singular moment for learning. This condition of attentive repose allowed the song to sink deep into Bran’s being, passing beneath his all-too-ready defences. Now it was under his skin, burrowing deep into his bones, seeping into his soul, changing him from the inside out, though he did not know it.
There would come a day when the meaning would break upon him; maybe sooner, maybe later, but it would come. And for this, as much as for the progress of his healing, Angharad watched him so that she would be there when it happened.
She also made plans.
One day, as Bran sat outside in a pool of warm sunlight, Angharad appeared with an ash-wood stave in her hand. She came to where he sat and said, “Stand up, Bran.”
Yawning, he did so, and she placed the length of wood against his shoulder. “What is this?” he asked. “Measuring me for a druid staff ?” In his restlessness, he had begun mocking her quaintly antiquated ways. The wise woman knew the source of his impatience and astutely ignored it.
“Nay, nay,” she said, “you would have to spend seventeen years at least before you could hold one of those—and you would have had to begin before your seventh summer.
This,” she said, placing the stave in his hands, “is your next occupation.”
“Herding sheep?”
“If that is your desire. I had something else in mind, but the choice is yours.”
He looked at the slender length of wood. Almost as long as he was tall, it had a good heft and balance. “A bow?” he guessed. “You want me to make a bow?”
She smiled. “And here I was thinking you slow-witted.
Yes, I want you to make a bow.”
Bran examined the length of ash once more. He held it up and looked down its length. Here and there it bent slightly out of true—not so badly that it could not be worked—but that was not the problem. “No,” he said at last, “it cannot be done.”
The old woman looked at the stave and then at Bran.
“Why not, Master Bran?”
“Do not call me that!” he said roughly. “I am a nobleman, remember, a prince—not a common tradesman.”
“You ceased being a prince when you abandoned your people,” she said. Though her voice was quiet, her manner was unforgiving, and Bran felt the now-familiar rush of shame. It was not the first time she had berated him for his plan to flee Elfael. Laying a hand on the stave, she said, “Tell me why the wood cannot be worked.”
“It is too green,” replied Bran, petulance making his voice low.
“Explain, please.”
“If you knew anything about making a longbow, you would know that you cannot simply cut a branch and begin shaping.
You must first season the wood, cure it—a year at least. Otherwise it will warp as it dries and will never bend properly.” He made to hand the length of ash back to her. “You can make a druid staff out of it, perhaps, but not a bow.”
“And what leads you to think I have not already seasoned this wood?”
“Have you?” Bran asked. “A year?”
“Not a year, no,” she said.
“Well then—” He shrugged and again tried to give the stave back to her.
“Two years,” she told him. “I kept it wrapped in leather so it would not dry too quickly.”
“Two years,” he repeated suspiciously. “I don’t believe you.” In truth, he did believe her; he simply did not care to consider the more far-reaching implications of her remark.
Angharad had turned away and was moving toward the cave. “Sit,” she said. “I will bring you the tools.”
Bran settled himself on the rock once more. He had made a bow only twice as a lad, but he had seen them made countless times. His father’s warriors regularly filled their winter days, as well as the hall itself, with sawdust and wood shavings as they sat around the fire, regaling each other with their impossible boasts and lies. For battle, the longbow was the prime weapon of choice for all True Sons of Prydein—and a fair few of her fearless daughters, too. In skilled hands, a stout warbow was a formidable weapon—light, durable, easily made with materials ready to hand, and above all, devastatingly deadly.
Bran, like most every child who had grown up in the secluded valleys and rough hills of the west, had been taught the bowman’s art from the time he could stand on his own two unsteady legs. As a boy he had often gone to sleep with raw, throbbing fingers and aching