Three months passed, and winter did not loosen.
Men stopped saying "when the thaw comes" and began saying "if the paths open." It was a small change, but Torren heard it everywhere: around the cook fires, near the goat pens, beside the watched stones where raiders still waited after returning from below. Snow no longer felt like weather. It felt like a second roof laid over the mountains, pressing every clan lower into its own smoke.
The Painted Dogs endured it because enduring was what people did when there was no better choice. The bloody cough did not return in strength. There were fevers, sore throats, old men who died because old men died in winter, children who coughed for three days and then ran screaming through the snow as if death had never looked at them. The red measure stayed in use, but now it was a tool, not a miracle. Clean bowls, boiled water, bitterleaf, willow, sap in drops, not cups. The camp had learned the words so well that even Rusk could repeat them when angry.
The raids continued when the weather allowed. Not great raids. Not the sort men boasted about for years. Small ones, mean ones, hungry ones: a salt sack taken from a frozen shed, three goats driven off before dawn, a cart followed for half a day and left untouched because too many men guarded it. Perwyn's grave vanished under snow, and the herb chest he had helped them take sat near the Tree Speaker's stores, opened only when needed. Torren did not think of the boy every day. That was probably ugly. It was also true.
Hokor was fully himself again, which meant he had become unbearable in familiar ways. He fought with Pyk, mocked Torren for staring too much, carried wood until Nella told him to stop showing off, then carried more just to prove she had no say over his arms. No weakness lingered in him except the memory everyone else carried. Hokor hated that memory most of all.
Torren's own lessons continued when the ridge was safe enough to climb.
The Tree Speaker kept him with goats for weeks, then months. At first Torren thought the old man was being overcautious. By the second month, he understood that the goat was not the easy lesson; it was the lesson that could be survived repeatedly. He learned to enter without shoving. He learned to leave before hunger folded over his thoughts. He learned to feel the beast's fear without letting his own body flinch toward a cliff edge.
Sometimes he failed.
The Tree Speaker always noticed when he failed.
"Your jaw moved," the old man said once, after Torren came back from the old female goat.
Torren wiped his mouth quickly. "It did not."
"It did."
"I hate that goat."
"You like that goat too much. That is the problem."
Torren looked down at the herd, where the old female was chewing with her usual insulted dignity. "She doesn't even know I exist."
"She knows something scratches at her mind and has bad manners."
"That sounds like knowing me."
The Tree Speaker gave him a look. "Do not become proud of being recognized by a goat."
The eagle came and went through those months. Sometimes it was only a black mark above the ridges. Sometimes it circled lower and pulled Torren's eyes upward before he could stop himself. The Tree Speaker never let him reach. Not once. "Goats teach the road back," he said whenever Torren grew restless. "Birds teach men how to forget there was a road."
Torren hated how much he wanted it anyway.
He did not say that aloud.
...
The dream came on a windless night.
Torren slept near the back of Harrag's tent, wrapped in two hides with his axe within reach and Hokor snoring somewhere to his left. The fire had burned low. Outside, the camp was quiet in the way winter camps were quiet: not silent, never that, but muffled. A cough here. A dog shifting in its sleep. Snow sliding from a hide roof with a soft thump.
Then there was wind.
Not against the tent. Not on his face.
Under him.
Torren opened his eyes and saw the mountains from above.
For a moment he thought he was dreaming in the ordinary way. Dreams had taken worse shapes than this: burning forests, bleeding trees, men kneeling under a white crown of branches. But the cold was too clean. The dark was too sharp. The world did not blur when he looked; it narrowed, focused, cut itself into movement and heat and distance.
He was not in his body.
The eagle rode the night air with wings spread wide, each feather feeling the current like fingers feel running water. Below, the Painted Dog camp lay scattered between stones, its fires small and orange under the snow. Men were warm shapes near hides and coals. Dogs were smaller heat. Goats bunched close. The weirwood stood pale and still, its red leaves black in the dark.
Torren tried to pull back.
Nothing happened.
The eagle turned north.
The camp slid behind them.
Ridges opened ahead, one after another, black stone and white snow under a thin moon. The cold did not hurt the eagle. Height did not frighten it. Distance was not a burden; it was invitation. Torren felt its hunger, but it was not only hunger for meat. It was hunger for height, for the next current, for the small living motion far below that did not yet know it had been seen.
Unplanned contact.
The voice cut through the dark so suddenly that Torren almost lost the eagle's sight.
Wake.
He tried.
The eagle climbed instead.
For an instant, through torn cloud and moonlit snow, Torren saw something far to the north: a pale rise above darker ridges, white against white, too distant to know clearly. A peak, perhaps. Or a tree. Or only a trick of moon and snow.
The sight struck him harder than the wind.
White Crown.
The thought was his. Not the eagle's. Not the voice's.
The eagle dipped.
