Now her strength was terrible and unrestrained.  She danced naked among the frost-sided oaks and the shambling evergreens, leaving no foot-mark upon the deep drifts.  Her eyes shone like winter fires above the bonfire sky, and her lips were red with the terrified animals she fell upon and devoured for the heady taste of blood.

She unmade the shapes she coveted, unstitched them with her fatal hands and bound them into skein and weft and marrow of the spirit.  Ravens she taunted and spoke to, learned their speech and then stole a single black-scrap shape.  With wings, she was free as never before, and she flew about the tower and laughed as the cruel winds snatched her up and whirled her form above the spire.  Wolves she haunted, followed and learned woodcraft from.  When an old she-wolf left the pack Ygraine took her, and undid her, and thence all the secrets of the wolfkin were hers as well.  She learned the riddles of the blood-hunt, the shapes of smells and the sky-arch song that cries across the night.

A pallid white lioness moored in an ice-cavern deep in the cliffsides, and Ygraine took from her a stillborn cub and took its place.  She drew dagger milk from her teats and let her teach her lessons of stalk and stealth, of plunder and craft.

Yet always she returned to her tower, through the cold narrow window and let the dark bars close behind her.  They opened to her command now, and she did not doubt any longer that she had strength to tear them apart with her hands if they refused her.