“Very well. The Firsts concluded that committing the strength of the Inkalls to this struggle offered at least the possibility of firming the Black Road’s grip upon the world. Whether it does so or not, we will all live – or die – with the consequences of that commitment. We need ask ourselves only one question about this na’kyrim that so unsettles Fiallic, and so offends the noble Eagle. Can he serve the creed?
Does he offer the possibility of advancing our cause?”
“Yes,” Wain said, and then, with greater certainty, “Yes.”
Goedellin looked up at her and smiled blackly.
“Well, then,” he said.
“Temegrin will not be happy. He wants Aeglyss dead.”
“So Fiallic told me. No matter. The Eagle is timid. Those whose answer to the Black Road is timidity seldom prosper. You keep the halfbreed at your side. We will do what we can to dissuade Temegrin, and others if needed, from intemperate action.”
Wain nodded. Goedellin coughed and hung his head, so that she could no longer see his eyes, or those stained lips.
“Go,” the Inkallim muttered. “Take yourself back to Glasbridge, and your brother’s side. The army is already starting to move. Our greatest victory in more than a century is mere days away. If fate favours us.”
Wain gathered the few warriors of her Blood who remained in the city on the main square. She had them lay out their weapons and chain mail and shields on the ground. She and her Shield walked up and down the meagre ranks, heads down, eyes searching for any flaw. Wain found a mail shirt with broken links.
She struck the man who owned it on the chest, staggering him a little.
“You’re done here,” she said as she walked. “We’re done with this city. The newcomers can have it: Gyre, or the Battle, or the thousands who follow them. The battle’s to the south now, and so is your Thane, so that’s where we’ll take ourselves. To Glasbridge. That’s where your Blood makes its stand.”
She kicked a battered shield with the toe of her boot. It skittered away over the cobbles.
“That’ll split at the first blow. Find another. We’ll stand against whatever marches up from the south.
We’ll hold it, and bleed it, and pin it there for this great army to come down upon it. And those of us who die will die in a great cause, and in a great victory.”
The house where Wain and Kanin had taken quarters when they overran Anduran still stood, on the edge of the square. She wandered up its stairs, from room to room, while her warriors outside mounted up. There were memories here that had a warm, tempting texture to them: of their first, triumphant surge into this city, and of the dizzying sense that fate might lay out for them the richest of feasts. Wain knew that it was an indulgence to seek out those memories, and a failing to take comfort in them. In normal times, she would need no such recourse to the past. These were not normal times, though, and she felt almost a stranger in her own skull. She was unsettled. The certainties of life and of the world, usually so clear to her, had lost something of their sharpness. What reassurance her discussion with Goedellin had brought was a fragile thing, already fraying at the edges.
She stared, for a time, into a fireplace. There was only ash there now, and a few fragments of dead, charred wood.
A soft sound had her spinning on her heel, and reaching for her sword. Aeglyss was standing in the doorway, his hands clasped across his midriff.
“You should not be in here,” Wain snapped.
“Why not?” the na’kyrim asked as he drifted into the room. “Is your solitude so precious to you?”
“Precious enough that I don’t want it disturbed by you, halfbreed.” She strove to make her tone dismissive, contemptuous. It did not come easily, though.
Aeglyss smiled, and Wain had the lurching sense of her self splintering. It was as if two different beings, looking out through her eyes, saw two different things. That smile was at once leering and warming; the na’kyrim ’s face was at once sickly and captivating; her throat tightened from both repulsion and anticipation. Was this madness?
Her vision blurred then, and the dim light that suffused the room dipped for an instant into a murky fog.
She shook her head, and found Aeglyss close to her, almost touching. She stepped backwards from him, but he murmured “No,” and followed her.
She tried to call for her Shield, but some invisible hand was pressed across her mouth, stilling all sound.
“It is your instincts you fight against, Thane’s sister.” He whispered the words, but they filled Wain’s every sense, they were glowing and ringing and hot against her skin. “What I have become wakes something in you. Don’t you see? You won’t be the only one. When I reach out, when I drift, I can feel hopes and desires and hungers and hatreds all flocking about me. They cluster in my wake. Oh, I wish I could show you.”
