BRIAN RUCKLEY
FALL OF THANES
WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE
Orisian oc Lannis-Haig is now Thane of his Blood, but he is a Thane exiled from his lands, for the Glas Valley where he and his family dwelled lies under the brutal control of the Bloods of the Black Road. Orisian has escaped from the pursuing forces of the Black Road to Kolkyre, the capital of the Kilkry Blood, long a close friend and ally to his own. With him have come Yvane and Hammarn, na’kyrim from the north, Ess’yr and Varryn, Kyrinin of the Fox clan, his shieldman Rothe and his sister Anyara. Others have also converged upon Kolkyre, however, and Orisian finds himself the object of unwelcome attention from Mordyn Jerain, the Shadowhand, Chancellor to the Haig Blood, and Aewult, Bloodheir to the High Thane, Gryvan oc Haig. Their intent is to ensure the primacy of Haig in the efforts to turn back the Black Road. Frustrated by the machinations of these supposed allies, Orisian dispatches Taim Narran, his Blood’s most accomplished warrior, with their meagre remaining forces northwards, hoping to delay or turn back the Black Road’s advance. Orisian himself, concerned that a greater threat than even the armies of the Black Road is being overlooked, travels to Highfast, where a number of na’kyrim maintain a library. The threat that so troubles Orisian is Aeglyss, a na’kyrim who has been crucified by the White Owl Kyrinin, but rather than dying, descends from their Breaking Stone imbued with a rare and powerful ability to make use of the powers some na’kyrim can draw from the Shared. Aeglyss first asserts control over the White Owl clan, and then the Black Road army itself. He is the first na’kyrim in centuries with the ability to bind another wholly and unreservedly to his will, and chooses to exercise this power over Wain nan Horin-Gyre, sister of the Thane Kanin, to Kanin’s increasingly desperate dismay. In the course of his ascent, Aeglyss wins the allegiance of Shraeve, a Battle Inkallim. He completes his rise to power when Shraeve champions him in single combat against the senior war leader of the Battle Inkall, Fiallic. With Aeglyss’ subtle intervention, Shraeve is victorious, assumes command of the Battle Inkall’s army and immediately pledges it to Aeglyss. At Highfast, Orisian discovers that many of the na’kyrim there can feel the alarming changes taking place in the Shared, and the stirring of the Anain. He also finds Eshenna, who tells him that Aeglyss is searching for a na’kyrim called K’rina, his foster mother in his childhood. Believing he can be of more use in such a task than trying to lead an army in the war, Orisian leaves Highfast with a small company of warriors led by Torcaill, crosses the Karkyre Peaks and descends into the Veiled Woods, where Eshenna is certain K’rina can be found. They do indeed discover the na’kyrim, but she has been mysteriously and disturbingly transformed by the Anain, and in the course of capturing her, Rothe, Orisian’s shieldman and in some ways his closest surviving friend, is slain in battle with White Owl Kyrinin. Orisian and the other survivors are driven by pursuing White Owls back over the Karkyre Peaks. In their absence, Aeglyss invades Highfast by possessing the body of Tyn, a na’kyrim known as the Dreamer. When the other na’kyrim there refuse to offer him any aid, Aeglyss destroys their library and kills many of them. He also discovers Mordyn Jerain, the Shadowhand, who lies injured after being attacked while he travelled there in pursuit of Orisian. The Shadowhand is carried away by Aeglyss’ forces, and brought to Kan Avor in the Glas Valley, where the na’kyrim now resides. Aeglyss reluctantly resolves that the Shadowhand would be more valuable to him than Wain nan Horin-Gyre. He releases Wain from her binding, but has Shraeve kill her rather than let her go free. He then binds Mordyn Jerain, and sends him south to return to the Vaymouth, the capital of the Haig Bloods. Taim Narran, leading the remaining forces of the Lannis Blood, is caught up in a great battle near Glasbridge. There, due to the pride and inexperience of Aewult nan Haig, the Black Road wins a major victory, and the armies of the True Bloods fall back in disarray to Kolkyre, where Aewult nan Haig accuses Taim Narran of treachery and imprisons him. He also takes hostage Anyara, Orisian’s sister. She reluctantly remains in Kolkyre when Orisian sets out for Highfast, and there witnesses the assassination of Lheanor, the Kilkry Thane, by a member of the Hunt Inkall. As a result, Lheanor’s son Roaric, a tempestuous young man, rises to the Thaneship of the Kilkry Blood. Aewult sends Anyara south to Vaymouth and the court of the Thane of Thanes. The Black Road army descends upon Kolkyre and there, with the aid of Aeglyss’ immense power, inflicts a further crippling defeat upon Aewult’s forces. Escaping in the chaos, Taim Narran flees before the disaster now engulfing the lands of the Kilkry Blood. On the road to Ive, a small town south of Kolkyre, he is reunited with Orisian.
CHAPTER 1
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Ruins
Loss alone is but the wounding of a heart; it is memory that makes it our ruin.
A proverb of the Aygll Kingship
Pay no heed to grief. It is only weakness leaving your heart.
A saying of the Battle Inkall
I
The movement of birds. That was what told Orisian oc Lannis-Haig that they were coming. Wood pigeons, half a dozen, took flight from the leafless treetops, their wingtips cracking like a rattle of drums. He saw them arrowing away over the canopy, and knew that in their flight they told a tale of what lay beneath. Somewhere there, down amidst the dank greys and browns of the tree trunks and undergrowth, the enemy were coming: men, and likely women, he meant to see dead before the pale, sinking sun touched the horizon. The woodlands were not large, not compared to the great tracts of forest Orisian had seen on the flanks of the Car Criagar or beyond the Karkyre Peaks. He shied away from that latter thought. His mind refused to approach too closely any memory of the Veiled Woods, and of what had happened there. If once he turned over that rock, what he uncovered might break him. These woods were tame, as docile as any horse broken to the saddle and bit. Their oaks grew straight and tall above thickets of coppiced hazel. They lay amidst vast swathes of farmland and pasture on the gentle slopes west of Ive, and were just as much shaped by human hand as were those surrounding fields. Charcoal burners and timber merchants had laid out nets of pathways and clearings and campsites through them. Now, Orisian knew, one of those trails was being followed not by woodsmen but by the wolves of the Black Road. He glanced at the warrior Torcaill, who was crouched alongside him amongst the rocks at the top of the slope. “You saw?” “Yes, sire. It won’t be long. Will you come away now? Back behind the crest, at least?” “No,” murmured Orisian. “I’ll see what’s done in my name.” He looked up, briefly, towards the west. There were clouds there: great dark masses that would muffle the sun before it set. More snow to come. The last fall had been almost a week ago, and light enough that no trace of it now remained. “Let me bring up your horse, at least, sire,” Torcaill said. “So I can flee more easily? No. Leave it where it is.” The warrior frowned, his displeasure unconcealed. “Go to your men,” Orisian told him. “Make sure they’re mounted and ready. If Taim needs you, it’ll be soon.” Torcaill went, scrambling back over the rocks. He had two dozen men waiting just out of sight. Orisian knew they would already be fully prepared. They were as eager as anyone to spill Black Road blood, and needed no encouragement from Torcaill to ready themselves for the task, but he found the warrior’s concern for his safety unsettling. Troubling. Only Ess’yr and Varryn remained with him. The two Kyrinin were nestled down in the shadow of a boulder, paying no heed to the events unfolding around them. Ess’yr was smoothing the flights of her arrows one after another, a picture of perfect, absorbed attention. Her brother sat staring fixedly at the patch of grass between his feet. Neither had spoken since they settled into their place of concealment. They seldom did now, and perhaps that was why Orisian found their company easier than most. He craved silence, sought it as a friend and ally. Three figures emerged from the woods: hunters from Ive, who today were bait in the trap. They trotted along the faint path that led up the slope. They were almost casual in their demeanour, but their backward glances hinted at tension. Orisian narrowed his eyes, trying to unpick the thick tapestry of the woodland edge, searching for the pursuit that—if all was happening as intended—should be close behind. He could detect no sign of it yet. He noted that Ess’yr had set her quiver down. She wiped her right hand down the flank of her hide jacket, from the faint rise of her breast to her hip, and with her left took up her bow. She would willingly use it to kill on his behalf, Orisian knew. Varryn he was less sure of. The Kyrinin warrior had become the most reluctant of allies ever since they left the Veiled Woods; ever since Orisian had refused to free Ess’yr of any obligation to him, or send her away. Rothe’s absence stabbed at him afresh then, the anguish as pointed and wounding as ever. Each time he remembered that he could not turn his head and see the big, bluff shieldman there, an arm’s length away, the thought strangled the breath in his throat and pinched at his eyes. It always brought the insistent memory, contemptuous of his every effort to dispel it, of his hand over the wound in Rothe’s neck. Of the thick blood pulsing out between his fingers. He blinked twice, knowing that the image would never be so easily dismissed. The sounds of slaughter saved him. Cries were rising from the woods. He heard people crashing through the thickets, blades clattering against one another. The noise rescued him, for now, from the grasp of his memories. The three Kilkry-Haig huntsmen had turned and were heading back to join the fight. Ess’yr stood up, shaking her hair away from her face with a feline flick of her head. Orisian could see movement in the gloom beneath the closest trees: figures struggling back and forth. Taim Narran’s mixed company of Lannis and Kilkry men had closed with its prey. Black Road bands were ranging widely across the territory of the Kilkry Blood, raiding, scouting, seeking pillage or simple bloodshed. This was the second such group to come within reach of Ive in the last week; the second they had lured into ambush. Men spilled out from amongst the trees, stumbling and struggling and hacking. Orisian rose. The shield was heavy on his left arm. He drew his sword, rhythmically tightening and easing his fingers about its hilt. It felt much more familiar in his grasp than once it had. Familiar but not yet natural, not good. Never good, perhaps. “Friend or foe?” Ess’yr stood perfectly still, bowstring drawn back almost to touch her lips. “What?” Orisian asked. “Is that one friend or foe?” she asked. Orisian looked down the slope. One man had broken free from the battle and was labouring up towards them. His head was low, his attention consumed by the task of keeping his footing on the wet, slick grass. He wore a jerkin of hide and fur, carried a lumber axe in one hand. He had thick, dark hair. A heavy beard. “Foe, I think,” Orisian said quietly, and before the sound of his words had died the arrow was gone, cutting through the cold air. He watched it, skimming out and down, struck by its elegant precision and the soft whisper of its flight, as it went unerringly to its warm home. They entered Ive without ceremony, the last light of the day at their backs. What relief there was at their return was muted. They had killed twenty or more Black Roaders, and brought another back with them as prisoner, but such small victories brought little and brief comfort. There were, everyone knew, thousands more to take the place of those enemies felled today. Torcaill and Taim rode on either side of Orisian. Varryn and Ess’yr walked a few paces behind them. When they had first arrived here with Orisian, the Kyrinin had been met everywhere they went in Ive by hostility and suspicion. They attracted little attention now. The town’s inhabitants recognised them as members of Orisian’s retinue, and accepted them—if reluctantly—as such. Orisian’s Blood had long been allied to their own, and its Thane could keep what company he saw fit, no matter how strange and ill-advised such company might be. As they made their way through Ive’s darkening streets, they found their path blocked by a great mass of cattle, jostling and barging along beneath the switches of cowherds. In the failing light, the beasts all but merged into a single roiling creature, lowing and steaming as it rumbled into the town’s heart, its flanks turned yellow by firelight spilling from windows. Men shouted at the cowherds to clear the roadway. Orisian rode on regardless, ploughing through the fringes of the herd. His company of warriors strung out behind him. Many of the Kilkry men amongst them drifted off down side streets, making for the homes they had been summoned from that morning, or to take their turn at sentry duty on the town’s outskirts. The cattle and their herders were only the latest of many to come seeking sanctuary in Ive, hoping for refuge from the chaos sweeping across the Kilkry Blood. Every time another family arrived, they brought tales of horror and disaster: wild Tarbain tribesmen burning and looting villages; companies of Inkallim appearing suddenly out of the night, intent upon slaughter. Donnish, the coastal town a day or two’s ride west of Ive, had already fallen, abandoned by the tattered remnants of the Haig armies all but destroyed by the Black Road’s remorseless advance. Further north, Kolkyre, where Roaric the Kilkry Thane languished, was cut off by a besieging host, and accessible only by sea. His Blood was on its knees. Still, it was not yet as utterly ruined as was Orisian’s own Blood. The sixty or so Lannis warriors at his back as he dismounted in the courtyard of Ive’s Guard barracks were all that remained to him of his inheritance as Thane. He bore the title but in truth was master of nothing more than whatever strength rode with him. What respect was shown to him—and there was a good deal of it, from both his own followers and the people of Ive—felt, as often as not, undeserved and unearned. Weariness took him as he entered the barracks. It was crowded inside, full of Guardsmen and townsfolk alike. And outsiders, too: those who had fled here with nothing but what they could carry, reliant upon the town’s Guard for shelter or sustenance; warriors who had found their way here after defeat, and now slept on the floorboards of these draughty halls, dreaming perhaps of the chance to redeem themselves. Orisian ignored them all. He met no one’s eyes as he made his way to the stairs. When they recognised him, people here sometimes came begging for favours or aid. He helped them when he could—though that was seldom—but he was too exhausted for such exchanges tonight. “I’ll eat in my room,” he murmured to Taim, and climbed away from the hubbub. He ate without enthusiasm. The food that was brought to him was good, the best the town had to offer, but he seldom had much of an appetite now. It was as if his mind and body could accommodate only so many hungers, and that for food was crowded out by less corporeal longings: for his sister’s safety, for the undoing of so much that had been done to those he knew and loved. For some reason to be given for all the deaths. After pushing aside the half-finished meal, Orisian closed his eyes and allowed his head to sink down onto his chest. He let time pass, consciously clearing his thoughts. It was a struggle, for he had barely more mastery over them than over the Blood he was supposed to lead, but he managed it. He dozed, until something—he did not know whether it was a sound from outside, or perhaps the determined, ungovernable stirring of his own mind—roused him. He went sluggishly towards the window. He halted an arm’s length back from it, keeping to the dark. He did not want to be seen if he could help it, and he was close enough to look down upon the little orchard, bounded by high stone walls, that lay behind the barracks. The ancient, crooked apple trees clenched up like wizened hands, half-lit by lamps burning in the kitchens. Almost beyond the reach of that light, in the heart of the grove, Ess’yr and Varryn had made shelters from stakes and hides. Orisian could see the two Kyrinin now, moving amongst the trees. They drifted through the winter’s dark, unhurried. They were gathering sticks for a fire. Orisian held himself quite still. Even his breathing grew shallow and soft. He did not know if they could see him from down there amongst the shadows, but they might. Their eyes were more than human, after all. Ess’yr squatted down on her haunches to build the fire. Her hair slipped forward to hide her face. Orisian watched her hands instead. They were pale, indistinct shapes, but still their movements had grace and ease. Done with her preparations, she reached for some small bag or pouch and scattered something from it on a flat stone at the fireside. Food, Orisian knew. He had seen this many times since that first night with her in the forests far north of here. She left morsels for the restless dead. He found himself wishing Ess’yr would look up, and turn her face towards him. He both wanted her to know that he was watching her, and feared it. Perhaps she already knew. Perhaps she knew that he was constantly aware of her presence; that wherever they were, whoever he was talking to, if she was near there was always a portion of his attention claimed by her. He could hear voices, softened and blurred, from the rooms below, and, more distant, the lowing of cattle, penned up in some yard or barn. Sparks flared amongst the sleeping apple trees. Once, twice, Ess’yr struck glimmers of fire from a flint. One must have taken, for she delicately raised the little bundle of kindling in her cupped hands and blew upon it. In moments, a tiny flame was born. Orisian could see her face then; see a faint line of firelight reflected on her hair. He smiled. There were footsteps in the passageway outside. Taim Narran was calling for him. Orisian turned away from the window, feeling as he did so suddenly and terribly sad. “You wanted to be informed, sire, if the prisoner was saying anything of interest,” Taim said when Orisian opened the door. “Wait a moment while I get a cloak,” Orisian murmured. “I can tell you what he’s saying. If you would prefer to stay here. There is no need…” “Do you think it’s too cold for me outside?” Orisian asked gently as he settled the cloak about his shoulders. “Or that I should not see what happens to prisoners in Ive?” His Captain made no reply. “It’s all right, Taim. Whatever was fragile in me was broken long ago. Lead the way.”
II
The room clenched about him like a tight, hot fist. The heat of half a dozen small braziers was gathered by the rock walls, concentrated, blasted back to make the air thick and suffocating. Within a couple of paces Orisian could feel sweat on his forehead. The orange-red heart of each brazier almost seemed to pulse, so intense was the light and heat being hammered out into the cramped space. The prisoner was tied to the far wall. His arms were stretched up and apart, bound to iron rings set in the stonework. He had slumped down and his own weight had tautened the muscles in his arms and shoulders. He was naked to the waist, his skin overlaid with a film of sweat. Fresh burns pockmarked his chest, red and brown and raw. The man who had inflicted them was standing to one side, stocky, black-bearded. Orisian vaguely recognised him: he had seen him around the barracks once or twice before. One of the town’s Guard. He wore massive leather gloves, and was watching the hilt of a knife sunk into the brazier. He did not even look up when Orisian and the others entered. There was no room in his attention for anything save that knife, buried in the fire, collecting into its metal the savage heat. One of the several Kilkry warriors gathered there grasped the prisoner’s hair and lifted his head up. His nose was broken and bent. The blood from it might be what crusted the man’s lips, or his mouth might be shattered as well. Orisian winced momentarily at the sight of him. His own jaw and cheek gave a single aching beat, remembering the ruin visited upon them by the haft of a Kyrinin spear. A thread of mixed saliva and blood hung from the man’s chin. Some remembered instinct made Orisian want to turn away. It was the stirring of the person he no longer quite was. It lacked conviction. He chose to look. “Speak,” someone hissed at the broken Black Roader. “Let’s hear your poison again.” Orisian glanced at Taim. His Captain’s face was fixed and grim. Was there the slightest disapproving tightening around his eyes? A faint disgusted curl at the edge of his mouth? Orisian could not be sure. Perhaps he wanted to see those things there, and allowed that desire to imagine them for him. He wanted to find in Taim some disgust and revulsion that he could borrow for himself; to be as horrified by this sight as he would have been just a few weeks ago. The man’s voice was stronger than Orisian would have expected. Uneven but clear despite the distortion of his heavy northern accent. “You’re finished. Your time’s done. It’s his time now. The Black Road’s time. The Kall. He’ll cast you all down into ruin and wreck, and lead us to the mastery of the world, and open the path for the Gods to return.” “Who will?” the interrogator demanded, shaking the man’s head so violently he pulled a fistful of hair from his scalp. He took hold again and twisted the prisoner’s face toward Orisian. Orisian watched those battered lips stretching into a snarling smile. “The halfbreed. The Fisherwoman’s heir. Fate works through him.” “His name?” Orisian asked quietly. “Not to be named. The na’kyrim. In Kan Avor. That is enough.” “Aeglyss?” Orisian demanded, but the prisoner only grinned at him through blood. There was a madness in his eyes. A sort of mad joy, Orisian thought, a delight at the descent of the world into savagery. “Keep him alive,” Orisian said, and left the choking heat of that deep chamber without another word. He climbed up the steps and out into the bitter night air. Tiny flecks of snow were darting down out of the darkness, dancing in the cauldron of the courtyard. He felt them falling on his cheeks and lips: points of numbing cold. “It’s as you thought,” Taim said behind him. “As your na’kyrim have been saying. Whether in his own right, or as someone else’s tool, the halfbreed’s worked his way to the heart of things.” Orisian looked up into the black sky, blinking against the grainy snow. “They’re not my na’kyrim,” he said. In Eshenna’s half-human eyes, Orisian saw very human things: exhaustion and a haunted, hunted unease. When first he met this na’kyrim in Highfast, he had found her determined, firm. That vigour was gone, or at least buried by the debris of what she had seen since then. “Where’s Yvane?” Orisian asked her. “With K’rina.” She spoke that name with obvious reluctance. Another of the petty, cruel tricks the world was working upon its inhabitants in these troubled times: it had been Eshenna who insisted most determinedly that K’rina might be a weapon in the struggle against Aeglyss, yet the cost of finding her, and her condition when they did, had shaken Eshenna to her core. She had not been as well prepared as she imagined for what lay outside the walls of Highfast. Orisian pitied her, but it was a detached kind of pity. Few had been ready for what had happened since Winterbirth. Many suffered. More than most, Eshenna had at least made some kind of choice in the path her life had taken in recent weeks. That path had led here, to a simple, bare house just outside Ive’s Guard compound. Erval, the town’s Captain—and a good man as far as Orisian could tell, though as deeply unsettled as anyone by the course of recent events—had made it available to Eshenna and Yvane without hesitation or demur. Judging by its dilapidated and damp state, Orisian suspected it had been empty for some time. Still, it served the purpose asked of it now: a place for the na’kyrim to shelter away from prying eyes, small enough that it could easily be watched over by the men Taim Narran had set to the task. Whether the more important role of those guards was to ensure no misguided townspeople caused trouble for Yvane and Eshenna, or to protect those townspeople from K’rina if necessary, Orisian did not know. No one did. “K’rina still will not come inside?” he asked Eshenna. She shook her head. “If we try to move her from the goat shed, she thrashes about. Howls.” “But does not speak.” “No. She never speaks.” “You don’t look well,” Orisian murmured. Eshenna gave a short, bitter laugh. She was feeding wood to a little fire. As she bent, and sparkling embers swirled up in front of her face, the gauntness of her features was apparent. Since leaving Highfast, she had thinned and her skin had grown paler, almost as if the Kyrinin half of her mixed heritage was asserting itself. “If there’s anything I—anyone—can do for you, tell me,” Orisian said. “I’ll help if I can.” “I know,” Eshenna sighed. She held a stubby chunk of wood in her hand, gazing down at it, running her long fingers over its flaking bark. “I need sleep. And I need the voices, and the storms, in the Shared to quieten. You can’t do that, can you?” “No. I can’t.” Eshenna threw the log into the flames and crossed her arms, staring blankly into the heart of the fire. “Yvane will be a while yet. She spends a lot of time with K’rina.” Orisian nodded silently and left the na’kyrim to her dark contemplations. Behind the run-down house, stone walls enclosed a long, thin yard. Half of it was given over to dark, bare soil, which the inhabitants must once have cultivated. Snow was speckling the earth now. The rest was cobbled, running down a gentle slope to a ramshackle shed against the furthest wall. Orisian walked towards it, brushing snow from his hair as he went. He could hear the low voices of two of Taim’s guards coming from beyond the wall and the rumble of the slowly rising wind as it blustered about Ive’s roofs, but there was no sound from within the shed. He pulled the door open and peered in. The stink of goats assailed him. The animals were long gone. The only light within came from a single tallow candle Yvane must have brought with her. K’rina was curled in the corner of the shed, on old straw, facing the wall. Yvane knelt beside her, sitting back on her heels. Neither of the na’kyrim stirred at Orisian’s arrival. He stepped inside. “No change?” “No,” said Yvane without looking round. “You shouldn’t be in here alone,” Orisian said. “What if she attacked you? What if she tried to escape again?” Yvane rose to her feet. There was just a hint of stiffness, the slightest unsteadiness, in the movement. Perhaps her years weighed a little more heavily on her now. Perhaps sleepless nights were taking their toll on her, as they did on so many others. “She’s not some wild animal,” Yvane said softly. “Nor a prisoner, as far as I recall.” “Maybe not, but we’ve paid a high price to bring her here. If we lose her, that price was for nothing. She’s tried to slip away once already.” Yvane hunched forward a little to brush straw and dirt from her hide dress. She gave the task more attention than it merited. “What?” asked Orisian. “You’re wounded,” the na’kyrim muttered. Orisian put a hand to the side of his face, tracing the great welt that ran up his cheek, feeling the yielding gap left by lost teeth. That was not what she meant, though. He knew the shape of her concerns, and it had nothing to do with the punishment his body had taken. “Some wounds grow thick scars,” she said. “Enough wounds, enough scars, and you can hardly recognise the one who bears them. Ends up being someone completely different.” Orisian grimaced and stared down at the flagstone floor. He did not want to hear this. It achieved nothing, ploughing over and over the same small field of Yvane’s preoccupations. “When I first met you…” the na’kyrim began. “When you first met me, all of this had only just started. I hadn’t seen then what I’ve seen now.” Yvane sniffed and rubbed at her nose with the back of a grubby finger. “None of us had, I don’t suppose,” she said. “I could see why Inurian had taken to you, back then. I could see a little something of what he must have seen in you. He always prized gentleness, thoughtfulness. Compassion.” “There are other things I need—we need—more now.” “Are there? You think Inurian would agree, if he was still here? You think he would find you as worthy of his affection now as he did…” “Don’t,” Orisian snapped. He glared at her, and met those impassive, piercing eyes with a resilience he would once have thought impossible. He had much deeper reserves of anger to draw upon now, and it could armour him against even Yvane’s fierce gaze. She smiled, a gesture that started sad and became something much darker and colder before it faded away. She looked down at K’rina. “None of us had any idea how far all of this would go,” she muttered. “Except perhaps Inurian. He looked into Aeglyss’ heart back then and saw the poison in it.” “We’ve got a prisoner. He talks of Aeglyss as a leader. A ruler, almost, in Kan Avor. As if they all follow him now.” “Oh?” Yvane sounded barely interested. “It makes K’rina more important.” “As what? A club to beat Aeglyss with?” “Or a key in a lock,” Orisian said, exasperated. “I don’t know. Something. It was you and Eshenna who told me she mattered in the first place. I didn’t want to find her like this. None of us did. But now we know the White Owls—Aeglyss—were seeking her. We can see that something, whatever it is, has been done to her. She’s important. Don’t blame me for wanting to understand how, and why. For wanting to know that there was a reason for my warriors to die finding her.” Yvane held out a placatory hand. “We’ll disturb her,” she said, with a glance down at the prostrate woman in the straw. She bent and picked up the little candle. The flame died between her finger and thumb. For a moment there was only darkness and the wind rattling the roof shingles. “Let’s go back to the house,” Yvane said. They barred the door of the shed behind them. “I need to know, Yvane,” Orisian said as they walked. “We all do. There’s no time left to be gentle, or cautious. Things are falling apart. If K’rina is to mean anything…” “Mean anything?” Yvane snapped, coming to a sudden halt and jabbing Orisian in the chest. “She means as much as I do. Or you. That is precisely what she means. Or do you think a mere halfbreed must work harder than that to have meaning?” “You know that’s not —” Orisian protested. “Something’s been done to her,” Yvane rushed on, uninterested in anything he might have to say. “That’s what you said. Well, she didn’t do it to herself. The Anain have scraped out her mind, as best we can tell. As if she was nothing, as if whatever thoughts and feelings were in there before mattered not at all. She’s a victim in all of this, as surely as anyone is. As surely as Inurian was, or Cerys or any of the others at Highfast.” She hung her head. The two of them stood there in the dark yard, the wind rumbling overhead. “Nevertheless,” murmured Orisian. “Nevertheless,” said Yvane dully. “There’s always a nevertheless. But not tonight. Tonight, I’m going to try to sleep.” She turned and walked away from him, towards the pale flame of a candle burning in the window of the house. Orisian stalked back to his bedchamber with a familiar, imprecise anger churning in him. It was always there, always ready to fill any spaces in his thoughts if given the chance. Yvane would say it was the wake Aeglyss left as he moved through the Shared, discolouring everything—every mind—it washed up against. Orisian did not know. It felt like his own thing, crafted from his own experience, but he did not doubt that such a sense might be deceptive. It hardly mattered. It was there, in his heart and his mind, and he must deal with it, whatever its source. Before taking to his bed he looked down on the orchard once more. The fire was still burning, a little beacon beneath the creaking and swaying apple trees. There was no sign of Ess’yr and Varryn. They had probably retired to the shelters they had made for themselves. He laid himself out on the mattress and closed his eyes. He no longer expected any night to bring easy rest, for they were always full of frightening dreams and sudden wakings. Still, he could hope.
