Free Trinity Rising: Book Two of the Wild Hunt (Wild Hunt Trilogy 2) by Elspeth Cooper Page B

children and our children’s children for ever. We are twice the numbers we were then; the herds cannot sustain us. Our families will hunger, we will starve and die. Maybe not this winter, nor the next, but soon. The Speaker of the Crainnh has seen portents. Without space to hunt, without our honour and our freedom, we will cease to be. The time has come for us to take back what was ours.’
    A pretty speech. Not one of Drwyn’s making, though. It had Ytha’s hand on it, that was for sure. And who had given him this sudden hunger for land to roam? Certainly Drw had seen no need to go to war for it – despite their numbers, the herds had not failed them yet, and he’d been content to follow them across the plains to the end of his days. Had that notion come from the Speaker, too, along with the carefully chosen words? The thought made Teia shiver.
    The chiefs and their Speakers digested what Drwyn had said. Some nodded and murmured amongst themselves; others stared down at the turf or off towards the lake. One or two, like Eirdubh, gazed straight at Drwyn and dared him to hold their eye.
    Drwyn did not fail them. He kept his head high, stance erect and proud. The tilt of his jaw, the way he held himself, were so like how she imagined Drw must have been in his prime that Teia felt a sharp pang of loss. The other chiefs obviously thought much the same. She could see it in their eyes, the way they measured him and found little lacking. It spoke powerfully in his favour.
    She remembered what Ytha had said, how he must be his father’s son and more, and began to see how the Speaker was manipulating not just the Crainnh, but the other clans as well. Teia followed the path with her mind’s eye and saw the spear of the Chief of Chiefs at the end of it.
    She dragged her attention back to the present and steadied the viewing, which had begun to waver with her distraction. Eirdubh was speaking. The Amhain chief was on his feet, a sinewy man in leather and fur with a face as worn and weathered as a tor. Silence spread around him as the other chiefs listened.
    ‘A grand plan, Drwyn,’ he said in that deep, quiet voice of his. ‘Grand indeed. But how do you expect to carry it out? The Empire and its Knights will not have vanished. They will still be there, in their stone forts in the mountains, waiting for us.’
    ‘The forts are empty,’ Drwyn said. A hiss of indrawn breath snaked around the Moot. ‘My Speaker has shown them to me and, to be certain, I have sent warriors to scout them. There are no iron men in the mountains.’
    ‘Can you prove this, Drwyn?’ asked Eirdubh. ‘Can your Speaker show us also? We do not doubt her words, for a Speaker can tell no untruth, but we men are not gifted in the way of Speakers and need to be shown plainly.’
    ‘I can show you,’ Ytha said, cool and composed. ‘Your own Speakers can, if you ask them. The lake is here – use the waters.’
    Three of the other Speakers exchanged glances as they conferred. Teia recognised two of them: the White Lake and Stone Crow Clans’ lands were close and they wintered in the mountains not far from the Crainnh. As one they nodded.
    The middle one stepped forward, her staff clasped before her. ‘We know the places of which Chief Drwyn speaks,’ she said. ‘We will scry.’
    Teia felt their power draw in and focus, as if the sky had suddenly taken a deep breath. The waters of the lake rippled and grew still, but the water in her basin trembled as the Speakers’ scrying overlapped her viewing for an instant. Then the image in the water steadied. Teia brought her viewing closer, so she could see the scrying more clearly.
    The Speakers had conjured an image of the an-Archen, blue-white and sharp, the snowy peaks dazzling to behold. The image drew in, as if seen from a swooping bird’s perspective, and focused on a mountain pass with a fortress blocking its narrowest point. Massive walls spanned the pass between heavily fortified towers, in which