The hall of the Tower of Thrones was small but grand. It had room for no more than thirty or forty people, but on the night of the feast to welcome Aewult nan Haig, whatever the guests lacked in numbers was more than made up for by their grandeur. Lheanor oc Kilkry-Haig and his wife Ilessa sat at the high table. On their right hand was Aewult, then Orisian and Anyara. On the left sat Mordyn Jerain and the High Thane’s Steward, Lagair. There should have been one other there. The rumour, already flying through the Tower’s corridors, was that Roaric nan Kilkry-Haig had refused to share a table, or even a room, with the Haig Blood. Orisian, required to spend the evening at Aewult’s elbow, almost wished he could have done likewise.
The long table that ran away down the length of the hall was filled with Lheanor’s officials, the captains of the Haig army and the wealthiest merchants and Craftsmen of Kolkyre. It was not an admixture likely to produce high good humour, and so it proved. A kind of leaden, forced jollity arose, but it lacked conviction. The resentment and mistrust between the Haig and Kilkry Bloods were too deep-rooted to be wholly set aside for even a single night.
Musicians came and paraded up and down the hall. Falconers displayed Lheanor’s finest hunting hawks. A trickster made coins disappear. None of it did much to ease the evening’s latent tension. At length a storyteller was ushered in. As he bowed to Lheanor a hush fell across the room.
“In the Storm Years,” the storyteller began, “not long after the Kingship fell, a man called Rase oc Rainur – tall and red and strong-handed – had a hall at Drinan, which was then but a village. In the summer, the people grazed their cattle far out through the forest. Now, there was a girl called Fianna, daughter of Evinn, who often stood watch over her father’s cattle, taking only his two black dogs with her.”
Aewult nan Haig leaned too close to Orisian, his breath heavy with wine and grease.
“I think I’ve heard this before,” the Bloodheir said.
“It’s a common tale here,” Orisian replied. “It’s called ‘The Maid and the Woodwight’.”
“A miserable one, isn’t it? Doesn’t everybody die?”
“Not quite everyone.”
The storyteller pressed on, but he had clearly failed to catch the Bloodheir’s attention. As a scattering of discussions resumed around the hall, Aewult turned his attention to Anyara.
“You’ve a very fair face, my lady.” He flicked a wide grin at Orisian. “Has your sister given her affections to anyone, Thane?”
“My affections are my own,” Anyara said, “and I don’t give them away. I’m sure your own lady would say the same thing.” She glanced pointedly at the beautiful young woman who sat amongst the Haig captains at the long table.
Orisian was not certain of her name – Ishbel, he thought – but it was already common knowledge in Kolkyre that she shared a bed with the Bloodheir. It was said that he had smuggled her all the way from Vaymouth in one of the supply wagons. Apparently Aewult’s mother, Abeh oc Haig, had forbidden the liaison, as she disapproved of the woman’s background or breeding. Whatever the truth of it, Orisian suspected it was not wise ground for Anyara to start digging in.
To his relief, Aewult appeared to be amused rather than annoyed.
“A pretty face but a pointed tongue, I see,” the Bloodheir said through a mouthful of mutton. “You’ll have to blunt that a bit if you want to marry her off, you know.”
“I don’t mean to marry her off,” Orisian said quickly. He pressed forward against the table, hoping to put a barrier between Aewult and his sister. “How long do you expect to remain here in Kolkyre?”
“Keen to see us off to battle?” Aewult asked, with a smirk. “You don’t need to worry. We’ll be on our way soon enough. We’ll get your lands back for you, Thane, and sit you on your throne in Anduran. Believe me, I’ll not spend a day more than I must up here. It’s too cold and too wet.”
“It’ll get colder yet,” Orisian said. “Our winters aren’t really made for fighting.”
“Ha! A bit of weather won’t hinder us. I’ve an army here big enough to cut a path all the way to Kan Dredar if we needed to.” The Bloodheir waved a bone from which he had picked all the meat, as if that somehow proved his point. “It’ll be a massacre. You’ll see. It’s only Horin-Gyre that’s come south, from the sound of it. Stupid, but then they’re all a bit mad on the cold side of the Stone Vale, aren’t they?”
“It was Inkallim and White Owls that attacked Kolglas at Winterbirth, not Horin-Gyre,” Orisian muttered. There was a patronising, dismissive strand in Aewult’s demeanour that annoyed him. Apart from anything else, it belittled the price that Croesan, Kennet and all the others had already paid for Horin-Gyre ambition.
The Bloodheir snorted, flourishing his empty goblet to attract the attention of a serving girl.
“There’s not enough ravens or woodwights in all the world to trouble ten thousand determined men. Have you ever ridden to battle, Thane? Too young, I suppose. Have you even killed a man yet?”
Orisian could not help but look away. He remembered driving his knife into the chest of a fallen Tarbain warrior; remembered a torrent of blood that only grew in his memory. And the emptiness that came after that act, leaving unsated whatever hunger for revenge had preceded it.
Anyara was tearing at a slab of bread, concentrating with a fierce intensity that made Orisian glad he was seated between her and the Bloodheir.
Aewult drew his own conclusions from Orisian’s silence.
“No, eh? Well, don’t worry. You can rest here while we cleanse the Glas valley for you. You’re the last of your Blood, Thane. There’s no one to come after you. Can’t risk anything unfortunate happening to you, can we? Haig warriors will do the dying that’s needed to open the path back to your throne.”
Orisian gazed at the storyteller, who was still manfully persisting in his efforts to make himself heard above the soft drone of conversation. Those last phrases had sounded glib, almost rehearsed, in Aewult’s mouth, as if he was repeating a thought crafted by someone else. Orisian wondered whether Mordyn Jerain held even the Bloodheir’s reins.
“There’s been no shortage of dying already,” he said.
“Maybe, but it’s not gained you much, has it?” grunted Aewult. There was a blush in his cheeks, whether born of drink or heat or anger Orisian could not tell. But the Bloodheir’s speech was losing its shape a little; his eyes were gleaming. He regarded Orisian with what seemed to be naked contempt.
“Those who’ve died did so fighting,” Orisian snapped.
“Fighting and losing.” Aewult’s lips were stained red with wine. “Make no mistake, it’ll take the strength of Haig to win you back your seat, Thane.”
“At least you remember that my brother is Thane,” Anyara hissed from beyond Orisian. “The way you talk, I’d thought you had forgotten. Bloodheir.”
For once, Orisian hardly cared if Anyara wanted to pick a fight. His own jaw was tightening in anger, and a kind of furious shame burned in him: so little did Haig think of his Blood, and of him as its Thane, that he was treated as nothing more than a child. He was uncertain whether Aewult deliberately meant to goad him into some mistake or whether the Bloodheir simply did not care.
“Bloodheir to Gryvan,” Aewult said, and grinned. He turned his attention to his plate, cutting into the joint of a chicken leg on his platter. His movements were crude and imprecise. The knife glanced off bone. “I speak with my father’s authority. And I say Lannis stays behind when I march.”
“We’ll see,” Orisian said. He turned to Anyara, urging her to silence with the slightest shake of his head.
The noise was so sudden and sharp that he started, almost lifting from his chair. Aewult had punched his knife into the table top and it stood there, trembling. The Bloodheir glared at Orisian.
“We’ll see you do as the High Thane commands,” he said. “That’s what we’ll see.”
Lheanor had turned at the sound of blade splitting wood. Beyond the Thane, Orisian saw Mordyn Jerain leaning forward and looking down along the table. He thought he detected a momentary narrowing of the Shadowhand’s eyes, a pinch of displeasure on his lips.
“I can’t hear the tale with so much noise,” Lheanor said, clear and strangely solemn. “It is almost done.”
Slowly Aewult nan Haig sank back into his chair. He tugged the knife from the table and dropped it back onto his plate.
“Of course,” he said, looking pointedly at the storyteller rather than at Lheanor. “Let’s hear it.”