III
Orisian broke his fast the next morning in the main hall. The trestle tables were lined with Guardsmen, and with the homeless and destitute given shelter in the barracks. Orisian sat with Taim and Torcaill and the rest of the Lannis warriors. The hall was filled with cacophonous activity. Plates clattered; arguments raged; cooks and servants rushed back and forth. Orisian’s head ached, and he winced at each crash of a falling tray and each shouted insult. The night had not, in the end, been restful. Several times he had woken with a heart set racing by the horror of some forgotten dream. The wind had raged all through the hours of darkness, shaking the building. “Two dead sentries on the edge of town last night,” Taim said between mouthfuls of salted porridge. “No one saw anything?” asked Orisian. Taim shook his head. “But one of them was savaged. Had his hand almost torn off, and his throat bitten out. Dogs, it looked like.” “Hunt Inkallim,” said Torcaill. He looked as weary as Orisian felt. “Seems likely,” agreed Taim. “There’s a good chance one or more of them got inside the town. Not a good sign.” “I don’t mean to be chased out of here yet,” said Orisian quickly. Best, he thought, to anticipate the suggestion he could already imagine Taim formulating. The warrior regarded his Thane for a moment or two, and Orisian could see his disagreement clearly in his expression, but when Taim spoke it was mildly: “The Hunt’d only be creeping around in here for two reasons I can think of. Either they meant to kill someone—you, most likely, if they know you’re here—or they’re scouting the place out for an attack. Neither choice bodes well for us.” “I know,” Orisian said. Although Ive was a substantial town, one of the Kilkry Blood’s biggest, it was ill prepared to stand against an assault. It had long been remote from any disputed land or battlefield; it had no castle, and the wall that once ringed it had long ago been dismantled, its stones turned to more peaceful use in the skeletons of barns and farmhouses. For days now, labourers had been toiling all around the edge of town, trying to encircle it with a ditch and timber palisade. Until that work was completed, Ive’s only defence was the flesh and steel of the warriors gathered there, the Guard and the poorly armed townsfolk themselves. In all there were perhaps a thousand trained fighting men, and another two thousand untrained but willing and able to fight. More than enough to master the savage but disorganised raiding bands they had faced so far; too few to last long if the Black Road’s full might descended upon them. “There might still be time to get to Kilvale,” Torcaill said, sounding almost hopeful. “For every score that turn up in Ive each day, there’s a dozen leaving and heading south. They think the road’s still open.” “But they don’t know,” Orisian said. “Nobody knows who’s in control anywhere, not really. It’d take… what, two days to get there? If we’re caught on the road, we’d be finished. And there’s nowhere the Black Road will want more than Kilvale. It’s their birthplace. If we did reach Kilvale, and it falls, where do we run to then? Dun Aygll? Vaymouth, even? What kind of a Thane would that make me?” He glared questioningly at Torcaill. The warrior studied his bowl, stirring the porridge within it carefully. Taim Narran was less reticent. “A living one, at least,” he murmured. Orisian looked at the older warrior, an angry retort boiling up towards his lips. But the momentary fury passed. He breathed deeply. “I’m sorry,” he said. He pressed finger and thumb to his temple, willing the throbbing in his skull to subside. “I just think… I think we lack the strength to make any difference in whatever struggles are to come between Haig and the Black Road. And we—you most of all, Taim—could hardly expect a warm welcome from Aewult, in any case.” “It’s true Haig has no need of our few swords,” Taim acknowledged. “Gryvan must wake to the danger now. Once he rouses himself and his people from sloth, the Black Road’s ascendancy will be at an end, Aeglyss or no Aeglyss. But we—you—still need to survive long enough to see that day. I’d not choose Ive to make a stand, if that’s…” Erval, the leader of Ive’s Guard, came hurrying down between the lines of tables. He stumbled over a sword someone had rested against a bench, but rushed on regardless. He was red-faced, plainly agitated. Heads turned to follow his progress. He came to a rather disorderly halt behind Orisian and dipped into a hasty bow. “There are messengers come in search of you, sire. I’ve got them waiting in the courtyard.” “Who sent them?” Orisian asked. The Guard Captain looked apologetic. “Aewult nan Haig, sire. They claim his authority, and through him that of his father, for the message they bear.” “Let them freeze the rest of the day in the yard, then,” Torcaill muttered. “I think they may have left their patience behind when they set out on their journey,” said Erval. Orisian sighed and swung a leg out over the bench. “There’s no point in delaying,” he said as he rose. “It might be best,” Erval agreed, relief plain in his voice. “There’s a fierce mood in the town, and word’s already spreading that there’re Haig men here. You know how that will taste to people. The sooner they’ve said their piece and gone, the better.” Torcaill and Taim were getting to their feet to follow Orisian. “Not you, Taim,” he said. The warrior frowned. Orisian smiled at him. “You’re an escaped prisoner, aren’t you? A fugitive from Aewult’s version of justice?” Taim sank heavily back onto the bench. “I don’t want any trouble if I can avoid it,” said Orisian. “No more than we’ve already got, anyway.” “Take a few of the other men, at least,” Taim said. “Let them think you’ve got some swords at your back. And remember they have your sister.” “That’s not something I’m likely to forget.” Torcaill quickly assembled a little escort party, and Erval led them all out of the hall. The place was silent as they left. The wide courtyard was dusted with snow. Most of it had been swept up by the overnight wind, and packed into corners and crevices. There was no wind now, but it was bitterly cold. As Orisian and the others emerged onto the cobblestones, the nearest of the messengers was clapping his gloved hands together to warm them. The Haig Bloodheir had sent ten men. Six of them were warriors, standing back and watching over the party’s horses. The other four were less martially attired, clad in fur capes, wearing gauntlets of what looked like velvet rather than leather. The one who stepped forward to greet Orisian had a gold clasp holding his cloak around his neck. The man bowed more deeply and respectfully than Orisian might have expected from one of Aewult’s household. Any appearance of respect was quickly dispelled once that formal gesture had been completed, however. “This man,” the messenger said with a jab of his chin in Erval’s direction, “seems to think our business is best conducted out here in the cold. Perhaps you could prevail upon him to change his mind, Thane?” And in that one instant Orisian was vividly transported back to Kolkyre, to the entirely uncomfortable company of Aewult and Gryvan’s Chancellor Mordyn Jerain. Evidently disdain and casual self-importance were traits shared by all ranks within the Haig Blood. Back in Kolkyre, he had been somewhat cowed by it. Now, his mood merely soured, and his headache asserted itself. “I imagine the Captain anticipated your desire to be back on the road south as quickly as possible,” he said. “You seem to know my name, so perhaps you could allow me the same privilege.” The messenger stood a good head taller than Orisian, but the reprimand narrowed his shoulders slightly, put the faintest hint of submission into his posture. “I am Gorred Mant dar Haig, sire. Emissary of Aewult nan Haig. These men are —” He gestured towards his companions, but Orisian cut him off. It was indeed cold out here beneath the cloudless winter sky. For that and other reasons, brevity appealed greatly to him. “You came seeking me, did you?” he asked. “Indeed, sire.” Gorred had recovered a little of his composure now. He stood straight once more and Orisian suspected that beneath that voluminous cloak his chest swelled. “Rumours reached Kilvale mere days ago that you were here in Ive. There was great relief, of course. People have been concerned for your safety since you left Kolkyre.” “You may report that I am in good health, then.” “Indeed.” Gorred extended an arm, flapping his hand. One of the other Haig men stepped forward, hurriedly dragging out two scroll cases from some hidden pocket or bag and passing them over. “I bear two messages, sire,” Gorred said, proffering the two tubes to Orisian. “Just tell me,” Orisian said. “I do need to hand them over, sire.” That welcome trace of discomfiture was back in the emissary’s voice. “I will not be deemed to have discharged my duty if I don’t put them in your hand.” Orisian took the cases from him, and passed them at once to Torcaill, who casually tucked them under his belt. “Tell me,” Orisian said again. There was an abrupt flurry of noise from beyond the open gate. Loud but indistinct voices were battling one another in the street beyond. Gorred glanced over his shoulder in irritation. Several of Erval’s Guards were clustered in the gateway, in animated discussion, gesticulating towards something out in the street. Gorred turned back to Orisian. “These are delicate matters, sire. Perhaps best discussed in a more private setting.” “The sooner we are done, the sooner you can be on your way back to Kilvale. You’ll know better than I that the roads grow more dangerous with every passing day. Every hour, even.” Gorred looked distinctly unhappy but did not press the point any further. “Very well. First an assurance as to the well-being of your sister, who is protected from all harm within the walls of Vaymouth itself, under the attentive care of —” “Move on,” barked Orisian. It was a struggle—one in which he was not entirely successful—to keep the anger that welled up within him out of his voice. The mere mention of Anyara, especially in the mouth of one whose master had made her a virtual captive, or hostage, was enough to shake his precariously maintained balance. Gorred blinked. “Ah. Well, the substance of the first message is an invitation to join with the Bloodheir at Kilvale. It is his hope that you and he could then discuss the possibility of your attendance upon the High Thane in Vaymouth. You would thus be able to satisfy yourself as to your sister’s…” Another surge of agitated cries disturbed the messenger’s flow. Gorred grunted in irritation. Everyone looked towards the gate, for the voices drifting in from the street unmistakably now carried an undercurrent of violence and anger. “Forgive me,” Erval murmured in Orisian’s ear. “I should see what’s happening.” Orisian nodded, and the Captain of the Guard went trotting over to join his men at the gate. “What’s your second message?” Orisian asked, before Gorred could resume. “It was hoped you might be able to accompany us on our return to Kilvale, sire. The Bloodheir was very hopeful of that.” “I am needed here for a little while yet,” Orisian said. “I will have to follow after you when I can. If I can. What’s the second message?” Gorred’s eyes flicked momentarily away from Orisian, scanning Torcaill and the other warriors behind him. There was clear unease in the glance. “It is understood that you have Taim Narran here with you. Is that true?” Orisian put a hand to his brow, fending off the aching beat in his skull. His hands were so chilled that he barely felt the touch of skin to skin. He envied Gorred his fine gloves. But he made no reply to the messenger’s question. “I was instructed to ask after Taim Narran’s presence, you see,” Gorred persisted, “because certain charges were raised against him during the period of your absence. The Bloodheir requires —” “Requires?” echoed Orisian. “Taim Narran is my man, not Aewult’s.” “Nevertheless,” Gorred said. “Nevertheless.” There was a dogged, somewhat glum determination about his manner now. As if he had at last resigned himself to abandoning any pretence at courteous discourse; as if he accepted the futility of clothing hard words in fine silks. “No command was issued to release him; rather, you might say, Taim Narran chose to bestow freedom upon himself. And he fled from battle.” Torcaill and the other Lannis warriors stirred at that. Orisian bit back his own instinctive contempt for Gorred’s accusations. Erval was returning hurriedly from the gate. Behind him, Orisian could see a solid knot of Guardsmen now barring the entrance to the courtyard. There were other figures moving beyond them, rushing up and down the street. Something dark, which at first Orisian thought must be a bird, darted over the heads of the Guards. The object arced down and broke apart on the yard’s cobbles, a clod of muddy earth. “Trouble,” Erval hissed into Orisian’s ear. “There’s a crowd gathering. They know who’s in here. Haig’s little better liked than Gyre these days.” Gorred was watching them, frowning. Orisian turned his head enough to hide his lips from the emissary. “Can you quieten it all down, if we keep them out of sight?” “Not sure, sire,” Erval whispered. “There’s more folk arriving every moment, and I’ve not seen a bloodier mood on them in years. Not ever. Could easily go bad, this. My men… it could be difficult if I ask them to fight their own people in defence of Haig.” Orisian looked back to Gorred. The messenger raised questioning eyebrows. Orisian came to a decision. “We’re done,” he said, as clearly and firmly as he could. “For your own safety, emissary, you must leave at once. Erval here will have his men escort you out of Ive, and see you a way down the road.” “Sire? We have not finished our discussions, surely? If I am to return to the Bloodheir with nothing more than this, I must of necessity make an honest report of how I was received and treated.” “Report as you like,” snapped Orisian. “Dead men make no reports, and that’s what you’ll likely be if you tarry here.” Gorred smirked, as if Orisian’s words were preposterous. “Messengers are protected, sire. They are not to be harmed, on pain of death. Everyone knows as much.” Orisian pointed at the gate. “Does that not sound to you like ignorance, then? Do you really think such laws are what govern hearts today? I’m trying to protect you.” Gorred looked from Orisian to the gateway. Some of the Guards were dragging a man into the compound and beating him with their clubs. Another of them was on his knees, pressing his hand to a bloody scalp wound. Aewult nan Haig’s messenger pondered for the space of a few heartbeats, and the fight leached out of him. “Very well,” he said curtly. At a single, sharp gesture his companions and escorts began to mount their horses. He glanced almost dismissively at Orisian. “You have the messages, Thane. The Bloodheir will anticipate an early reply, to both of them. Or better yet, your presence, and that of Taim Narran.” The ten horses clattered over the cobblestones towards the gate. Erval ran ahead of them, shouting at his Guards to clear a path for the Haig party. Orisian and his men followed more slowly in their wake. It all felt unpleasantly like disaster to Orisian. A chasm was opening up between the Haig Blood and those of Lannis and Kilkry, yawning ever wider with each defeat and humiliation visited upon them by the Black Road. The Guardsmen pushed out into the street, and Orisian saw for the first time just how large and frenzied a crowd of townsfolk had assembled. There were scores of them, of every age and kind. They choked the street. They fell back before the determined advance of Erval’s men, but it was only the crowd reshaping itself, yielding in one place to thicken in another. Not a retreat. More figures came rushing from side streets and houses, like bees plunging in to join a furious swarm. The Haig riders ventured out onto the muddy roadway. Their horses were skittish, catching the feral mood of the throng. People were falling, crushed between the lines of Guardsmen and the mass of townsfolk surging up, howling abuse at Gorred and the others. On every face Orisian saw visceral hatred, an instinctive yearning for bloodshed. “Gods,” he heard Erval muttering at his side, “it’s bad.” A stick came tumbling end over end through the air, blurring past Gorred’s shoulder. The envoy ducked and scowled. His horse tossed its head. Slowly, edgily, the beleaguered company moved down the street. “You need more men,” Orisian said to Erval. The Captain of the Guard looked bewildered, almost lost, in the face of the savagery that had taken hold of his town and his people. “Send for more men!” Orisian shouted at him, and this shook Erval from his daze. One of the nearest Guardsmen was dispatched to find reinforcements. It was too late. The townsfolk of Ive were possessed by a terrible fury, one that would brook no restraint and had purged them of any doubt or sense. Events rushed, like avalanching snow, towards their conclusion, as if that very conclusion had reached back and dragged everything irresistibly into its hungry maw. One of the Guardsmen facing the multitude was knocked down. The space around Gorred and the others was abruptly constricted. Someone flailed at one of the Haig messengers with a hoe. A flurry of missiles came tumbling in: sticks, earth, stones, even a clattering pot. A Haig warrior was struck and reeled in his saddle, almost falling. His horse lurched sideways. Its mass ruptured the protective ring of Guardsmen. Townsfolk boiled into the gaps. “Stop them!” Orisian shouted at Erval. The Captain was shaking his head, not in denial but impotence. He took two leaden paces out into the street and shouted angry commands. His voice was drowned in the flood of rage-bloated cries and howls. The mob thickened around the horses. Here and there, like helpless flotsam on a surging sea, Guardsmen struggled against the crowd, but they were too few, and the ire of the townsfolk was far too fierce to be dampened by half-hearted blows from clubs or staves. The horses were rearing, their riders now slashing about them with swords and spears. Stones and chunks of wood were raining down on them. A couple of men had climbed onto the roof of one of the houses and were stripping its tiles; the slate squares sliced through the air, spinning straight and true. Even as Orisian watched, one hammered into the forehead of Gorred’s horse. The animal screamed and staggered. As it stumbled, eager hands reached up from the crowd and grabbed its mane, clawed at the rider’s legs, tore at the saddle. Man and horse went crashing down and were instantly swallowed up. Orisian started forward, but Torcaill held him back. “If they kill them, Aewult will blame us!” Orisian cried. “Lannis, Kilkry, all of us.” “I know,” Torcaill said, “but we can’t stop it now. Look at them. It’s not safe to even try.” Horrified, Orisian turned back to the street in time to see one of the Haig men leaning low to jab his spear into a youth’s belly, and then in his turn being hooked out of his saddle and dragged down. The riderless horse went charging off through the mob, battering a path clear, trampling bodies as it went. Torcaill was pulling Orisian back from the gateway. A stunned Erval retreated alongside them. Someone was screaming amidst the chaos. It was a raw, unrestrained sound. Another horse, its saddle empty, came pounding back into the courtyard, wild-eyed and bleeding from cuts to its neck. It ran in great circles, shaking. It did not take long, once that peak of violence had been reached. The awful sounds surged and merged and then gradually fell away. Men spilled out from the barracks in some numbers, too late: Guards, and warriors, and Orisian’s own men, with Taim Narran at their head. Careful, cautious, they advanced out into the street, and found there only the dead and the injured and the debris. And shocked and shivering townsfolk, left feeble by the ebbing of their fury, staring at their bloody handiwork, murmuring in unsteady voices, trying to drag the wounded away to shelter or aid. Orisian and Torcaill and Taim walked numbly among the bodies. The corpses of the Haig party were easy enough to find. Fur cloaks were bloodied and soiled and trampled, velvet gloves torn. Torcaill prodded Gorred’s body with the toe of his boot. The messenger’s head rolled to one side. His face was broken in, the cheekbone and orbit of his eye shattered. The one eye that remained intact stared up at Orisian. He felt the cold, accusatory weight of that dead gaze, and turned away. “The day’s hardly begun, and already it’s decided to be a bad one,” Taim said. “Our troubles breed faster than mice.” Torcaill stood looking up and down the street, his gaze drifting over the dead and the dazed. “I count eight Haig dead. Two short. They must have broken out. This’ll foster no friendship for us if word reaches Aewult,” he said. “Soon we’ll have nothing but enemies left,” murmured Orisian.
