Like a long sausage, the ridge rose in an oddly symmetrical shape. A circular depression marked each end, as if the earth had settled over some kind of construction underneath. In the center, where the new buildings stood, he could only guess at the ground underneath, but it seemed oddly uneven, as if boulders or some sort of loose rock underlay the soil. At least part of the ridge, then, was no natural feature, but an ancient structure, perhaps even an enormous barrow joined to shrines at either end.

Did the Horsekin realize that they were building upon a supremely unstable foundation? Apparently not. Long barges, anchored side to shore, fringed the nearby river. Each of them held cubical blocks of gray stone. Somewhere upstream the Horsekin were quarrying. Rori could guess that they had learned a hard lesson about dwarven fire the summer before and intended to defend against it as best they could, but he doubted if any master masons were working on this citadel. The city-builders of the Gel da’Thae would have understood another lesson—that stone walls required a firm footing if they were to stand. A peculiar mound like this one would destabilize anything heavy built upon it.

They could perhaps build a stone fortress here if they drove pilings for a foundation, but after they drove the pilings, then what should they do? The more Rori considered the question, the more uncertain of the answer he became. While he could recall his days as Gwerbret Aberwyn, and the long discussions of fort craft he’d held with master craftsmen, the memories were curiously dim and hard to recall, compared with his dweomer memories of old lives and old hatreds.

The hatreds, in particular, burned in his mind. As he floated on the currents of the wind, he counted them: the Horsekin, certainly. Tren. Raena. Alastyr—but, he reminded himself, Alastyr and Tren were one and the same soul. The Bear clan of Eldidd that had tried to undermine his rule as Gwerbret Aberwyn—all of them, too. Most deeply of all, he hated the dark dweomermen of Bardek, who had broken his mind and will back when he’d still been a young man and an exile. Nearly a hundred years old, some of those memories, but the hatreds still smoldered in his soul. At times they flared up, so hot and bitter that they made him uneasy, threatening every shred of mercy and justice he possessed. The years that he’d passed in dragon form were divesting him of everything that had made him a good ruler, a decent lord, a human being. Dalla was right, he thought. I can’t—can’t what? keep living like this?