“Soul-casting is different. Forbidden. Soul-casting is when the soul of an animal is blotted out and replaced. Its body may live for days afterward, but its vital spark is extinguished. It damages the caster, too, in more insidious ways.”
“It can be done to men?”
She nodded grimly. “Which is why to us soul-casting is a black magic. Damned magic. Always forbidden, always disastrous, as the stories of the living dead and of wolf men tell. Loathed and despised.”
“And mostly moot, because only a full-spectrum polychrome can soul-cast,” Kip said. It was partly a guess.
She looked stung. “That’s right.”
“Ruadhán and his twin Rónán, full-spectrum polychromes?” he guessed.
“Yes.”
“And Rónán soul-cast himself?”
She licked her lips with a small blue tongue. “While dying. Doubtless it is a unique temptation for those with such great power. And now you know Ruadhán’s shame.”
“No,” Kip said, “now I know why he swore fealty to me instead of taking the lead himself.” The big man had the respect of his people, and the intellect and fierceness to lead, but at the word of some prophet he had given up the lead and sworn himself to Kip? Why would a man do that?
Kip had only hatred for his own half brother, but he’d seen what a big-hearted man will give for his brother. And he said a silent thanks to Tremblefist and Ironfist for that. For here, though different in culture and color and circumstances, he saw a mirror of their love. And what Tremblefist had taught him might just save his life.
Why would Conn Arthur not lead?
Not because he was ashamed of his brother, who had done something desperate as he died. There was little shame in that. Conn Arthur wouldn’t lead because he was ashamed of himself.
Because there was no way in hell he’d killed Rónán’s bear Lorcan, because that would have meant killing his brother. Rónán was out there, somewhere, trapped and going mad in the body of that bear, and nothing could stop him but death. Conn Arthur bore the responsibility to his people and to his brother to kill the animal, but that would mean admitting Rónán was dead. It would mean killing the last remnant of his brother with his own hands.
His love was his shame. But if he wouldn’t confront that on his own, Kip was going to have to make him do so before someone got killed.
But how do you reveal a man’s deepest secret shame, accuse him of heresy and cowardice, and not destroy him?
A commander couldn’t. Maybe a friend could. Kip had to give Conn Arthur time to deal with it, had to pray the forest was big enough for one crazed grizzly.
Time was up. The island was coming into view.
“What are you going to do?” Sibéal asked.
It all seemed abstract—a philosophical difference about the best uses of magic. That was, until the skimmers beached on the island and Kip saw the sudden fear in the Cwn y Wawr men’s eyes at the sight of Sibéal and at their sudden comprehension of who these people were.
The Cwn y Wawr, these hardened magic-using warriors, were terrified of the will-casters. Terrified through ignorance, partly, sure. But when you live in the forest, and you know the creatures there well, how scary is the idea of someone who can turn any one of those creatures against you, with the capabilities of the animal but the mind of a human? How terrifying is it that a person might take over your own body? How terrifying is it to actually meet the kind of people responsible for all the tales of the living dead and wolf men and worse?
To them, the name ‘Ghosts’ wasn’t a sarcastic reference to how ephemeral and helpless these homeless, bereaved wanderers were. To them, the Ghosts haunted the darkness of the forest, ready to turn nature or even your fellow man or your dead against you.
But trained warrior-drafters were scary, too. And these Cwn y Wawr were in bad shape, whether they knew it or not. They’d been freed from death or servitude, but they’d lost two precious things: their confidence and their honor. They’d lost their confidence in being betrayed and captured and needing to be rescued, and they’d lost their honor in pursuing a separate peace with the White King.
A soldier without confidence and honor is a breath away from becoming a brigand or gangster.
But it had always been a fool’s dream. Kip, leading men to destroy the White King himself? These two camps were like lodestones pushing against each other invisibly, endlessly.
Ergo, just flip one. They’ll fuse themselves together.
Right?
Kip stepped ashore without a word, without so much as a nod at the men standing there to ask him a question.
Drafting green from a thousand trees shining on each bank of the river in the noonday sun, he threw down steps and made a small platform to stand on. “We,” he declared, “are damaged but not dismayed, oppressed but not overwhelmed. We are the Broken, for when our oaths were tested, we broke them and ourselves. We were the despised: Here are my best friends. This world sees a bastard, an orphan, a hostage, a cripple, an idiot. I call them the Mighty. We—you—are outcasts all, the homeless driven from the lands where our mothers were buried. They have taken the light from our lives. Killed our loved ones, our friends. Taken our homes. Left us to wander as ghosts and feral dogs.”
He didn’t remember, afterward, much of what he said after that. He was looking at the faces, watching how they moved, the little twitches of expression. A man’s face is the surface of a pond, reflecting the sky, reflecting the trees, reflecting whatever is the object of his gaze and his love, the reflection hiding his depths. But when a wave passes, in the swell, for an instant, you can see what lies beneath the waters.
Their ears listened to his words, but their hearts inclined to the sincerity of his soul, deep calling unto deep: We have lost, but we are not lost. We have failed, he told them… but we can do better. We can be forgiven, we can make things new. This is not the end for us.
“They have taken the light from us. Yes. But now they expect us to cower like dogs beaten and fade like shades forgotten. But I don’t see dogs and shades here. Do they not know what they’ve begun? I see wolves. I see ghosts…”
He looked around at them as if they had forgotten who they were, and he was here to hold up a mirror for them that they might remember.
“Have you forgotten? Have they made you, for this brief hour, forget? Ghosts and wolves hunt at night. They think we cower, waiting for the light? Alone we are broken, bereaved, afraid. Together we are strong. Together we will hunt. In darkness, we will usher them into the final darkness. Alone we were weak and frightened. That time is past. Together, today, we are the Nightbringers.”