IV
Kanin oc Horin-Gyre ran. The snow was thick on the ground here on the western fringe of the Karkyre Peaks, but still he ran, and took a bitter pleasure in the burning of his lungs and the aching of his legs. He pounded through the drifts, not caring whether his warriors kept pace with him, barely even remembering that they were there behind him somewhere. Past and future were gone from his mind, and only this momentary present existed for him; only the straining of his muscles, the heaving of his chest. And that small group of fleeing figures just ahead: the men he meant to kill. One of them glanced back and staggered to a halt, shouting something Kanin could not make out. Several of the men kept running, but as many stopped and turned. It must mean, of course, that Kanin had left his Shield behind. These Kilkry peasants thought they had him outnumbered. Outmatched. He rushed on. They did not know him; did not know what cold passion burned in him. They could not see the embracing shadow of death that he felt all about him now, in his every waking moment. He brushed aside a spearpoint with the face of his shield, slashed an arm with his sword. Snow sprayed up. Shouts crowded the still air. It was only noise, without meaning, to Kanin. Figures closed upon him. He did not see faces, only bodies to be cut at, dark forms to be broken. A second went down beneath his blade. A spear thrust glanced harmlessly off his mailed shoulder. His opponents seemed slow and clumsy to him. He, by contrast, rode a cresting wave of death-hunger. It sped his limbs, sharpened his eyes and mind. It made sense of the senseless world for him. A man whose brown hair was speckled with the silver of age came towards him, gesturing ineffectually with an old sword. Kanin could see that the blade was notched and had no edge. He ran to greet it, unhindered by the snow that tugged at his ankles. He killed the man, and then another, and rejoiced in the shedding of their blood. And soon there were only bodies about him, and he could hear his warriors coming up behind him. Kanin stood still and straight for a few moments, panting out great gouts of misting breath. Sword and shield hung slack on either side of him. “Half a dozen must have escaped us, sire,” Igris said. “So?” Kanin growled. “Send someone after them, if you wish. I’m done with it.” “These’ll not be hunting any more of our scouts, at least,” Igris said, surveying the corpses laid out around his master. “They’re nothing,” grunted Kanin, sheathing his sword. “Look at them. Farmers. Old warriors, perhaps, who’ve not lifted a blade for years. There’s none left north of Kilvale that are worth fighting.” “Except those shut up in Kolkyre with their Thane,” the shieldman suggested. Kanin shook his head, not in denial but frustration. He strode away, back down the trail of trampled snow the pursuit had created. Whatever warriors Roaric oc Kilkry-Haig had at his side behind Kolkyre’s walls were beyond reach. They could not venture out without risking destruction, but nor were the investing forces of the Black Road strong enough to storm the place. Not without a firm guiding hand to muster them all together and drive them into an assault, at least, and it seemed there was no such hand at work any more. Things had passed far beyond that. Forces more ferocious and unthinking held sway. Kanin slipped and slithered down the rocky slope they had ascended to outflank the Kilkry bandits. He went recklessly, letting his feet stutter over slick stones, taking a slide of loose snow and pebbles with him. He hit the ground at the foot of the incline hard, punching his knees up into his chest. The cold-looking men who had been left to guard the horses watched in silence. Kanin ignored them and went straight to his mount. He hung his shield from the saddle and brushed dirt and grit from his elbows. The urgency of the chase and the slaughter was leaving him, retreating like a slack tide. It left the familiar hollowness behind. Only violence seemed to fill him now; without it he had only an empty kind of longing. So it had been since his sister’s death. So, he knew, it would remain until Aeglyss was dead too. There were a dozen or more tents around the huge farmhouse Kanin had slept in for the last couple of nights. Horin warriors were scattered amongst them, tending fires, clearing snow, sharpening blades. Three were deep in discussion with a band of Tarbains who had come up to the edge of the camp; negotiating, Kanin guessed, a trade of booty or food. Kilkry lands were thick with such roving companies of looters and raiders and scavengers. The army of the Black Road had once, briefly, been mighty and vast. Triumphant. That had changed since their crushing defeat of the Haig forces outside Kolkyre. Great fragments of the army had splintered off, becoming a thousand ravening wolf packs, uncontrolled and uncontrollable, seething back and forth across the land, almost delirious in their desire for blood. He reined his horse in outside the stables and left it to a stable boy to feed and water the animal. It was the third mount Kanin had had since marching out from Castle Hakkan in the far north all those months ago. The first, he had felt some affection for, but it, and the second, had been killed beneath him. This one would no doubt suffer the same fate soon. He felt nothing for it. Icicles bearded the eaves of the farmhouse. Kanin heard laughter from within: a brief outburst in response to some jest or mishap. It was like hearing a language he did not know. Beyond the building, a column of men and women trudged through the shallow snow. They were folk of the Kilkry Blood, pressed into service as pack animals by their captors. Each carried a deep, wide-mouthed basket strapped to his or her back. They bore firewood and grain down towards the sprawling Black Road camps on the plain around Kolkyre. Their escort looked to be mostly Wyn-Gyre warriors, but there were several overseers who carried no weapons at all save stubby whips. One of these men was standing off to the side of the column, flailing away at some fallen victim. Kanin paused to watch. The whip cracked back and forth. None of the other guards so much as glanced at the scene. Many of the passing prisoners did, but their burdens were heavy and they could spare no more than a moment’s attention for fear of losing their footing on the path of hard-packed snow. No matter their age, Kanin thought, they all looked old: bent and ragged and gaunt. The badge of defeat. He found himself becoming irritated. The blows from the whip were having no effect on the prostrate form at the overseer’s feet, yet the man went on and on, his exertions becoming wilder and more frenzied with every stroke. The futility of it angered Kanin. He walked closer, approaching from the side to avoid the flailing whip. The man curled in the snow was folded down into a small, pathetic bundle like discarded sacking; unmoving beneath the increasingly savage blows. Kanin did not need to see his face to know that a whipping was not going to bring him back to his feet. “Enough,” shouted Kanin. “He’s dead. You’re wasting time.” The overseer ignored him. He lashed the corpse again, and then again, each strike accompanied by a grunting snarl that took to the air in a cloud of mist. As the man drew back his arm once more, the whip curling around and out behind him, Kanin stepped forwards and seized his wrist. “Enough, I said.” The man spun about, his face contorted by rage. He shrugged off the Thane’s grasp and stumbled back a few paces as if unbalanced by the ferocity of his emotions. Such ire burned in his eyes that Kanin could see nothing beyond it: there was no spark of recognition, no glimmer of anything other than animal fury. The man came forward. He raised his arm, the whip quivering with all the anger it inherited from its bearer. Kanin arched his eyebrows in disbelief, but did not move aside or raise any defence against the imminent blow. Igris, his shieldman, was quicker. The warrior stepped in front of his Thane and, even as the whip began to snap forward, put his sword deep into the overseer’s belly. The man fell to his knees. The whip snaked out feebly across the white snow. Igris pushed, tipping the man onto his back, then set a foot on his chest and pulled his blade free. The overseer gently placed his hands across the wound in his stomach, interlacing the fingers almost as if he were settling himself to sleep on a soft bed. He blinked and panted. Tears ran from the corners of his eyes. His blood trickled into the snow and stained it. Kanin turned and walked away. The column had shuffled to a halt, both guards and bearers watching. Their interest was desultory, remote. Kanin ignored them. Igris came hurrying after him. “Did you see his eyes?” Kanin asked. “Yes, sire,” Igris answered. “Nothing in him but bloodlust. Didn’t even know me; blinded by it. That’s what we’ve come to. We turn on each other, like starving dogs.” “Perhaps you’ve some ale you could offer me, Thane?” Kanin looked up from the platter of goat stew he was hunched over. Cannek was standing in the doorway of the farmhouse. Over the Hunt Inkallim’s shoulder, Kanin could see snow falling. Cannek’s cloak—a heavy, rustic garment more suited to an impoverished farmer—was smeared with melting flakes. The Inkallim was smiling. He smiled too much, Kanin thought, and without good reason. “Or if not ale, a seat at least?” Kanin nodded at the bench opposite his own. He took another mouthful of tasteless stew. “No ale, though,” he said through it. Cannek wrinkled his nose in disappointment as he shrugged the cloak from his shoulders. He spread it to dry on the floor in front of the fire. “I looked for you down by the city.” He sat at the table, facing Kanin. “You wearied of the siege, it seems.” Kanin glared at the Inkallim from under a creased brow, and then returned his attention to the bowl of stew. But his appetite, meagre at the best of times, was gone. “If so, I sympathise,” Cannek said. He unbuckled the knives that were always strapped to his forearms and laid them down on the uneven tabletop. Their dark wooden handles, Kanin noticed for the first time, had tiny ravens carved into them. Cannek rolled his shoulders and flexed his arms back. It was a lazy movement, like a wolf stretching. “It’s unpleasant down there,” the Inkallim said. “A shortage of food, an excess of foul tempers and ready blades. The dead go unburied and unburned. Some of the Gyre levies have taken to Tarbain customs, by all accounts: making cups from the skulls of dead Kilkry farmers and suchlike. I am not surprised you took your leave.” “There’s a sickness abroad. Everything is falling into ruin. I want no part of it. Anyway, nothing will come of the siege.” Cannek nodded. “Kolkyre can’t be starved into submission, since we’ve not got the ships to close their harbour. And it can’t be stormed. Not unless Shraeve recalled every spear that’s gone off south beyond Donnish.” “Would they come?” Kanin asked darkly, pushing aside his plate. “If Shraeve summoned them?” Cannek scratched the side of his nose. “Probably. The issue of command remains a little… unclear. There are plenty of companies from Gyre and the other Bloods milling about now, trying to assert themselves. Not wanting to miss out on all the glory to be won. But the Battle dominates, on the whole; and Shraeve is their Banner-captain. So yes, the armies might come and go at her call. Or that of Aeglyss, which amounts to the same thing. The masses seem willing to put a good deal of trust in him.” “You are remarkably at ease with the thought.” “I find our faith a great comfort in troubled times.” Cannek smiled again, sharp and fleeting. “Things are as they are. If there’s one thing the creed teaches us, it’s that a man gains nothing by worrying about it. Not even when he hopes to be the agent of change.” The Inkallim looked pointedly around the empty room. “I’d heard you’d developed a liking for solitude. Are we truly alone? No prying ears?” “None,” said Kanin. He insisted that his meals and his rest were undisturbed these days. Barring immediate need, not even his Shield were permitted to attend him. He and his thoughts occupied a world that every day seemed more distant from that inhabited by others; the two domains, he found, did not mix well. Cannek nodded, satisfied. “There’s a council called at Hommen. The Battle, the Lore, some of the Captains from the Bloods. Aeglyss is coming down from Kan Avor.” Kanin grimaced in surprise. “I’d not heard.” “You were not invited, Thane. You’re thought to have… what’s the phrase? Retired from the fray, I suppose. You’ve shown no great interest in the broad course of events. And it’s Shraeve who is calling us together; she—or the halfbreed, I suppose we should say—is no great admirer of your talents. Or your preoccupations.” “You’re going?” Kanin asked. “I, and one or two of my fellows.” “You’ll kill him?” said Kanin. The excitement he felt was not an elevating sentiment; there was nothing bright or warming about it. “The opportunity may arise. It seems likely.” Cannek shrugged. “What the outcome will be, I cannot say. That’s for forces greater than you or I to determine.” “How will you do it?” Kanin asked. “Oh, best not to enquire too deeply into such things for now. We must preserve your innocence in these matters as far as we can, don’t you think? Half the point of this is to protect you, and your Blood, from the consequences of what is happening. Comfort yourself with the thought that our reach was long enough to put an end to a Thane in his own feasting hall. Aeglyss is a good deal nearer at hand than Lheanor ever was.” There was a dull thump from outside one of the shuttered windows. Cannek’s eyes were drawn by the sound. His hand went to one of his knives, and had it halfway out of its sheath before Kanin could even draw breath. “Snow,” the Thane said. “It falls from the roof.” “Of course.” Cannek relaxed a trifle, though his hand remained on the knife. Kanin pushed back the bench on which he sat from the table, and rose. He began to stride back and forth. A rare vigour, such as he seldom felt now except when in battle, had taken hold of him. “It’s as well you came to tell me. I could not have waited much longer, whatever promises you dangled before me. It’s eating me from the inside out. What must be done, must be done.” “Patience is a virtue often rewarded by fate, Thane. Your restraint has been commendable, I’m sure. Still, I told you the Hunt would take this burden from you, and so we will, if fortune permits us. The Hunt does not make empty promises.” “Does it not?” growled Kanin. He could think of more than one occasion when the Hunt Inkall had failed in its avowed intent—not least when the children of Kennet nan Lannis-Haig had slipped through its grasp in the Car Criagar—but now was not the time to pick fights with the one ally he had against Aeglyss. And there was as clear a sign as there could be of how misshapen everything had become: that he should look to the ranks of the Hunt for allies. He sat heavily on a three-legged stool close by the fire. His limbs would not rest, though, and he was back on his feet in a moment. “Does Goedellin concur in this?” he demanded. “Does the Lore give its backing?” Cannek sighed expressively. “The Lore deals in fine judgements. The intricacies of the creed, teasing out the complexities of any case or cause: these are things we can leave to Goedellin. You and I, we can deal in more… direct explorations of fate’s intent.” “No, then,” said Kanin. “The Lore will not take your side. Our side.” “The Lore—or Goedellin, who is the Lore here and now—reserves its judgement,” said Cannek, spreading his arms. “Let us leave it at that.” “Can’t he see?” cried Kanin in exasperation. “Is he so slack-eyed he can’t see an enemy when one stands before him?” “It is possible to see too much, sometimes.” Cannek said. “Too many possibilities, too many potential explanations. Success easily overturns old rules, old ways of thinking. Such are the victories we have gained, it is no surprise that some—many—see the glimmer of still greater, perhaps even final, glories on the horizon. For such a prize, they are willing to keep the most surprising company. “But in any case, I do not think of Aeglyss as my enemy, Thane. I will try to kill him, but not out of malice. I simply mistrust the notion that he is fated to play so central a role in our affairs. I mistrust the notion that a halfbreed, and one whose adherence to the creed is at best questionable, should be the one to usher in the final triumph of our faith. Others find those notions more plausible than I. There is error, somewhere. My only intent is to remove any uncertainty over whose it is. Fate already knows the answer. Soon, we will too.” And that is where our ways must part, thought Kanin. The vengeful, unambiguous passion that burned in him was something Cannek would never share. The Inkallim still framed everything in terms of the faith, of fate. Once Kanin might have thought in the same patterns, but such habits had flaked away from his mind like dead skin, day by day. The door creaked open, caught by the cold wind. A flurry of snowflakes tumbled in and Kanin saw, sitting outside, one of Cannek’s great dark, jowly hounds. As if sensing an invitation, the beast rose and took a couple of heavy paces towards the light and warmth. Cannek rose and went to the door, giving an animal hiss. The dog sank back onto its haunches as the Inkallim closed it out. “I will come to Hommen,” Kanin said. “Indeed,” said Cannek, going to stand by the fire, taking its heat into his back. “Even uninvited, your presence could hardly be challenged. You are a Thane, after all.” “I want to see him die.” “I assumed you would.” “We’ll leave in the morning.” “You do as you wish. I will be travelling through the night.” The Inkallim scooped his knives up from the table and began strapping them back onto his arms. “It would be best if we did not arrive together. Our intimacies must remain secret, Thane, like any pair of illicit lovers.” Kanin grimaced. “It’s not love we cultivate.”
V
A host of crows came raucously in under the clouds, like black fish shoaling in the shallow sky. They jostled and tumbled and rolled their way down into the naked trees on the edge of town, where they roosted. Orisian watched their tumultuous descent through the dusk, and in their voices heard the sound of Highfast, where he had watched their like playing violent games with the mountain wind. Highfast, of which neither Yvane nor Eshenna would willingly speak now, fearful of its meaning, of what they had felt happening there. Only the vaguest of rumours had reached Ive regarding that remote stronghold’s fate, but Orisian had access to other truths, ones he thought more reliable than the wild stories of terrified villagers. He believed what Yvane had told him before she fell into grim reticence on the subject: na’kyrim minds snuffed out like crushed candle flames, a torrent of death and destruction running through the Shared. Aeglyss. Aeglyss, the question to which he could find no answer. Perhaps there was none to be had, but he could not bring himself to stop looking. Torcaill and a handful of his warriors walked at Orisian’s back. They had been shadowing him for much of the day, disturbed by the violence visited upon Ive’s sentries in the night, and upon the Haig messengers. Every raised voice, every figure moving in an alley or doorway, seemed a possible threat. A formless dread, an anticipation of imminent catastrophe, was in the air. When they reached the house where Eshenna and Yvane sheltered, Orisian defied Torcaill’s protests and left his escort on the street. It was not only that he found the poorly concealed unease of the warriors when in the company of na’kyrim distracting; there was also a deeper-rooted instinct to keep some portion of whatever incomplete and vague truths might emerge here hidden. There was too much in K’rina’s plight, and in the things Yvane and Eshenna spoke of, that could point the way to despair. Yvane and Eshenna were seated by the crackling fire. They had flatbreads spread on slates and propped up to cook in front of the flames. “You heard what happened this morning?” Orisian asked as he entered. “To Aewult’s emissaries?” Yvane nodded. “We could hardly miss it. Noisier than rutting stags.” “Every time we get word of what’s going on out in the countryside, it’s of some horror worse than the last,” Orisian said. “Everything’s falling apart. Everyone’s going mad.” “There’s a fever in the world. The weak, the angry, the fearful, the bitter; they’ll lose themselves to it first. And there’s never been a shortage of those sentiments in the world, has there? But we could all follow. Every one of us, pure-blooded or not, knowing it or not, is touched by the Shared. Aeglyss will rot us all from the inside out. He may not even mean to.” She shrugged. “I don’t know. Whether by choice or not, he’s potent enough to make his own sickness into everyone’s. Or bring the sickness that’s already there to the surface.” She sounded tired, defeated, to Orisian. That was not the Yvane he needed. “You talk like one of the Black Roaders. A sick world, ready to rot from the inside?” Yvane sighed. “Centuries of Huanin killing Kyrinin, True Blood killing Black Road. Sons killing fathers killing sons. Aeglyss is making nothing new; he’s only releasing what’s always there, under the surface.” Orisian flicked a hand at her in irritation. “There’s more than that. We haven’t lost yet.” “Of course there’s more than that,” Yvane said. “But the Shared remembers all things. It makes memories of every sentiment, every thought, every desire. Believe me, a great many of them are dark.” “Not all, though,” Orisian said stubbornly. Yvane looked up at him. She had weary eyes. “What do you want to do?” she asked him. “That’s what I have to decide. It’s why I’m here.” “We’ve told you all we can.” “There’s no time left, Yvane. The Black Road is winning. We’ll be cut off, or worse, any day now. We can’t remain here. But where we should go, what we should do… You can’t tell me, but perhaps she can.” He pointed at the wall, and beyond it the yard and the shed and the mute, damaged na’kyrim within. “We don’t even know if she’s got any secrets to reveal,” Yvane muttered stubbornly. “I need to find out.” He could hear his voice rising, his frustration stretching it. “Inurian could reach inside anyone and tell truth from lie, read the temper of their heart. You can find another na’kyrim wherever they are, and speak with them. I’ve seen you do it. Eshenna can find minds in the Shared. She led us to K’rina in the first place. I don’t believe there’s nothing more we can know. I need you to help me find an answer, in the Shared, in K’rina. Anywhere. Somehow. Please.” Orisian felt guiltily as though he were accusing these two na’kyrim of something. That was not what he intended, but Yvane’s intransigence bred a certain reckless desperation in him. “You don’t understand what you’re asking,” Yvane said. “The Shared’s nothing but storm and misery and horror now. It’s a darkness, haunted by beasts. By one beast in particular.” “As is the world. That’s why it matters. I know you never wanted to be a part of this, not any of it. I know that. But you’ve got to choose sides, Yvane. I can’t understand, but still I ask. Who are you trying to protect? K’rina? Yourself?” “I will do it.” Orisian looked in surprise at Eshenna. “Do what?” Yvane asked the other na’kyrim sharply. “Reach out. Reach for her,” Eshenna said quietly, without looking up. “I can’t carry on like this. It’s grinding me away, inside and out. When I wake, the first thing I feel is fear, as if it’s been waiting there at the side of my bed while I slept. Like a black dog, waiting for me to come back to it. Hateful. I’m too tired to carry that weight all day, every day. I can hardly think straight; everything in my head that’s mine is getting drowned out.” “I know,” Yvane said. She looked as if she was about to say more, but pursed her lips. There was, Orisian recognised, a certain strain of sympathy and understanding that she could fall back upon—if she chose to—only when dealing with other na’kyrim. It remained, and she could still find it, even when her temper ran hot. It clouded her judgement too, he thought, when it came to K’rina. “Perhaps I should never have left Highfast,” Eshenna sighed, “but all of this would still have found me there. Perhaps worse. In any case, it won’t stop.” She glanced up at Yvane, seeking confirmation. “It’s not going to stop, is it? Not unless Aeglyss chooses to stop it. Or someone kills him.” “I doubt he could choose to stop this,” Yvane said. “I doubt he can control anything about it, really.” “Then someone has to kill him.” “If you reach into the Shared, if you let even the smallest part of it into you… you risk letting him in too.” Yvane was sad rather than argumentative. “You know that? It’s his territory now. His hunting ground. You might come apart.” “The first thing I feel when I wake up is fear,” Eshenna repeated in a flat voice. “That is already breaking me apart.” The three of them went together to the shed at the end of the yard, each carrying a candle that they had to shield against the shifting of the cold dusk air. They entered in silence, and set the lights down, and gathered about K’rina. She did not respond to their presence. She just lay there, curled on her bed of straw; perhaps asleep, perhaps not. Yvane gently roused K’rina and lifted her onto her knees. “Can you hear me?” Yvane asked quietly. K’rina remained blank. Silent. Yvane backed away and Eshenna took her place, kneeling in front of K’rina. “Be careful,” Yvane said. She was resigned now. “Go no further, no deeper, than you must.” “I know,” Eshenna replied as she reached up and brushed K’rina’s hair away from her eyes. She laid one hand on the na’kyrim’s cheek, the other on her hand where it rested in her lap. In another place, between other people, it could have been a loving contact, Orisian thought. A gesture of affection. “I’m sorry,” he said. The words came of their own accord. He suddenly felt guilty, even ashamed, that he had forced this. Yet it was necessary, his instincts insisted. “Keep quiet,” Yvane said. Eshenna closed her eyes, bowed her head a little. Her breath fluttered out of her. Her shoulders sagged. She might almost have been falling asleep. K’rina remained wholly impassive. The two of them sat thus, linked in their different, unnatural trances, for so long that Orisian’s doubts began to reassert themselves. “It’s not working,” he whispered to Yvane. She splayed her hand at him, irritably demanding silence. She was frowning in concentration. Somewhere outside, diminished by distance, Orisian thought he could just still hear the harsh calling of the crows. The sound seemed to him to have a hostile edge to it now, as if mocking his hopeless efforts to oppose forces that could not be opposed, or understood. He flailed about like a drowning man in a flood, he thought. Perhaps all he could hope for was that he did not drag too many others down with him. He caught himself before that despair took too firm a hold. Could he even trust it as wholly his own? A faint hiss from Yvane brought him back from his dark, distracted reverie. Eshenna was gasping. Her jaw cracked open and shut, the joint creaking as her muscles spasmed. A blush was spreading through her cheeks and brow, brightening and deepening with every desperate breath. Orisian looked at Yvane in concern. She narrowed her eyes. “I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t tell what’s happening.” Eshenna jerked, almost as if she was trying to pull away from K’rina, but she did not—or could not—release her grip. Her spine curved and flexed, snapping her head back then down again into her chest. Orisian saw Yvane wincing, her brow creasing. She shrank away from the other two na’kyrim. “What is it?” he asked her. “Something…” she whispered, then shook her head sharply, as if beset by a host of biting flies. Orisian could hear—or feel—a roaring, like a distant waterfall, or a storm blowing through trees. But it was inside his head, not outside, in the bone of his skull and the substance of his thoughts. It bled darkness from the edges of its sound, blurring shadows across his vision. The world was tumbling away from him, or he from it. The cramped shed around him swelled, rushing out to become a vertiginously immense space. “Separate them,” he said, reeling at the dizzying sense of dislocation. He reached out and took hold of Eshenna’s arm, trying to pull it away from K’rina. “Help me,” he hissed at Yvane. There was an instant of reluctance, a hesitant fear, and then Yvane too had hold of Eshenna, and was murmuring urgently to her. “Come back, Eshenna. Come back. Can you hear me? Come back to yourself.” Orisian could barely hear her above the rushing within his skull. The sensation of falling was sickening. It was only with the greatest difficulty that they could part the two of them. K’rina slumped limply to the straw. Eshenna fell back into Orisian’s arms. He laid her down as gently as he could. She was calm now, though tremors still inhabited her hands, and when her eyes struggled open, her gaze was unfocused. Orisian found himself cradling her head, and could feel the dampness of sweat in her hair. Her stone-grey eyes blinked up at him. “She’s empty,” Eshenna gasped. “Nothing there, just a pit that falls away for ever. Into nothingness. It wanted to take hold of me, and I could not prevent it. But it didn’t know me. That’s the only thing that saved me. It’s made for someone else, waiting for someone else, or I would have been lost. Swallowed up and caged in there for ever.” She was crying, though whether it was from pain, or fear, or relief Orisian could not tell. “Be still,” said Yvane. She spoke to Eshenna, but it was K’rina she was looking at, in the flickering light of the candles, and it was a look of suppressed horror or perhaps grief. “Was it Aeglyss?” Orisian asked. “No, no,” Eshenna said, casting a desolate glance towards the prostrate na’kyrim. “It’s what’s in her; what’s been made of her. She wasn’t meant for us. We should never have taken her. We should never have interfered. We’ve ruined everything.” There were voices outside in the yard. Footsteps on the paving stones, a muttered conversation, and then a rapping at the door that shook it on its old hinges. “The Black Road, sire,” Torcaill shouted. “They’re on the road south of here, close enough to reach us tomorrow from the sound of it. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands.” “All right,” called Orisian. Then, more softly: “I’m coming.” He cast a last worried glance at Eshenna and met her tear-filled eyes. “I have to go,” he said. “It’s true, what I said before,” she breathed. “What?” “Someone has to kill him.”
