Nor was he the only one at work making new wonders in the Fastness. The blankets and the garment-stuff of Knotweave had put the Pantheon in mind of making smaller and finer fabrics on which marks could be inscribed using loose feathers from wings dipped in black potions concocted from the fruits and barks of certain trees. The ingenuity of Knotweave thus came together with Warm Wings’s feathers and Freewander’s knowledge of trees and flowers to create paper and ink. Longregard and Freewander roamed about drawing maps of the Land and pictures of mountains and trees. Speaksall and Greyhame for their parts devised a system of writing and put it to use setting down accounts of what had happened in the Land, as best as it could be remembered. They taught these arts to certain souls of Town, foremost among them a woman who came to be known as Pestle.

When summer was nearing its peak, Egdod flew out from the Fastness carrying the form of a bird that Thingor had devised, into which he hoped Spring might breathe life. But before going her way he flew in a broad sweep across the Land, climbing high into the air to seek out the wild souls who made its winds and its weathers, and making a circuit of its coast to speak with the wild souls of the oceans. To each of them he made it known that in a few months’ time, when the apples were harvested in the Garden, there would be a feast, and that each of them would be welcome to take part in it.

When he had made this invitation to the last of the wild souls, who inhabited the eastern sea where it beat against the great rock, he flew up the course of the river and followed its branchings all the way to the Forest, and then likewise all the way up to the abode of Spring. There he found her much as he had seen her before, but strangely different. And before long the nature of this change made itself clear in his mind and he knew that she was creating two new souls just as she had foretold. But because of the greatness of the work it was a thing that would be much longer in doing: not the work of a few moments, as when she had put life into the first bee, but of seasons to come.

Abashed, he showed her the form of the bird that he and Thingor had fashioned, and gave it over into her hands. As she regarded it and caressed its feathers, Egdod said to her, “I see now that you are at work on a task much greater than putting life into a bird, and so I regret that I have so troubled you with what now strikes me as a small matter.”