Rituals. Spirits of earth and sky, of water and blood. Headdresses of antler and horn, furs of the hunter and hide of the hunted. This shall be the Legion’s own mirror.

Mother Dark, where are you in all of this?

The morning was bright and cold. Upon the camp, along every pathway and track, smoke hung in wreaths low over the frozen ground, as the Legion wakened to the new day.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

‘IT IS OUR CURSE, ONCE WE ARE PAST CHILDHOOD, TO LOOK UPON innocence through a veil of sorrow.’

Standing beside Lord Anomander as they gazed out across the landscape, Ivis grunted. ‘Milord, it’s only what we’ve lost that makes innocence sting so.’

Their breaths plumed, quickly whipped away in the building north wind. The day’s eerie gloom was deepening.

After a moment, Anomander shook his head. ‘I would hold, my friend, that what you describe is but one side of the matter, and indeed one that looks only inward, as if the borders of your life enclose everything to be valued, while what lies beyond is of no worth whatsoever.’

‘Perhaps I misunderstood, milord.’

‘Consider this, Ivis. The sorrow belongs also to our sense of what awaits that child. The harsh lessons, the wounds taken and felt but not yet understood, the losses and the failures – those the child is destined to make, and those made by others. The battering of belief, and the loss of faith, which begins with oneself and then comes, in a relentless storm, from loved ones – parents, tutors or guardians. By such wounding is innocence lost.’

Thinking on his own childhood, Ivis grunted.

Anomander sighed, and then said, ‘Sympathy is not a weakness, Ivis. To grieve for the loss of innocence is to remind yourself that yours is not the only life in this world.’

Before them, from this height of the tower, the forest to the north was a matt, greyish dun, its canopy of twigs and branches like a rumpled carpet of thorns. Bruised clouds were smeared across the sky above the trees, the hue of iron. The icy spit in the wind stung the face. Snow was coming.

‘There is no other path possible,’ Ivis said after a time. ‘We are hardened to the ways of living, and of life itself. These things cannot be avoided, milord. In any case, from what we’ve heard, young Wreneck has already had more than his share of suffering.’

‘And yet, has he once uttered a question about any of it, Ivis? Has he ever voiced in wonder why things are as they are?’

‘Not that I have heard,’ Ivis confessed, scratching at his beard and feeling icy crystals tangled in the whiskers. ‘In that way, milord, perhaps he is older than his years.’

‘Must it fall to the child to ask questions no adult dare ask?’