VI
Kanin hated the sight of Hommen. This miserable and meek little town was where word of Wain’s death had first reached him. It was here that he had watched Shraeve win leadership of the Battle in combat, and save Aeglyss’ life in doing so. It was here that his life and his faith had been brought to ruin. And perhaps all the world with them. On his journey north, he had seen plentiful signs of the dereliction into which a once-noble enterprise was slipping. He and his company had skirted the edge of the vast army sprawled around the landward walls of Kolkyre. Like ants teeming about a corpse too thick-skinned for their jaws to pierce, the forces of the Black Road had spread themselves across great swathes of farmland. A stench, of burning and death and animals, hung over the fields and camps. Riding through the fringes of this disorderly host, Kanin saw bodies lying bloated by the side of the track; men and women howling with glee as they mobbed together to beat a Tarbain tribesman; a warrior kneeling in the mud, weeping uncontrollably, hands resting limp and upturned on his thighs. Beyond Kolkyre, they made camp for the night a short way from the road, and in the freezing darkness a band of looters, reckless or starving or mad, tried to steal their horses. They killed two of Kanin’s guards before his warriors could be mustered to drive them off. His Shield took one alive, though only because Kanin intervened to preserve the man’s life for a time. He questioned the prisoner himself, but got little sense from him. The man was of the Gaven-Gyre Blood, a carpenter from Whale Harbour. He would not, or could not, give his name, or that of any captain he followed. Nor could he explain how the faith and duty that led him to leave his home and march to battle had been corrupted into banditry and murder. Kanin cursed him, and struck him, and walked away. He heard Igris behead the carpenter as he stooped back into his tent. As they followed the road along the bleak shoreline towards Hommen, they passed through a broken, almost deserted, land. Many of the farmsteads and hamlets bore the black scars of fires. Doors hung loose or had been torn away completely. Outside an isolated cottage, a dead child, a boy, was impaled on a stake. Frost had laid a crisp white veil over his face. Crows had taken his eyes and opened his nose and shredded his lips. Waves lapped along a coast littered with broken-backed boats that had been thrown ashore after coming free of their moorings. There were sea-softened corpses that lay pale and fat on the pebbles. A pack of dogs was tearing at one such piece of the war’s debris, surrounded by a patient audience of gulls and crows. A bone-thin grey hound tensed and growled when Kanin reined in his horse to watch. There were few of the living left in this ruined land. A handful of sick Gyre warriors who had taken refuge to recover or die in a mill looked on with rheumy eyes as Kanin passed by. A solitary woman stumbled along beside his horse for a way, until she tripped and fell to her hands and knees in the snow. She said not a word, but laughed feverishly, desperately. In a field, a dozen or more enslaved villagers scrabbled in the snow and soil for half-rotted vegetables that should have been harvested long ago, watched over by grim-faced men who stared suspiciously at Kanin’s company. And Kyrinin. Three times Kanin saw woodwights. They roamed the higher ground inland from the coast, falling away behind the shelter of ridge lines almost as soon as he caught sight of them. Had they been closer, he might have led his warriors in pursuit of them, hunted them. When his father had agreed to the alliance between his Blood and the White Owls what felt like a lifetime ago, it had been meant to last only as long as did the Kyrinin’s usefulness. That they still lingered, with impunity, in the lands the Black Road had reconquered was an insult. A corruption of what should have been. A sign of how thoroughly Aeglyss had twisted everything. Amidst all this emptiness, Hommen itself was an island of life. As he drew near, Kanin could see the smoke of scores of cooking fires. There were countless tents amongst the houses, ranks of tethered horses being fed and watered, crowds of men and women from every Blood. And to Kanin it was still more hateful, and reeked still more pungently of death, than the desolation that surrounded it. He left Igris to find shelter and food for his band of warriors and walked down through the crowds to the crude wooden quay. The masses of men and women who thronged Hommen’s streets barely intruded upon his awareness. He recognised no one. He heard the babble of voices as the empty noise of birds. He felt no bonds of faith or purpose or intent with these people. He stood on the planks of the quay, close to the spot he had been standing when the rumour of Wain’s death first found him. He looked west, across the grey, dead expanse of the estuary towards the limitless sea. And so bright was the sinking sun that lay white and cold on the horizon, so piercing its light, that he had to close his eyes. He heard seagulls overhead, laughing. “What happened to my sister, Shraeve? You were there, in Kan Avor, when she died. You must know what happened.” “She was fortunate enough to leave this world. That is what happened. She will wake in a better one, and you will see her there, Thane.” Shraeve and Kanin stood outside the little hall that lay beside the main road through Hommen. It was an island of comparative calm, the space in front of the hall’s doors, for Shraeve’s ravens had cleared it. Twenty of them stood in a wide half-circle, keeping back any who sought to draw near without permission. Onlookers were clustered beyond that silent cordon, eager to catch sight of the great and the powerful who were gathering here. “Not good enough,” Kanin hissed. He took hold of the Inkallim’s upper arm as she walked away from him. It was like grasping rock. He turned her to face him, and she met him with cold contempt. “I am Banner-captain of the Battle Inkall, Thane,” Shraeve said softly. She glanced at his restraining hand, and he let it fall away from her; not through fear, or respect, but because his purposes would not be served by fighting with her today. Shraeve would have to die as well as Aeglyss, he realised with new clarity, but not now. Not yet. “I want to know what happened to my sister,” he said. “There is no shame in such a desire.” “Shame? No, perhaps not. But it serves no purpose. Mourning is but self-pity. You know it as well as I do.” Once he had known it. Now, it sounded like a hollow platitude, vindictively crafted by the lips of an enemy. “Let the dead go, Thane,” Shraeve said. “We will join them soon enough, in the better world.” Men and women were filing past them into the hall. Leaders from the Gyre and Gaven and Fane Bloods; Lore Inkallim, led by the shuffling, hunched, black-lipped figure of Goedellin; Cannek, who studiously avoided Kanin’s gaze as he settled his two hounds down to await his return from the council. “It’s time,” Shraeve said, and turned away from Kanin. He followed her into the musty gloom of the hall. It was empty save for a single table at its centre, lined with chairs. Serving girls—whether brought from the north with the armies or prisoners pressed into service, Kanin could not say—were lighting torches along the walls and setting out beakers of wine and ale and plates. At the far end of the hall, standing by small doors that must lead to the kitchens or other antechambers, were White Owl Kyrinin. They were hateful in Kanin’s sight, and he averted his eyes from them. One or two of those already seated regarded him with curiosity, perhaps even suspicion, as he took his place at the table. He ignored them. They were nothing to him, these latecomers to the war his family had started. Not one of them had offered his father any support; not one of them had crossed the Stone Vale until they, or their masters, caught the scent of victories already won, and of spoils and glory to be claimed. He clasped his hands in his lap and stared fixedly down at them, watching his fingertips redden as the tension within him tightened its grip. He heard the wide doors of the hall scrape shut. The last of the daylight was excluded and they were left with the yellow flamelight and the scent of smoke. The servants went out, one by one, past the woodwight sentinels, and a heavy silence descended. “Where’s the halfbreed?” a man asked at length. Kanin had met him once or twice before, long ago: Talark, Captain of a castle on the southern borders of the Gyre Blood. A relative, by marriage, to Ragnor oc Gyre himself. “He will join us shortly,” Shraeve said placidly. She had taken her twin swords from her back. They rested in their scabbards against the side of her chair. “He is preparing himself.” “For what, I wonder?” Cannek asked, almost mirthful, as if some unuttered jest was pleasing him. Shraeve ignored the Hunt Inkallim. “There are other matters to talk of first. Kilvale. Kolkyre.” “Food, if you’ve any sense,” Talark muttered irritably. “Half my warriors are starving. Most of my horses have gone into their bellies.” “All the more reason to keep moving on. Conquest will feed our armies. Every town we take, every village, has stores laid in for winter. That promise, and the strength of their faith must keep them —” “They have stores only if they don’t burn them or empty them before we get there,” Talark interrupted her. “And if the farmers and villagers who flee before us haven’t already eaten them.” “The Battle has arranged for supplies to be brought down through the Stone Vale,” Shraeve replied. “A hundred mules, all fully laden, reached Anduran only two days ago.” “Mules!” Talark scoffed. “It’s wagons we need, and oceans of them. Not a few mules.” “Perhaps if the High Thane, your master, gave more than half his heart in support of us, you could have those wagons.” The Gyre warrior glowered at Shraeve. “It’s difficult to get wagons across the Vale at this time of year. You know that.” “Indeed. Yet you sit in the hall of a Kilkry-Haig town. It seems we—those who came before you, Talark—have already proved that even the impossible can sometimes be possible. If the will is there. The faith.” One of the Gaven-Gyre warriors cut short the burgeoning argument by rasping her chair back across the floor and rapping the back of her hand on the table. “If it’s conquest that concerns you, our time might have been better spent busying ourselves with that task instead of riding all the way back here to indulge in petty disputes. There’s more than enough chaos already, without our absence to help it along.” “She knows that,” Talark grunted. “She’s got her ravens out there taking charge of everything while we’re dragged back here. This serves no purpose save that of the Children of the Hundred.” “No purpose?” Shraeve snapped, anger colouring her voice for the first time. “There is only one purpose in any of this. The service of the creed. Raising it up until all the world falls beneath its shadow. None who would dissent from that, none who doubt that the moment has come for all other concerns to be set aside, have any place in this endeavour. There must be unity. That is why we are gathered here now. Not to indulge in dispute, but to end it.” “Don’t question my faithfulness to the creed,” Talark said, though his tone lacked the steel of conviction. “There must be unity,” Goedellin murmured. All looked towards him. To Kanin’s eyes, the man looked more frail and weary than ever before. He spoke slowly, heavily, his seerstem-darkened lips sluggish. “There must be unity, and certainty. Doubt is the enemy of faith. Yet these times are… confused. Few things seem as clear as once they did.” “Success is clarity,” Shraeve said. “It answers all questions.” She was firm, but her manner had shed its confrontational edge. It was good to see, Kanin thought, that the Battle’s confidence and arrogance had not yet become bloated enough to crowd out some vestigial respect for an Inner Servant of the Lore. “Indeed.” Goedellin nodded. “Indeed.” And then: “Perhaps.” “When Kilvale falls, all doubt will be undone,” said Shraeve with cold certainty. “When we hold the Fisherwoman’s birthplace, the birthplace of our creed, then the fire will burn brightly in every heart. Nothing will quench it then. None will be able to argue fate’s intent.” “Oh, there’s always room for argument,” Cannek interjected lightly. “It’s in our nature to be disputatious.” Kanin groaned inwardly. Why taunt the woman? Why so brazenly flaunt his opposition? But, of course, Cannek was one of those who found such liberation in the Black Road that he feared nothing, found nothing troubling. He would dare anything, and greet the consequences of his daring with equanimity. Such sentiments, once familiar, were beyond Kanin’s reach now. At the far, gloomy end of the hall, the Kyrinin were moving. One of the doors opened. Kanin held his breath, and sensed the same sudden expectation taking hold of everyone else at the table. The na’kyrim entered, and whatever feelings had been stirring in Kanin turned to disgust at the sight of him. Aeglyss was a wasted figure, emaciated and gaunt, coming unsteadily forward on the arm of a tall woodwight. The halfbreed’s colourless skin was scabbed and slack. Kanin grimaced. Yet when he looked about the faces of the others gathered there, he saw entirely different emotions portrayed. A hint of unease now and again, but fascination too. Even Talark watched Aeglyss approach with a pathetic, wide-eyed touch of wonder. There was an empty chair at Shraeve’s side. Aeglyss settled gingerly into it. He looked so small. Kanin imagined that the halfbreed’s neck would break with only the gentlest of twists. The Kyrinin warrior who had escorted Aeglyss to his place remained standing there, just behind him. “Must we have woodwights in attendance?” asked Talark, recovering a fragment of his previous antagonism. “This is Hothyn,” Shraeve said. “He is the son of the White Owl Voice, and leader of the warband that accompanies Aeglyss. His presence is a sign of our strength, not our weakness.” Yet I saw these same White Owls killing one another in the streets of Glasbridge, Kanin thought. Even in them, Aeglyss could not command the unity you hope for. Not until those who contested it had been killed. “Do not be distressed by my appearance,” Aeglyss suddenly said. His voice grated in his throat. “I am engaged in a struggle, every day, to contain and to shape what burns within me. It takes its toll. Flesh and bone were not made to bear such burdens. A river that rises in its greatest flood will ruin and break its banks, and so it is with me. The flood is in me. Once I master it, I will repair its ravages.” He smiled, and Kanin saw yellowing teeth, black veins of corruption and decay spreading from them through white gums. He imagined that were he close enough he would catch the stink of rot from that foul mouth. The smile faded, and Aeglyss closed his eyes. “I can smell the spice-thick air of Adravane’s Inner Court,” the na’kyrim murmured. “I feel the sand beneath the hoofs of a Saolin running on the Din Sive shore. I remember the Whreinin; can reach out and know what it was to be of the wolfenkind. The Anain raised a forest to drown a city with trees, yet they flee from the shadow of my mind as I move through the Shared. But they cannot flee far enough, or fast enough. Even them I can taste. Their age, their thoughts running like blood through veins of leaf and bough. All of this flows through me, and I flow through all things.” He shivered, as if a cold pleasure filled him. “Your cause has found a servant in me, and the world has never seen my like. Such is the gift that fate, through me, bestows upon you. It is a terrible gift, but that is my burden. I will bear it and I will serve you.” He looked around them all then, giving each of those at the table a brief moment of his undivided attention. His gaze brushed most briefly over Kanin, or so it seemed to Kanin himself. Even that instant of contact was enough to feel the weight of what lay behind the na’kyrim’s eyes. To Kanin, it was oppressive and invasive. To others, he saw as their turns came, one by one, it was exhilarating. “I am the answer you and your people have been seeking all these years,” Aeglyss breathed at length. And Kanin felt it. He felt it blooming in his breast and spreading its warmth through his limbs. It lifted him, and for the space of those few heartbeats there was nothing but the utter delight of knowing that all was as it should, and must, be. That all his hopes would be fulfilled, in their last and smallest detail. That the world this na’kyrim could promise him was all he could ever desire. Yet still, amidst it all, there was a hard nugget marring the perfection of the sensation: a nugget of hatred; the contradictory whisper that his truest, deepest desire could not be fulfilled by this halfbreed, but only by his death. “All I ask is that you put your faith in me,” Aeglyss said. “And in the allies I bring to your cause. The White Owls. The force of my own will. The Shadowhand.” “It’s true, then, that the Shadowhand is bound? That you have done to him what Orlane did to Tarcene?” Goedellin’s voice broke the skin of the moment. Kanin found himself suddenly breathing deeply, realising only now that he had been holding his breath. “To have such a weapon at our enemy’s very heart…” whispered Talark. “The Haig Chancellor is bound to our service —” Shraeve began, but Aeglyss cut her short with a strange, strangled grunt. “Some things should not be spoken of,” the na’kyrim said. “Think instead of the gifts I shall bring you. Kolkyre, Kilvale. Even unto Vaymouth itself, if that is your wish.” “Still, Tarcene’s binding hardly ended well. Not for the Kingbinder himself, nor for the Kyrinin he served. Certainly not for Tarcene,” murmured Cannek, but no one save Kanin seemed to even notice that he had spoken. “There are things—aspects of what I have become—that none can understand,” Aeglyss continued. “Burdens I must bear alone, in silence. Only my own kind could understand what I… but they are afraid. They fear my brightness will burn them. Only one… only she… She would understand.” His head twitched and dipped to one side. His crab-like hand scraped rigidly across the surface of the table. His eyes lost their focus. “But she’s been stolen from me,” he rasped. “I can’t find her. She is gone.” Goedellin was regarding the na’kyrim with consternation. Talark frowned uneasily. Yes, Kanin thought, you can see if you choose to; see his madness. This is the man you would make master of your hopes, your fates? This poisoned ruin of a man, whose thoughts trickle through his own fingers like so much grain? But the moment did not last. The doubts had no time to take root. “We should eat,” Shraeve said, and at the sound of her voice Aeglyss recovered himself. “Yes,” he sighed, straightening in his chair, drawing his hand back to press it against his chest. “We should eat.” The food was neither plentiful nor elegant. Bread and broth and a single haunch of mutton. They ate in silence. All save Aeglyss. He touched nothing, only watched. A serving girl made her way around the table, pouring out wine from a clay jug. She came to Aeglyss last, and wiped the lip of the jug clean with a cloth before emptying the last of its contents into his cup. Aeglyss pushed away his plateful of neglected food. He lifted the cup to his lips and drank deeply. As he set it down again his hand gave a brief involuntary jerk, spilling wine on the table. Kanin saw Cannek lay down a hunk of bread he had been gnawing. The Inkallim was watching Aeglyss intently. Others caught the change in mood. Conversations died. Aeglyss’ face was white, paler even than it had been before. His eyes, the pupils dilated, were gleaming wetly. A muscle in his left cheek twitched, though his jaw was tight clenched. Otherwise, he was as motionless as a statue. Kanin looked around. Every eye was upon the halfbreed. Still Aeglyss had not moved. His white fingernails were digging into the rough surface of the table. His eyes stared rigidly at Cannek. The Inkallim was quite calm. “What have you done?” Shraeve said softly. Abruptly Aeglyss retched, gripped by a convulsion that rose from deep in his midriff. He hunched forward and then straightened with a great gasp. The movement seemed to release all the tension from his body. He put one hand to his mouth and spat a small dark object into his palm. He held it out: a perfect orb of black matter the size of an eyeball, with strands of saliva still clinging to it. “Yours, I think,” said Aeglyss thickly to Cannek. He set it down upon the table, where it rested like a dull, sodden marble a child had discarded. Cannek regarded it thoughtfully for a moment or two, his hands clasped together before him. The globule lost its form, slumping into a viscous stain. “That’s very clever,” Cannek murmured with a smile. “What is this?” Goedellin asked, his voice all indignant puzzlement. “Poison?” Cannek’s hands parted, and there was a blade in one of them. Shraeve’s arm snapped up. One of her swords, still sheathed, came spinning across the table. Cannek ducked and swayed to one side, so that the sword went cartwheeling away off the side of his head. It was enough to spoil his own aim. His knife, sent darting out with a flick of his wrist, flashed past Aeglyss’ shoulder. Shraeve followed her sword, vaulting the table, pivoting on one hand to drive a straight-legged kick into Cannek’s chest. The Hunt Inkallim went crashing back with his chair, rolling and rising smoothly to a crouch. But Shraeve was too fast even for him. In the moment it took Cannek to recover his balance, she hit him with her full weight, wrapping an arm about his neck, splaying her other hand over his eyes. She took him backwards, tumbled the pair of them across the floor. And out of that blur of movement rose a clear, long cracking. Shraeve stood. Cannek lay, eyes and mouth open, head tilted sideways on a broken neck. Shraeve brushed dust from her knees. The assembled warriors stared in a mixture of amazement and confusion at the dead Inkallim. Only Kanin turned back at once to Aeglyss. And found the na’kyrim watching him. Aeglyss wiped the back of his hand across his lips. He was breathing fast. “Is that what you all require?” the halfbreed said loudly, and was at once the focus of all attention once more. “That’s the kind of answer you people demand, isn’t it? There’s fate for you. There’s the choice made for you. I live.” Kanin wondered if he was the only one to hear the contempt, the bitterness, that suffused Aeglyss’ words. Silently, he raged against the immobility of his limbs, and against the impotence of his own anger. His sword was within reach—he imagined it calling out to him—but Aeglyss, the idea of Aeglyss, filled his field of vision: out of reach, untouchable, inviolable. “You cannot kill me, for I am not as you are,” Aeglyss said. He slammed his bony fist down on the table. “You think because I am flesh, I am weak. No, no. You must learn to think differently. You will learn. For all your hatred and your betrayals, I will raise you up. I will give you all that you want, feed all the hungers in your hearts, and those who turn against me will be cast down and ruined. There is no other way. No other truth.” “As it is written,” Shraeve murmured as she picked up her sword and came back around the table to stand beside Hothyn. The two warriors, Inkallim and White Owl, flanked the na’kyrim. And no gaze would meet the challenge those three offered. No one could deny them the submission they demanded. “Kill the girl who served me my wine,” Aeglyss said. “And all the rest of the servants. All of them.” He looked up at Shraeve and she nodded. “You’ve uttered not a word, Thane,” Aeglyss said to Kanin. “I’ve never known such silence from you. Have you nothing to say?” “Nothing.” Kanin rose, horrified at the effort it took to turn away from Aeglyss, and at the yearning he felt to love the halfbreed and all that he offered. But his hatred provided the one, thin sheen of armour he needed to resist that call. He spared a lingering moment for a last look at Cannek lying dead on the floor, and walked out. An absurd, half-formed smile had been locked into the Inkallim’s lips by death. Kanin waited outside, and the rest came soon after him, emerging blinking into the clear winter light. All were silent; some thoughtful, some shocked and shaken. In some faces he was sickened to see a sort of joy. This, he understood, was how it happened. There were some—many, perhaps—who found the horrors that Aeglyss embodied and offered not repellent but intoxicating. Once they caught their first scent of his corruption they wanted nothing more than to drink deep of it, to drown themselves in it. When Goedellin appeared, Kanin stepped in front of the Lore Inkallim, forcing the old, bent man to stop. “How many have to die, Goedellin? Before you will open your eyes to this madness?” The Inner Servant rapped the heel of his walking stick on the ground but said nothing. “My sister was the truest and most loyal follower of the creed, old man. Every beat of her heart was a promise of faith. Is she owed nothing for that lifetime of fidelity? Did it earn her no honour from the Lore?” “Such matters are not straightforward, Thane,” Goedellin grumbled. He shuffled sideways, trying to pass. Kanin blocked his path. “We had tutors when we were children,” he said quietly, insistently. “Tutors from your Inkall.” “I know. Wain told me.” “Did she tell you that my father wanted to send them away? After only a couple of seasons, he doubted his decision to bring them to Hakkan. She changed so quickly, you see. She devoured their teachings as if she had been starving until then, without ever knowing it. My father was disturbed by it.” The Inner Servant of the Lore angled his head a little, looking up to meet Kanin’s gaze just for a moment. “We knew nothing of it until one day the tutors were simply gone. Wain flew into such a rage.” Kanin smiled at the memory, at the thought of that distant childhood, but knew it would bring unbearable pain if he let it take too firm a hold. “She meant to have them back, and she did. A little girl, Goedellin, bending a whole castle, the household of a Thane, to her will. She sulked, and raged, and the tutors were recalled. That was what it meant to her.” The Inkallim was shaking his bowed head, though what the gesture meant Kanin did not know. “She should not have died,” Kanin whispered. “You know this is not as it should be. You know this is not fate.” “What else is there, Thane?” Goedellin snapped. “What else is there?” “Corruption! You think the warriors of the creed are fated to fawn over that monstrous little creature in there? You think this is what Tegric’s Hundred died for? For us to submit ourselves to the twisted delusions of that…?” “Thane.” Kanin turned. Shraeve was standing a few paces away in the doorway, watching him with those dead eyes. Her swords lay once more across her back, their hilts framing her face. “Aeglyss would talk with you,” she said. In the instant of Kanin’s distraction, Goedellin brushed unsteadily past him, hobbling after all the