Bloodheir

by Brian Ruckley

  Yvane did not fare so well. Orisian had known she would not. He and Rothe dropped back along the line of men and rode beside the na’kyrim for a time. She said nothing, made no complaint, but was obviously struggling. The road surface was scored across with little gullies, strewn with loose stones and scarred with pits where the cobbles had disappeared altogether. More than once Yvane stumbled. Had she been human, it would have been impossible for her to continue on foot; because she was not, Orisian felt, it was merely a bad idea.

  “You’ll turn an ankle,” he called down to her eventually.

  She ignored him, though he did hear what might have been a grunt – of either exertion or dismissal.

  “Get up behind Rothe.” Orisian saw the expression of alarm that contorted his shieldman’s face.

  “I managed to climb the Car Criagar, up and down, many times on these two feet,” Yvane said. “I walked the length of the Vale of Tears more than once. I can manage this road.”

  “She doesn’t like horses,” Rothe said. “That’s fair enough. It’s her choice.”

  Orisian frowned at his shieldman, but Rothe was now staring fixedly ahead, fascinated by the back of the nearest warrior.

  “Ride with me, then,” Orisian said.

  Yvane kept striding on. If anything, she picked up her pace a little, presumably hoping to either dissuade him or leave him behind. Irritated, Orisian gave his horse a sharp nudge and brought it to a halt across Yvane’s path. She almost walked into its shoulder. The lines of warriors parted around the two of them and flowed on.

  “Listen,” said Orisian, “you will slow us down, sooner or later. You encouraged me in this undertaking, and I won’t have you now hindering me out of stubbornness, or whatever it is. I also won’t leave you behind on your own. Therefore, we are going to stand here and argue about it until you ride.”

  Yvane glared up at him, drops of water beading her hair. She blinked misty rain out of her eyes. Orisian did not flinch as he once might have done. Instead, he raised his eyebrows expectantly and waited. It was Yvane who yielded.

  “I never mastered the trick of riding. Tried a couple of times, at Koldihrve. Neither attempt ended well.

  Not for me, at least; the horses seemed to quite enjoy it.”

  “All you have to do is hang on.”

  “That is much what I was told on previous occasions.”

  “But this time you just have to hang on to me, not the reins or the horse.”

  Yvane displayed neither grace nor good humour, but she did, eventually, allow herself to be hoisted up behind Orisian. She clutched him so tightly about the midriff that he had to ask her to loosen her grip more than once.

  The sky cleared, the air grew cold. Forest closed in along either side of the road. Everyone became tense, now that they could not see more than a few dozen paces in any direction. The tallest trees –

  elegant ash and soaring oak – almost touched their outermost branches together across the road. Orisian and the others advanced beneath a skeletal roof of leafless boughs.

  Eshenna rode beside Orisian and Yvane for a time. Her pony was looking bedraggled and sorry for itself, but walked doggedly on amongst the warhorses.

  “I’m feeling dizzy,” Eshenna said. She spoke to Orisian, but he had the feeling that her words were addressed to Yvane more than anyone. “If I close my eyes, I lose balance; my head whirls. I can’t hold on to a thought for more than a few moments.”

  “I know,” grunted Yvane into Orisian’s shoulder.

  “Can you still lead us to this woman?” Orisian asked.

  Eshenna nodded. She was gloomy, her face drawn and lifeless as if she was sick.

  “It feels as if she’s close. It’s getting hard to tell. Such storms are running through the Shared that it’s . . .

  difficult. The Anain, Aeglyss. It’s all too much.”

  “Are the Anain here?” Orisian murmured. “Watching us?” He remembered, clearly, what Ess’yr had told him of the Anain, when they were in the Car Criagar. She had spoken of those then as though they were always present, as though the land was always inhabited by their incorporeal minds.

  “We are beneath their notice,” Eshenna said, and grimaced. “They are no more likely to watch us than they are to watch a mouse, digging about in the moss. Still, they are here. They move, like ships, and we are just twigs caught up in their wake.”

