forest growing less dense. Then he broke out into open ground, a rising bluff on which heather grew, thick and purple and waist-high at this time of year, a month after midsummer. He was facing east towards the dawn, and a crimson glow striped the horizon.
And, on the crest of the bluff, he saw a figure standing alone - stooped, shivering from more than the faint chill of the late summer morning. Shade stopped, silent, cautious, until he recognised the man. ‘Resin? It’s me.’
The priest whirled, startled. But then he had always been jumpy, even before he had cut back on the poppy juice. ‘Shade? That is you, isn’t it? My eyes aren’t so good in the dark.’
‘Then what are you doing out here?’
The priest clutched his hide robe closer. Adorned with cryptic symbols and networks of lines like tree branches, the robe was old, shabby, worn, and it stank of piss. He had a mane of ragged grey hair, a face that was lined and sunken, a mouth that was often slick with drool. Resin was younger than Shade, but he looked much older, the poppies had seen to that. ‘Oh, I can never sleep. Not in a house full of your hunters, Shade, with their farting and belching, and the women they take from the Eel folk - and, worse, a Leafy girl, it takes two or three of them to subdue one of those, it’s like having a mad aurochs calf in the house with you.’
Shade laughed out loud. ‘You’ve become funny since I made you give up the poppy.’
‘Funny? I’m glad something good has come of it.’ He held out his hand, which trembled violently. ‘Look at me. I can’t sleep, can’t eat. Can’t get it up, as your hunters never cease to point out to me.’
‘You were useless under the juice,’ Shade said sternly. ‘I feel like I’m getting a priest back.’
‘Maybe you’re right. Anyhow if you hadn’t stopped me the poppies would have killed me soon enough. But you didn’t come out here to talk about me, did you?’
‘Walk with me.’ Together they stepped forward, towards the crest of the ridge.
And from here, they looked down over Northland.
There was no obvious boundary between Albia and Northland, nothing like a river to mark off one territory from another. But standing here you could see how the nature of the country changed. Looking east from this high point the land sloped down, with forest clumps and copses dark in the grey dawn light. Beyond that the land stretched away as far as Shade could see, low and glimmering with water and folded gently into rolling hills, a plain that merged into the mist of the horizon. A flock of birds rose up in a cloud from some distant lake, their cries just audible. You could see how rich the country was just standing here, with all that standing water and the easy hills.
And all across the plain he could see the spark of fires, twinkling like orange-red stars, the people of Northland dreaming in the dark.
‘It’s so vast.’ Resin pointed at random to a fire. ‘So many of them.’
‘Yes. And most probably have never even heard of Etxelur, or Pretani. And yet here we are preparing to make war.’
‘Yes. And a war like no other waged before.’
‘Why do we hate Northland so much, do you think?’
The priest looked at him, startled. ‘That’s an odd question.’
Shade was the Root, after all, and he saw that Resin wasn’t sure how to answer his question safely. ‘I know I have my own history with Etxelur. My brother, my father, both dead at my own hands.’ He touched the scars on his forehead, his body’s memory of those terrible times. ‘That wouldn’t have happened if not for Northlanders. And Zesi has her own grudges. Maybe we wouldn’t be mounting this war if not for her. But it was easy enough to stir everybody up for the campaign, even though it’s turned out to be so complicated, with the trading, the stone and the slaves, all Hollow’s schemes. We were ready for the war, even if we didn’t know it.’
Resin nodded. ‘I remember your father. He loathed Etxelur, and all Northlanders. Fat lazy rooting pigs, he called them. He always tried to stir up trouble with them.’
‘Why?’
‘He hated their country, for it is so easy.’
‘Easy?’
‘You know the stories of our gods as well as I do.’ Resin rapped his head with his knuckles. ‘Better, probably. How our earliest ancestors were hunters