others. “It’s not fate,” Kanin hissed after the old man. “It’s something else.” He turned back to Shraeve, his lip curled in contempt. “Let your master talk to those who wish to hear.” “You will wish to hear this, Thane.” She was unmoved by his bitter tone, as if what he felt or thought was of less consequence than the dance of a fly on a breeze. “It is for no one else but you. It concerns your sister.” And she turned and walked away. Like a hunter who knew her quarry was safely taken, needing and deserving no more of her attention. Kanin followed, heavy-footed, back into the hall, unable to do anything else. He wondered, with little interest, if he might be going to his death. Behind him he heard startled, pitiful yelps. They were killing Cannek’s hounds. Aeglyss was alone in the hall, standing waiting for Kanin. Cannek’s corpse was gone, along with Hothyn and the other woodwights who must have carried it away. So easily do we vanish from the world, Kanin thought. Our every intention and hope disappears in a moment, and counts for nothing. Shraeve, at his side, drew Kanin to a halt three swords’ lengths from Aeglyss. Feeling her touch, he turned to rebuke her, but the words died in his throat, smothered by the sound of Aeglyss’ voice. “You hate me, Thane. Don’t trouble to deny it. I can taste your hatred of me, and that’s a flavour I know well. It’s been all around me through my whole life, the very air I breathe. There’s nothing more to you than your desire to see me dead. And I understand. I do.” The halfbreed’s voice dripped with concern, with affection. A warm, comforting sense of sympathy enfolded Kanin, an almost physical sensation: a kind hand, taking him in its gentle grasp. “Terrible things have happened,” Aeglyss whispered. “You know but a fragment of it. I promise you, though, I promise you: I loved your sister just as dearly as you did.” The truth of that was an unquestionable certainty, insinuating itself into Kanin’s mind, entangling itself with the instinctive revulsion he felt at the thought. The bitter retorts that came boiling up towards his lips were snared and snuffed out. “I can hardly tell any more what I remember, what I imagine, what memories I gather into me from the Shared,” Aeglyss rasped. “But I know I loved her, and she loved me. She loved me as none has before. Only my mother… my mothers. But I was not strong enough to save her. Oh, I longed to. You cannot know…” A tear, at the corner of the na’kyrim’s grey eye. Kanin could see nothing else but that perfect bead of moisture, a gleam of torchlight reflected in its smooth surface. It ran free, and Kanin watched its descent, felt his own vast grief carried along with it and growing, bursting up, swelling to merge with the still greater sorrow that filled the hall like a turbid mist. He trembled, overcome by the sense that there was nothing in all the world save loss and impotence. “Nothing is as I wanted it to be,” Aeglyss said thickly. “I never asked for all this death. Hers least of all. Don’t you understand? What has happened is… I didn’t choose this. Why can’t you see that? Give me your forgiveness, Thane. Give me her forgiveness.” “Forgive?” Kanin murmured. His thoughts were softening, losing their shape. “It was my weakness.” Aeglyss hung his head. “I could not sustain her love for me and still take hold of the Shadowhand. I would have done, if I could. Oh, nothing would have been sweeter. But I am too weak, too feeble; and I had to have the Shadowhand.” He looked suddenly at Shraeve, and then to Kanin, beseeching. “We had to have the Shadowhand, did we not? We needed him? I gave up so much—Wain, K’rina—but the sacrifice was necessary, wasn’t it?” Kanin pitied the halfbreed in that moment, and could easily have reached out to him in comfort, offered the forgiveness and agreement that he craved. Yet nothing, no bewilderment of his mind, could wholly extinguish the murderous flame that persisted in the deepest, most fortified, refuge of his self. It flickered there still, and through all the fogs that beset him, its light remained a beacon he could follow. “No path worth following is without sacrifice,” he heard Shraeve saying beside him. “No,” whispered Aeglyss. “No. And she knew that. Wain knew that.” He looked up, and there was a new chill in the gaze he laid upon Kanin. “Others know it. Yet you do not, Thane. You are like ice, on which none of this can find purchase. There is something in you that resists me. Denies me. “Why is it that you cannot share in this understanding? The Battle sees the shape of things, the Lore, and the White Owls. The Bloods fall in at my side, for they understand what it is I offer, what I can give to those who walk with me. All I ask for is loyalty. Trust. If those things had been there from the start—if you had offered them to me, Thane—none of this need have happened. Yet here we are. By choice or not, wondrous events begin to unfold, and I allow even those who have betrayed me to share in them. Why can you not be a part of this?” Stubborn contempt rose within Kanin. “Do you really not know?” he asked the halfbreed. “Do you really understand so little of people?” Aeglyss said nothing, but Kanin could see in his face genuine uncertainty, infantile hurt. “If you wanted me to walk at your side,” Kanin said flatly, “you should not have taken my sister from me.” A twist of some violent emotion distorted Aeglyss’ features for a moment. He bared his teeth. “From you?” he hissed. “You think the loss only yours? You don’t know! What it cost me…” He faltered. A tremor ran through his feeble frame, twisting his head to one side, tugging at his eyelids. Spittle bubbled out onto his chin. The soft deadening of Kanin’s senses abruptly cleared. He blinked. Aeglyss slumped down onto one knee, coughing. Sudden hope blossomed within Kanin. The halfbreed’s head was bowed, jerking as he spat out phlegm from his lungs. Kanin’s hand went to his sword. The blade began to sigh out of its scabbard. He stepped forward, possessed by a vision of what was about to happen, what he could do in the next moment. And Shraeve lashed her forearm across his throat. He staggered, choking. Shraeve stepped in front of him, shielding Aeglyss from his sight, and his intent. She reached up and lightly grasped the hilts of the two swords sheathed across her back. “It is my belief, Thane, that this man serves fate, and our creed. I do not know if you could harm him, but I will not permit the attempt.” Kanin gasped for air, croaking incoherently, clasping a hand to his throat. He took hold once again of his own sword. Breath came at last, ragged and rough. Aeglyss was only now rising unsteadily to his feet. He was still enfeebled. Vulnerable. But there was Shraeve, quite still and calm. “I would regret killing a Thane,” she said softly. “It would be a fell deed. But the end of the world must be a time for fell deeds, if needed, don’t you think?” Kanin did not believe he could overcome her. Perhaps if Igris was here, the two of them together might have a chance against this raven, but Kanin knew what would happen if he challenged her alone. She was too fast, too skilled. He could hear, in his memory, the sound of Cannek’s spine breaking. Once he had believed that fate could be generous to those who dared; now he was uncertain whether such laws still governed—had ever governed—the twisted world. Daring felt like recklessness, when the goal he sought was so all-consumingly crucial. He would be permitted only one attempt upon Aeglyss, and to fail in it would be to fail in everything, his entire life. He coughed, and folded his arms across his chest. “Your master seems unwell,” he said. “Perhaps I should leave the two of you alone.” He spun on his heel and walked briskly away, his heart racing, his cheeks burning with the backwash of tension and fear and anger that was now released in him. He could hear Aeglyss groaning, but did not look round. He went out into the light.
VII
Nyve’s skin was old, with the hue of worn and faded hide. It had loosened as the years slackened the muscles beneath it and narrowed his shoulders. But still the First of the Battle had an air of resilient strength. There was enough breadth to him, and just enough firmness left in his skin, to give life to the raven tattoo that spread its wings across his shoulder blades. Theor, master of the Lore Inkallim, watched that black bird stir and ripple as a manservant drew a cloth slowly across Nyve’s back. The First of the Battle sat naked on a low stool in the centre of the stone wash-house floor. The servant went silently about his duties, pausing occasionally to rinse his cloth in a pail of hot water. Now and again Nyve grunted at the pressure of firm fingers on some sore joint, but he made no other complaint. The servant carefully lifted the First’s arm and stretched it out, and ran the cloth down it from shoulder to wrist. Drops of water pattered onto the stone tiles. “I cannot undo what fate has decreed,” Nyve said softly. “Of course,” said Theor. “I would never ask such a thing. You know how much it pains me to even raise with you matters that are internal to the Battle.” “Yet you do.” Theor could not see his friend’s face, but heard the wry smile in Nyve’s voice. “I do. It cannot be avoided. Such are the tempestuous times in which we live. Don’t pretend you don’t share my concerns.” Nyve lowered his arm. The servant charged the cloth with water and then twisted it into a tight cord above the First’s head. Water splashed across his scalp and shoulders. It ran down over the great welt where his ear had once been. “We set this horse running,” Nyve said. He gave his head a single dipping shake, scattering droplets. “Too late to try to rein it in.” “The Thane of Thanes disagrees,” Theor muttered. He walked round to the stone bench that ran along one wall of the wash house and tested its surface with the palm of his hand. It was warm: hot charcoal could be fed into a hidden compartment. Carefully, he settled himself onto the bench. The seductive warmth spread through his thighs and buttocks. Outside, the snow was knee-deep. Every stream ran beneath a skin of ice. Even down in the valley, in Kan Dredar, there had been no night without a hard frost, no day without at least some snow, for two weeks. “When was the last time he agreed with us?” Nyve asked. Theor rested his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. He truly was getting old, he thought, for how else to explain the intoxicating delight of such a simple thing? Luxuriant warmth in winter had never meant so much to him when he was young. Now, this warm stone bench filled his bones with delight, answering a need in them he had not known existed. Such were the seductions of comfort. “If you need to sleep, we can always continue our discussions later,” Nyve said, a little louder this time. Theor opened his eyes and winced apologetically at his friend. The old warrior was watching him, but there was no irritation or impatience in his gaze. Nyve would understand as well as anyone what it was to find the body ageing and faltering before the spirit within had prepared itself for the change. Nyve’s hands were all but crippled, bunched into claws that would barely respond to their owner’s command. “I like this bench you’ve got here,” Theor observed. “So do I.” “I might have one made for myself.” “Too indulgent for the Lore, surely?” Nyve grunted. “I doubt your people would approve.” “Seeking approval does not really accord with the precepts of the creed. In any case, I find myself less and less concerned with the approval of others as the years pass.” “Indeed,” Nyve said, and then glanced at the manservant. “Help me up.” The First of the Battle rose, only a fraction unsteady, leaning on the servant’s arm. Once he was securely on his feet he dismissed the attendant with a silent flick of his head. “Pass me that robe, would you?” he said to Theor once they were alone in the warm, humid stone chamber. Theor hung the robe on his friend’s shoulders and watched as Nyve made his careful way over to the heated bench. Nyve settled onto the stone with a satisfied sigh. He stared at Theor. Those eyes, at least, were undimmed, unblunted. It was still the gaze of a fierce and potent warrior for the faith. “You’re tired,” Nyve said. “You look sick, in fact.” “I feel both. The world’s as unsteady beneath my feet as a foundering boat. I am… lost, I suppose.” Theor knew he should feel shame that such words were on his lips. He was the First of the Lore, custodian of the creed. Keeper of the truth. He, of all people, should be resistant to the kind of uncertainty and confusion that assailed him. Yet there was no point in pretending things were other than they were. Not in front of Nyve, at least. The First of the Battle grunted. “Whisper such things softly, friend. There’s danger in honesty.” “It seems to me we are beset by dangers of many kinds,” Theor murmured. “There are terrible temptations in success. It all too easily breeds pride, or error.” “I see you are entirely determined to discuss Shraeve, no matter how it pains you to walk upon the Battle’s ground,” smiled Nyve. Theor shrugged regretfully. “I must do as my heart and my faith bid me.” “As I say, the horse is running. It is not our hands that guide it, but fate.” “That is as it may be, but I fear Ragnor oc Gyre lays the blame for his Captain’s death on our all too mortal shoulders. Temegrin the Eagle may not have been the most valued of the High Thane’s servants, but neither was he entirely inconsequential. Ragnor sees our scheming, rather than fate’s working, in the ascendancy of this halfbreed. In Shraeve’s… accomplishments.” “And you?” Nyve asked quietly. “I care less than I should what our High Thane thinks. Tell me what you see.” “I see nothing as clearly as I would wish. Fiallic was a good man. Measured. You told me yourself he was the finest Banner-captain the Battle has had in our lifetimes. Shraeve is… more turbulent.” He spread his hands, an almost helpless gesture. “This is not where any of us thought this track might lead. You cannot be as free of doubt as you pretend.” Nyve grunted. “Of course. If it was my choice, I’d have Fiallic back. If these bent hands could shape things, he would have killed Shraeve. But he didn’t. No message I’ve had from the south, no rumour even, denies that she won her rank justly, by the will of fate.” “And the halfbreed? She has drawn up your entire host, all the ranks of your ravens, at the side of some mongrel who was supposed to be nothing more than a tool in the hands of the Horin Blood. I find myself uncertain whose purposes are being served.” Nyve regarded Theor pensively. He rested his hands, knuckles down, on the bench. “I was never much given to deep thought on matters such as this; you know that.” He gestured, club-handed, at the lumpen scar across the side of his head. “Had I spent much time thinking about it, I’d likely have taken flight. Let the hound that took my ear go hungry. But the path of my life was not written that way. It seems to me…” He hesitated, narrowing his eyes as he searched for the right words. “It seems to me that this is what we are for, you and I. Our lives have been very simple things: to serve the creed, to follow—and foster—the descent of this world to its inevitable ruin. We have been, in every sense that matters, meaningless except in our service to that purpose. “So don’t ask me to shed whatever little meaning I have had now, in the twilight of my life.” Nyve smiled, as if feeling the glow of that very twilight on his skin. “The ascendancy of the creed is closer than ever before. By whatever means, however unexpectedly, Shraeve has restored us—the Inkalls—to heights we have not seen in many years. It is to us that the people look now for guidance, not the Thanes. If we pull back, hesitate, would we not make a lie of the long lives we have led? Would we not be denying the very purpose that has been our guide? I am too old to make such changes, friend. We both are. We’ve always been in the hands of fate. That the journey along the Road has become tortuous does not change that.” Theor nodded. He understood. He felt it himself: the nagging sense that whatever doubts now assailed him were a betrayal of something precious and central to him. That if he surrendered to them, he would render himself, and the life he had lived, entirely empty. Still, those doubts were there. As was the insidious, all but heretical, fear that fate was somehow going astray from its proper path. “Do you sleep well?” he asked Nyve. “Are your dreams troubled?” There was only the briefest moment of hesitation. “I dream of violence. And of death. But I have always done so. They’ve been my sleep-companions as long as I can remember. And you? Is your rest uneasy?” “It is.” Theor had to hold himself back. Some things he could not share, even with this oldest of friends. The waking dreams brought by seerstem belonged to the Lore, and only to the Lore. Yet a part of him wanted to tell Nyve how harsh and inhospitable the inner territories that seerstem opened up had become. The herb had blackened Theor’s lips over the years: the smallest of prices to pay for the comfort and insight it had brought. But whatever it brought now, it was not comfort. Fear, sometimes. Doubt. It obscured where once it had clarified. The strange dreamlands that lay beyond the seerstem gate were bleak and unwelcoming. There was always the sensation of someone looking over his shoulder, or some movement just beyond the corner of his dreaming eye. “I’m tired,” he murmured. “Perhaps that’s all it is. Perhaps I grow too old and weak to face the unfolding of fate’s great plan.” “You’ve a few years in you yet,” Nyve grunted. “Perhaps. I am to meet with Ragnor oc Gyre. Down in Kan Dredar. He refuses to come to the Sanctuary, which is as sure a sign as you could wish for of his fraying patience. I thought perhaps you could provide me with an escort. I hear that there is unrest in the town. Riots. Killings.” “You shall have as fine a guard of my ravens as you wish, First.” Nyve chuckled. “It will do our High Thane good to see that all the Children of the Hundred stand shoulder to shoulder in this. And that the Battle still has enough swords here to put on a show.” Theor smiled, and in smiling tried to pull taut the old, secure strands of his friendship with the master of the Battle. But there was a looseness in them that had never been there before, and he could not overcome it. The profound agreement of their instincts had always persisted without having to be spoken. Now, he felt it to be seamed with faint flaws that could not be patched with words, or with mere affection. He secretly and fearfully mourned the loss of its perfection.
VIII
Taim Narran cast an experienced eye over the host of the Black Road as it edged its way up the road towards Ive. Only a few hundred, he thought, yet the knowledge brought none of the relief he might have expected. Rather, he felt an empty despair at the prospect of inevitable slaughter, and the knowledge that victory or defeat today would bring no release for any save the dead. There must be light somewhere amidst this darkness, he thought, but he seemed to have lost the ability to detect its gleam. “Move the horsemen out to the right flank,” he said quietly. “They don’t look to have any horses of their own. Perhaps we can get in behind them.” He did not look round, but heard the riders galloping off to deliver his commands. Everyone, whether of Lannis or Kilkry stock, deferred willingly to him here. A certain martial fame—nothing he treasured or relished—had long ago attached itself to his name, and the people of Ive imagined him to be something he himself had struggled to recognise for some time: a great warrior and leader. They trusted in him to save them, and their town. It was a burden he bore without protest, but not gladly, and not lightly. Never lightly. There were banners and standards from several of the Black Road Bloods scattered through the approaching army, yet Taim could see little sign of ordered companies or disciplined array. The northerners came on in a jostling mass, spreading out into a long, thick rank on either side of the road. There were no obvious Captains, just these hundreds of men and women come together into one huge blood-hungry crowd. And they bore a grim forest in their van: dozens of tall spears jostling for space against the grey sky, each topped with a severed head or bearing strips of flayed skin that stirred on the wind like pennants. A woman, hands bound behind her back, legs hobbled, was dragged out in front of the seething army. She was wailing and struggling. Five warriors marched her a few paces forward and threw her down in the middle of the road. One of her captors spread his arms wide and bellowed wordless hatred at the ranks of Kilkry and Lannis men. Then he and the others beat the woman to death with clubs and staffs. Taim turned away. She had looked to be much the same age as Maira, his daughter. He had never seen this from the Black Road before. This wanton, tribal brutality. It was not how battles were meant to be fought. Or perhaps it was, now. The noise was new too. In all his years of facing the Black Road, he had grown used to the grim, almost unnatural, silence in which they often fought. This time, his ears rang to hate-filled roaring, like the baying of a thousand leashed hounds. And then those leashes were slipped, and the dark wall of bodies and blades was rushing towards him. He drew his sword, cast one brief glance up towards the clouds scudding across the sky, not knowing what he hoped to see there, and heeled his horse into motion.
*
Ess’yr held out a flake of greasy squirrel meat to Orisian. He took it with a nod of gratitude. They ate in silence, warmed by the little fire, while the stubby twigs of the apple trees creaked in the breeze. Heavy clouds were racing overhead, but down in the orchard, amidst the aged protection of the trees, with the comforting flames, Orisian felt safe. Almost at ease. Varryn would not join them, of course. He sat cross-legged some little distance away, cleaning the squirrel skin. He scraped away at the hide with his knife in silence, studiously ignoring Orisian and his sister. Ess’yr herself picked flecks of meat from a leg bone with precise finger and thumb. Orisian watched her, but when she looked at him he averted his eyes with a fleeting self-conscious smile. He was faintly aware of the warriors loitering beyond the trees, at the back of the Guard barracks. Theirs was not an intrusive presence, though. They were sufficiently comforted by the high stone walls that enclosed the orchard, and sufficiently trusting now of these two Kyrinin, to permit Orisian some little privacy. It was a kind of wonder, he recognised, that a Thane of the Lannis Blood could sit alone in such company without his warriors imagining or expecting disaster. Those protective walls sheltered a moment, a scene, drawn from another world, another possibility, less scarred by bitter history. Though Orisian could not forget all that had happened, or the storms that raged beyond this island of calm, he could find here, in this company, a brief span of rest. Of stillness. He licked his fingers clean. The fire was burning low, sinking into its bed of bright embers. He threw another couple of sticks onto it and listened to them crackle and hiss. “There might be trouble coming,” he said pensively. Ess’yr said nothing. She was watching him, her eyes set like polished flints in the blue frame of her tattoos. Varryn’s knife continued to rasp rhythmically across the skin. “We think the Black Road has cut us off from the south,” Orisian went on, unperturbed by their silence. “Taim’s gone to meet them. He wouldn’t let me go with him.” “You are precious to him,” Ess’yr said impassively. “Yes.” Orisian flicked a sideways glance in her direction. Part of him longed to reach out to her, and lay a soft hand on her shoulder, her arm. “Yes, perhaps. Though I don’t know that I’m really any safer here than out there. I’m not sure such a thing as safety’s possible any more.” Ess’yr looked down, returning her attention to the little carcass. “I would not…” Orisian began, but the sentence collapsed beneath the confused weight of his feelings. He tried again: “I don’t know quite why you have stayed here. I am—I am glad of it, but… If you want to go, you shouldn’t stay because you think you owe me anything.” He was aware that Varryn had stopped his work and was now staring at him. The cleaning knife rested point down on the warrior’s knee. “Owe you?” Ess’yr said. “No. Not you.” “Inurian?” “It does not matter,” she said. A lie, Orisian thought; or at best a kind of truth his human understanding could not encompass. “Our enemy makes alliance with your enemy,” Ess’yr placidly continued. “We do not need to seek them out, for they come in search of you. Your fight is our fight.” “Your brother does not agree,” Orisian said. Ess’yr ignored him. Varryn returned to his task. “It is only that I fear what may happen,” Orisian said. His mood was darkening once again, and he half-regretted speaking. If he had said nothing, just sat here and treasured the silent companionship, he might have preserved the illusion of closeness, of intimacy, a little longer. “I see few paths that lead anywhere other than into shadow. I would regret it if you followed me that way when you did not need to. I just wanted you to know that.” Ess’yr flicked bones into the fire. The trees above shivered in a momentary surge of wind. “All paths lead to shadow in the end,” Ess’yr said. “If we live through today,” said Orisian, watching the trembling flames, “and through the next night, I mean to leave this place. I don’t know what will happen, but the time is coming when all of this will end. One way or the other.” He realised that he had lost their attention. The two Kyrinin lifted their heads, turned towards the west. Orisian saw the knife fall from Varryn’s hand and his fingers dance into a blur of motion. Ess’yr made a grunting reply to whatever message her brother conveyed and rose to her feet. “What is it?” Orisian asked softly, looking up at her. He could guess, in truth, for he had learned to read the code of their bodies and moods: in some sound or scent upon the air, some sign too subtle for meagre human senses, they had caught forewarning of danger. Orisian twisted, a shout for his own warriors gathering in his throat, but Ess’yr was already moving. One pace, two, away from the fire. A stoop to sweep up her spear from where it rested against one of the apple trees. Her front foot stamped down. Her arm snapped forward. The spear flew. And as that shaft left her hand, and darted across the darkening air between the ancient trees, there was movement atop the wall: a head, and then shoulders, just rising into sight. Orisian had time to register nothing more than a swirl of dark hair, the dull flash of a blade clasped in a gloved hand, before the spear thudded into the man’s chest. He fell back silently and disappeared. “There are more,” Ess’yr said, reaching for her bow. But Orisian knew that for himself by then. He could hear the voices, the angry cries, the pounding feet. He leaped up and ran, shouting for his sword and shield as he went.
