaustible knowledge fascinating and could spend hours assailing him with questions in the as-yet-vain hope she could stump him.
“He knows far more than he shares,” Dahrena said.
“He’ll share it,” Vaelin assured her. “If I have to, I’ll wring every ounce of knowledge from him until he has no more breath to speak it.”
He spent the next morning travelling with the Eorhil, the horse-people leading their mounts through the trees and displaying almost as much discomfort as the gifted. “Horses can’t see the sky,” Sanesh Poltar said, smoothing a hand over his stallion’s head, the animal’s ears constantly twitching and his eyes wide. “Don’t like it. Neither do I.”
“The Eorhil are not welcome in the forest?” Vaelin asked.
Wisdom gave a soft laugh as she walked alongside the war chief. “We never have reason to come here. Eorhil and Seordah speak much the same tongue and trade for skins and weapons, but we are not the same people. They are of the forest, we are of the plains.”
“Do the Eorhil have stories,” Vaelin asked, “of the time before the plains, before the Marelim Sil came?”
Sanesh and Wisdom exchanged an amused glance. “Never a time before the plains,” Sanesh explained. “Eorhil always ride the plains. Always will. There was a time the Seordah were not so many in the forest, so it’s said by the grandfathers who speak of their grandfathers. But we had no knowledge of the Marelim Sil until they came to dig for stones in the hills.”
“But you do know of the blind woman?” Vaelin said to Wisdom.
Both Eorhil instantly became subdued, Sanesh striding on a ways and tugging his horse along.
Wisdom walked in silence for several moments, face set and closed. When she spoke again her tone was heavy with reluctance. “There’s a city, a ruin on the fringes of the Lonak Dominion. The Eorhil do not like the place and stay away, the grandfathers tell of troubled dreams and madness for any who venture there. But as a girl I was ever curious, for curiosity breeds wisdom, although I was yet to earn my name. So I journeyed there, alone, finding just the remnants of something that may have been wondrous in its time. I made my camp amongst the ruins and a woman came to my fire, a Seordah woman with empty eyes, although they could see me. I was not overly afraid for the Seordah are known to birth more gifted than the Eorhil. She said she also had journeyed far to view these ruins and we spent the night exchanging what little knowledge we had about the place. She pointed me to a certain stone amongst the rubble, very small, small enough to carry in both hands in fact, but also perfectly square, the surface smooth and undamaged. I asked her if she wanted it but she just shook her head, ‘This is for you,’ she said. So I picked it up.”
“It took you somewhere,” Vaelin prompted when the old woman fell silent once again.
Wisdom shook her head. “No. It gave me . . . knowledge. So much knowledge, all at once. Your language, the Lonak tongue, even the words spoken by the people we go to fight, and many more besides. I can recite every catechism of your Faith and every word in the Ten Books of the World Father, name all the Alpiran gods and relate every legend told by the Lonak. There was no insight to it, no context, just knowledge. It . . . hurt. So much that I fainted. When I woke the blind woman had gone, but the knowledge hadn’t.”