The storyteller struggled on to the end of his tale amidst a taut silence. Once done, he retired with a look of undisguised relief on his face. There was some thin applause. The evening rolled uncomfortably on. Aewult nan Haig spoke not one more word to Orisian and Anyara. Before long, he abandoned the high table altogether. With a sour glance in Orisian’s direction, he went down the hall and took the seat next to Ishbel for himself, leaving its evicted occupant to go in search of space elsewhere.
“Let’s go,” Anyara whispered to Orisian. “Tell Lheanor we want to call on Yvane, to see how she is. He won’t mind that.”
Orisian doubted whether Lheanor would mind if every single guest rose as one and left him alone in his hall. Ilessa oc Kilkry-Haig had been trying hard – keeping a smile on her face, laughing at whatever nothings the Shadowhand whispered to her – but her eyes betrayed the effort it took to maintain the appearance of pleasure, of levity. Apparently, it was an effort of which her husband was incapable.
Orisian looked from the Thane and his wife out over the rest of the gathering. Aewult was laughing at his own crude stories, Ishbel listening with rapt attention. Further down the table a Kolkyre merchant was arguing with some official who had travelled up from Vaymouth with the army. One of Aewult’s warriors – perhaps from his Palace Shield, judging by his size – spilled a beaker of ale as he rose, swaying, from his seat. He was loudly extolling the virtues of Vaymouth’s sword-makers.
“Yes,” Orisian said to his sister. “We’re not needed here.”
They climbed into the higher reaches of the Tower of Thrones, ascending a narrow spiral staircase like those of Castle Kolglas. The stones in these walls were smoother, though, and of a hard rock that glistened as if wet beneath the light of the torches. For all the many hints of similarity – the smell of those torches, and of old wood; the way footsteps and voices shivered along the stonework – this place felt stranger and more ancient, in its bones, than the castle in the sea ever had. The Tower had, after all, been here since before the Gods abandoned the world. The Kilkry Thanes had only inherited it from its unknown makers.
A short passage led off the stairway to Yvane’s room. An odd pair awaited Orisian and Anyara outside the door. Hammarn the na’kyrim was seated cross-legged on the cold flagstones, scratching away at a piece of wood with a tiny blade. Woodchips and shavings lay all around him. A young Lannis warrior was standing guard opposite Hammarn. He was watching the na’kyrim with an air of puzzled fascination, as if he had never seen anything quite so unusual as this white-haired, half-human old man.
At Orisian’s approach, the guard straightened and stared ahead.
“Go and rest your legs,” Orisian said to him. “Sit on the stairs a while, or find a window and get some air.”
Hammarn scrambled to his feet as the guard moved away. He blew a little plume of wood dust from his carving and grinned first at Orisian, then at Anyara.
“How long have you been sitting out here?” she asked him.
Hammarn frowned. “A time, yes. Cold out, you know. All sorts of cold out there for the likes of me. Best place to be, I think.” He jerked his head at the closed door. “Not very welcoming, though, these days. Bit cold in here, too.”
Orisian rapped on the door.
“I am resting,” Yvane shouted from within.
“Not true,” whispered Hammarn. “She’s not been sleeping, not restful at all. I know. She told me.”
“Let us come and talk with you,” Orisian said through the thick door. “You’d be doing us a favour. We need a hiding place to avoid a tiresome feast.”
“Who’s we?” Yvane asked, each word thick with suspicion.
“Me and Anyara. And Hammarn. Surely you don’t mean to leave him sitting outside this door all night?”
There was an extended silence. Orisian shrugged at Anyara, noting the frown of irritation that had already settled on his sister’s brow. He hoped that she and Yvane could resist the urge to set about one another, but even if they didn’t it could hardly be more unpleasant than Aewult nan Haig’s company.
“No one else, then,” Yvane called by way of grudging permission.
Hammarn clapped Orisian roughly on the shoulder.
“Very persuasive,” he grinned. “Always thought you stood most high in the lady’s affections. Mind you… not sure she has affections, in truth.”
Yvane was sitting in a broad bed, propped up against some voluminous pillows. She looked tired. Her eyes, almost as perfectly grey as a Kyrinin’s, were sluggish. Her reddish brown hair had lost some of its former sheen.
Hammarn went straight to the side of her bed and held out the piece of wood he had been carving. Yvane had to reach clumsily across her body to take it: her nearer arm was still weak, having been skewered by a crossbow bolt during their escape from Koldihrve
“Made you a woodtwine, dear lady,” said Hammarn. “Of Kulkain’s first entry into Kolkyre as Thane, you’ll see. He has Alban of Ist Norr in chains there, if you look close. Bit crude, perhaps. Not my finest.”
“It’s a welcome gift in any case, Hammarn,” Yvane said. Orisian often thought she exhibited far more patience and gentleness in her dealings with Hammarn than with anyone else. It was almost as if she expended all her limited stores of those sentiments on the old na’kyrim, leaving none for anyone else.
“How are you feeling?” Orisian asked.
“How should I be feeling? I’m stuck at the top of a tower in Kolkyre – where they burned na’kyrim, by the way, before Grey Kulkain came to power. My right arm’s all but useless because some madman, or madwoman for all I know, took it into their head to shoot me with a crossbow. And my head feels like it’s full of woodpeckers, chipping away at the inside of my skull trying to get out.”
“No better, then?” Anyara asked. Yvane scowled at her.
Orisian noted a tray of food lying apparently forgotten on a table by the shuttered window. He held a hand over the bowl of soup. It had gone cold.
“Don’t tell me you’re refusing food as well?” he said.
“I’ve no appetite,” Yvane muttered.
“Nothing’s changed?” Orisian asked, seating himself on the end of the bed. “In the Shared, I mean?”
“No.” Yvane started to fold her arms, but winced and thought better of it. “No change.”
“That’s true, that’s true,” said Hammarn. “The taint can’t enter this quiet head, can’t stir the thoughts in this bucket.” He rapped his knuckles against his forehead. “But even Hammarn can smell its stink.”
“There you are, you see,” said Yvane as if Hammarn’s words explained everything. It took a long questioning look from Orisian to induce her to say anything more. “It’s like a never-ending echo. That first night we spent in this town, the… the howl that filled the Shared, that woke me; it’s the echo of that. Anger, pain, bitterness, all mixed up, all inside my head. And none of it mine.”
“Not good, not good,” murmured Hammarn. He was pacing up and down now, his hands clasped behind his back.
“Couldn’t have put it better myself,” Yvane said.
“Not yours,” Anyara said. “His, then? Aeglyss?”
“I’ve told you: I can’t be certain.”
“But you think it’s him, don’t you?” Anyara persisted. “Anger, pain, bitterness. That’s how Inurian talked about what he saw inside Aeglyss.”
Yvane sighed and looked down at Hammarn’s woodtwine where it lay in her lap.
“I don’t know,” she said wearily. “I only glimpsed the edges of whatever it was that Inurian saw. But yes, it might be him. If it is. .. well, if he’s still in league with the Black Road I think they might be in for a nasty surprise. It’s frightening to think what it must be like inside his head now, if his is the sickness that’s afflicting the Shared.”
Hammarn had paused by the window, and pulled back one of the shutters.
“Look,” he murmured. “Little fires.”
Orisian joined him and looked down onto the dark gardens beneath them. A few torches were burning there, their bearers arrayed in a circle. In their orange light, two men, naked to the waist, were wrestling on the grass. Orisian could hear shouts of encouragement from the onlookers, made soft and faint by distance and the breeze.
It was probably Aewult’s men, absenting themselves from the feast, hot with drink and the prospect of battle. They had an angry, arrogant hunger for revelry, the thousands of warriors the Bloodheir had brought north with him. They were barred from leaving their great camps outside the city except in small groups, but Orisian had already heard, from Rothe, rumours of thievery and drunkenness within Kolkyre. They took their mood from Aewult, perhaps, and there seemed to be nothing gentle in him.