*
Taim Narran had abandoned any hope of imposing his will upon the battle. Slaughter swept across the fields and copses and stream beds. Like storm water, it went where it willed, its bloody extremities flowing down whatever channel the rise and fall of the land offered. No command could be given that would shape it or slow it. It was deaf to all save its own inner demands, which impelled it to consume and thrive and rage. The men and women who acted upon its savage imperative forgot who they were and why they fought. They recognised neither friend nor foe, felt neither fear nor elation. There was within them only the burning need to kill. Each fought alone, subject to that need and only to that need. Taim’s horse had been hit by a crossbow bolt. It staggered down into a tiny gully and threw him. He splashed across the stream, seeing dark strands of blood threaded in the rushing water. Higher up the gully bodies were lying in the narrow channel. A woman was hacking feverishly at one of them with a long-bladed knife. Taim started towards her, to kill her, but a knot of men came suddenly tumbling down into his path, struggling and stabbing even as they fell and rolled in the stream. Taim could confidently identify only one of them as an enemy: a massive mailclad warrior who laboured to his feet, water cascading from his back and shoulders. Taim ducked behind his shield and barged into him, knocking him down. A single blow, with all of Taim’s strength behind it, was enough to stave in the side of the man’s helm. He began to convulse at once, thrashing about in the midst of the stream. Blood smeared out from his mouth; he had bitten through his tongue. Taim was staggered sideways by two wrestling figures. He stumbled precariously over the smooth stones at the edge of the watercourse. The butt of a spear tripped him and in falling he punched his knee against a rock. The sharp, bone-shaking pain was like a lance of light, momentarily sharpening his senses, sending a beat of urgency and energy through him. Without it, he might have been too slow to avoid the axe that slashed down in search of his back. He rolled away through mud and spun onto his feet in time to catch the second axe blow on his shield and cut up into his assailant’s crotch. He scrambled up the bank of the gully, the soft turf smearing beneath his feet. He emerged onto a field strewn with bodies and with dropped or broken weapons. The thin grass had been trampled and torn. A woman went staggering past, her shattered arm held tight to her side with a hand that was itself split and bloody. A horse was lying on its flank close by, its legs stirring faintly. Beyond it, a Kilkry warrior was fleeing from half a dozen Tarbains, who pursued him with howls of mad fervour. Taim ran to intervene, but his knee rebelled, and he faltered. The Tarbains pulled down the warrior and fell on him like a pack of wolves tearing at a deer. A terrible hatred had hold of Taim, a formless thing that began with no clear target or cause but willingly gathered those Tarbain tribesmen in and made them its object. Overruling his knee’s protests, he rushed to them. So intent were they upon their savage business that they were deaf and blind to his approach until he was amongst them. One went down, and then another. A club battered against Taim’s thigh, and he felt the bone blades that studded its head punching through his skin, but there was no pain. He killed another. The rest fled from him. The Kilkry man was long dead, of course. The Tarbains had been trying to behead him. There was no single battle happening here. There never had been, from the first moments of contact between the opposing forces. Instead, many brutal, separate little struggles were played out across the fields, and on the slopes beyond. Many lonely deaths. A hundred intimate horrors and cruelties. Taim reeled from fight to fight. His mind and body were exhausted but he drove himself on, possessed by the conviction that the only way he could escape this waking nightmare was by helping it towards its end, by killing everyone who could be killed. And in time he had done that, and he could find no more victims for his blade. The armies had drifted apart. There was no victory or defeat: the numbed survivors on both sides simply walked, or crawled, away, alone or in small bands. The cruel day had taken everything they had to give, and left them empty and trembling and lost, forgetful of themselves. They let weapons and banners fall and stumbled silently back the way they had come Taim slumped to his hands and knees. He curled his fingers into the earth, making fists through the wiry grass. He was shivering, though he felt an almost feverish heat running through his skin. Blood was crusted all across his thigh where the Tarbain club had hit him. His guts were clenching, twisting. His stomach heaved and he retched and vomited up the morning’s food. Once he was done, he rolled onto his back and lay there for a time, blindly watching the sky as it darkened, moment by moment, towards the gloom of dusk.
*
Ive quickly, almost enthusiastically, surrendered itself to violence. Chaos descended, and as it did so something rose up within the townsfolk to embrace it. Small bands of Black Road raiders burst in all along the western flank of the town, but they were few and disorganised, not enough to truly threaten Ive’s safety. They were enough, though, to act as spark to the fire that had been on the brink of eruption for so many days. The townspeople rushed from their homes, surging through the dusk in frantic search of enemies, whether real or imagined. In this great boiling cauldron the Black Roaders fought with savage abandon. They hurried from house to house, slaughtering all they found; they battled and died in narrow alleyways; they crept their way to the storehouses and the bakeries and the almshouses and set them afire. Smoke swirled in the yards and streets like acrid fog. Consumed by their own ungovernable fear and fury, the people of Ive turned upon one another. Those who were not recognised were slain, hacked with kitchen knives and axes, beaten with hammers and impaled upon hay forks. The pillars of flame mounted higher and higher, turning the sky orange and rustred. Horror was piled upon horror. Washed by the heat of a burning house, the family that had abandoned it was killed in the roadway before it. They cried out in vain to their killers, who had forgotten, in their madness, that they knew them. Some neighbours, armed with nothing more than clubs, hunted a Gyre warrior into a farrier’s yard, cornered her there and battered her to death in the shadows; then, hurrying out, blundered into a company of Kilkry swordsmen, thought them foes, and died on the blades of their supposed protectors. The storm raged. Reason and restraint were rent apart. Some few strove to hold firm against the beast that was running loose. “We must keep the na’kyrim safe,” Orisian shouted at Torcaill. They ran together, with a handful of Torcaill’s men behind them, out from the gate of the barracks. There had been a sharp, vicious struggle in the orchard: invaders spilling over the walls, going down with Kyrinin arrows in throat or flank, stumbling in amongst the trees and running futilely onto human swords. Onto Orisian’s sword. He had killed a man almost without knowing it, not recognising what was happening until the body was at his feet. Something in him rejoiced at the sight and something else recoiled. Both felt, in that moment, like a true reflection of who he was. His heart pounded, his arms shook, so ferocious was his body’s response to the sound and scent and feel of battle. Everything faded from his awareness save the overwhelming need to act, to move, to join the bloody dance. He had heard himself shouting as he ran from the orchard, through the courtyard of the barracks. He would have gone blindly and wildly out into the chaos but for the sudden sight of towering flames rising from some building on the far side of the town, and for the sudden burning in his nostrils and eyes as a hot wind blasted smoke into his face. With that bitter smell, he was returned for an instant to Castle Anduran on the night of Winterbirth; and the memory dampened rather than fed the sanguinary ardour that had burned within him. There was no sign of the Lannis guards who should have been outside the little house where Yvane and Eshenna sheltered. Bursting in, ignoring Torcaill’s anguished demands for caution, Orisian found no sign of the two na’kyrim within, either. He went, clumsy in his haste, knocking aside stools and chairs, out into the little walled yard behind the house. There was a corpse there, sprawled across the cobblestones. One of his guards, Orisian thought, but he did not have the time to be certain. Half a dozen figures were clustered down by the goat shed. One or two held blazing torches aloft while others hauled at the door, trying to tear it open against faltering resistance from within. Orisian heard Yvane’s voice, angry. Frightened. “Get away!” Orisian shouted, leaping over the body. Heads turned. “There’s halfbreeds in here,” one of them snapped at Orisian, as if that should explain everything to him. “Wightborns!” As if there was nothing more that could, or should, be said. It was not the words, though, that put a hollow kind of horror into the pit of Orisian’s stomach, but the accent. These men were Ive townsfolk, not northerners. “Stand aside,” he demanded, lifting his sword a little. But the door came free then. Yvane came tumbling forward from within the shed, and Eshenna was crying out in fear inside. One of the men roared in triumph. Another threw his torch at Orisian and it came spinning towards him in a wreath of embers and flame. He ducked under it and ran at them. His shield shook beneath some blow, he cut at legs, veered away from a fist that darted at his head. And amidst all the chaos, he found a kind of clarity, centred upon the need to keep those within that shed alive. He fought as Taim Narran would have wished him to, with a cold determination. For the first time in his life, his mind and body united unquestioningly in the cause of killing. His sword broke an arm, and he heard the crack of the bone. He drove on, brought the blade down on the back of a man who was blocking the shed’s doorway. He trampled the falling figure and turned to bar the entrance himself. And found Torcaill and the others, following in his wake, already ending the one-sided fight. Orisian sat, legs splayed out on the cobblestones of the yard. Blood was running through the crevices all around him but he did not care. His warriors were dragging away the dead and the injured with little regard for which was which. Orisian unbuckled his shield and laid it flat across his knees. “They’d have killed you if we hadn’t come,” he said weakly. Even to speak seemed a terrible effort. “They would,” agreed Yvane. He felt her hand touch his shoulder for a moment. “Thank you.” “They’d have killed you. And K’rina. Everything would have been for nothing.” He laid his hands on the gently curving surface of his shield and watched his fingers tremble. It was almost dark now. Still rising into the sky, from all around, were cries of fury and fear, the scattered thunder of running feet, the audible death throes of buildings plunging into fiery ruin. The delirium, perhaps death, of the town. “This can’t go on,” he said. “I’m killing Kilkry men now. That can’t be right, can it? We have to find a way to end it. There has to be a way.” “There is a way,” he heard Eshenna say behind him. She sounded utterly exhausted. “Kill Aeglyss. This is his taint, his poison, at work. Use K’rina against him. It’s the purpose the Anain meant for her, until we interfered.” “Until Aeglyss grew too strong, perhaps,” Yvane said. “Too strong for even the Anain to overcome.” “Perhaps,” Eshenna acknowledged, empty and faint. “Perhaps. But what other hope is there?” Nobody spoke for a moment or two, and then Eshenna said again, “What other hope is there?”
CHAPTER 2
____
The City
This place, this city, shall henceforth be the seat of High Thanes; first amongst all cities, as we are now first amongst all Bloods. Vaymouth is mighty now, and shall be mightier still in years to come, for who can doubt that all the world will walk the road to its gates? All deeds of consequence, all acts of significance, shall be done here and nowhere else. Memories of Tane will be dimmed and overshadowed. Kolkyre will be forgotten. The pride of those who dwell in distant Evaness will be blunted, their arrogant tongues stilled. We who call Vaymouth home shall live amidst the greatest power and the greatest glory this world has known since the Gods departed. Their radiant presence has passed, never to return, but see here what other lights a people may find amidst the darkness, what we may build with our own hands, and shape with our will: all the goods and coin of the world, flowing like tributary streams into the river of our streets and our marketplaces. Peace and prosperity and order. Great walls to shelter us, great towers to keep watch from. These are the stars by which we plot our course. These are the torches to light our path into the future. The glories of the Gods are lost to us; if there are to be new glories we must fashion them for ourselves, carving them from the base matter of this abandoned world. This, the city, shall be their embodiment, and the place where they burn most brightly.
From Merwen’s Encomium
I
The two young girls walked hand in hand, whispering as they went. Anyara did not need to hear what they said to know that they were beyond the reach of the world. They were followed, as they wandered idly through the bare garden, by maids who carried songbirds in gilded cages, but they might as well have been entirely alone. The girls were enclosed in the perfect privacy of their own realm: the place in childhood where nothing mattered save whatever thought had hold of them at that moment; where adults were but faint and inconvenient clouds on the horizon of their secret concerns. Anyara could remember such a place, though she had inhabited it only briefly. She and Orisian and Fariel had shared it, in the days before the Heart Fever: a few precious years in which everything had been bright and exciting, and fashioned for them and them alone. She was exiled from that place by the passage of time, by deaths. And now by distance, for she sat on a marble bench in a terrace garden of Gryvan oc Haig’s Moon Palace. These self-absorbed girls she watched were the children of some lady of the High Thane’s court. Anyara shrugged deeper into her fur coat. Winter had followed her southwards. All the way down from Kolkyre, through Ayth-Haig lands, across the moors and on through the farmlands of the Nar Vay shore, it had been an intangible, morose hound dogging every step her horse had taken, eating up the land in her wake. There was a faint mist on the air now. Around this palace in which she was a comfortable, imprisoned guest, Vaymouth sprawled beneath a dank grey blanket. All sound was deadened by the thick air. The birds in their cages did not sing. “It must seem a silly affectation to you, this fashion for birdcages.” Tara Jerain, the wife of the Haig Blood’s infamous Chancellor, smiled down at Anyara. “I hadn’t given it any thought,” Anyara murmured. Tara gave her another complicitous, almost conspiratorial, smile. “It’s kind of you to be so gentle with our foibles,” she said. “I don’t like them myself. The birds, I mean. May I join you?” Without waiting for an answer, Tara settled herself on the bench. The many layers of fine fabric that enveloped her sighed and shifted over one another. Even in this dull light there were threads in there that shone and glimmered. The Chancellor’s wife clasped her hands in her lap. The cuffs of her cape were trimmed with the white fur of snow hares. “Nobody was interested in songbirds until Abeh oc Haig decided she liked them.” She leaned a little closer to Anyara as she spoke. “Then, all of a sudden, every lady of the court—even the girls, intent upon being ladies one day—realised that they are the most fascinating and precious of things. Silly. Birds aren’t meant to sing in the winter, but still everyone must have one.” “Everyone except you,” Anyara grunted. “Oh, no.” Tara shook her head lightly. “I have one. Of course I do. Two, in fact. The best that money can buy, I’m told.” Anyara wished this woman would leave her alone. She found more than enough that was hateful about her situation here in Vaymouth without being subjected to the babbling of the self-regarding butterflies who thronged the Moon Palace. She had heard of Tara Jerain, of course, even before she was brought here: the beautiful, cunning wife of the hated, still more cunning, Shadowhand. And Tara was indeed beautiful: eyes that even in this wintry light glittered like jewels, skin that bore a lustrous sheen of health. Her poise and confidence made Anyara feel like a child all over again. “Those who think they know about such things tell me we’ll have snow here in a few days,” Tara mused absently. “Some years we have none at all, you know. I enjoy snow, myself. It makes everything look better than it really is, like fine furs and gems.” Again, that warm smile. Anyara could think of no good reason why the Chancellor’s wife should suddenly have decided to make this pretence at friendship. She had paid her no attention before now. No one in the Moon Palace had. On the day of her arrival, Anyara—aching, tired and feeling entirely bedraggled—had endured a brief and rather strange audience with Gryvan oc Haig himself and his wife Abeh. They seemed more than a little bemused—in Abeh’s case, offended—by her presence, as if she were an unexpected and unwanted guest they did not know what to do with. All of which served to irritate Anyara almost beyond concealment. She comforted herself by imagining that Aewult nan Haig might in due course learn precisely what the High Thane thought of sons who sent unsought hostages to their fathers. Since that initial, clumsy welcome, Anyara had found herself all but ignored. She had fine chambers on the favoured south flank of the palace. She was given gifts of gowns and necklaces. Maidservants were assigned to her service. But almost no one spoke to her. She was given no reason or excuse to leave those fine chambers, and if she did so of her own accord, she found herself oppressively shadowed by those same, watchful maids, who would herd her back to her rooms as if she were a wayward, simple-minded sheep in need of penning. She had asked, once, to borrow horses so that she and Coinach could ride out towards the sea. She had not expected the request to be granted, and it was not. “Your shieldman has been much remarked upon.” Anyara glanced round. Coinach was standing a short distance away, by the gates that gave out onto these tidy gardens. He was rigidly straight-backed, staring ahead, steadfastly ignoring all the ladies and the servants and the children. It made Anyara smile, though she dipped her head to hide the expression from Tara Jerain. Coinach’s determination to retain his dignity even in these disquieting circumstances had a touch of youthful pride and dogged loyalty about it that she found very pleasing. “He’s a striking man,” Tara observed. “And it’s so unusual for us here to see a woman with so… martial an attendant.” “Things are a little different in the north these days,” Anyara said rather more sharply than she intended. She did not know whether it was Coinach or herself she was defending. “Very different. Perhaps if all of you —” Tara cut her short with a flourish of her smooth, ringed fingers. “That’s not what I wanted to discuss with you, in any case. Really, it’s a little too cold to spend more time than is necessary out here, don’t you think? I have a proposition for you. I thought you might find it more comfortable, more… well, more comfortable, if we found you different quarters.” Tara leaned in once more and whispered, “Things can be so formal and tedious here, don’t you find?” “What have you got in mind?” Anyara asked cautiously. “My own home, of course. We have a great many rooms that might find favour in your eyes, and I think you’ll find it a good deal quieter. Much more calming.” Anyara thought for a moment or two, and then looked sideways at Tara. “Is this Gryvan’s idea?” she asked. “He doesn’t know what to do with me, so tidies me away into your care. Am I so much of an embarrassment to him?” Tara rolled her eyes in amused frustration. It was such a natural, relaxed gesture that Anyara found herself warming to the woman. She had to remind herself that this was the Shadowhand’s wife, and by that measure unlikely to be a reliable friend. “Really,” Tara said, “is everyone of your Blood so blunt? It’s refreshing, but there is no need to make quite such a close alliance with suspicion. Look —” confiding, companionable “—there’s been some misunderstanding between your brother and Aewult. Or between Aewult and Taim Narran. I don’t know; I don’t follow these things closely. But it will all be cleared up before long, I’m sure, particularly now that Mordyn is coming back to us.” “Your husband?” Anyara said in surprise. She knew the Shadowhand had been injured and then gone missing in the chaos consuming the Kilkry Blood. It had been one of the charges—or suspicions at least—laid against her, against Orisian, by Aewult nan Haig when he took her hostage. “Oh, yes,” Tara said with such undisguised, apparently uncontrived delight that Anyara once again felt that questionable twinge of affection for her. “Have you not heard? My husband is on his way south even now. He will be here very soon. And really, there’s no need for you to be shut up in this marble tomb in the meantime. That is what I think, anyway, and the High Thane agrees.” Anyara nodded thoughtfully. She did not dare to hope that all of this would really be so easily tidied away, but there was no denying that she hated the Moon Palace. If Gryvan oc Haig wanted her out of the way, for whatever reason, she was not inclined to resist. The two girls she had been watching earlier had turned back to their maids. One of them was poking a stick through the golden bars of her birdcage, trying to make the prisoner within sing. “All right,” Anyara said. “I’d be grateful for your hospitality.” “Do you find our new accommodation more to your taste?” Anyara asked Coinach. The shieldman shrugged and wrinkled his nose. “Each palace seems much like another to me. What colour it is makes little odds.” He stood uncomfortably in the doorway of Anyara’s new quarters in the Palace of Red Stone. His stiffness and formality amused her, for no obvious reason. “It’s porphyry,” she said. “The red.” “Is it?” “Oh, don’t try so hard to sound interested.” Anyara lifted the finely carved lid of a massive chest at the foot of the bed and peered in. Sheets and blankets: linen, wool, silk. Better, if she was any judge, than what she had slept amidst in the High Thane’s palace. “Sorry, my lady.” “And don’t start calling me that again,” Anyara said in mock irritation. She sniffed the bowl of water at the bedside. It had a strong scent. Roses, perhaps. “There’re more than enough ladies in this city already.” Coinach made a non-committal noise that came surprisingly close to a grunt. “Perhaps now that we’re little a less closely watched, we can start some training again,” Anyara mused. Since leaving Kolkyre, there had been almost no opportunities for Anyara to refine her still rudimentary skills with a blade. The constant supervision had made it all but impossible. If she was honest, she feared drawing ridicule down upon herself and—even more so—upon Coinach if they were observed. “Perhaps,” Coinach acknowledged without notable enthusiasm. The shieldman moved aside to allow a maidservant to enter, bearing fresh pillows for Anyara’s bed. She was a short but graceful girl, much the same age as Anyara, with strikingly red hair. She gave a neat bobbing curtsy, and there was even a flicker of a smile on her face. “What’s your name?” Anyara asked, wondering how far the warmer welcome she was receiving here would go. “Eleth, my lady.” “I’m Anyara.” “Oh yes. I know, my lady.” “And this is Coinach.” The maid blinked and cast a fleeting smile over her shoulder towards the warrior. Then, much to Anyara’s surprise, she gave a little giggle. Coinach frowned, as darkly as if he had just heard someone impugning his honour. Eleth energetically plumped the pillows and arrayed them upon the bed. “The lady asked if you would join her,” she said as she worked. “There are sweetmeats and warm wine prepared in the Tapestry Room.” Anyara and Coinach followed their guide through the Palace of Red Stone. It felt entirely unlike Gryvan oc Haig’s gargantuan Moon Palace. Whatever splendour the Moon Palace bought through crude size and ostentation, the Chancellor’s abode matched through elegance. From its meticulously painted ceilings to its cool marble passageways, every element of its fabric spoke in refined and tasteful tones. There was a sweet, faint aroma on the air that Anyara could not quite place, though it reminded her of spice. The Tapestry Room lived up to its name. Long tapestries covered three of its walls. In the fourth were set latticed windows, the light that fell from them diffused by shimmering, almost transparent curtains. Tara Jerain was already seated at a table bearing trays of tiny cakes and biscuits, and a jug of wine as darkly red as any Anyara had ever seen. Coinach waited by the door, distancing himself slightly from the pair of serving girls who also stood there. Tara glanced at the shieldman as Anyara settled into a chair. “Does he go everywhere with you, then?” she asked, without a trace of criticism or mockery. “Not everywhere,” Anyara replied, slightly defensive. “But most places.” “And why not?” Tara offered a platter laden with intricate, absurd little confections. “I am sure his presence must be of great comfort. In all manner of ways.” Anyara wondered briefly if anything unseemly had been implied, but Tara was, as ever, smiling warmly. Whatever she said, it was always dressed in the livery of friendly, innocent banter. “I hope your bedchamber is satisfactory,” Tara said. Anyara nodded as the flavours of almond and apple suffused her mouth. Such wonderful delicacies were unknown in her homeland. Tara gestured to one of the servants, who came nimbly forward and poured wine into a pair of goblets. “You must tell me at once if there’s anything you require,” the Chancellor’s wife went on. “We will do whatever we can to make your stay here comfortable. Perhaps even pleasurable, I hope.” “I would not want to cause you any inconvenience,” Anyara said. She tasted the wine. Its rich warmth eased down her throat. Tara gave a little laugh. “Believe me, you need not concern yourself over such things. You cannot imagine how tedious it becomes to see only the same people, day after day after day. You are a most refreshing change, I can assure you.” “Perhaps one thing, then,” Anyara said, making a studied effort to sound casual and light-hearted. “I hoped, when I was at the Moon Palace, that it might be possible to borrow some horses, and ride out to the sea. The opportunity never arose.” “Of course.” Tara looked delighted by the suggestion. It was impossible to read the woman, Anyara thought. Or at least it was impossible to detect whatever calculation might lurk within her. Even Anyara’s stubborn mistrust might be eroded by such meticulously crafted good humour. “Yes,” Tara breezed on. “We may have to wait a day or three for the weather to don a clement face, but it would be good to get out of the city for a little while. I’ll go with you, if you will have me. I’ve a very fine bay horse that would be just right for you, I’m sure. Although there’s a grey, too, and he’s a wonderfully gentle creature…” Tara chattered on, outlining the merits of various possible mounts. Anyara’s attention drifted as the soothing wine, Tara’s graceful voice, the soft light spilling in through the curtains, all conspired to lull her into comfortable distraction. She allowed herself briefly to wonder what it must be like to live this easy life, so abundant in its comforts. She mentally shook herself, hardening her lazy thoughts. Slaughter was still being done, far from these marble halls. Orisian and Taim Narran and countless others were still adrift in that storm. Her people were drowning in blood. She set down the cup of wine and pushed it carefully away from her. She was suddenly ashamed to be sitting here, in such company, amidst such grace, while others fought and died on fields that felt immeasurably distant.
