The journey to the outer rim stretched across another four grueling days, pushing the total trek to a full week beneath the oppressive, shadowed canopy of the eastern frontier. The forest grew denser, the pines taller and choked with briars as old Fergus led them deeper into the untamed wild. Every league brought them further from the ashes of civilization and deeper into the lawless grey zone where monsters roamed and men survived by wits alone.
On the fourth morning, pausing near a rocky creek bed choked with grey silt, old Fergus stopped. He ran his calloused fingers along the trunk of a young, resilient yew tree rooted in the damp bank.
"If you want a bow that will not snap in your hands when the frost bites hardest, you do not cut the first straight branch you see," old Fergus said, his voice flat and steady. He tapped the pale sapwood with a knuckle. "You look for the tension. You want the heartwood for the core, the sapwood for the stretch. The tree fights the wind every day of its life. You are simply harnessing that fight."
They harvested the wood before midday, stripping the bark with careful, measured strokes. Over the next three days of marching, as they wove through treacherous ravines and shadowed ridges, old Fergus taught the boy the meticulous craft of shaping a practice bow. They scraped the stave with skinning knives, steamed the green wood over small pockets of hot coals, and tapered the limbs until they flexed with smooth, lethal grace.
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To old Fergus's quiet astonishment, Ronan took to the work with an eerie, effortless precision.
With fingers that had spent years handling hot iron, heavy tongs, and delicate file work at Bran’s forge, Ronan understood the hidden temperament of materials. He treated the yew wood not as a green branch, but as metal waiting to be tempered. He measured the balance of the limbs by eye, shaved away microscopic curls of wood to correct a warping tiller, and smoothed the handle grip until it fit his long, thin palms as though it had grown there. He knew how pressure revealed weak points, how grain dictated strength, and how patience dictated form.
That night, huddled by a smokeless fire while old Fergus kept watch in the perimeter shadows, Ronan pulled out his father's dog-eared leather booklet. By the faint, dying glow of the coals, he used a piece of charred charcoal to sketch the exact measurements of the bow's taper, noting the precise degree of bend and the thickness required for the sinew-backed pull he would eventually graduate to.
Across the camp, old Fergus lay half-wrapped in his bedroll, his eyes half-closed but intensely awake. He watched the boy by the firelight, seeing the careful, deliberate scratch of charcoal on paper, and the way Ronan’s thumb tested the tension of the unstrung stave with the practiced feel of a master artisan.
A slow, grim shadow of respect crossed the Ranger's weathered face. The boy possessed a sharp, hungry mind, forged in the soot of a peasant smithy and tempered by absolute loss. He did not weep anymore. He absorbed.
He learns like a man with nothing left to lose, old Fergus thought, pulling his cloak tighter against the mountain wind as the heavy stillness of the outer rim closed in around them.