“Lovely friends we have,” Anyara said, looking over Orisian’s shoulder.
“We can only hope our enemies justify our allies,” Orisian murmured. He turned thoughtfully back towards Yvane.
“You can find out whether it’s Aeglyss, can’t you?” he asked her.
The na’kyrim winced. He could see that she knew what he meant, and that her reluctance was instinctive. Her hand rose defensively, unconsciously towards her injured shoulder.
“You’ve said that whatever’s happening in the Shared is… dangerous,” he persisted. “You’ve said it might be Aeglyss. Don’t we need to know? He hounded Inurian to his death. He helped the Inkallim take Kolglas. He’s our enemy. One of them, at least.”
“You wouldn’t ask that if you understood,” Yvane said. “No reason why you should, of course. Last time I reached out through the Shared to Aeglyss, he drove me off. It… hurt.”
“I know. But…” Orisian reached for words, finding nothing to quite express what he felt. “Something’s changed. You’ve said it yourself. We – no – you might be the only person here who can say what it is.”
“It’s like an ocean, the Shared,” Yvane said. She was unusually passive. Distant. “What’s in it now is… poison. You’re asking me to swim out into a poisoned sea; breathe its waters.”
“Only to arm ourselves against our enemies. To know what we face. Aewult and his thousands of warriors: they think they’re the answer to every question. They think nothing else matters. Maybe they’re wrong.”
“If I do it,” muttered Yvane, recovering a touch of her customary bristle, “it’ll be for me. It’ll be because Inurian was a wise man who probably didn’t deserve to die, and because he saw threat in Aeglyss. Not for Thanes or Bloodheirs or armies; not to help you Huanin kill each other in ever greater numbers.”
“You will do it, then?” Anyara said, with a soft smile.
The three of them watched in silence while Yvane willed herself into slumber: Hammarn sitting nervously on the end of the bed, Orisian and Anyara leaning against the frame of the window. There was nothing obviously amiss with the sleep into which Yvane fell. Her face slackened, her eyelids trembled minutely. She looked gentle in her repose, as she never quite did when awake.
Orisian watched intently, aware that for all the apparent mundanity of the scene he was witnessing something remarkable. Yvane was right, of course, when she said he did not understand this. No human could. The Shared was the sole preserve of na’kyrim. He did not envy them that. Few of the mighty na’kyrim of legend, who wielded great powers drawn from the Shared, had profited by it in the end. While they lived, though, they had done enough harm to make those of his own time outcasts, feared and loathed as much for the mystery they embodied as for the mixed blood that ran in their veins. If the Shared was a gift, it came at a heavy price.
Yvane made soft sounds. Hammarn was growing nervous, fidgeting. The muffled noise of laughter and cheering rose up from outside. Neither Orisian nor Anyara looked round. Yvane held their attention.
Her head rolled slowly to one side. One of her hands opened, splaying itself out on the bed sheet. Hammarn stood up and edged closer to the window, though never taking his eyes off Yvane.
“Not sure,” he whispered. “Not sure.”
“Not sure of what?” Anyara asked.
The old na’kyrim shook his head sharply. “Feels… Not sure.”
There was a tremor in Yvane’s shoulders. Her breaths were coming faster and faster, turning into a faint panting.
“Is something wrong?” Orisian asked, pushing himself away from the wall. “Hammarn, is something wrong?” If Yvane came to harm in this endeavour, he knew that much of the blame would be his to bear.
Hammarn did not seem to have heard him.
“No,” breathed Yvane. Her eyes were still closed, but her head was lifting now, coming away from the pillow. “That is not my name. I am not her.”
“We should wake her,” said Anyara, stepping towards the bed.
“No,” snapped Yvane, much louder this time. Orisian could see the muscles in her pale neck, strung taut as a bowstring. Her hands were bunching into fists. A shiver ran down Orisian’s spine.
Hammarn was sinking down to the floor, shaking. A faint moan escaped his lips.
Yvane pressed her head and shoulders back against the wall. Her eyes snapped open. Orisian saw alarm in them. He moved to go to her side, but before he had taken more than a couple of strides Hammarn was yelping and scrambling towards the corner of the room.
“He’s here!” Hammarn cried. He twisted his head violently round and down, as if averting his eyes from some horrifying sight.
“Go,” Yvane rasped. “Go.” She was staring fixedly towards the door. Orisian and Anyara, standing side by side, looked that way. There was nothing: the plain wood of the door, the grey stonework of the walls. Nothing.
“I am not the one you seek,” Yvane said.
Orisian’s skin was crawling. The air was suddenly thick in his throat, the light fading around the edges of his vision. He put a hand on Anyara’s arm, as much to stave off the dizzying sense of disorientation that beset him as anything. Shadows seemed to be… moving, shifting. He believed, in that moment, that there was something in the room with them. Something he could not see, or hear, but something that nevertheless had a weight, a presence.
“Leave me. Leave us.” Yvane spat the words out. Fear and anger and insistence swelled her voice.
Anyara swayed against Orisian. He glanced at her, and saw beads of sweat on her brow, her eyelids sagging. He put an arm around her. Something unseen, intangible, was constricting his chest.
Then, without warning, it was gone. He breathed again, deeply. Anyara stiffened and straightened at his side. The tension ran out of Yvane’s frame. Her shoulders sagged and she put her good hand to the side of her head, pressing briefly against her skull as if fighting off an ache.
“I will be listening to your suggestions with much less sympathy in future,” the na’kyrim murmured.
“What happened?” Orisian asked.
“I turned stupid. That’s what happened.”
Hammarn unfolded himself out of the corner and hurried to Yvane’s side. He regarded her with acute concern.
“Gone, though?” he whispered. “Gone? And you safe, lady? Safe and well.”
Yvane smiled at him. Orisian noted the fragility of that smile; its weary, almost sad tone.
“He’s gone, my friend,” Yvane said, and turned to Orisian. “The Shared’s a seething pit, and Aeglyss is the snake in its depths. I should have turned away, but… I was so close. I looked upon him. It might have been… I can’t be sure. Perhaps there were Kyrinin there. He might be amongst the White Owls.”
She closed her eyes, wrinkled her brow. The rawness of the memory was plain in her face.
“Whatever he’s become, it’s far beyond me. He had hold of me at once. But didn’t know me.” She grunted. “Thought I was someone else. And when I pulled away, came rushing back to myself, he followed. He couldn’t do that before.” She stared at Orisian. “He’s learning new tricks.”
“He didn’t harm you, though,” Orisian said quietly. “Did he?”
Yvane shook her head just once. “He’s got ten – a hundred – times my strength in the Shared, but he doesn’t know how to use it. Not yet. He’s wild, half-mad. Still, I’ll not be trying it again. Next time, I wouldn’t get back; not unless he’s the slowest learner the world has ever seen.”
“At least we know it’s him now,” Anyara said. She spoke much more gently than was her wont, almost hesitant. “For sure, I mean. We – you – learned that much.”
“That much, and a little more. He thought I was someone else, and when that thought was in him, I felt such… need. Such longing. There’s someone he’s searching for, someone he longs for, and her name is K’rina.”
Ammen Lyre dar Kilkry-Haig had learned many things from his father, Ochan. He had learned that a clever man need not be subject to the same rules and restrictions as others; that the weak made themselves victims by virtue of their shortcomings; that a father might love daughters easily but would only love a son who fought for, and earned, that affection.
A year ago, not long after Ammen’s thirteenth birthday, he had been cornered in a Kolkyre alleyway by two youths. They had good cause. While out that night carrying messages for Ochan, Ammen had found a man sprawled in the middle of a narrow, dark street. The reek of drink was as strong as he had ever smelled. Groping through the man’s clothes, Ammen was disappointed to find not a single coin, but the sot did wear a fine little knife on his belt, a blade with a horn handle and a decorated scabbard of good leather. Ammen unbuckled the belt and slid the knife off, complete with sheath. As he straightened, glancing up and down the silent street, the drunken man suddenly cried out and grabbed at Ammen’s sleeve.
