and send out his spirit. He didn't roam far, didn't do much more than look around the immediate vicinity, or track various animals; marvel at a hawk as he flew alongside it or see a small fire in the far distance of the south that told him other men were passing along the tried and tested tracks of the forest between Briavel and Morgravia.
Cassien was in the north, where the forest ultimately gave way to the more hilly regions and then the mountain range known as the Razors and the former realm beyond. He'd heard tales as a child of its infamous King Cailech, the barbaric human-flesh-eating leader of the mountain tribes, who ultimately bested the monarch of Morgravia and married the new Queen of Briavel to achieve empire. As it had turned out, Cailech was not the barbarian that the southern kingdoms had once believed. Subsequent stories and songs proclaimed that Emperor Cailech was refined, with courtly manners - as though bred and raised in Morgravia - and of a calm, generous disposition. Or so the stories went.
He'd toyed with the idea of roaming as far as the Morgravian capital, Pearlis, and finding out who sat on the imperial throne these days; monarchs could easily change in a decade. However, it would mean leaving his body to roam the distance and he feared that he couldn't let it remain uninhabited for so long.
There were unpalatable consequences to roaming, including sapping his strength and sometimes making himself ill, and he hated his finely trained and attuned body not to be strong in every way. He had hoped that if he practised enough he would become more adapted to the rigours it demanded but the contrary was true. Frequency only intensified the debilitating effects.
There was more though. Each time he roamed, creatures around him perished. The first time it happened he thought the birds and badgers, wolves and deer had been poisoned somehow when he found their bodies littered around the hut.
It was Romaine, the now grown she-wolf, who had told him otherwise.
It's you, she'd said calmly, although he could hear the anger, her despair simmering at the edge of the voice in his mind. We are paying for your freedom, she'd added, when she'd dragged over the corpse of a young wolf to show him.
And so he moved as a spirit only rarely now, when loneliness niggled too hard, and before doing so he would talk to Romaine and seek her permission. She would alert the creatures in a way he didn't understand and then she would guide him to a section of the forest that he could never otherwise find, even though he had tried.
For some reason, the location felt repellent, although it had all the same sort of trees and vegetation as elsewhere. There was nothing he could actually pin down as being specifically different other than an odd atmosphere, which he couldn't fully explain but he felt in the tingles on the surface of his flesh and the raising of hair at the back of his neck. It felt ever so slightly warmer there, less populated by the insects and birds that should be evident and, as a result, vaguely threatening. If he was being very particular, he might have argued that it was denser at the shrub level. On the occasions he'd mentioned this, Romaine had said she'd never noticed, but he suspected that she skirted the truth.
'Why here?' he'd asked on the most recent occasion, determined to learn the secret. 'You've always denied there was anything special about this place.'
I lied, she'd pushed into his mind. You weren't ready to know it. Now you are.
'Tell me.'
It's a deliberately grown offshoot of natural vegetation known as the Thicket.
'But what is it?'
It possesses a magic. That's all I know.
'And if I roam from here the animals are safe?'
As safe as we can make them. Most are allowing you a wide range right now. We can't maintain it for very long though, so get on with what you need to do.
And that's how it had been. The Thicket somehow keeping the forest animals safe, filtering his magic through itself and cleansing, or perhaps absorbing, the part of his power that killed. It couldn't help Cassien in any way, but Romaine had admitted once that the Thicket didn't care about his health; its concern was for the beasts.
None, he'd observed, from hawk to badger, had ever been aware of his presence when he roamed. With