  “We might have been beneath their notice once,” Yvane muttered, “but now, who knows? The Hymyr Ot’tryn is near.”

  “What’s that?” Orisian asked over his shoulder.

  “It’s the Snake name for what you would call the Veiled Woods.”

  “I’ve not heard of it,” Orisian said, but then hesitated at a flickering of memory. “Perhaps I have. In stories, maybe.”

  “A stretch of forest, not far from here. One of the places, some say, where the Anain come a little nearer to the surface of the world.” Yvane glanced across at Eshenna. The younger woman was tight-lipped, staring at her pony’s neck.

  “Even the Kyrinin get shivers down their backs thinking about that place, for all that they imagine the Anain are more or less benevolent,” Yvane went on. “They’re not stupid enough to think you could ever call them friendly. Even in the best of times.”

  In places, the surface of the old road was slick with wet, rotted leaves. Too few wheels and feet had passed this way, in recent decades, to clear the detritus of each autumn. In the cracks and crevices and ruts, soil was accumulating. Grass had taken hold between and across cobblestones. The deeper they went into the wooded landscape, the more and more the road they travelled came to resemble little more than an overgrown grassy track. Where the turf was thickest, there were sometimes bulbous anthills dotting the sward, and swathes of mushrooms bubbling up. Saplings, some more than twice the height of a man, grew in the middle of the highway, straggly things straining thinly upwards in search of light. Their hidden roots had lifted the road’s surface, tilting the stones up on their shoulders.

  Orisian grew ever more uneasy and doubtful of his choices. The further Highfast fell away behind them, the more remote seemed his reasons for coming this way. As the wilderness swallowed up the road before his eyes, so he felt as if it was drawing him into itself, distancing him ever more completely from the world of strife and conflict that lay beyond these narrow, tree-crowded horizons. A part of him – he wondered if it might be the honest part – accused the rest of cowardice. Did he secretly prefer to be Thane of just this small company, lost in this wild place where none could require great martial deeds or weighty decisions of him? Did he fear marching at the head of an army, facing the challenge of Aewult nan Haig and the Shadowhand, more than he feared whatever threat the forest, the White Owls, rumours of the Anain, could offer? Every step along this crumbling road was beginning to feel like flight. The trust he had placed in Eshenna, Yvane and the other na’kyrim seemed less certain with each passing moment.

  As night began to fall, a rough wind shook its way through the treetops. Torcaill turned the column off the road and chose a small clearing for a campsite. His warriors were silent and subdued. They disliked the forest, its suffocating density. Orisian wondered how much longer these men would follow his lead without question. The wind was rising, rocking the trees and rustling through the undergrowth. Those who had tents struggled to stake them into the ground. The men who must sleep without shelter were casting about for places where they might find some small protection from the elements.

  Rothe tried to light a fire. The wind kept swirling down into the clearing and scattering the flakes of bark that he had cut for kindling. The shieldman muttered under his breath as he set down his flint and scooped the bark back into a little pile. Orisian squatted beside him.

  “There’s a lot of unhappy men here, aren’t there?” he said softly.

  Rothe glanced at him, then concentrated on striking sparks.

  “It’s not of much consequence, whether a warrior’s happy or not. He does as he
’s commanded. You needn’t worry about that. However much any of them grumble, they’ll follow you.”

  Orisian wished he could share Rothe’s confidence. He glanced round, to find Ess’yr standing behind him. She was watching Rothe’s hands as he methodically chipped spark after spark out of the flint.

  “We heard the enemy,” she said. “Before. They call like birds.”

  Rothe looked up at that. Orisian stood, feeling the stiffness in his legs and back as he did so. His body had still not reconciled itself to so much time spent on horseback.

  “White Owls?” he asked her. “Are they near?”

  She gave the slightest, most delicate of shrugs. “Cannot say. Perhaps not. They moved . . .” she stretched a graceful arm out, a little south of east. “But others might be near. The weather favours the hunter.”