Surprised rather than alarmed, Ammen tried to pull away, but the man’s grip was much stronger than seemed reasonable. He rolled onto his side, shouting incoherently, pulling so hard at Ammen’s arm that the boy almost fell to his knees. Ammen kicked him as hard as he could in the face. The man wailed and relinquished his hold. Ammen wasted another moment in stamping ineffectually on his hand and then walked away. This was one of the many small pieces of advice – all of it seeming the greatest, fiercest wisdom to Ammen – that his father had imparted: a running man is more obvious than a painted dancing girl in a room full of fishwives. So if you want to avoid notice, walk.
On that night a year ago, the advice had failed. Ammen had covered less than two dozen paces before he’d heard angry shouts behind him. Two young men had come out from one of the shabby houses that lined the street, leaving its door open to spill feeble lamplight into the night. One crouched by the drunken, groaning figure on the ground; the other was staring after Ammen. The two youths exchanged a few curt words – enough to tell Ammen that the man he had robbed was their father – and then the chase was on.
Ammen knew the streets around Kolkyre’s harbour as well as anyone. It was his father’s territory, and thus his. But his pursuers had longer legs, and they were driven by powerful indignation. They ran him down in no time, and he turned at bay in a tight, lightless alley that stank of fish guts. Afterwards, turning the treasured memory of those moments over and over in his mind, he was proud that even then, with the two burly youths bearing down on him and shouting their fury in his face, he had not felt fear. Their anger made them careless: in the deep darkness of that alleyway they did not see Ammen draw their own father’s knife from its scabbard. He slashed the first one across the face and was rewarded with a piercing howl of shock and the sight of his assailant reeling away. There was no time to savour the victory, for the second closed and Ammen took a stunning blow to his head. The crunching sound and the splash of blood over his lips told him that his nose was broken, but he was so dazed by the impact that he felt only a numbness that spread across his cheeks. He fell, and his attacker threw himself down on top of him, fumbling for the hand that held the knife. Ammen never could remember exactly what happened then, but he knew that he stabbed the young man more than once. He might not have killed him, for the blade was short and his strength faltering. It was enough, though. Ammen staggered to his feet and ran, rather unsteadily, for home.
Ochan’s pleasure on hearing of the incident lit a glow of pride and joy in Ammen’s heart.
“Keep that blade close by you,” his father had laughed. “It’d be wrong to sell something that’s served you so well. We’ll call you Ammen Sharp now, shall we? The little boy who grew a tooth.”
So Ammen became Ammen Sharp, and treasured the name. Having borne it for a year now, it felt as much his true name as any other. Only Ochan called him by it; his mother and sisters remained ignorant of its origins. Being a secret shared only by Ammen and his father, it had become that much more precious to the boy.
He was with Ochan, watching as his father sorted through a pile of trinkets, when his cousin Malachoir – one of the numerous distant relatives who served Ochan as thieves, runners, watchers, guards – poked his head nervously around the door. Ochan was engrossed, minutely examining each bauble and bracelet for any sign that it might have some true value.
Ammen had no idea where this little hoard had come from, and the question had not occurred to him. From his earliest years he had understood and accepted that goods and materials of every imaginable kind appeared in his father’s possession and then, just as abruptly and inexplicably, disappeared once more.
Malachoir cleared his throat.
“What?” snapped Ochan without looking up. He disliked interruption.
“Urik’s here,” the cousin reported. “He wants to see you.”
“What does that mudhead want?”
“He won’t tell us. Says he needs to talk to you. Says there’ll not be another chance if you won’t talk to him now.”
With a snarl of displeasure Ochan let a copper brooch fall from his hands.
“I pay that man so I never have to see him, not so that he can visit me in my house. It looks bad to have a Wardcaptain of the Guard showing up on my doorstep. Attracts attention.”
“Well, he was hooded when he came. And he did come to the kitchen door, not-”
“Enough, enough,” Ochan grunted. “Get him in here.”
The man who entered was short and broad-shouldered, a stocky little bull. He wore a voluminous rain-cape that concealed any hint of his standing as a member of Kolkyre’s Guard. Narrow, dark eyes darted from side to side as he edged into Ochan’s presence.
“Look at that, look at that,” said Ochan to his son. “Our very own Wardcaptain come to test our hospitality.”
Ammen smiled, and then tried to fill the gaze he turned on Urik with suitable contempt. He knew this man was useful – important, even – to his father, but knew as well that he merited nothing in the way of respect.
“Don’t puff yourself up too much, Ochan,” Urik growled. “I’ve come here to warn you, not amuse you.”
“Warn me? Warn me?” Ammen felt a shiver of anticipation at the tone in his father’s voice. He knew it well. It presaged anger, danger, violence. When he was younger, Ammen had soon learned its perilous implications. Urik evidently did not recognise it, or did not care.
“Yes, warn you,” he snapped. “And I needn’t have come, so don’t think you can-”
Ochan was up and out of his seat in a single smooth movement, lashing a long arm across the table to seize the collar of Urik’s cape. He pulled the Guardsman’s face close to his own.
“I think I can do as I like in my own house, don’t you, Urik?”
Urik hesitated for only a moment before nodding. Ochan released him and sank back into his chair. He had knocked some of his piled trinkets to the ground, and flicked a finger at them.
“Pick ’em up, boy,” he said to Ammen, who obeyed at once, going down beneath the table on his hands and knees.
“What is it you think you’re warning me about, then?” he heard his father asking.
“That your luck’s run out, that’s what. You’ve been named for taking. The Guard’ll be looking for you tomorrow. It’ll be me, as like as not.”
“You?” roared Ochan. He sprang to his feet once more. His chair tumbled backwards, one of the legs rapping Ammen’s hip as it went. “You? Is it that I’m not paying you enough, Urik? Is that it? You’ve got yourself a hunger for more of my hard-won coin. That’s what this is about, is it?”
Ammen stuck his head up above the level of the table, not wanting to miss such excitement. Urik had shrunk back towards the door, holding up both his hands as if he could fend off Ochan’s anger.
“No, no,” the Wardcaptain insisted. “It’s nothing to do with that. I don’t want a thing more from you, Ochan. Not now, not ever. You don’t understand. This isn’t us, it’s not the Guard. The word’s come down from higher places, from the Tower of Thrones itself. You’re to be taken and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Nothing.”
“Then what use are you to me?” hissed Ochan as he edged around the table. “I’ll have back every coin I’ve passed into your stinking, fat little hands all these years.”
“But I’m here, I’m here, aren’t I? I’m here to give you the chance to disappear.”
“Oh, yes, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? If they take me, your name’ll be the first to spill from these lips, Urik. You’ll join me in whatever cell they’ve got in mind for me, or under the headtaker’s axe.”
“Ochan, please…” Ammen grinned to hear such a note of pleading in the voice of this man who held high office in the city’s Guard. “Please don’t think such things. I’ve taken my life in my hands just coming here to warn you. If I could turn them aside from your trail, don’t you think I’d do it? Haven’t I done it often enough before? No, this is beyond me, far beyond me. Your only chance is to take yourself off somewhere you’ll not be found.”
Ochan the Cook rushed forward and drove the Wardcaptain back against the wall. He pinned the small man’s shoulders to the stone.
“It’s the Shadowhand,” Urik cried. “They say it’s his command that you be taken. Sweet Gods, what could I do in the face of that? Nothing! Nothing!”
Ammen rose quietly to his feet. His father was silent and still, staring into Urik’s fearful face. Ammen had heard of the Shadowhand, of course: the Tal Dyreen who whispered in the High Thane’s ear.
Ochan released his grip on Urik’s shoulders and stepped back, deep in thought. The Wardcaptain shook himself and resettled his cape about him.
