Chapter 1457: A Bored Morning

Lord arrived at the Castle Keep a little before dawn, and nobody on the Keep ever knew he had been there.

Northern had seen to that. He had walked out through the western postern in the dark with a lantern and a lie about checking the sentries, and three miles beyond the wall, in a hollow between two ridges where the pines grew too thick for anyone on the ramparts to see through, he had put out the lantern and opened the Soul Forge.

Lord stepped out of it the way a man steps through a door.

He was as tall as ever, and as silent, turned toward Northern with that very slight tilt it always had, as though the face behind it were listening to something just under the floor. He looked around the hollow once, at the frost furring the pine needles and the grey light gathering above the ridges, and then back at his master.

"You called, Master."

"I’m bored."

Lord said nothing to that. The mask tilted a fraction further.

Northern sighed and rolled his shoulders.

It was true, as far as it went. In the six weeks since the wall fell, the rest of him had been anything but bored.

Rehema was still in the Spire, and still asking questions he did not want to answer. Rigel was still in his tower, still eating his way through the fruit. Bairan had not yet finished fixing the mountain, and would not stop apologising for it in a way that somehow made it worse.

And every one of Northern’s other bodies was working through the nights on armour that split and metals that would not unfold, with one ear always turned toward a father who had stood in his tower, looked at everything, and gone home to think.

But this body was a Sage called Rian, with one talent and a squad of Drifters, in a forest where nothing had moved for three weeks.

And this body was bored out of its mind.

"Just a spar," Northern said. "An hour. Then you go back. I don’t like the Spire without you in it."

Lord bowed his head.

"As you wish."

They sparred for an hour in the hollow while the sun came up.

It was not much of a spar, to begin with. Northern kept Lightning Rod throttled, because the light of it would carry, and Lord did him the courtesy of fighting at roughly the same level.

They traded blows among the pines, Northern’s lightning cracking and hissing through the frost and scorching thin black seams into the bark, while Lord moved through it like smoke through a keyhole, never quite where the bolt landed. It was pleasant.

It was the first time in weeks that this body had been made to sweat, and by the tenth exchange Northern found he was grinning.

Then, in the middle of a feint, he stopped.

Lord stopped with him.

Neither of them looked up. Northern let his gaze drift lazily past Lord’s shoulder toward the eastern ridge, and let Shingan do the looking for him.

It was sitting in the crown of a pine forty paces up the slope. A single Forest Hunter, long and dusk-blue and perfectly still, lay pressed flat along a branch with its golden eyes fixed on the hollow.

It had no spear. It had something else instead, a small clay pot hung round its neck on a cord, and from the pot rose a thin grey thread of mist that curled around the Hunter and around the branch and around the whole top of the tree, so faint that Northern would have missed it without the Third Eye.

’Hello there. Where have you been hiding?’

He knew the mist now. He had stood in it on the rubble slope. It drank fire, and it drank sound, and it seemed it drank something else as well, because the pine the Hunter was sitting in had a crow’s nest in it, and the crow in the nest was fast asleep with its head tucked under one wing.

The birds had not seen it.

"Master." Lord’s voice was very low. "Shall I kill it?"

"No."

Northern turned his back on the ridge and aimed a slow, sloppy blow at Lord’s head, the kind a bored young soldier might throw. Lord caught it, and they went on sparring as if nothing had happened.

"The birds told Tema nothing was moving for three weeks," Northern said quietly, between blows. "I thought they’d pulled back. They haven’t. They’ve been walking around under the birds’ noses with those little pots, and the birds never saw a thing."

Lord parried.

"Then they know about the girl."

"I don’t think they know about her. I think they know about the birds." He ducked a strike that was not really aimed at him. "They talk like birds. Tema said so. So when every crow in the north starts gossiping to the humans on the wall, who do you think hears it first?"

Lord was quiet for a moment.

"I do not understand, Master."

