The summons came at dusk.
Torren had spent most of the day near the camp's edge, never straying far from the central fires and never climbing back to the ridge. He knew he could have gone. No one had forbidden it. But after the Black Ears scouts, and after Cale's questions, and after the Tree Speaker's quiet words by the fire that morning, something in him had grown more cautious.
He was sitting near a pile of split pine branches, scraping dirt from the side of his boot with a small knife, when one of the older girls from the camp stopped beside him.
"The Tree Speaker wants you," she said.
Torren looked up.
The girl's face was unreadable. Not fearful. Not mocking. Just serious, which was somehow worse.
"Now?"
She nodded once. "At the grove."
Torren stared at her for a moment after she walked away. Around him, the camp moved through the final work of evening. Women hung strips of meat to dry. An old man tied leather lashings around a cracked spear shaft. A pair of children ran past one another through the smoke, shouting until one of their mothers snapped at them to keep quiet.
Everything looked ordinary.
That made the summons feel heavier.
Inside his mind, the calm voice spoke softly.
You expected this.
Torren wiped the knife clean against his cloak and slid it back into his belt.
Maybe.
He stood, glanced once toward his mother near the fires, and began walking uphill.
The path to the Weeping Grove was different at dusk.
In daylight it felt old and quiet. In darkness it felt haunted. But at dusk, with the last red of the sun caught between the mountains and the first cold blue of evening slipping into the trees, it felt like a threshold. The pines stood darker along the climb, their branches weaving together overhead so that the path seemed narrower than it truly was. The wind moved through them in long, whispering breaths.
Torren knew this trail now. He had walked it more than once in the last few days. Even so, he found himself stepping more carefully than usual as the camp sounds faded behind him.
At last the trees thinned.
The Weeping Grove waited beyond them.
The pale trunks of the weirwoods rose from the earth like bones under moonlight, even though the moon had not yet fully risen. Their bark caught what little light remained in the sky and held it strangely. The red leaves above them shifted in a sound softer than pine needles and somehow more deliberate, as though they responded to something other than wind.
At the center of the grove stood the great weirwood beneath which he had been born.
Its carved face stared into the deepening dusk with hollow eyes and a mouth cut into an old, silent anguish. Fresh sap had gathered beneath one eye and run down the white bark in a dark red line.
The Tree Speaker stood below it.
He did not turn when Torren entered the grove. His thin frame seemed almost part of the place itself, wrapped in bark-cloth, feather, and shadow. For a long moment he stood with one hand resting against the trunk, his head bowed slightly, as if listening to something Torren could not hear.
Then the old man spoke.
"You came."
Torren stopped a few paces away.
"You sent for me."
The Tree Speaker nodded slowly and turned.
The red paint beneath his eyes was darker than it had been that morning. In the fading light it looked less like paint than dried blood.
"Yes," he said. "I did."
Torren crossed his arms.
The gesture was instinctive more than deliberate, a boy's attempt to make himself feel less small under the eyes of old trees and older men.
The Tree Speaker studied him for a few heartbeats. His gaze moved across Torren's pale face, his shaven head, the red eyes that even now made grown warriors quiet at the campfires.
"You have seen something," the old man said.
Torren's face did not change.
"I saw Black Ears."
"That is not what I meant."
The air in the grove seemed colder suddenly.
Torren looked away from the old man and toward the carved face of the tree. He did not answer at once. Part of him wanted to deny it outright. Part of him wanted to ask how the Tree Speaker knew there was anything to deny.
Inside his mind, the calm voice remained silent.
The Tree Speaker took a slow step closer.
"Some boys climb high and see far," he said. "Some boys hear the wind and think it wise. Some boys are simply born odd and spend the rest of their lives being stared at by fools." A faint line of amusement touched his mouth, but it vanished quickly. "And some boys are touched."
Torren's gaze snapped back to him.
"Touched by what?"
The old man tilted his head.
"You know the answer to that."
Torren did not, not exactly. Or perhaps he did, and hated that he might.
The grove whispered around them. High above, the red leaves shifted in the evening wind. Torren became aware of the smell of the place: cold bark, damp earth, and the faint metallic scent of fresh sap.
"I don't hear voices from trees," he said carefully.
The Tree Speaker's expression did not change.
"I did not say you did."
The answer irritated him for reasons he could not fully explain. It was the same sort of half-answer the voice in his head sometimes gave him, except from the Tree Speaker it felt less like guidance and more like testing.
