Torren turned from the fire.
Behind him, Gerrik did not speak. Neither did the apprentices. For once, even the forge seemed to hold its breath, the coals glowing low around the half-made piece of steel as if some buried eye watched him leave. The girl who had brought the news ran ahead up the dark path, one hand pressed to the stitch in her side.
Lysa's waters had broken.
The child was coming now.
Not in the sleeping cave.
Not by the lower hides.
The speaker's woman had ordered her taken to the grove.
Pale Roots had many hidden places, but none like that one. The grove stood above the main hollow, cupped between two walls of black stone where wind came thin and cold even when the lower paths were warm. Twenty weirwoods grew there in a broken ring, their white trunks twisted by age, their red leaves whispering to one another when no other tree in the mountain moved. Their roots rose from the earth like old bones. Their carved faces watched through red sap and shadow.
Savar and Morna had not been born here.
They had come into the world years ago under another heart tree, in the Painted Dogs camp, when Harrag still lived and Torren had been younger, bloodier, and less able to bear being useless. He remembered that night too well. He had tried to reach Lysa then. The old women had stopped him before he crossed the roots. He had argued. Then threatened. Then nearly put hands on a woman old enough to have birthed half the camp, until Harrag himself took him by the shoulder and told him, softly, that there were places where a man's knife, name, and rage meant less than mud.
Torren had hated him for it.
Then Savar had screamed.
Then Morna had followed.
And Torren had learned that waiting could wound a man without touching him.
So this time, he did not try to pass.
He climbed as far as the stone markers below the grove and stopped where men were meant to stop. Above him, torchlight moved between the pale trunks. Women's shadows crossed the carved faces. He heard Lysa once, low and furious, then the speaker's woman, then nothing but leaves and the distant cough of the forge below.
Brak came up behind him. "You will wait here?"
Torren looked toward the trees. "Yes."
Brak grunted. "Good. I did not want to be the one to stop you."
"You would have tried?"
"No." Brak looked at the grove. "But I would have felt bad about not trying."
Torren did not smile.
The twins came soon after, followed by Tomm.
Savar arrived first, hair loose, breath misting in the cold. He had been born first too, and had never let anyone forget it once he learned the fact had weight. Morna walked behind him more slowly, one hand wrapped around Tomm's wrist because the boy had not known whether he was allowed to climb. Tomm looked up at the weirwoods with the uneasy face he wore whenever Pale Roots became too strange for the common tongue to hold.
"Why there?" he asked.
Savar frowned at the common words, then gave the Old Tongue name for the grove and pointed upward.
Tomm did not understand.
Morna translated. "Because the trees remember."
Tomm looked at the white trunks, the red leaves, the carved eyes wet with sap. "Remember what?"
"Everything worth not forgetting."
That did not comfort him.
They sat near Torren on the cold stones below the grove. Not too near. The children knew his silence had edges tonight. Savar picked at a strip of bark. Morna watched the torchlight shift among the roots. Tomm held the small stone he had been carrying for weeks, the one Morna used when teaching him words.
The first hour passed.
Lysa did not scream.
That was worse than if she had.
Women moved in and out of the grove. One brought more warm water. Another carried away cloths in a covered basket. The speaker's woman came once to the edge of the trees, saw Torren standing below, and pointed at the ground without speaking.
Stay.
He stayed.
The forge below began again.
One hammer strike. Then another. Slow at first, as if Gerrik had waited to hear whether the world had ended and, finding that it had not, returned to making something that might help end a smaller part of it later. The sound climbed through the hollow and broke against the grove stones.
Savar looked down toward the red glow far below. "He is still working."
"Gerrik?" Tomm asked.
"Your father," Morna said.
Tomm's mouth tightened. He had learned the Old Tongue word for father, but he did not use it now.
From the grove came Lysa's voice, sharp with pain.
Torren's fingers closed around the pommel of Lady Forlorn.
Morna saw.
"Do not," she said.
Torren looked down at her.
"Mother will be angry if she hears you moved."
Savar nodded, suddenly solemn. "She will know."
"She always knows," Morna said.
Torren released the sword.
The second hour passed.
The moon moved behind the mountain wall. The torches burned lower and were replaced. Someone brought cloaks for the children. Savar refused his until Morna put hers on first, then took it as if he had decided independently. Tomm accepted his at once and wrapped both hands in the wool.
"What if it is a girl?" Morna asked.
Savar looked up. "It will be a boy."
"You do not know."
"I want a brother."
"You have me."
"You are not a brother."
"You are not much of one either."
Tomm looked between them, trying to follow the pieces he understood. "Girl?" he asked in the Old Tongue, mispronouncing the word.