  As if to emphasise her words a violent gust of wind rushed through the clearing, tumbling twigs and dead leaves along. Orisian ushered Ess’yr to one side, putting a little distance between her and the closest of Torcaill’s warriors. He might have touched her elbow, or her back – applied a gentle pressure to indicate his desire to move – but there was something in the simple thought of such contact that made him nervous.

  “Yvane and Eshenna were talking about the Anain before,” he said, once he was confident that none could overhear them. “They say they’re awake. Moving. And that we’re close to places . . . to their places.”

  Ess’yr gazed back at him, waiting for a question. In the half-light of dusk, her face seemed to him like a soft mask; the gentle curves of her tattoos like some pattern impressed upon pale silk. It was too dark for him to see her eyes clearly. They were shadows.

  “Is it true?” he asked. “Do you think they’re here, around us?”

  “Always,” she replied, and he heard her voice quite clearly even though the trees all about were roaring and creaking in the wind. “We walk on their backs. When we touch a tree, we touch their arm. The roots are their bones.”

  “They’re waking, though. That’s what all the na’kyrim say: they’re moving closer to the surface. Why?

  Do you know?”

  “Such a thing is not to be known. They are not like us, not like Huanin or Kyrinin. You do not ask why the river flows, or why the fire moves as it does. If the Anain rise, they rise. If they act, they act. That is all.”

  “Yet your people seek their favour. Your anhyne , the catchers of the dead. They guard you, don’t they?”

  Ess’yr regarded Orisian inexpressively. She blinked, sheathing and then unsheathing the deep, dark pools that her eyes had become.

  “My thought is that the Anain favour none and nothing. Some of my people say they ended the war between Huanin and Kyrinin to end our suffering. I think not. It think they ended it because it disturbed the balance in their world. If we are beneath their gaze, if they wake, we will not choose the ending. The seal pup does not choose if the storm takes it out to sea. The storm does that.”

  Later, as Orisian lay in his tent, his mind sank down into a half-sleeping fog. The rushing of the wind through the trees was transformed into the breaking of waves. He saw himself standing on the shore looking out towards Castle Kolglas. The sea was high, far higher than he had ever known it. Huge foaming breakers roared in and pounded at the isolated castle. It was breaking apart beneath the onslaught. He felt an awful dread churning in his chest.

  He woke once. The gale had fallen away. Cold prickled across his cheeks. He could hear Rothe breathing. He closed his eyes and slept.

  IV

  Four men died in the night. A hard frost had come, brittling the grass and casting its white sheen over everything. The ground crackled beneath Orisian’s feet. He left a trail of dark prints behind him, pressed into the cold dusting. He shivered and sniffed as he walked.

  Rothe showed him the bodies. One – a guard – lay at the foot of a shallow slope, stretched out against the thick base of a tree. The other three lay where they had settled down for the night. In the evening they, like everyone else, had wandered about beneath the trees, pursing their lips and weighing up the options. They had chosen a place where the ground seemed even, the grass dry, and they had unrolled their sleeping mats, made a pillow of their jacket or shield or a rock. They had lain down and pulled their blankets tight about them. And they had died there, silently, in the darkness. Their throats had been cut.

  Their blood had made puddles on the forest floor.

  Orisian looked into the face of the corpse nearest him. He looked away again quickly, repelled by that too-familiar vision of death, but he had time to see the bruises on the man’s face where someone had roughly clamped a hand over his mouth.

  “They killed the sentry first,” muttered Rothe. “Then these three, just because they were within reach, on the edge of the camp.”

  “Kyrinin?” Orisian asked dully.

  “Beyond doubt. I’ve seen this kind of thing before, in Anlane.”

  “They could have killed us all.”

  “There may only be a handful of them. Perhaps someone stirred while they were about their work; perhaps they thought they were about to be discovered. They’d always rather be cutting throats in the darkness than facing up to a real fight.”

  “It’s a pity Varryn and Ess’yr were sleeping on the other side of the camp. They might have heard something.”

  “Perhaps.”

  Torcaill was going from corpse to corpse, collecting swords. He paused beside Orisian.