Something moved below: a hare, bright with life against the cold ground. The eagle folded itself and dropped. The world became speed. Snow, stone, prey, talons. Torren's stomach twisted in a body that was not there.
Wake now.
Torren slammed back into himself with a choked breath.
He sat up so fast Hokor stirred beside him.
"What?" Hokor muttered, half-asleep.
"Nothing," Torren said, too quickly.
Hokor rolled onto his other side. "Then stop breathing like Rusk sat on you."
Torren did not answer.
His hands were clenched in the bedding. One of them had closed around nothing, fingers curved as if a cord should have been there. No black stone. No Tree Speaker's hand. No old man's voice asking him what had wings.
His body was cold.
Not freezing. Not dying. But cold enough that he knew he had been gone longer than a normal dream allowed.
He lay back down, but he did not sleep again.
...
By morning, Torren had decided not to tell the Tree Speaker.
That lasted until he saw the old man scraping ice from the rim of a water bowl near the weirwood.
The Tree Speaker looked ordinary. Irritated by cold, perhaps. Tired. He had not come looking for Torren. He had not stared with blind wisdom or said some sideways thing about wings in sleep. He only scraped ice, muttered at the bowl, and looked like an old man whose fingers hurt.
That made telling him harder.
Torren stood there long enough that the old man glanced up.
"If you are waiting for the bowl to speak first, you will be disappointed."
Torren shifted his weight. "It happened last night."
The scraping stopped.
The Tree Speaker did not look up immediately. "What happened?"
"The eagle."
Now the old man looked at him.
Torren swallowed. "I didn't reach for it."
The Tree Speaker's face changed, just a little. Not surprise, exactly. Not fear either. Something tighter.
"Say it properly," he said.
Torren looked toward the camp. Hokor was arguing with Pyk near the woodpile. Nella was shouting at a child to put a bowl back where he found it. Nobody was close enough to hear if Torren kept his voice low.
"I was asleep," Torren said.
The Tree Speaker was quiet for long enough that Torren wished he had not spoken.
Then the old man asked, "Dream?"
"I thought so. At first."
"And then?"
"Then it was like before. Wind under wings. The camp below. Too sharp for a dream. I tried to wake and it didn't—" He stopped, annoyed at how that sounded. "It didn't listen."
"The eagle did not listen?"
"Maybe I didn't. I don't know."
The Tree Speaker set the bowl down carefully. "Did you have the stone?"
"No."
"The cord?"
"No."
"Did you know your body?"
Torren hesitated.
The old man's eyes hardened. "Do not make the answer prettier."
"No," Torren said. "Not at first. Not enough."
The Tree Speaker exhaled through his nose. "Then you were lucky."
"I came back."
"That is why I said lucky."
Torren frowned. "You make it sound like I crawled out of a wolf's mouth."
"You did."
"It was an eagle."
"That is worse in some ways."
"How is that worse?"
"A wolf wants blood and pack. A goat wants grass and stone. A bird wants height. Men think height is freedom. That makes it sweet. Sweet things keep fools longer."
Torren looked away. The worst part was that he understood.
The Tree Speaker picked up the bowl again, then seemed to forget why he had done it. His thumb moved along the icy rim once, twice.
"What did you see?" he asked.
"The camp. The ridges. A hare, I think. The eagle dropped before I woke."
"Anything else?"
Torren said nothing.
The Tree Speaker waited.
Torren rubbed at his wrist, where no cord mark remained. "North. Something pale. A high place, maybe. Could have been snow. Could have been nothing."
"Could have been."
"You don't believe that."
"I believe snow is often snow. I also believe boys lie badly when they hope snow is only snow."
Torren gave him a tired look. "You are very difficult to talk to."
"Yes. It keeps the foolish away."
"It doesn't seem to be working."
The old man's mouth twitched, but only for a moment.
Then he said, "No ridge today."
Torren blinked. "I wasn't asking."
"No ridge tomorrow either."
"That sounds like punishment."
"It is rest."
"Rest never sounds like an order unless people are trying to stop you doing something."
"Yes."
Torren folded his arms. "So what now?"
The Tree Speaker looked toward the weirwood's carved face. Snow clung in the grooves around its eyes like old tears.
"Now," he said, "you learn how not to answer."
Torren frowned. "I thought I was learning how to enter."
"That was the easy part."
"It did not feel easy."
"Good. Then maybe this will frighten you enough to listen."
Torren almost said he was not frightened.
He stopped himself, because it was not true in the way that mattered. He was not afraid of the eagle. He was afraid of how much he wanted the height again. He was afraid of waking with his hand closed around a cord that had not been there.
The Tree Speaker saw the answer he did not speak.
"Better," the old man said.
Torren looked at him. "I didn't say anything."
"You finally learned one thing, then."
The old man picked up the bowl and went back to scraping ice as if the matter were settled.
It was not settled. Not even close.
But Torren stayed away from the ridge that day.
And the next.