"What do you want from me?" Torren asked.
The old man turned and rested his hand once more on the great trunk.
"I want to know whether the gods are wasting my time."
Torren frowned.
That was not the answer he expected.
The Tree Speaker looked over his shoulder at the boy.
"You were born under this face," he said. "Your eyes came into this world the color of the leaves above you. You see things others do not. You are watched by chance too often for chance to be the only answer." His voice grew quieter. "And yet that still proves nothing."
Torren stared at him.
The old man raised a hand and gestured.
"Come here."
Torren hesitated.
Then he walked forward until he stood directly beneath the carved face of the weirwood. Up close, the bark seemed smoother than any tree had a right to be. The face towered above him, cut deep into white wood that had outlived generations of men.
The Tree Speaker placed his palm flat against the trunk.
"Touch it."
Torren did not move.
"Why?"
The old man's eyes did not leave him.
"Because I asked."
"That isn't a reason."
For the first time, the Tree Speaker's mouth twitched slightly, as if he were resisting the urge to smile.
"No," he said. "It is not."
He lowered his hand from the bark and stepped aside.
"You are not the kind of child who obeys without hunger, and I have no patience for lies tonight. So here is the reason. If the old blood runs strong in you, the tree may answer. If it does not, then you will feel bark, cold, and nothing more. In either case, I will know more than I do now."
Torren looked at the trunk.
It looked like a tree.
An ancient one, a sacred one, a tree with a face and blood-colored sap, but still a tree.
Inside his mind, the voice spoke at last.
Physical contact may strengthen the connection.
Torren kept his breathing steady.
To what?
To memory.
He did not like that answer.
And yet he stepped forward.
The bark was colder than he expected.
Not simply cold from evening air, but deep cold, as though the white trunk held winter in its center no matter the season. Torren laid his palm against it and for a moment felt nothing beyond the smoothness of the wood and the slight tack of sap near the edge of the carved face.
Then the grove disappeared.
The shift was not like the eagle.
When he had touched the bird's mind, the world had tilted and opened. This was different. It did not open. It folded.
The wind vanished.
The smell of pine vanished.
The pale grove, the Tree Speaker, the stone beneath his boots—all of it dropped away like a skin being stripped from the world.
Torren was no longer standing beneath the weirwood.
He was in snow.
Not the thin frost of the upper ridges, nor the sharp, wind-driven powder that sometimes swept through the passes in winter. This was deep snow, churned by boots and darkened by blood. Men were shouting around him in a language that was almost his and not his at all, harsher in the throat, more ancient in its shape.
He could not see their faces clearly.
He saw fragments instead: bronze rings sewn into thick leather, fur cloaks stiff with ice, painted cheeks, spearpoints, axes slick with gore.
Then Andals.
He knew them without being told.
Steel helms gleamed through the storm. Long shields. Seven-pointed stars carved onto wood and hanging from throats. Men in mail pushed uphill through the snow while arrows vanished into the white around them.
A man near Torren shouted and fell with half his face missing.
Another slipped, rose, and died before he had fully stood.
The sound was terrible. Iron on bone. Men screaming prayers to gods who answered with more snow.
Torren tried to move and found he could not. He had no body here. He was only sight, only witness, pinned inside a moment that had happened long before his birth.
The weirwood was there too.
He saw it suddenly through the storm, higher on the slope, smaller than the High Weirwood yet older than anything else in the battlefield. Men fought beneath its branches. One was huge, wrapped in wolf fur and bronze scale, and his axe rose and fell like judgment. Around him clustered mountain men—his people, or something that would become them—bleeding into the snow as the Andals pressed upward.
A horn sounded from somewhere below.
Then another.
The bronze-scaled warrior turned his head sharply.
Torren saw understanding strike him a moment before death did. More Andals were climbing the slope from behind. The line had broken somewhere in the storm. The mountain men around the great warrior began to turn, too late, too scattered.
Then the vision shifted.
Not forward. Not away. Sideways.
Torren saw fire now.
A village beneath a mountain ridge. Not the Vale proper, not the soft lowlands, but some harsher settlement in a narrow valley. Huts burned. Women ran carrying children. Men with seven-pointed stars on their shields dragged one screaming figure through the mud while another hacked down a pale-faced warrior at the edge of the flames.
Then another shift.
A cave high in the rocks. Thin people huddled around a fire. A child crying from hunger. A man with frost in his beard telling some old story about kings beneath bronze crowns and valleys that once belonged to their blood.
Then darkness.
