but Loup’s expression rarely changed from blank.
His task was to test Cassien and no doubt report back to Brother Josse. Why didn’t Josse simply pay a visit and judge for himself? Once in a decade was surely not too much to ask? Why send a mute to a solitary man? Josse would have his reasons, Cassien had long ago decided. And so Loup would arrive silently, remaining for however long it took to satisfy himself that Cassien was keeping sharp and healthy, that he was constantly improving his skills with a range of weapons, such as the throwing arrows, sword, or the short whip and club.
Loup would put Cassien through a series of contortions to test his strength, control and suppleness. They would run for hours to prove Cassien’s stamina, but Loup would do his miles on horseback. He would check Cassien’s teeth, that his eyes were clear and vision accurate, his hearing perfect. He would even check his stools to ensure that his diet was balanced. Finally he would check for clues — ingredients or implements — that Cassien might be smoking, chewing or distilling. Cassien always told Loup not to waste his time. He had no need of any drug. But Loup never took his word for it.
He tested that a blindfolded Cassien — from a distance — was able to gauge various temperatures, smells, Loup’s position changes, even times of the day, despite being deprived of the usual clues.
Loup also assessed pain tolerance, the most difficult of sessions for both of them: stony faced, the man of the Brotherhood went about his ugly business diligently. Cassien had wept before his tormentor many times. But no longer. He had taught himself through deep mind control techniques to welcome the sessions, to see how far he could go, and now no cold, no heat, no exhaustion, no surface wound nor sprained limb could stop Cassien completing his test. A few moons previously the older man had taken his trial to a new level of near hanging and near drowning in the space of two days. Cassien knew his companion would not kill him and so it was a matter of trusting this fact, not struggling, and living long enough for Loup to lose his nerve first. Hanging until almost choked, near drowning, Cassien had briefly lost consciousness on both tests but he’d hauled himself to his feet finally and spat defiantly into the bushes. Loup had only nodded but Cassien had seen the spark of respect in the man’s expression.
The list of trials over the years seemed endless and ranged from subtle to savage. They were preparing him but for what? He was confident by this time that his thinking processes were lightning fast, as were his physical reactions.
Cassien had not been able to best Loup in hand-to-hand combat in all these years until two moons previously, when it seemed that everything he had trained his body for, everything his mind had steeled itself for, everything his emotions and desires had kept themselves dampened for, came out one sun-drenched afternoon. The surprise of defeat didn’t need to be spoken; Cassien could see it written across the older man’s face and he knew a special milestone had been reached. And so on his most recent visit the trial was painless; his test was to see if Cassien could read disguised shifts in emotion or thought from Loup’s closed features.
But there was a side to him that Loup couldn’t test. No-one knew about his magic. Cassien had never told anyone of it, for in his early years he didn’t understand and was fearful of it. By sixteen he not only wanted to conform to the monastic lifestyle, but to excel. He didn’t want Brother Josse to mark him as different, perhaps even unbalanced or dangerous, because of an odd ability.
However, in the solitude and isolation of the forest Cassien had sparingly used the skill he thought of as ‘roaming’ — it was as though he could disengage from his body and send out his spirit. He didn’t roam far, didn’t do much more than look around the immediate vicinity, or track various animals; marvel at a hawk as he flew alongside it or see a small fire in the far distance of the south that told him other men were passing along the tried and tested tracks of the forest between Briavel and Morgravia.
Cassien was in the north, where the forest ultimately gave way to the more hilly regions and then the mountain range known as the Razors and the former realm beyond. He’d heard tales as a child of its infamous King Cailech, the barbaric human-flesh-eating leader of the mountain tribes, who ultimately bested the monarch of Morgravia and married the new Queen of Briavel to achieve empire. As it had turned out, Cailech was not the barbarian that the southern kingdoms had once believed. Subsequent stories and songs proclaimed that Emperor Cailech was refined, with courtly manners — as though bred and raised in Morgravia — and of a calm, generous disposition. Or so the stories went.
He’d toyed with the idea of roaming as far as the Morgravian capital, Pearlis, and finding out who sat on the imperial throne these days; monarchs could easily change in a decade. However, it would mean leaving his body to roam the distance and he feared that he couldn’t let it remain uninhabited for so long.
There were unpalatable consequences to roaming, including sapping his strength and sometimes making himself ill, and he hated his finely trained and attuned body not to be strong in every way. He had hoped that if he practised enough he would become more adapted to the rigours it demanded but the contrary was true. Frequency only intensified the debilitating effects.
There was more though. Each time he roamed, creatures around him perished. The first time it happened he thought the birds and badgers, wolves and deer had been poisoned somehow when he found their bodies littered around the hut.
It was Romaine, the now grown she-wolf, who had told him otherwise.
It’s you, she’d said calmly, although he could hear the anger, her despair simmering at the edge of the voice in his mind. We are paying for your freedom, she’d added, when she’d dragged over the corpse of a young wolf to show him.
And so he moved as a spirit only rarely now, when loneliness niggled too hard, and before doing so he would talk to Romaine and seek her permission. She would alert the creatures in a way he didn’t understand and then she would guide him to a section of the forest that he could never otherwise find, even though he had tried.
For some reason, the location felt repellent, although it had all the same sort of trees and vegetation as elsewhere. There was nothing he could actually pin down as being specifically different other than an odd atmosphere, which he couldn’t fully explain but he felt in the tingles on the surface of his flesh and the raising of hair at the back of his neck. It felt ever so slightly warmer there, less populated by the insects and birds that should be evident and, as a result, vaguely threatening. If he was being very particular, he might have argued that it was denser at the shrub level. On the occasions he’d mentioned this, Romaine had said she’d never noticed, but he suspected that she skirted the truth.
‘Why here?’ he’d asked on the most recent occasion, determined to learn the secret. ‘You’ve always denied there was anything special about this place.’
I lied, she’d pushed into his mind. You weren’t ready to know it. Now you are.
‘Tell me.’
It’s a deliberately grown offshoot of natural vegetation known as the Thicket.
‘But what is it?’
It possesses a magic. That’s all I know.
‘And if I roam from here the animals are safe?’
As safe as we can make them. Most are allowing you a wide range right now. We can’t maintain it for very long though, so get on with what you need to do.
And that’s how it had been. The Thicket somehow keeping the forest animals safe, filtering his magic through itself and cleansing, or perhaps absorbing, the part of his power that killed. It couldn’t help Cassien in any way, but Romaine