His mouth was close to her cheek. She could feel his breath, and smell his sweet, rotten exhalations.
“Let me show you. Open yourself to me.” His hands, like spiders: one on her shoulder, the other cupping her breast, pressing the rings of her mail shirt against her. “Please.”
The strands of her resistance were thinning. They would have parted, she distantly knew, had Aeglyss himself not faltered then. A spasm deformed his face, baring his teeth like a snarl. His hands jerked, perhaps bruising her in the instant before they splayed themselves open and fell away. Trembling, released, she pushed him and he staggered backwards.
“Help me,” he gasped. “They’re coming for me. Can you smell it? The leaves, the forest?”
He reeled sideways, thumping into the wall. Wain edged towards the open door, horrified but still feeling the residue of a shaming desire.
Aeglyss sagged. “No. No.” He sank down on to his haunches, pressed against the wall, like a child making himself small, trying to hide. “You’ll not have me. I’m too . . .”
Wain turned away. Her head was heavy, resistant to the movement. She took a step, and then another, and her legs were sluggish. She had to force her way out of the room against the reluctance of her own body.
“Wain,” Aeglyss said behind her, and she could not help but look back at him. He was still crouched down there, in the crease between wall and floor, staring up at her. “I have terrible enemies,” he murmured. “The great beasts of the Shared would turn upon me. But you are not my enemy. You know it, in your heart. And I am not yours. Please. I am the greatest friend fate will ever grant you, and your cause.”
Perhaps. She was not certain whether she spoke it aloud, or only thought it deep in the turbulence this na’kyrim spun her mind into. Perhaps. I cannot think clearly. I cannot tell. Not any more. She walked out and descended into the more comprehensible company of her warriors.
VII
Something had died, up amongst the rocks. An eagle clambered into the sky as soon as Orisian and his company came in sight, its huge wings hauling it up and away from the hidden corpse. The ravens were more determined, or more hungry perhaps. They hopped and croaked amongst the boulders without regard to the column of riders passing on the road below.
Orisian had fifty men with him, all of them veterans of the war against Igryn oc Dargannan-Haig. The road they followed was an old one, a trading route from the days of the Kingship. Neglect had crumbled away some of its fabric, but it remained a good surface. It had carried them up the northern bank of the River Kyre, through the flat coastal farmlands and on into the rolling pasture-draped hills where the Kilkry Blood bred its famous horses and grazed its innumerable cattle. Now those hills were becoming mountains. The road ran along a terrace cut into a steep, bare slope above the river. The Kyre, down there in the huge gutter it had carved for itself, rushed between great boulders, rumbling as it foamed, milky, through rapids.
They had been climbing for some time. If he twisted and craned his neck, Orisian could still just make out the sea far behind them: a vast grey slab across the western horizon. Looking ahead, on up the road, there was nothing but the long bl
eak valley of the Kyre, driving into the heart of the Karkyre Peaks.
Somewhere in those mountains, Orisian knew, was Highfast, and he hoped it would offer something by way of warmth or comfort. The Karkyre Peaks were no loftier than the Car Criagar, but they were, if anything, still more unwelcoming. There was almost no vegetation, even on these lower slopes. A few stunted and ragged bushes hung on amongst the stones, and there were scattered patches of wiry, sparse grass; apart from that, it was a world of bare rock, scree and stone-dust. Ahead, a score of jagged pinnacles dominated the skyline, sharp-backed ridges splaying out from them. The mountains of the Car Criagar were massive, old, broad-shouldered; these Karkyre Peaks were like serrated blades newly stabbed up from out of the earth.
The desolation, and perhaps the leaden quality of the light, worked on the minds of Orisian and all his companions. There was no talking. The only sounds were the persistent flat roar of the river below, the clatter of hoofs and the occasional eerie cries of ravens. Ess’yr, Varryn, Yvane and Hammarn had all refused to ride. They walked in the midst of the column of horsemen. The two Kyrinin were cowled, the better to conceal themselves from the curious – and potentially hostile – eyes of observers. Orisian was surprised at how much human life there was along this road, even now that they had reached such barren terrain. In the last day they had passed a dozen hamlets or solitary huts. The inhabitants were uniformly silent and hard-eyed, watching them pass from the shadows of doorways, as if they resented this disturbance of their solitude.