II
When a clear morning at last arrived, and the horses were combed and saddled, it was a grand group that rode out from Vaymouth’s southern Gold Gate. As well as Anyara and Coinach, Tara came with a pair of her maids, Eleth, three palace guards, the master of the stables and one of his boys. It was hardly the liberating solitude Anyara had half-hoped she and Coinach might be permitted, but it was movement, and change, and a brief escape from the encircling city walls, so she was determined to savour it. They rode down the north bank of the River Vay, following a broad cobbled road through vast fields of stubble. Wagons and mule trains were brushed aside by the two guards who rode ahead, forced to the very edge of the road to make way for the riding party. Farmworkers and travellers and traders stood in the rough verge, watching with irritation or fascination or resentment, according to their disposition, as Tara Jerain and her retinue trotted splendidly past. Anyara paid little attention to all of this. She breathed deeply, and lifted her face to the breeze coming in from the west. The air had the sea on it, and that felt more like home than anything had in many days. The fields were wide and flat, the sky ever-changing as rank after rank of long, twisted clouds processed overhead, the low sun winking in and out of sight behind them. They rode past a huge sprawl of jetties and quays and warehouses and inns. The tide was out, so beyond this mass of habitation and industry lay a prodigious expanse of dark mudflats, over which flocks of birds swept back and forth in coordinated precision. On an open stretch of the shore, at the head of a beach of brown sand, was a cluster of trees and about it a short, green sward. Tara brought them to a halt there and dismounted. The maids unpacked bundles of cold meats and preserved fruits. Anyara went to stand with Coinach at the very edge of the grass. She could smell the strandline, the long-familiar but recently forgotten scent of rotting seaweed and brine and wet sand. She was pleased to see on Coinach’s face the same sad pleasure as she herself felt. He looked, as he stood there staring out to the immense flat horizon of the sea, more at ease than he had done for a long time. It felt good, that moment of shared sentiment, but it did not last. Tara walked over to them, bearing food. “We come hawking along here sometimes,” the Chancellor’s wife said. “Do you like hunting?” “Not particularly,” Anyara said, knowing it sounded ill-humoured, but not caring. “Ah, well. I can imagine how hard it must be to take much pleasure in that kind of thing at the moment. Believe me, since my husband left to go north, nothing has tasted good to me. It must have been still harder for you, to suffer the losses you have this winter, and now to know nothing of your brother’s fate.” Anyara grimaced. There was nothing she was less eager to discuss than Orisian, or anything that had happened since Winterbirth. “I’m sorry,” Tara said at once, and she sounded entirely genuine, aghast at her own behaviour. “Please forgive me. It is inexcusable to talk of such things without invitation. This sea air makes me foolish. That, and the promise of my husband’s return. In seeking to offer comfort, I stumble about like an ignorant —” “It’s all right,” Anyara said to stanch the apologetic flow. “I’m glad for you. You must have been greatly concerned for the Chancellor’s safety.” And she found that she meant what she said. For all that Anyara disliked—detested—Mordyn Jerain, this woman’s love for her husband was all too apparent. It felt churlish not to acknowledge such feelings. Tara nodded. “Oh, indeed. It was a misery, when so many terrible rumours were reaching us. I feel as though I am about to awaken from a bad dream. But what you and your family have suffered—my difficulties bear no comparison, especially now that they approach a happy resolution. Forgive me.” “Look,” said Coinach quietly at Anyara’s side. Far off along the beach, back towards the harbour and dockyards, figures were running over the sand. They were so distant it was impossible to tell what was happening, and no sound could reach so far across the onshore wind, but it looked to be a pursuit of some kind. Something in the way the figures moved—their urgency, their effort—implied violence. They reached the line of breaking waves. Anyara could just make out the white speckling of spray bursting up as the first of them struggled through the shallow water. “How odd,” Tara Jerain murmured. Someone fell, and the figures became indistinct, crowding in together in a dark mass. Sharp, angular movements suggested a flurry of knees and elbows. “They’re killing him,” Coinach said. “Surely not,” said Tara then, puzzled, doubtful: “Perhaps they caught him thieving.” “Perhaps you should send your guards to intervene,” Anyara suggested. There was some-thing in the silent, savage scene she found unsettling. Even though it was safely distant, it had a simple brutality that felt as though it could all too easily reach across that stretch of sand. It soured the air. “No, no,” Tara said. She was a little uneasy and distracted now herself. “Best not to interfere. There’s been a good deal of trouble recently, you know. I’ve heard that there has been much more… disturbance than is usual in the rougher parts of the city. As if some foul mood’s taken hold of everyone at the same time. No, best to keep away from it. Perhaps we should make ready to return.” In so far as she thought of it at all, Anyara had assumed that the Shadowhand’s return would be marked by pomp, by ceremony or rejoicing, but it came suddenly and unheralded instead. She went, on the morning after their ride to the shore, to break her fast with Tara Jerain, as had quickly become their habit, and the Chancellor was simply there, sitting at the finely laid table. He was thinner than Anyara remembered. His skin had an ashen, bloodless quality. Until now, these meals had been far more comfortable—almost pleasurable—occasions than Anyara would have expected. Tara was an easy companion, always ready to smooth the conversation along in gentle fashion. This morning was different, and from the moment of her first step into the room, Anyara sensed the change. Mordyn was a deadening, darkening presence; nothing like the casually confident and eloquent man Anyara remembered from Kolkyre. He barely acknowledged her arrival at the table. His eyes flicked briefly in her direction and then sank back towards his food. He sat in a tight knot, his arms pressed close in at his side, his chin nestled down into his chest. Tara Jerain said nothing. She greeted Anyara with a nod and a small smile, but they were frail tokens, the afterthoughts of a mind entirely elsewhere. In countless little ways, she betrayed her disquiet: snatched glances at her returned husband, the restless movement of her hands from platter to mouth to lap to table, the concern that pinched the skin at the corner of her eyes into nests of lines. Anyara was silenced by the oppressive unease. Even the serving girls moved quietly and hesitantly about their business. There were a dozen questions Anyara could have asked. Longed to ask. She did not dare to utter any of them. Mordyn Jerain had always intimidated her, but this was different. Now the bleak silence he imposed simply felt too weighty to disturb. She picked half-heartedly at the food before her. Her heart sank with the realisation that despite her determination to resist, she had come to believe the many subtle hints that once the Chancellor returned, all might be resolved in a satisfactory way. She had permitted a tentative blossoming of hope, seduced perhaps by Tara’s companionship and the comforts of the Palace of Red Stone, and sloughed a few fragments of her caution and suspicion. Well, the Chancellor had returned, and he brought not relief but some strange shadow. Anyara glanced at him. Mordyn Jerain was staring at her. For an instant his gaze was unguarded, piercing, then he appeared to realise she was watching him and his expression went blank, his eyelids fluttered and he lowered his head once more. But in that brief moment she had glimpsed such naked contempt, such loathing, that she was suddenly afraid. Anyara spent that day in restless distraction. Eleth, the maid, sensed her mood and produced from somewhere materials and needles. She suggested she might show Anyara how to produce the patterns of decorative threadwork that had become popular in Vaymouth in the last year or two. It was a kind, sincere offer, but wholly impotent as a cure for Anyara’s agitation. She could not settle, could not sit still for more than a moment or two. She snapped irritably at Coinach without cause. He exiled himself to the passageway outside her rooms. Eleth came and went in an increasingly desperate attempt to provide some amusement. She fetched dainty cakes from the kitchens. Anyara dutifully ate them, and though she recognised that they were delicious, she found they gave her no pleasure. Eleth brought singing cagebirds. To the maid’s consternation, Anyara only laughed bitterly at them, and bade her remove them. At last, as the afternoon stumbled towards a grey dusk, Anyara sprang up from her chair with a sigh of frustration. “There must be parts of this palace I haven’t seen yet,” she said to Eleth. “Show me something. Anything. I can’t sit around here any more. I have to move.” “Of course, my lady,” Eleth said promptly, evidently relieved. “There must be somewhere…” “Anywhere,” Anyara said, and stepped out into the corridor. Coinach was waiting there. He was a touch startled by her sudden appearance, and gave her a somewhat anxious look, as if in anticipation of a scolding. “Come,” said Anyara briskly. “We’re exploring. Or just wandering.” Eleth led the way, walking with quick, small steps. “Are you warm enough?” Coinach murmured at Anyara’s side. “I’m fine,” she said, which was not entirely true. Some of the passageways of the Chancellor’s palace gathered and retained enough heat from the kitchens and bedchambers and communal rooms to remain comfortable all day, others—such as this one—did not. She had left too hurriedly to think of bringing a cloak, but had no intention of turning back now. As they rounded a corner, Eleth gave a soft gasp of surprise and drew to an abrupt halt. Anyara almost walked into her. Mordyn Jerain was there, standing motionless in the corridor ahead of them. His arms hung limp at his side. He was staring blankly at the wall. If he breathed, he did so soundlessly, and without discernible movement of his chest. He did not, Anyara realised after a moment or two’s tense observation, blink. His eyes were glassy, unfocused. She took a step forward, gently easing Eleth to one side. Coinach whispered something cautionary, but she ignored him. There was something eerily unreal about the scene. The Shadowhand looked like a man who had simply… stopped; as if his body had been unexpectedly abandoned by whatever enlivening force had once inhabited it. “Chancellor?” Anyara said quietly as she took another pace closer. Here was an opportunity to undo her reticence of the morning, if Mordyn could be roused from whatever stupor had taken hold of him. Here was the chance to find out what he knew of Orisian; what role he might play in untangling her own uncomfortable situation. She firmly crushed the urge to slip away before this troubling man noticed her presence. If she was to be of any use at all to her brother, her Blood, herself, it would not be by hiding away, by giving in to the fears that flocked about her. And then, slowly, he turned his head. She met his cold eyes, and was reminded of the predatory gaze of the hunting hawks her family had kept at Kolglas. It brought her to an instant halt. Yet he said nothing. He simply stared at her. In the space of a few heartbeats, the silence became so potent that she imagined she could feel its pressure upon her skin. “Chancellor?” she said again, aware of the tremor in her voice. She quelled it. “I wondered if I might speak with you?” He tipped his head slightly to one side, narrowed those eyes a touch. “You…” he said slowly, clumsily. “You were in the forest. You were at Anduran.” Anyara frowned. “Anduran? Yes, yes, of course. Many times. Never… We met in Kolkyre, though, for the first time.” “Indeed.” He fell silent once more, yet continued to stare at Anyara. There was nothing in his gaze now: no life, no interest. No hostility even. Just that dead regard. Coinach came up beside Anyara. The Chancellor did not seem to notice him. “Perhaps you should return to your chambers, lady,” Coinach murmured. “I thought perhaps we might discuss my future,” Anyara said stubbornly to Mordyn. He would surely understand the absurdity of the circumstance they all found themselves in. Had he not been absent from Kolkyre at the crucial time, she doubted Aewult’s idiocy would have been permitted to follow its mad course. “I am sure this misunderstanding can be easily tidied away, now that you have returned. The High Thane will surely listen to you…” “Yes,” said Mordyn. He still held his head at that strange angle, like a bird. “He will. He already does. You are too late, though, to exert any influence upon what it is I choose to say to him. How unfortunate.” He took a single step towards them. Coinach edged his shoulder in front of Anyara, and for once she did not find his protective instincts foolish or misplaced. There was something in the Shadowhand’s manner so unnatural that it was impossible not to read threat into it. The corridor suddenly felt constricted: tight, like a trap. “Things change too fast for you,” the Shadowhand said. “You’re nothing now. The struggle stopped being about you, your Blood, a long time ago.” “Come away,” Anyara whispered to Coinach, tugging at his arm. There was, she now realised, nothing to be gained here. Quite the opposite, in fact: for the first time since she had arrived in this city, she sensed true danger rather than mere hostility or cold contempt, stirring in the shadows, in the edges. Drawing closer. Coinach kept himself between her and the Chancellor as they walked away. Eleth was watching with a shocked expression, one hand lightly touching her lips as if in a forgotten attempt to hide her reaction. Anyara glanced back over her shoulder as they went. Still Mordyn Jerain was staring at her, leaning forward slightly, as if his own sudden, intense interest had overbalanced him. “Hide,” he said. “Hide away. It doesn’t matter. What’s coming will find you; find everyone.” Anyara grimaced, filled with both detestation for the man and irritation at how deeply his words and his demeanour troubled her. She gathered in Eleth with an outstretched arm, and shepherded the alarmed maid away, back around the corner. “Stay away from my table, lady,” she heard the Shadowhand saying behind them, out of sight. “I will not break bread with you. Stay out of my sight, lest you draw my attention down upon you too soon.” Anyara walked quickly away. She shivered as she did so.
III
Snow could conceal many shortcomings, but even its gentle blanket was insufficient to render Ash Pit appealing or graceful to the eye. Vaymouth’s most ill-reputed ward stubbornly asserted its infamous character. The dilapidated houses remained grimy and tight-packed; whores still haunted shadowed doorways; rats still scurried brazenly through the debris of destitution; odious liquids still ran in the streets, cutting steaming channels in the snow. Mordyn Jerain came with a dozen watchful guards, the bulkiest and most uncompromising of the hirelings he paid from his own pocket. No great warriors these, but street fighters and brutes whose loyalty was solely to the man who paid them the most; and the Shadowhand could pay better than anyone save the High Thane himself. The party went openly through Ash Pit’s noisome roadways, with little of the discretion that had characterised Mordyn’s previous forays into this part of the city. Every onlooker—and there were some, even in this cold dusk, for Ash Pit never entirely slept—was driven off or turned away with snarled warnings and brandished cudgels. The Chancellor and his fierce entourage swept along like a savagely cleansing wind, leaving quiet and empty streets behind them. When they came to the door they sought, Mordyn’s ruffians dispersed, taking up stations at each nearby corner, disappearing down gloomy, tight alleys. Mordyn himself rapped on the weighty portal with his knuckles. Magrayn swung the door open and regarded him with suspicious distaste. “You are not expected,” she said, as distinctly as the King’s Rot that had ravaged her face would permit. “Nevertheless, I imagine your master will find the time to speak with me.” Magrayn eyed the Chancellor, and glanced over his shoulder, noting the menacing figures lurking along the street. “Won’t he?” Mordyn persisted. The doorkeeper grudgingly admitted him, and the Shadowhand was taken down into the cellars where the object of his journey was laired. “Have I offended you in some way, Chancellor?” Torquentine asked, with a trace of hurt in his voice. “What do you mean?” Mordyn asked. “You seem a little… cold.” “Would you have me pay you some pretty compliments? Or embrace you, perhaps?” “Hardly. Your reach is famously long, but not, I think, long enough for the task of encompassing my prodigious girth.” Torquentine rested his hands on his immense belly with a satisfied smile. Mordyn grunted. “I am not in the mood for merry banter. I want to buy your services. Will you hear my offer or not?” “Very well, Chancellor,” sighed Torquentine. It troubled him to find the Shadowhand so altered in manner, but by all rumour the man had suffered considerable misfortune during his adventures in Kilkry lands. Some allowance might be made for that, perhaps. “You know I am always only too pleased to entertain your proposals. If this one is as interesting as —” “Rest your tongue a while and listen. Igryn oc Dargannan-Haig will shortly be leaving Vaymouth. He will be sent to In’Vay, bound for the Lake Tower.” “The final—and fatal—abode of the last King. Seems not inappropriate, if rather ill-omened for poor Igryn. Dare I guess that the former Thane is shortly to depart for the Sleeping Dark, then?” “Be quiet. I want you to seize him before he reaches the Lake Tower, and transport him back to Hoke. To his own lands.” “Ah… Chancellor, I am… For once, I find myself short of words.” Torquentine shifted heavily upon his huge cushions, rare consternation troubling his features. He blinked his one good eye. “You want me to free Igryn? From chains the High Thane himself put upon him? That seems… Well, it’s beyond even my not inconsiderable resources.” “Nonsense. It’s the High Thane’s own desire you’ll be serving. I will ensure that the escort is depleted at the appropriate time. I’ll send you word of where and when the opportunity will present itself. Once you have him, it’s well within your power to move a single man from one place to another undetected. You’ve spent your life making much bulkier cargoes disappear and reappear where they are least expected. It’s not your resources that fall short, but your courage.” “Indeed, indeed. Call me coward, then. I’ll raise no protest. Craven, I am, when it comes to the matter of preserving my… lack of visibility, shall we say? What you ask runs counter to my most dearly held principles, not the least of which is to refrain from trampling the toes of those whose feet are larger than mine. Not, in other words, to swim in rivers where all the other fish have sharper teeth than I do.” “What are you talking about?” “I know my limitations, Chancellor,” Torquentine said. The first hint of alarm was stirring in his considerable gut. It was not just the faint flicker of contempt he heard in Mordyn’s tone; the Shadowhand’s entire demeanour was so brisk, so hasty, it smacked of carelessness. Or convoluted deceit. “Killing Igryn’s cousin exhausted my willingness to cavort amongst contending Bloods and Thanes. That wine’s too rich for me.” “You got what you wanted in exchange for that service. Ochan the Cook is dead.” “Of course, of course. Most grateful to you for that, sincerely. But Igryn’s a rebel, a prize of war. His lands are still unsettled, to say the least—growing more so, from what I hear. Blinded he may be, but if he’s returned to his people a free man, an enemy of the Thane of Thanes… my wit is unequal to the task of discerning the benefit—to Gryvan, or you, or any of us—in such a development.” “You are not required to discern such things.” Again that dismissive, curt edge to the words. The Chancellor had never, in Torquentine’s experience, been quite so verbally rough. “But how could renewed unrest—war, even—on our southern borders be in anybody’s interest, when the Black Road is —” “None of that is your concern.” “Well, with regret, I must differ on that.” Torquentine recognised dangerous ground when he felt it beneath his feet, but he found himself unable to meekly submit. This vaunted Chancellor owed him a good deal; owed him at least an acknowledgement that the two of them were masters in their own, very different, arenas. “War presents its opportunities, certainly, but they diminish precipitately if that war becomes too extensive, too disruptive. I, like everyone else, was under the impression all of this trouble with the Black Road would be tidied up rather more quickly—rather more victoriously, in fact—than is proving the case. Now you seem to be tempting yet more unpleasantness from an entirely different direction.” “You will be very adequately rewarded for your assistance. And there’s more. I want fires set in every warehouse and storehouse of the Goldsmiths you can reach. And the Gemsmiths, and the Furriers. I need it done urgently.” Torquentine could barely believe what he was hearing. “Oh, this is madness. You mean to make a fool of me. This is some strange jest, isn’t it?” “No.” “You want the whole city given over to riot and mayhem?” “I want you to do as I bid, and to enjoy the fruits of your efforts. I will give you fifty times the payment you’ve received for any other service you’ve done me.” “Now I know you are jesting.” “Not at all. And not in this, either: if you refuse me, you corpulent slug, I’ll have you dug out of this burrow and burned alive on one of Ash Pit’s famous fires. The world is changing, Torquentine. Those who don’t change with it will pay a heavy price for their intransigence.” After Mordyn Jerain had departed, Torquentine lay in such deep thoughtfulness, for so long, that the candles guttered around him. They failed, one by one, and his chamber eased its way into gloom. At length he stirred and summoned his doorkeeper. She came, Rot-faced, and knelt at his side. “Magrayn, we are in an unenviable position,” he said distractedly, with none of the humour or affection that usually coloured his dealings with his disfigured attendant. “I am required by the Shadowhand to court disaster, and to wage war upon enemies I do not want. He offers me absurd riches if I agree, and threatens, if I refuse, to instead wage war upon me.” “You could kill him,” Magrayn suggested promptly. Her tendency towards a practical way of thinking was one of the things he treasured about her. “Perhaps, though that would be an undertaking no more palatable. To kill a Chancellor? Insanely ambitious.” “Then we must find a way to satisfy him with the least risk possible.” “There might be ways. Might.” Torquentine shook his heavy head, wishing the tangle of his thoughts might be so easily unwound. “But there’s a foul taste to all this, Magrayn. We’re already in the midst of war, and he seems intent on starting another one inside our own house. He invites chaos in Dargannan-Haig, vengeful fury amongst the Crafts. I don’t see the sense in any of it. There’s nothing to be gained by it.” “The Shadowhand can unearth gain where others see only dirt,” Magrayn said, brushing a flake of forgotten food from Torquentine’s fat cheek. “Indeed. What if his gain wears the same cloak as our loss, though?” He sighed. “We’ve little choice but to play the Shadowhand’s game for now. Make such arrangements as would be needed to move a man, in total secrecy, from here to Hoke. A blind man. Put some eyes on every warehouse used by the Goldsmiths, the Gemsmiths and the Furriers. We need to know every nook and cranny of whatever nocturnal routine the guards keep. And find someone in the Palace of Red Stone who can tell us what’s happening in there.” “We’ve tried that before, without success. The Chancellor’s household is… tightly controlled.” “Try again, harder. We shied away from too much risk in our previous attempts; now, we may bear a little more of it, I think. Desperate times, my dear. Also, examine all our plans for making a hasty departure from this burrow, as the Shadowhand saw fit to call it. Make sure they remain both sound and secret. And bring the best killers we know to Vaymouth—those who can be here within, say, three or four days. I want them close at hand. When troubles gather, it’s best to have troublesome friends within reach.” “I will see to it all.” “Excellent. Perhaps you could send me down some of those little apple tarts too? All this worry is terribly unsettling for my stomach. It needs some comforting, I think.”