“You must find a hiding place, Ochan. Take yourself away from here. You’ve family in Ive, haven’t you? Or better yet, you could take to the Vare: no one would find you there.”
“You want me to hide away amongst masterless men like some common cutpurse?” Ochan growled. “Don’t insult me. You must be wrong, anyway. Why would the Shadowhand care about me?”
“How would I know?” snapped Urik in exasperation. “I’m only telling you what I’ve been told. The order came through the High Thane’s Steward, but I heard he used the Shadowhand’s name to nail it in place. That’s all I know, and if you’ve any sense it’ll be enough. Disappear, for a while at least. Maybe the clouds will clear once all this trouble with the Black Road is done and the Shadowhand is back in Vaymouth.”
“Get out,” muttered Ochan, turning his back on the Wardcaptain. Urik did not hesitate to obey.
Ochan righted his chair and slumped back onto it, his eyes fixed on the knotted surface of the table. He ignored his son, and the heap of baubles that had so recently been the subject of such close scrutiny. Ammen drifted towards the door on soft feet.
“Time to visit your cousins in Skeil Anchor, perhaps,” Ochan said quietly. “Better there than anywhere Urik might think of. But the Shadowhand can’t truly be after my blood, can he? I can’t have trodden on feet big enough to set him after me.”
He beckoned Ammen closer. He draped a strong, long arm around the boy’s shoulders.
“A miserable place, Skeil Anchor; wet and windy. But we’d not be looked for there. Not for a while, anyway. You’ll come with me, boy.”
Ammen grinned.
“But you tell everyone we’re going to Ive,” warned Ochan, jabbing a wet finger at him. “Your mother, your sisters, anyone who asks. You understand?”
Ammen nodded eagerly.
“The Shadowhand?” Ochan muttered. “Can’t be right. I’ll have that Urik’s guts if he’s lying about this. But then… there was… what was his name? Can’t remember. The one I got Urik to pick up. He was from Vaymouth, wasn’t he?” He looked up abruptly, his stare fixing on the wall in front of him. His arm fell away from Ochan’s shoulder. “Gods, he couldn’t have been Torquentine’s man, could he? It couldn’t be that fat slug who’s…” He lapsed into a pensive silence.
“Are we going now?” Ammen asked cautiously.
“Tomorrow, early. There’s one or two men I’ll need to talk to before we go. No telling how long we might be gone. But we’ll not stay here tonight. I know the watchmen on Polochain’s warehouse by the quay. You head down there after dark. Tell them I sent you. I’ll find you there, once I’ve done what needs doing.”
Ammen Sharp packed a travelling bag, and while he did so a smile broke unbidden across his face again and again. Tomorrow he and his father would be on the road together. Ammen was pleased and proud: his sisters would never be invited to share in this part of Ochan’s life. When his mother asked what was happening, Ammen told her they were going to Ive, and thought nothing of the lie.
He put his precious knife on his belt; crammed his wooden whistle into the pack, and his steel and flint, waterskin, stubby candles and the little crossbow he used to shoot seagulls from the rooftops.
It would be at least a full day’s journey to Skeil Anchor, more likely two now that the nights were stretching. If he was lucky, there might be bad weather to delay them, force them to hole up in a wayside inn; give him more time to be alone with his father, his sole companion in adventure.
V
Glasbridge was a carcass of a town, its heart torn out by the flood waters of the Glas. The river had shrunk back into its old channel many days ago but there were still slicks of filthy water, knee-deep mud and piles of debris all through the once-busy streets. Most of the houses closest to the river had been cast down by the torrent; only a few that had been built of stone survived and even they were gutted and crumbling. The waves along the seafront lapped heavily, burdened by the flotsam that had been spewed out into the sea by the flood. And by bodies. Even now, the sea was still returning a few corpses each day to the city. They bobbed like bloated sacks along the harbour, pale and putrid.
Most of what the waters had not ruined, fire had claimed. Everywhere the black shells of buildings and their smoke-stained walls told a tale of destruction. The Black Road conquerors of Glasbridge had been too few in number to control the inferno once they had set it loose, and had been disinclined to make the effort. The town could be rebuilt if fate and fortune allowed them the opportunity. For now, all that mattered was that the remnants of the Lannis Blood’s warriors could not gather here, and the other Haig Bloods could not use the harbour to bring spear-forested ships ashore.
Few people – the old, the very young, the sick and infirm – could be seen out on the ravaged streets, scrabbling amidst the rubble in search of food, clothing or lost relatives. They shared their search with the dogs and seagulls and crows that fought over every scrap of food. Many bodies were still hidden beneath the wreckage. Packs of dogs dug them out; they and the carrion birds and rats consumed them.
It was snowing as Kanin oc Horin-Gyre rode into Glasbridge. Big, fat flakes drifted like the seed-heads of countless winter flowers. They were blanketing the whole Glas valley, concealing its scars. Without any wind to drive them the flakes bobbed down in a lazy dance.
Kanin’s horse trod carefully along the city street, stepping over the shattered remains of a trader’s barrow. Like every one of the forty warriors who rode behind him, the Horin-Gyre Thane was hunched down against the weather. He wore a thick woollen cloak, looted from Koldihrve. The snow had piled up on his shoulders. Only his hands, protected by thick gauntlets, emerged from beneath the cloak to clutch the reins. The band of warriors came into Glasbridge silently. This had been the home of their Horin forebears before the Black Road’s exile, yet they showed no jubilation at its recapture after so long. Kanin’s mood defined that of those who followed him, and his had been grim for many days now.
The riders came to the place where a fine stone bridge had, until the town’s ruin, vaulted across the broad channel of the Glas. Now only the stubs of the bridge remained, jutting out from either bank. The water flowing between those banks was turbid and dark. The river was still carrying vast amounts of soil that it had stripped from the fields upstream of Glasbridge. Workers had already thrown a makeshift crossing over it, laying rows of planks across a series of small, flat barges.
Half a dozen spearmen appeared from out of the snow. They challenged the riders. Kanin shrugged back the hood of his cloak, scattering snowflakes, and scowled at them.
“Do you not know your own Thane?” he growled.
The spearmen bowed their heads, begged forgiveness.
“Where is my sister?” Kanin asked.
Reunion with Wain lifted Kanin’s spirits for a time at least. He embraced her, held her shoulders with his great gloved hands. Around them, in the yard of a wheelwright’s abandoned workshop, his weary band dismounted and stood by their horses. The thick snow was crusting the animals’ manes.
“I’d not thought to see you for a time yet,” Wain said to her brother.
“We rode hard,” he replied, examining her features with a keen eye. “I looked for you at Sirian’s Dyke. I did not think you would be camped in Glasbridge already.”
Wain glanced away. “The Dyke was broken. That eased our path.”
Kanin already knew the tale of the breaking of Sirian’s Dyke, and the flood that had swept the road to Glasbridge clean of Lannis warriors and cracked open the town’s defences; it had been on the lips of everyone they had met since they had descended out of the Car Criagar. He did not need to hear Wain say it to know that she resented the glory Shraeve and her Inkallim had won for themselves by destroying that great dam. Horin-Gyre and the Battle Inkall would never be the easiest of allies, and in the case of Wain and Shraeve mistrust was sharpened to active dislike.
“Let’s get out of this,” Kanin said, gesturing towards the snow-filled sky. “It’s been snowing or raining on me from the moment I left Koldihrve. I’ve had enough of it.”
“What happened, then?” Wain asked once they had settled in front of the fire in the absent wheelwright’s house. “I know it cannot have been all that you hoped, or you’d have told me already.”
A young girl – orphaned or abandoned in the chaos of Glasbridge’s fall and now pressed into service by Wain – brought them bread and bowls of mutton stew. There were ugly burns on the backs of her hands, a legacy of the conflagration that had come after the flood. Kanin tore the bread into chunks and dipped them in the unappetising stew.