Rounding a turn, Orisian’s eye was caught by a strange structure a short way above the road. It looked as though someone had tried to build a squat house out of great flat-sided boulders, only to be defeated by the sheer mass of their intended materials. Even at this distance, writing and symbols were faintly visible, cut into the weathered face of the rocks.
“What’s that?” Orisian asked.
Bannain, riding just ahead on a short-legged mountain pony, glanced up.
“It’s Morvain’s tomb. He died here, retreating from Highfast after the failure of his siege. Looted out long ago. There’s nothing left within. So I’m told, anyway.”
“I’m surprised the Aygll Kings let it stand.”
“Well, it was in the last days of their rule. It was Lerr, the Boy King, that Morvain rebelled against, and he’d already lost his grip on most of these lands. The child was dead himself within a year or two of Morvain’s death.”
“Hard times,” Rothe muttered from behind them.
“Yes,” acknowledged Bannain, then shrugged and gave his reins a casual shake. “No more so than these, though. This world’s not given to resting easy.”
They rode on. The road became ever more like a broad ledge cut into the side of a cliff. Walls of bare rock loomed above them. Below, a smaller river flowed into the Kyre: a tumultuous confluence that had fashioned a bowl in which to seethe. The road swung north and followed the lesser tributary up into the mountains.
Orisian rode beside Ess’yr. She was walking well, with no obvious sign of the broken ribs that had hampered her since their descent from the Car Criagar. Her face was hidden from him, lost in the depths of her capacious hood.
“I don’t much like this place,” Orisian said. “Not enough trees.”
She said nothing for a few paces, then: “No. Not enough. It is said the God Who Laughed never walked this land, because its edges hurt his feet.”
“A wise god. We’ll not be here long, I hope. A day or two, perhaps, and then on to Kolglas. You’ll be able to see my home.”
“I have seen it. From across the water. Close enough. And Inurian told me of it; the castle in the sea, he called it.”
“Yes,” murmured Orisian. “The castle in the sea.” What made him imagine that this woman would care what place he called home? She was a creature of the forest and the hills, her heart as unmoved by castles and stone walls as anyone’s could ever be. And she had been lover to a na’kyrim ; a man as gentle and wise as any Orisian had ever known. There was nothing he could offer her that would compare with the memory of Inurian, or make good his absence. Still, he longed for her goodwill. He lacked the tools to secure it, but that did not blunt the desire.
“I owe you a bow,” he said to her.
That made Ess’yr glance at him, a quick tip of her head sideways and up. He glimpsed her cheek, the thin line of her lips.
“I should have thought of it sooner,” he said. “You broke it saving me from the Horin-Gyre Bloodheir; broke it on his face. If you hadn’t, I might not be here now. I would have got you another one in Kolkyre if I’d thought of it.”
He caught a grunt – possibly contemptuous – from Varryn’s direction. Ess’yr’s brother was walking a few paces behind them. It was easy to forget how acute a Kyrinin’s hearing was. Ess’yr turned her eyes back to the road and the hood once more hid her face.
“I do not need a Huanin bow,” she said. “I will have another in time. It will be a Fox bow, made on Fox lands.”
“Or a White Owl bow, from a dead hand,” said Varryn, just loud enough for Orisian to hear. He glanced back over his shoulder, unable to disguise his irritation. He did not want Varryn eavesdropping on every word he uttered to Ess’yr.
“You’ll have your chance for revenge soon,” he said.
“Not revenge,” Ess’yr said. “Balance. The enemy have killed many Fox. Therefore many of the enemy must die.”
“I don’t know if it works, that kind of balancing.”
“There is no other kind.”
