Kip should have been thinking about whether he could bring together ancient enemies without losing everyone. Instead he thought about the Blackguard and its old discrimination against anyone not Parian or Ilytian, first justified because they were the peoples with the darkest skin—a justification made flimsier with every mixing generation.
Those old snubs must have made the Blood Foresters who became the Cwn y Wawr feel justified in stealing what training they could: ‘You won’t be fair to me? Fine, I’ll take your training and leave.’
Those desertions would have then made the Parians and Ilytians feel justified again: ‘See, these people are untrustworthy. They aren’t worthy of being Blackguards.’
Every community is a gull gliding over a sea of spite, eager for carrion, all too ready to steal, and all too quick to squawk when stolen from.
Kip held up his hands, and they all quieted. They actually listened to him. As if he was a real leader. “Some things at the Chromeria are going to have to change. But we’re in no position to change anything until we win. And to win, we need all the allies we can get. We’re in a fight to the death. I’ll pick up any sword I can.”
“Even if it cuts you?” Conn Arthur said. It must have come out louder than he’d meant, because he reddened—Orholam bless that light skin—but he stood fast when he saw the others look at him, suddenly stubborn.
“If it cuts the White King deeper? Absolutely. This isn’t a time when we have the luxury to cast aside help. And I’ll tell them the same thing, when they raise the same objections about you.”
The big muscles went rigid again, and then slowly deflated. Orholam have mercy, but Conn Arthur was big, his muscles and fiery body hair rippling with every move.
“Sibéal, explain will-casting. You have four minutes.”
And, with remarkable concision, she did. The peoples of the deep woods had been will-casting for millennia. And, perhaps affected by the Great River itself, they had always conceived of magic in dichotomies: drafting without casting one’s will into the world making one river, and will-casting making another. Down the will-casting river was another fork: will-casting into the soulless, and will-casting into the souled; then will-casting into the simple souled (small animals, mainly) and into complex souls (larger animals and humans); then will-casting into animal souls and into human souls, and so forth.
The first kind of will-casting—into objects, luxin, usually—was considered safe and almost mundane: it was tiring and usually short lived, but a drafter-archer might cast a bit of luxin into the fletching of her arrow, and then fix her will upon a target.
When released, the arrow would curve to some small extent, seeking its target automatically. These weren’t dramatic effects: the core physics of an arrow’s flight and momentum were still the same. One couldn’t shoot an arrow and have it curve back to hit someone behind you, but a skilled will-caster might curve an arrow a bit over a wall to hit someone taking cover behind it. Or—if she possessed greater skill—she might focus on a difficult target and be able to shoot more accurately than her own mundane skills ought to allow.
Holy shit, Kip thought. He’d heard of that in the Blackguard itself. Some of the nunks had sworn they’d seen some of the best archers like Buskin and Tugertent shoot arrows that curved in midair.
No wonder they’d been quiet about doing it—it was utterly forbidden.
No wonder they’d done it anyway—it worked.
This kind of magic was exhausting, Sibéal said, and it usually expired within seconds or hours of being separated from the caster. They could make simple machines, too. Hidden traps whose trigger was something like ‘If touched, ignite.’
The far more dangerous will-casting was into the souled. Whenever they could, they didn’t allow their will-casters to start learning it until they were at least thirty years old—when they had a stake in their community, when they had families, when they had reasons not to go mad.
The simple souled could be given only relatively simple instructions: ‘Go to this place,’ or maybe ‘Go to this place and do this.’ This, Kip realized, was what his father Gavin had done at the Gargantua. He had sent a rat to find the floating fortress’s powder magazine.
The height of the will-caster’s art was working with creatures with greater intelligence—the complex souls, as they called them—the wolves and dolphins and horses and elephants and jungle cats.
“And bears,” Kip guessed. Motherfucker.
“Yes. Bears.”
Conn Arthur gestured to a nearby skimmer to come closer. He turned to Sibéal after he hopped gracefully onto the moving deck of the other boat. “Tell him about it. Go on. I don’t want to hear it, but he needs to know.”
“Conn…?” Kip asked, as the other skimmer separated once more.
“Conn Arthur communes with a giant grizzly,” Sibéal said quietly, looking at the big man’s back.
A giant grizzly. In case a regular old grizzly wasn’t terrifying enough. “I thought the last of those died long ago,” he said.
“There are a few left. The Deep Forest remembers, Lord Guile.”
Wonderful. “Tell me about the dangers,” Kip said.
“With the lower forms of will-casting, we’re not sure why… It doesn’t sap people of their will, like the Chromeria believes. Instead it seems to slowly eat away at their intelligence. We think sometimes the caster forgets to breathe while his will is elsewhere, and his body dies a little. He might come back to himself, but never really be the same. It’s a death by slow degrees. As there are few old drafters, there are few old will-casters.”
“And as with drafters who go wight, there are the reckless among will-casters, too,” Tisis added. She’d been quiet until now. “There are men and women who believe they are wrongly souled. That they are, deep down, wolves or bears or tygre wolves.”
“And what happens to them?” Kip asked.
“Most madness shows up early,” Sibéal said. “It’s part of why we don’t teach will-casting to the young. They get themselves killed. Mauled by wild animals usually, or starved. A man is body and soul, and those who separate the two for long do it to their grief.”
“So if you’re controlling an animal, and it gets killed, what then?” Kip asked.