not do anything with it. They were Skilled, like you, but they pushed themselves farther and deeper into death, stretching the bond that linked their spirits to the living world. Many went too far and died for their work, but that, I believe, was the point. Very little worth knowing is discovered without risk.”
“Have you read the book?” asked Kate.
“I know enough to be sure that it is no use to me without someone who understands the veil completely,” said Silas. “You are that person. You cannot doubt that you have a natural ability. This book will help you to hone that ability even further.”
“I don’t see how,” said Kate.
Silas scowled at her, impatience spreading across his face. “You will not find the writers of Wintercraft mentioned in your history books,” he said. “Your ancestors, and people like them, called themselves Walkers. Some lived among the bonemen, but they had more of an affinity to the veil than most of the people who worked with the dead. Walkers embraced their higher level of natural abilities and trained their own spirits to walk fully into the veil, as you have already done. The Skilled did not agree with what the Walkers were doing. They preferred to watch the veil, not enter it, and they continued to study it from a distance, choosing not to push themselves into the unknown.”
“So the Walkers knew how to go into the veil,” said Kate. “That’s what Wintercraft is about?”
“There is far more to it than just that,” said Silas. “The Walkers had one thing in common that ordinary Skilled did not. Whenever they entered the veil, frost spread across their skin, just as it spreads across yours. It is a phenomenon so rare that no one has even tried to understand why so few people react that way. The Skilled chose to ignore it, seeing it as something to be prevented rather than explored, and at the time Wintercraft was written, they turned their backs on anyone who could enter the veil in that unusual way. The people they cast out grouped together, and so the Walkers were formed. They decided to examine their abnormality and explore it for themselves and, judging from that book, many of them succeeded. You should be looking to them for your answers, not to the Skilled.”
The book felt warm in Kate’s hands, so warm that the watery cold that had gripped her fingers slowly began to fade away. There was something very strange about that book. It felt as if she had owned it for a long time and the longer she held it, the more she felt as if it belonged to her.
“The Skilled would have driven you out eventually,” said Silas. “They would have lied to you and stripped your abilities down until you were as limited and closed-minded as they have always been. No good can come of a Walker who lives her life in their hands.”
A gentle whisper echoed around the river walls but Kate ignored it. She had to think. Anything else was just a distraction.
“I have no reason to lie to you,” said Silas, and despite everything else Kate knew about the man, she believed him.
She opened the book reluctantly and, in the light of the boat’s swinging lantern, began to read.
Wintercraft was divided into seven sections, each with a title that would make anyone but the most determined reader put down the book and never open it again. The title of one section—“The Tearing of a Captive Soul”—made Kate think the Skilled might have been right to turn the Walkers away, but as she read on, the book revealed its own strange story.
From the different colored inks and styles of handwriting, it seemed at least twenty people had contributed to the creation of Wintercraft over a long period of time. Most of them had been obsessed with stretching the essence of a person’s spirit to the breaking point, but as far as Kate could see, they had only ever experimented upon themselves, leaving what was left of their notes to be finished off by someone else after their death.
The neat handwriting of one Walker detailed her early experiments into using the veil to heal the body. She included a list of complex equations that Kate did not understand and detailed instructions for a process she called “Focused Reunification,” which could magnify the healing energy of the veil by focusing it on a specific spot instead of spreading it across the entire body