“We cornered the Lannis children in Koldihrve. The boy and the girl were both there. I had…” He stretched a hand out towards Wain, closing his fist on air. “I had him within my reach, as close as you are now. But they escaped us. A Tal Dyreen trading ship carried them away.”
“You’ve got yourself a trophy, I see,” Wain said with a nod at Kanin’s brow.
The Thane put a hand to the long, half-healed cut there.
“A woodwight broke her bow on my head,” he muttered. “I’d’ve had the Lannis-Haig brat otherwise. I was so close, Wain. So close.” He shook his head.
“It’s done,” his sister said. “There’s no point in regretting fate’s path.”
Kanin made a vague effort at a smile. Wain’s resilience, her steadfast adherence to the creed, had always been a staff he could lean on. He knew she was right, and that he should mimic her calmness in the face of misfortune, but it had never come as easily to him. He had promised his father that the Lannis-Haig line would be extinguished. If fate would not permit him to fulfil that promise, he could not help but regret the fact.
“What of the White Owls?” Wain asked. “Cannek claims his Hunt Inkallim have seen bands of them coming back out of the Car Criagar these last few nights, crossing the valley.”
Kanin shrugged. “I stayed clear of the wights as much as I could. They fought the Fox at Koldihrve. Won, I think, but I didn’t linger. How do things stand here?”
“At our high tide. We’ve reached the outermost limit of what is possible. I’ve less than a thousand swords left.”
Kanin rubbed his eyes. It had been far too long since he had slept properly. Even now, beside a vigorous fire, he could still feel the cold and damp of the Dihrve valley and the high Car Criagar in his limbs; in his heart, almost.
“No word from Tanwrye?”
“It is held against us still.”
“And Ragnor oc Gyre has not seen fit to march to our aid?”
“There has been no reply to our messages.”
“We’re spent, then.” Kanin set aside his bowl and stared at the dancing flames. “As you say, it’s the high tide of our good fortune.”
“Shraeve has set the townsfolk to building a ditch and dyke across the road from Kolglas.”
Kanin grunted. “She thinks we can hold the road against all the armies of Kilkry-Haig? With a thousand swords?”
“Who knows what she thinks? She tells me nothing any more. It hardly matters. Fate has given us this much; no more or less.” Wain’s eyes, as she regarded her brother, were clear, placid. “It would not break my heart to come to the end of my Road here, like this. The Book of Lives has been as kind to us as we could have hoped, has it not? And we have followed the course it laid out for us willingly. Nothing more could be asked of us.”
Kanin had wanted more. He had wanted their victories to be only the first, opening the way for all the armies of the other Bloods; he had wanted the Lannis line extinguished, in the name of his father. He had wanted to be able to die without regrets. Was that desire truly such a failing?
Wain put more wood on the fire: the spokes of a cartwheel that would never be made.
“I am minded to wait here,” she said quietly. “Wait for our enemies to come and face us. I do not think we are fated, you and I, to limp back to Hakkan and die in our beds. If I’m right in that, I will die content.”
Kanin stared at the orange heart of the fire. He had no great longing to see Hakkan again. It would be a poor kind of ending to struggle back across the Vale of Stones, defeated. More life would be no great boon after that.
“Yes,” he murmured. “Content.”
He wanted it to be true, but his heart remained uneasy.
The next morning was overcast. The snow had stopped in the night, and soon after dawn a thaw of sorts had begun. Kanin and Wain went out on the road south along the coast, at the head of thirty riders. Puddles lay all along the track. The sea lapped against the rocks and stony strands that lined the shore. Streams ran gurgling through culverts under the road, hastened by melt water.
They found Shraeve a little way outside Glasbridge. She and two dozen of her Inkallim were watching while enslaved townsfolk laboured. A ditch had been cut from the top of a shingle beach, across the road and on for two hundred or more paces inland to a rocky, wooded spur.
Running his eyes over the crowds of sullen labourers, and the low bund they were piling up with spoil from the ditch, Kanin recognised that Shraeve had chosen a good place for her works. Inland, low wooded hills and hummocks – outliers of the great mass of Anlane, further to the south – would hamper any marching army and provide ample opportunities for ambush. Anyone seeking to enter the Glas valley would have no choice but to attempt that rough ground or fight their way over Shraeve’s barrier.
“It’s as good a place as any to make a stand,” Igris, leader of Kanin’s Shield, muttered.
“It would be, if we had the strength to hold it,” Kanin said, and nudged his horse on.
Shraeve herself was standing atop the rampart of sodden earth. She had her back to them as Kanin and his company drew near, her two sheathed swords crossed over her spine. He noticed that Wain drifted away, allowing her horse to slow and veer down onto the shore. Another sign, he assumed, that her patience with the ravens of the Battle was exhausted.
Shraeve turned. She looked down on Kanin with unreadable eyes.
“Welcome back, Thane.”
“You have been busy,” he said, encompassing the length of the embankment with a sweep of his arm.
She nodded. “We have many hands to put to the task, unwilling as they are.”
“What will prevent them riding around your little wall, when they come?” he asked, indicating the wooded rising ground to the left. “It may be difficult for them, but we haven’t the numbers to stop them.”
“I will settle for making it difficult,” Shraeve said, with a hint of contempt. “I expect nothing more than to make the attempt, and let fate decide. Have you come to tell me that is not enough for you? Do you mean to crawl back into the north?”
There was nothing new in her arrogance, Kanin thought – that was, after all, an attribute shared by every one of the Inkallim – but she had acquired a brazen, confrontational energy. Wain had warned him that since Anduran, Shraeve had been growing ever more assertive, more willing to challenge any authority that was not her own.
“No,” he said, “that is not what I came to tell you, Shraeve.”
He pointed at a nearby woman, struggling to carry a small collection of rocks cradled in her arms, slipping on the mud facing of the bank.
“These people are mine. Glasbridge is mine. These are Horin-Gyre lands, and this is a Horin-Gyre war, unless and until Ragnor oc Gyre claims it for his own. So, I thank you for your efforts in breaking this ground and raising this wall, but you may leave the task to us now. We will finish it. We will hold it.”
Shraeve glared at him. She was fierce, this raven, but Kanin was resolute. If there was to be no glorious and lasting triumph in all of this, he could at least ensure that the glory of honest, faithful defeat belonged to Horin-Gyre. His Blood had earned that much.
The Inkallim sprang nimbly down from the bund and stood beside Kanin’s horse. She clapped her hands together, shaking dirt from them; she must have been digging and building herself.
“As you wish. From the Children of the Hundred to the Horin-Gyre Blood, this ditch, this bank: a gift. Finish it quickly, Thane. The Hunt killed scouts creeping up from Kolglas in the night.”
She waved an arm above her head and began walking back up the road towards Glasbridge. From all along the length of the embankment, the other Inkallim silently left their posts and began to follow her.
“At least you will not have to hold it for long,” Shraeve called over her shoulder.
“What does that mean?” Kanin shouted after her as Wain rode up from the beach to his side.
“Have you not heard? Your messengers must be slow. The Battle is marching, coming to join you. The air about your head will be thick with ravens soon. We will see then, Kanin oc Horin-Gyre, whose war this is.”
Stone walls ringed Tanwrye, and from them ramparts curved out across the southern entrance to the Stone Vale like the outstretched fingers of a monitory hand. Their turrets, battlements and ditches blocked almost all the width of the pass. Tiny outlying forts studded the hillsides around, sentinels to watch over the track and the turbulent river that ran side by side out of the north. It was a formidable defence, and more than once it had proved itself against the Black Road. This time it was being tested to its limits. Most of the outer ramparts, and all of the isolated fortlets, had already fallen.