Dusk came on quickly. Ravens were flocking in the darkening sky, tumbling around the peaks, plummeting in to ledges on the cliff faces. Their harsh cries carried a long way. The little river – now far below them – disappeared into the gloom that settled across the valley floor. Its voice, by turns hissing and chattering as it churned its way down out of the mountains, could still be heard, though. Somewhere high up on the other side of the valley, rocks came loose and tumbled, rattling, over scree.
Orisian was starting to become concerned, fearing a night to be spent under the cold stars, when distant points of light came into view ahead. Bannain had assured them that they would reach shelter before nightfall, but only now was Orisian able to wholly believe it.
The inn was like no other he had seen before. As they drew closer, he struggled to tell where the disordered, boulder-strewn mountainside ended and the building began. It was clear that the inn had once been a huge structure with workshops and stables and cottages built around and onto it. Most of them had collapsed into rubble and ruin, crumbling back into the rock of which they had been made.
Amidst this wreckage, the inn itself still stood. Slate tiles had slipped off part of its roof, and lay in a grey pile at the roadside. Oil lamps burned in some of the windows; others were dark and shuttered.
Torcaill, the man Taim Narran had assigned to lead Orisian’s escort, brought them to a halt a little way short of the inn.
“I’ll send a few men in first, sire,” he said to Orisian. “It will not take long.”
Orisian almost told him to forego such precautions. What possible danger could there be here, in this forgotten and abandoned place? But Torcaill took his responsibilities seriously, and Orisian had no wish to belittle that. He nodded in assent. Torcaill led half a dozen men on to the inn.
“What’s he up to?” Yvane asked. The na’kyrim had come up to stand beside Orisian’s horse, her hand resting on its neck. The animal looked round at her, but found her uninteresting and hung its head in a vain search for grass.
“Just having a look before we go in,” Orisian said.
Yvane grunted. “Does he fear some mountain goat waits within to stick you with its horns? No . . . wait, perhaps it’s lurking under one of the beds, ready to nip at your ankles?”
“You’re in a lively mood,” Orisian observed, looking down at her.
“No, I’m not. I’m exhausted. It makes me light-headed, all this walking.”
“
Ride, then. You’ve been offered a share of a horse’s back more than once.”
“She’s worried she’ll fall off and crack her head,” Rothe suggested, easing his horse past them.
Yvane glared after the shieldman as he drew up in front of the inn and dismounted a little stiffly. He stretched, digging his fingers into the small of his back. The light falling from the windows was bright now, the surrounding mountains almost wholly lost in darkness. There were clouds enough to hide the moon.
Orisian shivered and puffed out his cheeks. The muffled sound of boots thumping on stairs and floorboards came from the inn. Rothe stood in the doorway and peered inside. After a moment or two, he stepped back to allow Torcaill to emerge. The warrior waved.
“Looks like you’ll get a good night’s rest, anyway,” Orisian said to Yvane. “Plenty more walking tomorrow, I expect, so no doubt you’ll need it.”
“Not so much,” Yvane muttered dolefully. “Highfast’s not far now.”
“You’re not looking forward to it.”
The na’kyrim glanced up at him, and then away. It was a self-effacing, hesitant sort of movement; not what Orisian associated with Yvane at all. He almost felt sorry for her, but suspected that she would not welcome such a sentiment.
“Not greatly,” she acknowledged. “Too late for changing minds, though.”
The innkeeper who greeted them within was tall and thin, narrow eyes peering out from beneath bushy eyebrows. He gave no sign of pleasure at this unexpected glut of customers.
“There’s beds for an even dozen of you,” he said in the thick, lethargic accent of the Peaks. “The rest’ll be bedding down in the ruins. And I’ve not enough food for so many. Most’ll be feeding yourselves, too.”
“That’s fine,” Orisian said, paying little attention. He went back outside, peered around in the darkness.
He searched amongst the indistinct crowd of men and horses. He wanted to ask Ess’yr if she and Varryn would sleep inside. But the Kyrinin had already separated themselves from the others. They were slipping away, sinking into the night, moving into the thicket of broken walls and fallen roofs behind the inn. He stared after them even when the darkness had taken them from him.
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