Morna corrected him once. Then she said, "If it is a girl, she should be Narra."
Savar made a face. "That sounds like a name for an old woman who chews roots."
"It is an old root's name."
"Roots sit in dirt."
"And hold trees up."
Savar had no good answer to that, so he chose a louder one. "If it is a boy, Karn."
Morna turned her head. "Karn?"
"It is short."
"That is not a reason."
"It sounds hard."
"So does a rock falling into a cooking pot."
"Karn is a good name."
"Karn is what you name a dog that bites too much."
Tomm whispered the two names to himself, one after the other, as if they were Old Tongue lesson words. Narra. Karn. He said Narra more easily. Karn came out too soft, and Savar corrected him at once, pleased to have something to command.
"No. Not like that. Karn."
Tomm tried again.
Savar nodded. "Better."
Morna looked toward the grove. Another low cry came from Lysa, longer than before. "Names do not matter until the child breathes."
Savar's pride faded. "It will breathe."
Morna said nothing.
The third hour passed.
The grove grew louder.
Lysa's pains had found a rhythm now, and the rhythm was cruel. Her voice came between the trees in broken pieces: a curse, a breath, a sound too raw for words. The speaker's woman answered in the Old Tongue, steady and hard. The old women moved quickly. No one laughed now. No one whispered unless needed.
Torren stood through all of it.
Once, Savar leaned against his leg without seeming to notice. Torren put a hand on his son's shoulder. Morna sat on his other side, knees drawn up, face pale in the torchlight. Tomm watched the grove as if trying to decide whether birth was a kind of battle or a kind of punishment.
"Was I born like that?" Savar asked suddenly.
"Yes," Torren said.
Morna looked at him. "At the Painted Dogs camp."
"Under the heart tree," Torren said.
"Both of us?"
"You came together."
Savar straightened. "I came first."
"You screamed first," Torren said.
Morna's mouth twitched. "That is not the same."
"It is close enough," Savar muttered.
Above them, Lysa cried out again, and whatever words he might have used after that died in his throat.
Tomm looked at Torren. "Were you afraid?"
The common tongue sounded small under the weirwoods.
Torren did not answer at once.
"Yes," he said.
Savar stared at him.
Morna did not.
Tomm looked down at his stone. "Of what?"
Torren kept his eyes on the trees. "That wanting would not be enough."
The boy did not understand all of it. Perhaps none of the children did. That was fine. Some words were seeds. They could split later.
The fourth hour passed.
The forge rang below.
Not often. Not steadily. But it rang.
Each blow seemed wrong against the sounds from the grove. Hammer on steel. Woman against pain. Fire below. Blood above. Pale Roots did not sleep. Men stood in the hollow with their heads turned upward. Women waited at the grove's edge for what might be needed. Children who had been sent away crept back in pairs and were chased off by older girls. Even the goats seemed quiet.
Then the speaker's woman shouted for more cloth.
Torren moved one foot before he stopped himself.
Brak, who had returned with a skin of water and stood behind him, said quietly, "You did well."
Torren looked at him.
"Stopping," Brak said.
Torren hated him a little for seeing it.
The fifth hour came with blood on the hands of the women who carried water down and fresh hides up. No one said too much blood. No one said not enough. The speaker's woman had forbidden frightened words within hearing of the grove, and even fear obeyed her tonight.
Lysa screamed then.
Fully.
The sound tore out of the trees and struck the hollow below. Tomm flinched so hard the stone fell from his hand. Savar's face went white. Morna picked up the stone and put it back in Tomm's palm without looking away from the grove.
"She is dying," Tomm whispered.
"No," Savar said at once.
This time his voice shook.
Morna said nothing.
Another scream came.
Then the old woman's voice, sharp as a blade.
"Push."
Torren closed his eyes.
Not in prayer.
He did not know what he would pray to that had not already been watching from twenty carved faces above him.
The sixth hour began before the child came.
By then the cold had gone deep into the stones. Torren no longer felt it. Savar had stopped pretending not to hold his cloak closed. Morna's fingers were wrapped tight around the stone she had taken back from Tomm. Tomm whispered Old Tongue words under his breath, not well, not in order. Fire. Stone. Water. Mother. Father. Brother. Blood. Home.
At the word for home, Morna looked at him.
He did not notice.
A cry rose from the grove that was not Lysa's.
It was not weak.
It was not thin.
It came out angry, loud, and offended, as if the child had been dragged from some warmer darkness and meant to accuse the world of theft. The sound filled the grove, spilled down the stones, and reached the hollow below. Men looked up. Women exhaled. Somewhere near the forge, a hammer missed its rhythm.