Iavin Helt dar Lannis-Haig was cold, down to the marrow of his bones. He had been at his post on the north tower of Tanwrye’s wall since not long after nightfall. It had been snowing for most of that time. Winterbirth was long gone, and the peaks within sight of Tanwrye had been cloaked in their white winter vestments for days. Iavin hunched his shoulders, pushing the fur collar of his cape up around his ears. His hunger made it all worse. Staring out at the fires of the Black Road army, he could not help but wonder whether the besiegers fared as poorly as Tanwrye’s defenders. By rights they should be even hungrier, colder and wearier than Iavin and his comrades, but in all the weeks of the siege there had been no sign of a weakening in the will of their enemy. Rather, it was Lannis-Haig hearts that were flagging.
The shortage of food was not the only thing grinding spirits down. Sickness was prowling the town, picking off the youngest and the oldest, the weak and the wounded. The youth who had shared Iavin’s watch since the siege began had died just two nights gone. Firewood was running short. Families were burning their chairs, their bed frames and roof timbers in their hearths.
The hardships of the mind were just as severe as those of the body. More than a week ago, just out of bowshot but within clear sight of the walls, a company of Horin-Gyre warriors had erected two huge poles. Spiked atop them were two heads: the heads, if the shouts of the enemy were to be believed, of Croesan, Thane of the Lannis-Haig Blood, and his son Naradin. Iavin could not be certain if it was true – his eyesight was not sharp enough to recognise those crow-pecked features at such a distance – but most within Tanwrye were inclined to believe it. After all, if Croesan still lived, he would have brought an army to their relief by now.
Iavin brushed snowflakes from his collar. An old woman had given him gloves – gloves that had once belonged to the husband the Heart Fever took from her, as it had taken both of Iavin’s parents – and without them he suspected his hands would have been too cold to hold his spear. He rolled his shoulders, trying to loosen the stiff muscles.
A point of light where there should have been none caught his eye. To the north, high up and far out in the heart of the Vale of Stones, a torch was burning. All else in that direction was utter darkness. There was no moonlight on this cloud-bound night. The yellowish fragment of fire bobbed like a solitary bright moth. Iavin blinked, suspicious that his cold and exhausted eyes were playing tricks. But the light remained, and one by one others appeared.
Iavin heard a muffled call from somewhere along the wall, and answering shouts. He was not imagining it, then. Others were seeing the same thing. Even as he watched, any last vestiges of doubt were dispelled. A long tongue of fire was slowly winding its way over a saddle in the pass. Scores of torches, carried by scores of hands, were coming south through the falling snow.
Horns sounded to call Tanwrye’s captains to the walls. There were signs of movement amongst the besieging army, too. Figures passed to and fro in front of the campfires, orders were shouted. And the torches flowing out of the Vale of Stones were in the hundreds now. Iavin watched the fiery river in a kind of numb amazement. It was almost beautiful, this vision of light and fire in the winter’s night; it would have been beautiful, had it not told him that death was coming for him, and for everyone in Tanwrye.
At dawn, they were still coming. Thousand upon thousand, company after company, the Black Road was flooding through the Vale of Stones. The rocky, snow-covered ground around Tanwrye was already thick with tents and with seething crowds. A constant rumble of noise drifted up and over the besieged town, like a never-ending peal of distant thunder.
Every warrior who could still walk had come to the walls to witness this gigantic assembly of their foe. Iavin Helt should have been resting by now, his watch long done, but nobody expected any rest today, unless it was the final, unending kind offered by the Sleeping Dark. He glanced down the line of grim-faced men that stretched along the top of the wall. There were not nearly enough of them to withstand the coming storm.
It was not only the number of these newly arrived foes that had stilled any hope in the hearts of Tanwrye’s defenders, but their nature. Sometime in the night, amidst that river of blazing torches out of the Stone Vale, the Battle Inkall had arrived. So many of their great raven standards were now visible in the heart of the enemy camp that older, more experienced men than Iavin had shaken their heads in disbelief and despair. Tanwrye’s garrison included some of the finest warriors the Lannis-Haig Blood could muster; not one of them thought himself a match for the ravens of the Battle Inkall.
Iavin’s stomach was knotted and growling. He could not tell whether it was hunger or fear. His throat felt tight, his mouth dry. His mind had emptied itself of thoughts, as if it too had been numbed by the night’s awful cold. Hidden behind heavy clouds, the sun climbed the sky. The day grew no warmer, the light no less subdued. Eventually, in the late morning, surges of movement spread through the Black Road camp. Like some great beast bestirring itself, the army rumbled into motion.
The assault was controlled, precise and overwhelming. It rolled on through the afternoon. The few stretches of outlying wall and palisade that had still been held by Tanwrye’s defenders were stormed one after another. A few survivors made it back to the main town walls; most of their comrades died at their posts.
Without pause, the Black Road host pressed closer and closer to the town. Beneath a sheltering cloud of crossbow bolts and arrows and stones, ladders were brought to the walls. So thick and relentless were the flights of missiles that those on the battlements who were not struck at once could only hunch down and press themselves against the stone, trying to ignore the cries and pleas of the less fortunate. Iavin, crouched low atop the tower, clenched his eyes shut. A hand was gripping his ankle. He knew it was an old man called Hergal, who had risen from his sickbed to come to the wall just that morning. He was already dead.
“Get up, get up!” someone was shouting.
It took a great effort of will, but Iavin opened his eyes and looked around.
Men were surging past him, going to meet a black-haired woman who was vaulting over the parapet. Her jerkin and breeches were dark leather, studded with metal. Iavin rose to his feet. It seemed absurd and impossible that the Inkallim – the infamous ravens of the Black Road – were here, within a few paces of where he stood. Hergal’s dead hand fell away from his ankle.
The woman ducked inside the first warrior’s blow, then drove upwards. She clamped one hand on his throat, stabbing her short sword into his stomach with the other. In a single movement she heaved the dying man backwards, knocking another warrior aside. She wrenched her sword free and spun to kick someone in the groin.
Iavin lunged at her with his spear. Her flank was exposed. He would strike her in the stomach, on the left side. He could see it happening, see her dying, in his mind’s eye. Yet she rolled away and the spearpoint glanced off her hip bone. Somehow – Iavin could not understand how – she turned so quickly that she had hold of his spear before he could recover. She was far stronger than he had ever imagined a woman could be. He let go of the spear and fled as more dark-haired figures spilled over the wall.
He ran blindly down from the tower and into the town, without a single glance back. A captain he did not know was gathering men beside a well. He seized Iavin’s arm, arresting his flight so abruptly that both of them almost fell.
“Stand your ground!” he shouted in Iavin’s face. “Arm yourself!”
Iavin reeled, his mind still a blur of noise and images. Someone thrust a short sword into his hand and he stared down at it. There was blood already on the blade.
“With me,” the captain was crying now, and Iavin was caught up in the rush and carried back towards the walls.
There was fighting on one of the ramps that slanted up to the battlements. No sign of Inkallim here, Iavin vaguely recognised as he pushed up with the others to join the fray. He fought against men who wore the ordinary woollen clothes of farmers or artisans, half of them armed with nothing more than clubs or small axes. The ramp was narrow, without the room for skill or precision. Iavin pushed and stabbed at whatever body appeared before him, concentrated only on not losing his footing on the incline. Time drifted.
There was a sharp blow on his head and for a moment he could see nothing. He could hear himself shouting, perhaps screaming, and felt some blade sliding across his arm and opening it. His sight leaked back as he was crushed against the low wall that bounded the ramp.
Then, “Back, back!” he heard.
The press of bodies shifted and swayed. Iavin was suddenly freed and he stumbled, slithering, down the ramp. He sprawled across a corpse and gagged at the corrupt stench of blood and opened guts. He scrambled to his feet and staggered off down the cobbled roadway. He was panting, heaving air into aching lungs. He could taste bile in the back of his mouth.
Iavin found himself in a small market square. He looked around. There were thirty or forty other warriors close by, some kneeling with spears and shields readied. A great block of sheds stood nearby. For the goats and sheep, Iavin remembered, that they bought and sold here. There was a massive stone-built hay barn, too. He was at the very heart of Tanwrye. There was nowhere else to fly to from here.