Not empty darkness. Root-darkness.
Something deep.
Something old.
A sense of vastness under stone.
Torren felt minds there, not like the eagle's clean hunger and wind-born instinct, but layered, heavy, buried. They were not speaking. They were remembering.
He jerked backward.
The grove slammed back into existence around him.
Cold air rushed into his lungs. His hand tore free from the bark. Torren stumbled, caught himself badly on one knee, and stared at the tree as though it had struck him.
The Tree Speaker did not move to help him.
His pale eyes watched Torren with such intensity now that they seemed almost fevered.
"What did you see?" the old man asked.
Torren was breathing too hard to answer at first.
Snow. Blood. Bronze. Seven-pointed stars. Burning roofs. Hunger.
He swallowed.
"I…" His voice sounded thin in his own ears. "Men fighting. In snow."
The Tree Speaker's face remained still.
"Who?"
Torren shut his eyes briefly, trying to grab hold of fragments before they scattered.
"Our kind," he said. "And Andals."
The old man's chest rose slowly beneath his cloak.
"What else?"
Torren looked back at the tree.
The red sap still crept down its face. He hated how calm the grove seemed after what he had just seen.
"A village burning," he said. "People running. Then… caves. Hunger."
The Tree Speaker's gaze sharpened at that.
"The mountains," he murmured, almost to himself. "Flight into the mountains."
Torren opened his mouth, then stopped. There was one more thing, something harder to explain because it had no shape.
"There was… something under it all."
The old man's eyes flicked to him.
"What?"
Torren shook his head in frustration.
"I don't know. It felt…" He searched for words and found only poor ones. "Deep. Like roots under stone. Like someone remembering."
For the first time since Torren entered the grove, the Tree Speaker looked almost afraid.
Not of the boy.
Of the answer.
He stepped forward and placed both palms against the trunk of the weirwood. His lips moved soundlessly for a few moments before he lowered his head.
When he finally looked back at Torren, the old man's face had changed. The testing patience was gone now. So was the mild doubt.
In its place was certainty.
"You were right to fear this path," he said quietly.
Torren pushed himself fully to his feet.
"I didn't ask for it."
"No." The Tree Speaker's voice remained soft, but there was iron under it now. "Few who receive such things do."
Torren stared at him.
"Was that real?"
The old man nodded once.
"Yes."
"What was it?"
"Memory," he answered. "Old memory. The kind trees keep."
Torren looked down at his own hand as if he expected to find blood or frost on it.
"There was a battle."
"There were many."
The Tree Speaker's gaze drifted past Torren toward the mountains beyond the grove.
"The Andals did not win the Vale in a single day, or a single year. They took it valley by valley, king by king, winter by winter. The trees remember what men bury."
Torren said nothing.
Inside his mind, the calm voice remained silent. Whether out of reverence, caution, or mere observation, he could not tell.
The Tree Speaker drew a slow breath.
"You must not speak of this to the others."
Torren looked up sharply.
"Why?"
"Because most men can live beside mystery. They cannot live beside proof of it."
That sounded uncomfortably close to what the voice in his head had told him earlier about fear.
The old man studied him a moment longer, then stepped back from the great trunk.
"You are not ready to be what I hoped," he said. "Not yet."
Torren frowned.
"I told you I didn't want to be your heir."
The Tree Speaker gave the faintest, most tired of smiles.
"And I am beginning to suspect the gods did not mark you for that alone."
He turned and began walking out of the grove.
Torren stood beneath the carved face for a moment longer, looking up into its hollow eyes.
The wind moved softly through the red leaves above.
At last he followed.
They descended the path in silence.
Below them, the campfires of the Painted Dogs glowed against the deepening dark, and the valley looked once again like a place of hides, smoke, meat, and ordinary people.
But Torren no longer felt ordinary.
He felt watched.
Not by the Tree Speaker.
Not even by the weirwood itself.
By history.
By something old enough to outlive kings and patient enough to wait beneath roots until the right hand touched bark.
When they reached the edge of the camp, the Tree Speaker stopped without looking at him.
"If the voice in the mountains speaks again," he said quietly, "listen carefully."
Torren's breath caught.
He had not told the old man about the voice.
He said nothing.
The Tree Speaker still did not turn.
"Not all guidance comes in the same form," he said. "And not all gifts belong to one path."
Then he walked away, leaving Torren standing at the edge of the firelight with the cold settling down from the mountains and the memory of snow and blood still sharp behind his eyes.