"They heard the birds telling on them," Northern said. "So they stopped letting the birds see."

He let Lord put him on his back in the frost, and lay there breathing hard, looking up at the sky through the pines.

And while he lay there, his shadow went.

It did not leave him all at once. It thinned first, a long dark smear stretching out across the frozen needles toward the eastern ridge. Then it slid up the trunk of the pine like water running uphill, and when it reached the branch where the Hunter lay, it poured itself very gently into the Hunter’s own shadow and was still.

Northern felt the rough bark under the Hunter’s belly. He felt the cold. He felt the small clay pot resting against its chest, warm, like a coal wrapped in cloth.

’There we go. Now take me home.’

A few minutes later, the Hunter slid down the far side of the pine and was gone into the forest, heading north, fast.

It carried Northern’s shadow with it.

Northern got up and brushed the frost off his back.

"That’s enough for today."

Lord straightened. The mask had turned toward the ridge, toward the empty branch where the Hunter had been.

"You are going to follow it."

"I’m going to let it walk me home. It knows the way, I don’t." Northern pulled his coat straight. "And you’re going back to the Spire."

"Master..."

"My father rode a thread into that tower once already, and I didn’t notice until it was too late. Rehema’s there. Rigel’s there. Half of Ryugan’s court is there, and Bairan is still stacking rocks." He looked at Lord, and his voice was quite flat. "I don’t want the Spire without you in it. Not for a day."

For a long moment, Lord did not move.

"And you, Master?"

Northern cracked his neck.

"I’m going hunting."

Lord looked at him a moment longer. Then he bowed low and stepped back into the Soul Forge the same way he had come out of it, and the hollow was empty except for Northern and the frost and a great many broken pine branches.

Northern sat down on a fallen log and closed his eyes.

The Hunter ran all day.

It ran north, and then north-west, and then north again, through a forest that grew older and thicker and darker with every mile, until the pines gave way to trunks so broad that the Hunter took a dozen strides to pass around one. It did not stop to eat. It did not stop to rest. Twice it met other Hunters coming the other way, and each time they stopped nose to nose, trilling and clicking at each other in that strange birdsong grammar, before going on. Northern understood none of it. All the while, he only felt through his shadow the Hunter’s heart beating, steady and tireless, and the warm clay pot swinging against its chest.

The sun went down.

And a little after dark, the Hunter came over the lip of a valley and stopped.

Northern let his shadow slip out of the Hunter’s and spread. Eyes of the Shadow opened in every patch of dark it touched, and it merged with each one as it went, running outward along the valley floor from root to root and tree to tree, until he could see all of it.

It was not a hideout. He had been expecting a hideout.

It was a city.

The valley was full of trees so enormous that their roots rose out of the earth in arches, and the arches had been hollowed out, and the hollows had been lived in for a very long time. The wood around their doorways was worn smooth and dark where countless hands had gripped it.

Censers hung from the roots on chains of black wood, hundreds of them, breathing their grey mist gently through the dark. There were cooking fires down there, smothered small in clay pits.

There were racks of black spears, and long trenches where new censers sat baking like pots in a kiln. There were Hunters everywhere, sitting together in circles between the roots, trilling softly to one another in the firelight.

And there were so many of them.

Northern counted. He did it the only way he could, six soul cores to a body, and when he got to ten thousand, he was not even halfway across the valley.

He stopped counting.

At the far end of the valley, beneath the largest of the trees, there was one root-hall that no fire burned near.

The Hunters walking past it went quiet as they passed, and did not trill again until they were well beyond it. Northern sent his shadow toward it slowly and carefully, and at the mouth of the hall, in the dark beyond the arch, he felt something vast and old and slow turn over in its sleep.

His shadow stopped.

’...Well. Look at that.’

Three miles beyond the wall of the Castle Keep, on a fallen log in a hollow full of broken branches, a black-haired boy opened his eyes.

He was grinning.