Savar stood.
"Boy," he said before anyone told him.
Morna rose beside him. "You do not know."
"Yes, I do."
The speaker's woman appeared between the trees with blood up to her forearms and an expression like a storm that had chosen not to kill the valley below.
"Boy," she called down.
Savar grinned.
Then the old woman added, "Large."
Brak laughed once under his breath. "That sounds like trouble."
Torren was already climbing.
This time no one stopped him at the markers. The old rule had done its work. The child had come. Men could see what birth had left behind.
He entered the grove slowly.
The twenty weirwoods stood around him like pale witnesses. Their carved faces shone red in torchlight. At the foot of the largest tree, Lysa lay against piled hides and roots, hair plastered to her face, skin grey with exhaustion. Her eyes were open. That mattered more than anything.
The child lay at her breast.
He was big.
Too big, it seemed, for something so newly made. His limbs were thick for a newborn's, his chest broad beneath the cloth, his fists clenched so hard the knuckles looked like small pale stones. White skin showed where the blood had been wiped away. A wet crown of pale hair clung to his skull.
He had stopped screaming only because he had found milk.
The speaker's woman stood near them, wiping her hands. "Too large is for dead mothers," she muttered before Torren could ask. "She lives. He lives. So he is only large."
Lysa's mouth moved. It might have been a smile if she had more strength to waste. "Hear that? Only large."
Torren knelt beside her.
For a moment he looked only at Lysa. At the sweat on her face, the tremor in her hands, the stubborn life in her eyes. Then the child shifted, annoyed by some offense known only to him, and opened his eyes.
Red.
Torren's red.
Too early, too bright, unfocused and furious beneath pale lashes.
The grove went quiet.
One of the young women made a sign with her fingers and lowered her eyes. The speaker's woman did not move, but her face changed. Even Lysa looked at the child a second time, as if pain had kept some part of him hidden until now.
Then she laughed.
Low.
Hoarse.
Almost cruel.
"Of course," she said.
Torren touched the boy's cheek with one finger.
The child turned toward him blindly, mouth opening in anger at being offered no milk. His skin was warm. His face was too new to know itself and already impossible to mistake.
Joy came to Torren then, but not cleanly.
Nothing in the mountains came cleanly.
It moved through him with fear under it, cold and deep. The hollow would speak of this. The clans would hear. White skin. Pale hair. Red eyes. Born under twenty weirwoods, large enough that the old women had cursed his size, loud enough to wake the stones. Men below had made Torren into a demon because fear needed a face. The mountains might make this boy into something else before he could stand.
Savar came forward, unable to wait any longer. Morna followed with Tomm half-hidden behind her.
"Karn," Savar said, though less strongly now than before. "If you want."
Lysa opened one eye. "Karn?"
Savar's ears reddened. "It is hard."
"It is a dog's name," Morna said.
"It is not."
"It is now."
Savar scowled at her.
Torren did not look away from the child. The boy's eyes had closed, but the red of them remained in his mind like forge heat after dark. He thought of the old word Morna had spoken earlier. A thing that came down and left a mark. A heavy thing. A falling thing. A thing men remembered by the wound it made in earth.
"Konnan," Torren said.
The grove stilled again.
Lysa looked at him.
The speaker's woman's eyes sharpened. "Old name."
"Yes," Torren said.
"Older than most still used."
"Good."
Lysa shifted the child against her and winced. "He looks old already."
Savar sounded the name under his breath. "Konnan."
Morna looked at the newborn, then at the weirwood faces above him. "A thing that comes down and leaves a mark."
Torren looked at her.
She did not lower her eyes.
Tomm stared at the newborn's white face and red eyes.
"Is he sick?" he whispered in the common tongue.
Savar bristled. "No."
Morna considered the question more carefully. "Marked."
Tomm did not know the Old Tongue word.
Morna gave it to him.
He repeated it badly.
No one laughed.
From below, the forge rang again.
One hammer blow.
Then another.
The sound climbed to the grove and passed between the white trunks. Konnan did not startle. He fed harder, small fists still clenched, his red eyes closed now but not forgotten. Lysa leaned her head back against the root of the weirwood and breathed as if each breath had been fought from the mountain itself.
Torren stayed on one knee beside her.
Around them the twenty trees watched with red, wet eyes.
Below, Gerrik's steel took shape in fire.
Above, Konnan drank beneath the heart trees, white as bone and loud as anger, named by his father under the eyes of the old gods.
Before dawn, Pale Roots had heard two new sounds in the dark: a hammer teaching iron to hate, and a white boy screaming his way into the world.