  “We should turn back, Thane,” he said. “There’ll be more dead if we don’t. I can’t put outriders ahead of us now. They’d not survive half the day.”

  Orisian took one of the sheathed blades from the warrior and turned it in his hands. There were notches and crude patterns scratched into the scabbard; the metal cap on its end had a simple design of dots punched into it. An incongruous little strand of red-dyed string was tied about the hilt.

  “What’s this?” Orisian asked, running a fingertip over the string. “Do you know why he had this on his sword?”

  Torcaill frowned at it. “No, sire. A token from some girl, perhaps. Or a reminder of some enemy he had killed. I don’t know.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Dorvadain. Dorvadain Emmen.”

  Orisian glanced over his shoulder. Varryn and Ess’yr were there. They had come silently across the frosted grass and now stared at the dead men. Orisian looked back to the sword in his hands for a moment, then returned it to Torcaill.

  “Will you do something for me?” he asked Varryn quietly.

  The Kyrinin waited.

  “I want to know how many White Owls there are. Where they are, where they are going. I don’t want to be surprised by them again. You can move faster than we can; see things we cannot. And you know them better than we do.”

  Varryn regarded him with the usual still, unreadable eyes. Yvane walked up behind the two Kyrinin, peering over their shoulders and wincing a little when she saw the bodies.

  “Of course he’ll go,” the na’kyrim said. “Never known a Fox that’d pass up the chance to stick a spear into a White Owl.”

  That brought no more response from Varryn than Orisian’s question had, but the Kyrinin warrior did turn to Ess’yr and murmur a few fluid words in the Fox tongue. Yvane brushed past him and pointed at the frost-blighted ground around the corpse of the guard.

  “They left enough of a trail for even a human to follow, I should think,” she said to Orisian.

  Orisian noticed Torcaill’s scowl at that, but ignored it.

  “If we all go running off into the forest after them, we’ll end up dead,” he said to Yvane. “You know that as well as I do. They might not even know Varryn is on their trail.”

  She shrugged, and blew out a breath that steamed into the chill air. “Probably true. I’m not so sure we won’t end up dead anyway, mind you.”

  “Did you sleep badly?” Rothe muttered. “You’re in a foul mood this morning.”

 
Yvane glared at the shieldman, who smiled as innocently as Orisian had ever seen him manage. The na’kyrim stalked away. Orisian gave Rothe a prod on the shoulder as they watched her receding back.

  “You wouldn’t be trying to pick a fight, would you?” he asked. “Quality of sleep’s not the best subject to discuss, these days.”

  Rothe muttered a half-hearted apology, and went to help Torcaill move the bodies.

  Orisian found Eshenna rolling up her thin sleeping mat. The skin beneath her eyes had a dark, almost bruised tinge to it. Little sleep, and less rest, he assumed. He squatted down beside her. She did not look up, concentrating on tying up the mat with a loop of cord. There was the very slightest tremor in her hands as she worked, he thought. It might have always been there, but if so he had never noticed it before.

  “I cannot go on much further,” he said quietly to her. “I have to turn back, head for Kolglas soon.

  Perhaps I’ve already come too far. Everyone else seems to think so.”

  “I don’t. Nor does Yvane.”

  “No. But you are only two. Men are dying now, Eshenna.”

  “We are the only two who understand even a little of what is happening.” She looked him in the eyes then, and her gaze was strong and firm. “You know that. It makes a difference.”

  “It makes some difference,” he murmured. “But you have to tell me she’s close, Eshenna. I can’t just keep marching deeper into the forest.”

  The na’kyrim returned her attention to her rolled mat, slinging it across her shoulder.

  “She is close. Today, we’ll have her. Tomorrow, perhaps.”

  Varryn and Ess’yr trotted past, spears in hand. They wove their way between the trees and disappeared, vanishing in an instant into the forest as if they had stepped across some intangible, impenetrable barrier. Orisian stared after them briefly, then rose and went to tell Torcaill to prepare his men for the march.