They came howling and boiling out from the side streets: Tarbain tribesmen, covered in bone and stone talismans. They swept up to the knot of Lannis-Haig warriors, flowed around it and embraced it like the flooding sea taking hold of a rocky outcrop. Iavin hacked and slashed. The clatter of weapons and stamping of feet, cries of horror and fury, all swelled and filled his ears. He felt blows against his arms and chest, flickers of pain carried away on the anger that seethed in him. Then on his side: a smack and a sudden numbness. He saw the blade darting back, saw a blur of his own blood. Darkness came rushing up, reached for him and flung its veil across his eyes.
Iavin still heard the terrible cacophony as he fell, but in a moment it too dissolved into the dark. His was only one amongst the many deaths on the day Tanwrye, the bastion so long believed to be impregnable, fell.
All through the Antyryn Hyr, the Thousand Tree-clad Valleys, the White Owls were moving. Messengers had gone out from the great vo’an at the heart of the forest, racing along the secret ways that Kyrinin feet had trodden for hundreds of years. From every one of the clan’s winter camps, they had summoned a spear a’an to come. So the White Owls ran beneath the leafless canopy of Anlane and a cloud-thick sky. They came silent and swift to answer the Voice’s call.
Five lifetimes ago, thousands of the White Owl had fought and died in the War of the Tainted. Only the Heron, Bull and Horse had fielded greater companies against the seething masses of humankind. The Huanin, who lived in a waking dream of their own splendour, might imagine that such strength was gone for ever. If so, they were misled by their own pride-fattened ignorance. The warband that had crossed into the Car Criagar to hunt Fox had been but a fraction of the clan’s spears. The vast deeps of the Thousand Tree-Clad Valleys held numbers unguessed by the Huanin. Many hundreds of warriors were on the move as the winter deepened and the first full snows of the season began to fall.
Rumours ran with the spear a’ans, twisting and thickening, feeding off one another. There was a na’kyrim, it was said, child of a long-dead White Owl mother. A man who had been on the clan’s Breaking Stone, the great boulder the Walking God had left behind, and – unthinkably, impossibly – had not died. Instead, the whisperers said, he had been changed. It was because of him, and because of what he had become, that the spears were now gathering.
The ground in front of the Voice’s lodge was hard and bare, sculpted by the touch of thousands of feet over many years. Song staffs, entwined with skulls and feathers and ivy, stood there. The people gathered before them, facing the lodge. The woven anhyne looked on from one side. The smoke of the ever-burning torkyr, the constant flame of the clan, drifted from behind the lodge.
Not all had gathered outside the Voice’s lodge, but many did. They came because they wanted to see and hear this na’kyrim who had stirred up such tumult; some because they thought this man must die before his presence caused more chaos, others because the scent of his power filled their hearts and minds with a febrile hope.
The na’kyrim lifted his head as he emerged from the lodge, casting his half-human eyes over the crowd. At the touch of that gaze, every man, woman and child felt a prickling of their skin, a drying in their throat. The na’kyrim was frail and drained, still ravaged by his long hours on the Breaking Stone, yet his presence was potent; arresting. It reached inside them, like an invisible hand.
He advanced slowly, carefully. The Voice came behind him. She walked with her head down.
Aeglyss took a great, deep breath as if flushing out his lungs with the clean air of the vo’an, the cleansing smoke of the torkyr. One of the kakyrin, the keepers of bones and stories and memories, stepped forwards from amongst the throng. He was an old man, the twofold kin’thyn tattoos on his face faded and weathered. His necklace of bone and owl feathers rustled as he walked. He stood in front of Aeglyss, but the na’kyrim ignored him.
“Is he not to be returned to the Breaking Stone, then?” the kakyrin enquired levelly. It was impossible to say whose answer he sought. He was examining Aeglyss through narrowed eyes.
“It’s not… I can’t be,” Aeglyss murmured.
“Is he mind-sick?” the kakyrin asked.
“Perhaps,” whispered the Voice. She took a few paces closer. “But it is a strange kind of mind-sickness. The Breaking Stone could not contain his spirit. Do you not feel it? He thickens the air with power. The White Owl have not had a child such as this in half a thousand years. Longer.”
“He betrayed us before. Made false promises. His words, his lies, they are more potent than anything you or I might utter. He can make nets out of words, to cast over our minds.”
“He says he was the one betrayed, by the Huanin of the Road. He says the false promises he made were made at their behest, and that he thought them to be true when he spoke them. The thought is in my mind that I believe him in this, and it is my own thought, unsnared in any net of his making.”
“You think he will give the clan back the strength it once had?”
“He may. We were mighty once, before the City fell. None then would have dared to steal our lands, fell our trees, drive our hunters from their summer grounds. We have been less than we were for a long time.”
The kakyrin sniffed. “As has every people, of every land.” He shook his head. His necklace rattled. “I see only a part-human whose mind has rotted.”
Aeglyss cupped the old man’s face in his hands. The kakyrin started backwards, but Aeglyss held him fast and the impulse to recoil seemed to fail almost before it had taken hold. The kakyrin began to groan. Aeglyss shook. His eyes rolled up slowly until the pupils were hidden.
“Do you see?” he rasped. “Do you see?”
The kakyrin ’s legs went slack. He slumped, only Aeglyss’s grip on his face keeping him from falling to the ground.
“Do you see?” Aeglyss demanded again, more distantly this time. The crowd of onlookers seethed; there were cries of anger, alarm.
“Release him,” the Voice said to Aeglyss, putting a hand on his arm. She spoke the words not as a command but softly.
Aeglyss blinked and looked down at the old woman, then at the man. His hands fell back to his sides. The kakyrin slumped to his knees, and swayed there.
“Have you harmed him?” the Voice asked.
“No,” breathed Aeglyss. “Not so much as you harmed me by placing me on the Stone. But I have forgiven you. Forgiven all of you.” He called it out loudly. “If I’ve been broken, it was only to be made afresh. Thus, I forgive you.”
“All the world,” the kakyrin was mumbling. “All the world.”
A warrior stepped out from the crowd, his spear levelled at Aeglyss, dark intent fixed in his eyes. The na’kyrim held him with a flashing, savage glare.
“You are my mother’s people,” cried Aeglyss, and the warrior shrank from the cry. “You are my people. My heart beats in time with yours, and whatever mistakes there have been in the past are done with now. Forgiven, forgotten. I am not as I was, and the White Owls shall not be as they were. Together we shall make such a beginning as the world has never seen. All things can change. If I will it.”
Children wailed in distant huts. The bravest of warriors felt tremors in their hands; the wisest of heads spun; the keenest of ears rang with endless echoes of anger and hunger.
“Have I not already given you the blood of the Fox to bathe your spears in? Has this not already been a bitter season for your enemies? More warriors now wear the kin’thyn than the clan has seen in a lifetime.”
There were cries of assent, some dazed, some eager. There was weeping too, in the great crowd.
“If I will it,” Aeglyss repeated, “all things can change. Let your will run with mine. I shall be the strength in your arms, the swiftness in your legs. You shall be the spear in my hands. I will bind the Huanin of the Road to us with bonds they cannot break; I will bend them until their arms serve our purposes. Long enough we have suffered. Long enough we have been less than we once were. Now all the world will be set into two camps: those who are friends to the White Owl and those who are enemies. And our enemies shall fall. They shall crumble. It is…”
He faltered, cast his stare up towards the flat sea of cloud. A thin, icy snow was beginning to fall. The na’kyrim sighed and fell to his knees. His head tipped back and he stared into the bleak, unbounded expanse of the sky.
“I shall be servant to all your hopes and dreams,” he said quietly. “I shall make them real.”
Though he spoke softly, all heard. And many felt belief unfolding itself in their hearts like a dark flower.