*
Joy and despair contended for mastery of Tara Jerain’s heart. Her beloved husband was restored to her, and she longed to rejoice in that simple fact. So fearful had she been during those long days when no one could tell her where he was, or even whether he still lived, that she had felt like some fragile vessel of the thinnest glass: a single clumsy word, a single barb of spite, might have broken her. The nights had been the worst, contorted by the agony of ignorance, haunted by the fear of the coming dawn and the possibility that it might bring with it some ashen-faced messenger bearing the worst possible news. And now that terrible shadow was lifted. But another had fallen, for the husband returned to her was not the one who had left her. Their lovemaking on the night of his return, which during his absence had been an imagined island of hope amidst despair, had instead been perfunctory: a thing of habit or necessity rather than love. Nothing in the days since had shown that to be an aberration. Something in him had changed. Something had gone, and with the recognition of its departure Tara found joy losing its ever more tenuous grip upon her spirits. Mordyn was bent over a table, his shoulders lit by the candles that burned all around. The swan feather of his quill shivered as it scraped across parchment. There was no other sound. He was utterly engrossed in his work. Tara watched from the doorway. This was a familiar sight. Many times she had seen her husband at work in just this way, in just this warm light. Yet all was not as it had once, so comfortingly, been. The hunch of his shoulders was narrower, tenser, than it used to be. His hand darted to and from the inkwell with angry impatience. Even the sound was different: harsher, cruder, as if quill and parchment warred. He had always had the lightest and most precise of hands. She felt an aching sense of bereavement as she noted each one of these tiny differences. Yet how could she be bereaved, when the object of all her affections was here before her, alive? She walked forward, her slippers soundless on the floor. Mordyn was too absorbed in his labours to notice her approach. When she set her hands gently on his shoulders, in the way she had done countless times before, he started and gave a half-strangled grunt of alarm. He glanced up at her even as he covered over what he had been writing with blank sheets of parchment. Perhaps he thought Tara would not notice this petty act of concealment, but she did. He had never done such a thing before, never shown the slightest sign of distrust or secrecy. What pained her still more, though, was the way he shrugged off her hands with an irritated shake of his shoulders. With that single loveless gesture, he wounded her to the quick. Tara was startled to find her eyes moistening, a premonition of tears. This man bore the face and form of her husband, but she no longer recognised what lay beneath that surface. “What happened?” she asked, standing limp and empty behind him. He must have heard the hurt in her voice, for he twisted about in the chair to look up at her, and though his gaze was at first unsympathetic, it softened. “What do you mean?” he asked. “You cannot have told me everything that happened to you. There must be more, to have changed you so much. If you won’t tell me, how am I to understand? How am I to ease whatever troubles you if you shut me out?” “No, no.” The affection in his voice rang hollow to Tara. She did not believe it, and did not know what to do with the horror, the crippling fear, that disbelief engendered. She loved this man with all her heart, and had never doubted his equal love for her. Yet now… now, she felt terribly alone. “It’s nothing,” Mordyn went on. “I am troubled only by the amount that must be done, now that I have returned. There are so many demands upon my time, my thought. I’m sorry. I do not mean to cause you alarm, or concern.” “You’re so thin, so pale. You must be sick.” She could hope for that, in this horribly changed world; she could hope that her precious husband was sick, for it might explain, more gently and comprehensibly than any other explanation, why he had become a stranger to her. But he shook his head. “I am well. Any pallor is only the mark of my travels, my tribulations. You will see: soon enough, I will have some fat back on these bones, some colour back in my cheeks. Do not worry.” And he turned away from her again, bent back towards his writing table. That dismissal allowed anger to rise briefly through Tara’s confusion and sorrow. “What are you writing?” she asked sharply. “Tedious matters. Nothing of consequence.” “May I see it?” She reached over his shoulder and lifted a corner of the covering sheet. He slapped it down again. “Please. I am in haste. Let me finish this in peace.” Tara left without another word, forcing herself not to look back as she went. She yearned to do so, to indulge the faint hope that she might find him gazing after her with all the old, profound love in his eyes, but she could hear that hateful quill scratching out its black path. He had forgotten her already, she knew; she, and all her concerns, had been expunged from his awareness in an instant. For years she had dwelled in the light of the warmest, most elevating sun imaginable. Now it was being extinguished, and the darkness descending upon her was all the deeper for the glory that had preceded it. And, she reflected as she walked along a corridor of white marble, it had not even been his own hand in which her husband wrote. She knew his spidery, flowing script as well as she knew her own. Even that momentary glimpse of his work had been enough for her to know it was in another style altogether. He meant to conceal authorship of the text. Or his hand had changed along with his manner, his mood. His heart. She paused at a narrow window that looked out over the rooftops towards the heart of Vaymouth. Gryvan’s Moon Palace loomed like a pale mountain over the city. Snow was falling, drifting down in a slow, tumbling dance. Where once Tara might have seen a certain austere beauty, now she saw only bleakness.
IV
The Lannis warrior writhed on Malloc’s spear like a great, impaled fish. Flopping around, he thought contemptuously. They die like animals. It was fitting. The last of the Lannis men had fallen back to a bare knoll outside Kilvale. Only some thirty of them left now. The killing had begun before dawn, and carried on, in fits and starts, all through the grey morning. Most of them had died in the first hour, killed in their tents, beneath their blankets. Since then it had been more hunt than battle, the stragglers cornered in barns and orchards and ditches as they scattered. There had been, Malloc thought, perhaps two hundred of them when the cleansing began; now just these thirty, squatting atop the hillock, behind their wall of shields, their hedge of spears. He ducked instinctively as arrows thrummed over his head. He freed his spear and trotted back to the Haig line. There was a great eagerness in him, so powerful it had him trembling, and it would be easy to give in to it, to go howling up the hill and throw himself at these traitors, these craven orphans of a shattered Blood. But he had spent half his life fighting in Gryvan oc Haig’s service, and that long experience still spoke loudly enough—just—to restrain him. The final reckoning would not be long delayed. He could wait. More than a hundred Haig warriors were massed at the base of the knoll, and more were constantly arriving, gradually spreading themselves out to encircle this last refuge of the Lannis survivors. Malloc pushed clumsily through the line of archers, ignoring the curses directed at him. He found his companions already resting on a grassy bank, sharing bread and water. One of them threw a cloth to him as he drew near. “You’ve Lannis blood on your face.” Malloc grunted and wiped his brow and cheeks. “And you’ve none, I see,” he said to Garrent, his oldest friend, in the business of war at least. “You been shirking?” “They run too fast for me to catch them up,” Garrent said with a grin, shaking his left leg in Malloc’s direction. He had twisted his ankle during the retreat from Kolkyre, and claimed it still hampered him. Malloc slumped down beside him and grabbed the bread from his hand. “Not running now,” he observed. “More fool them. They’ll last no longer than a maiden’s virtue in Tal Dyre once there’s a few more of us.” Malloc looked around. A company of Taral-Haig horsemen was thundering up, their hide-armoured horses as menacing as the men who rode them. And behind them another fifty or more Haig spearmen came running, every eye fixed on their cowering quarry above. The archers had a rhythm now, flighting a steady shower of arrows up onto the hilltop. A few would surely find flesh. “There’s enough of us now,” Malloc muttered, tearing at the dry, hard bread. “Oh, wait for the order, man. It’ll come soon enough.” “We’re getting orders now?” Malloc said through a full mouth. He had encountered no one who could say where the command for this had come from, whose the decision had been to settle with the Lannis men. Some murmured that Aewult nan Haig himself had issued the order, some that one or other of his Captains had taken it upon themselves. Malloc doubted such explanations. The killing had simply begun, in the night, like a rainstorm breaking of its own volition. Sometimes these things just happened because they had to. The need for it had been building ever since word reached the army that the Bloodheir’s messengers had been massacred in Ive. Lannis and Kilkry were already being blamed, around the campfires, for the mystifying defeats inflicted upon the Haig forces by the Black Road at Glasbridge and Kolkyre. Ever since then, it seemed to Malloc, the few Lannis warriors entangled in the Bloodheir’s army had been marked men. The added weight of dead messengers had been too much for what little trust remained. The army of the Black Road was not far away, though whether it still merited the title of army was uncertain. Those scouts Malloc had talked to reported thousands of the northerners spread across huge swathes of countryside in loose bands and companies, some of them in good order, some appearing to be leaderless mobs. Whatever their state, they could have attacked at any time in the last few days, but had not. Haig and Gyre thus faced one another in unresolved opposition, neither advancing, neither retreating. Malloc had not realised how agonising the tension had become until this bloody morning had offered itself up as release. A single arrow skittered off the helm of a Haig swordsman further forward and spun into the long grass a few arms’ lengths from Malloc. “Toothless as old dogs, they are,” Garrent said. It was true enough. It had all been too sudden, too fierce for much in the way of resistance. Malloc’s one vague regret was that he had spent all morning struggling through wet fields and marshes in pursuit of fleeing Lannis men while—if the reports he had heard were true—others had found easier prey. Kilvale was full of Kilkry families exiled from their lands and homes by the Black Road’s advance. Some of those who had been forced to take shelter in camps or farms outside the town itself, beyond the protection of Kilvale’s Guard, had felt the force of Haig wrath today as well. Malloc would have liked to be a part of that. Lannis had never been much more than lackey to the arrogant inhabitants of Kolkyre’s Tower of Thrones; if any Blood truly deserved chastisement, humbling, it was Kilkry. But he had no complaint. He had killed, and would kill again before the day was out. And once it was all done, the army would be the stronger for it. Cleaner. Unreliable allies—traitorous ones—were worse than no allies at all. There was a healing to be had in this, a making right of so much that had been wrong. It took the edge off Malloc’s shame at his flight—and that of so many other good Haig men—from the battle outside Kolkyre. A great deal had been inexplicably lost that day amidst the terrible, causeless panic that took hold of Aewult’s army. Some of it, some respect, was recovered by this cutting out of the canker from their ranks. If anything did trouble him, it was the unfamiliar joy this carnage engendered in him. He had often found excitement in fighting, in ending a life and keeping his own, but this was different. This killing felt as if it somehow completed him, answered a fervent desire he had never before known. That seemed strange to him, but it was too sweet-tasting to concern him overly much. He wanted to drink still more deeply from this well. There was a cry from up above. One of the Lannis spearmen fell forward from the shield wall, an arrow in the notch of his shoulder. He slid on his stomach a short way down the grassy slope as the shields closed up behind him. An arm stretched out, scrabbling at his ankle, trying to get a grip to haul him back. He was too heavy, and a further flurry of shafts quickly deterred the man who sought to help him. “All be over soon,” Malloc murmured. It was odd that such a thought should stir regret, but it did. “The Bloodheir,” said Garrent, suddenly leaping to his feet. Malloc rose too. Everyone was stirring, making themselves appear ready and willing. Malloc craned his neck to get a glimpse of Aewult nan Haig. The Bloodheir came with a dozen of his mighty Palace Shield, great men clad in metal, bearing pennanted lances, astride massive horses. Malloc smiled. Aewult himself was magnificent, cloak flowing from his shoulders, eyes fixed upon the miserable little crowd of warriors atop the hillock. He drew his horse to a halt and bent to talk to someone in the throng that closed about him. Malloc had never been so close to any of his ruling house. To be able to see every line upon the Bloodheir’s brow, the stitching in his great leather gauntlets, renewed his fervour. The urge to loose some wildly adulatory cry, perhaps draw a fragment of that noble attention to himself, was almost irresistible. The Bloodheir straightened. He was nodding at something said to him. “It’s too late to do anything but finish it now,” Malloc heard him say. “And if it’s to be done, do it well. Make sure none escape.” Those words were all it took. They spread through the Haig ranks, repeated by every eager mouth, and men began to move without waiting for any further command. One began to run, then another, then tens, then scores. Archers threw aside their bows, drew knives and rushed forward. All swarming up the slippery turf incline, all desperate to be in at the end of this, all filled with unreasoning, consuming hatred. And Malloc was at the front of it, feeling as strong, as potent, as ever he had in his life. His legs pounded, his heart soared; they both carried him on and up to meet the waiting spears of a dying Blood.
V
Taim Narran could feel sweat slick on his back and shoulders beneath his shirt. Exertion made his face burn against the bitter air. Fatigue was building in his thighs. Yet still Orisian came at him. His Thane, less than half his age, battled on and on. Taim retreated, a few quick steps back across the training ground, blocking sword blows with his shield as he went. Orisian came after him, on the very borders of control. It was often this way when the two of them fought. The longer the training bouts went on—and Orisian always insisted on extending them, pushing himself to his limits and beyond—the more aggressive the young Thane became, the more violent and unrestrained grew his attacks. Taim let Orisian bear down on him, and twisted aside. Orisian went stumbling through and Taim gave him a smack on the side of his head with the flat of his blade as he went. To his credit, Orisian managed to keep his feet, staggering down almost to his knees before whirling about and surging up again. The two of them battled back and forth. Servants had swept the training square free of snow, but the ground was still frozen, almost rock-like. Orisian’s knuckles, even his cheek, were grazed from earlier falls. Nothing dimmed his willingness to come forward again and again, but exhaustion was at last blunting the ferocity of his attacks. His shield was drifting low, his feet becoming a touch sluggish. Enough, Taim thought. He dropped his own guard just enough to offer temptation. Orisian lunged. Taim sidestepped, and brought his own shield up in a slicing arc. He opened Orisian’s forehead with its rim. Orisian reeled, blood streaking down his face. Taim hooked a foot around the back of his knee, and sent him sprawling. “We’re done for today,” Taim said, kicking his Thane’s sword away. “You’re not learning now, only exhausting yourself.” Orisian struggled to his feet, wiping blood from his brow. “I can carry on,” he said breathlessly. He looked around for his sword. “Your mind’s not clear enough,” Taim said. He sheathed his own sword. “You told me once I had to fight by instinct, not by thinking.” “True enough, but that only works with the right instincts. Anger fouls them up. Fight angry, and you won’t fight long.” Orisian looked downcast. “I know. I try.” “You do. And for as long as you concentrate and keep calm, you fight well. But something happens. You start fighting something more than just me.” Orisian stooped to retrieve his blade. He made a clumsy effort to return it to its scabbard, missing at the first attempt. “You must get that wound cleaned and bound,” Taim said. “Yes,” murmured Orisian. He grimaced at his Captain. “Did you have to hit me so hard?” “Thought it might clear your head. It’s not much more than a touch. It’ll clean up fine.” Orisian grunted, and walked slowly off towards the barracks. As Taim watched him go, he felt sorrow for the young man. He could not call it pity, for that was a sentiment Orisian would utterly refuse. Sorrow fitted better, in any case. Taim was not certain what it was that came over Orisian when they trained. Some formless fury woke in him. Perhaps he became lost in the punishing rhythm of strike and counter-strike, parry and sidestep, and found himself battling against memories, or fears, or death itself. Perhaps each blow he aimed at Taim’s shield was, for him, aimed rather at the whole array of enemies, and of misfortunes, that had taken his father from him, and Inurian. And Rothe. That last death had been the one that finally and fatally weakened the child in Orisian, Taim reflected as he stamped smooth a few of the deeper marks they had gouged into the hard surface of the training ground during their bout. The second shieldman to die in Orisian’s defence, and someone he had been wholly unready to lose. Nothing had been quite the same since then. Taim shook the shield free from his left arm and took it towards the armoury. He walked slowly, for he was weary. And now that there were none to see, he allowed himself to limp. His thigh ached. Beneath his leggings, tight bandages covered the puncture marks and the prodigious bruise inflicted by that bone-encrusted Tarbain club. His weariness was not, though, so much of the body as of the mind and spirit. Though he hid it meticulously from those around him, Orisian most of all, the days were taking a heavy toll. The fighting, the almost sleepless nights, the pervasive and insidious mood of despairing aggression. It all sapped his strength. And there was the sickening worry for his wife and his daughter, left behind in besieged Kolkyre. He had promised Jaen he would be there at her side when their grandchild was born. It would break his heart, and shame him, to fail in that promise. Ranks of shields greeted him as he entered the armoury. They hung from the wall in overlapping rows. To call the place an armoury was overgenerous, in truth. It was little more than a storeroom, and a poorly ordered one at that. The shields might be neatly displayed, but spears were piled lazily and loosely against one wall. There were quivers of arrows in one corner, their flights frayed and broken. Taim hung his shield with the others. He closed the door behind him and made for the barracks. What he wanted, with all his heart, was to be with his family, in front of a warming fire, talking of idle and foolish matters. But no matter how fervent that desire, Taim could contain it—much of the time, at least—within a sealed and silent chamber deep within himself. There were other promises that bound him, and even at the cost of a broken heart, he could not turn aside from them. He had pledged his life to the Blood, to the service of its Thane. For Taim that remained the greater part of what gave his life meaning. There was a blinding white sun in the sky, unfettered by clouds for the first time in days. But its light seemed more to expose the world than to illuminate it. It sharpened every edge, bared everything beneath its cold wash. As Taim walked along Ive’s main street his nostrils were filled with the smell of wet ash. He passed by a long stretch of houses gutted and tumbled by the recent fires. Every detail, every seam and stain of the charred timbers, every smoke scar smearing across the stonework, was clear, precisely delineated by this acute winter light. He could hear an argument somewhere, a man and woman raging at one another. He could hear a baby crying too, off in another direction. In the raw, despairing need of that wail he sensed the expression of something deep. Something of the tune to which the world now danced. He found Torcaill at the town’s edge, standing with a dozen of his men. They were watching a band of townsfolk struggling eastwards across a field, leading a pair of mules that bore huge packs. “There are scores of them leaving now,” Torcaill muttered. “They think Ive’s finished.” “They’re right,” Taim said. “Where are they going?” “I don’t think they know that themselves. Most head east, hoping to lose themselves in the mountains or the woods.” “They’ll have a hard time of it out there. Bad weather, not enough food.” “They will. Worse than hard, a lot of them. But it’s their choice. If they lack the spirit to fight for their town, their Blood, they must bear the consequences.” Taim glanced sideways at the younger man. Torcaill’s vehemence was striking, and his eyes as he watched the departing townsfolk gleamed with a cold contempt. That anger that lurked beneath so many surfaces now was there, unforgiving, judging. “They want to live,” Taim murmured. “Keep their families, their children, alive. There’s no shame in that. They’ve already seen indisputable proof that we can’t keep the Black Road out of their town. If I wore their clothes, I’d do the same.” A flock of birds shot up from a copse beyond the field. They sprayed out in all directions from the treetops, then veered back together and went arrowing together out of sight into the east. “How’s your leg?” Torcaill asked. Taim shrugged. “Wound’s not gone bad so far. Any word from the scouts?” “Half of them have disappeared,” sighed Torcaill. “Killed somewhere out there, or fled perhaps. As for the rest… there’re Tarbains burning farms half a day west of here. The army you fought on the south road is still there, camped at some village. There’s another, bigger, in the hills to the west. My men saw their fires last night. They could be on us tomorrow, if they choose.” Taim nodded. “We’re finished, then. Here, at least. If we stay, we’re done.” “Perhaps.” Torcaill’s assent was grudging. He wanted to fight. “Have you talked to Orisian about it?” “He knows it as well as we do. He wants to meet with us, all of us, this afternoon. After the oath-taking. I think he’ll tell us then what he means to do.” Torcaill pushed forefinger and thumb into his eyes, grinding away the tiredness Taim knew must be lodged there. Nobody was sleeping well. “They’re to go ahead with that, then?” the younger man asked heavily. “The oath-taking, I mean?” “Why not?” Taim said. Torcaill shrugged, but made no reply. “Orisian is Thane of our Blood.” Taim turned away, heading back into the town’s heart. “Those who wish to take the oath in his name have the right. The duty.” “But we’ve no Oathmen, have we?” Torcaill called after him. “They’re all dead. Or lost.” “I’m to do it,” Taim said as he walked, perhaps too softly for the other man to hear. “I’m to wield the knife.” The boy was eight years old. Small and nervous. Perhaps more than nervous, for he paled as his gaze settled upon the knife held in his mother’s open palm. “In the name of Sirian and Powll, Anvar and Gahan and Tavan and Croesan, the Thanes who have been; of Orisian oc Lannis-Haig, the Thane who is now; and of the Thanes yet to come, I command you all to hear the bloodoath taken,” Taim intoned. The words sat strangely in his mouth. They were ancient, weighty words that only Oathmen should speak. “I am Thane and Blood, past and future, and this life will be bound to mine. I command you all to mark it.” The boy was looking up at him now, eyes wide. Taim tried to smile at him, but found the expression difficult, as if it knew it did not truly belong in this moment. He turned instead to the mother, and held out his hand. “The blade is fresh-forged?” he asked her. “Unbloodied? Unmarked?” “Never used,” she murmured, and passed the short simple knife to him. Behind him, Taim could hear feet scraping on the floor as someone shifted position. Not Orisian, he suspected. The Thane had worn a solemn demeanour from the moment this woman first came to him asking that her son should take the bloodoath. The first time his name would be at the centre of this, the ritual heart of his Blood, and it was happening in exile from their rightful lands, in a hall borrowed for the occasion, with a mere warrior playing the makeshift role of Oathman. In the shadow of uncounted deaths. Not how any of them would have wished it to be, yet there was a weight to it, an importance. Taim felt it as much anyone, perhaps more than most. He tightened his grip upon the blade, and moistened his lips. He took hold of the boy’s wrist and gently twisted it to expose the white skin of his underarm. “You will give of your blood to seal this oath?” he asked the child. A moment’s silence, and then the boy whispered, “I will.” “Speak up, boy,” Taim said softly. “Let them hear you.” “I will.” Louder this time, but still tremulous. Good enough, Taim thought. “By this oath your life is bound to mine,” he said. “The word of the Thane of Lannis is your law and rule…” His tongue stumbled to a halt. Something had gone awry, and after a moment he realised what it was. Lannis-Haig, of course. It should have been Lannis-Haig. But something hardened in him, and he went on. “Your law and rule, as the word of a father is to a child. Your life is the life of the Lannis Blood.” He heard the softest of murmurs amongst the onlookers. Some, at least, had noticed his omission. None raised any protest. Such was the nature of the times. Taim drew the blade across the boy’s arm. He felt the briefest, instinctive tensing of the muscles, the slight tug against his firm grip. The child looked away. It was a shallow cut, and clean. A neat line of blood swelled out, but did not run. “You pledge your life to the Lannis Blood?” Taim asked. The boy nodded once, still averting his eyes. “You must say it,” Taim murmured. “Yes.” “You bend the knee to the Thane, who is the Blood?” Taim released the boy’s arm. He set his thumb against the flat of the knife, smearing a trace of the child’s blood across it. “I do.” “Then none may come between you and this oath.” Taim stared at the thick fluid smudged across the dull metal. Such small things, this deed, these words, yet containing so much. Containing within their narrow bounds as much of his own life, as much of his history and meaning, as anything could. The mother must have thought the same, to seek out this moment for her son. Fleeing from horrors, she had found herself in an unknown town, destitute, amidst chaos; yet there too she happened to find her Thane, and from that turn of fortune she sought to give her child this boon. Perhaps the boy would not recognise it for the gift it was. Perhaps that would only come later; perhaps never. “None may come between you and this oath,” Taim said. “By it you set aside all other allegiances. The Blood shall sustain you and bear you up. You shall sustain the Blood. Speak your oath.” The boy looked up from his wound. And Taim found he could smile at him now, an honest smile of reassurance and encouragement. “I am Tollen Lanan dar Lannis-Haig… dar Lannis… son of Cammenech and Inossa. By my blood I pledge my life to Lannis. The word of the Thane is my law and rule; it is the root and… and staff of my life. The enemy of the Blood is my enemy. My enemy is the enemy of the Blood. Unto death.” “Unto death,” Taim said. He pressed the hilt of the oathknife into the boy’s hand, and watched those thin fingers close about it. “Unto death.”
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