He’d sensed his mother’s arrival. His powers had grown, and now the city and its outskirts trembled as if sheathed in his own skin. The black river, with its crisp shelves of ice along the banks, felt like his own heartline, rich with the tireless flow of blood, too swift to freeze solid, too fierce to be turned aside. He felt his mother and her uncertain steps. He shivered to the sudden presence of the First Son of Darkness, whose spirit was like a mailed fist; and the stranger beside him, in the moments before retreating back into the forest – that man held in his heart all the resolve of a wounded world, of nature steeling itself against a storm of its own making.

Orfantal was still a child, and yet in the space given to him, since his arrival at the Citadel, he had soaked in the dubious wisdom of ancient stone walls, of floors laid out in ritual, of magicks swirling down every passage, murmuring the memories of old gods. He had prodded awake sleeping spirits, and each one had given him new words, new thoughts, new ways of seeing. But, for all that, his mind remained as it had always been, quick to absorb all the new things given him, and as quick to find itself wandering lost in confusion, knowing he was not yet able to understand it all. Knowing that such gifts, these blessings of stone and old gods, were meant for someone older, wiser – someone who understood enough to be afraid.

He saw the boy Wreneck, his old friend who’d stopped being his friend, rushing into the keep. It was startling to find that Wreneck could see the wolf ghost he’d left there, near the Terondai, and Orfantal was not yet sure if he was pleased by that, or alarmed.

Wreneck looked much older than Orfantal remembered, scarred and sure-eyed, like a warrior or a hunter. He carried a spear, and no one he passed in the corridors challenged him. Orfantal did not know if he should be frightened as Wreneck followed the ghost ever deeper into the Citadel, and ever closer to where he now hid.

But all these details were shoved to the wayside upon the return of Emral Lanear, the mother he would have chosen for himself. He longed to curl up in her lap again, not just in spirit, but with his own body, its solid limbs and the weight of his head resting on her breast.