The trees came first in ones and twos, scattered across the long, shallow slope they were descending. Then clumps of them, more and more, until they merged into a single unbroken canopy. Anlane closed itself above and behind them.
Taim felt his tension mount in response to the deepening of the shadows. This place had been a battleground for his Blood from the moment Sirian first wore the title of Thane. It had been a meagre, intermittent kind of war, the struggle against the depredations of the White Owls, but a war nonetheless, and a savage one. Merciless. Anlane could never, to someone of Taim’s upbringing and experiences, be anything other than a bad memory.
The trees crowded about them, a numberless host moving imperceptibly slowly to smother them. Perhaps even absorb them. Taim was aware of a change in the air. It was as if they had entered the body of some immense sleeping creature, and burrowed now ever deeper into its living flesh. It was not warm, but the wind was gone, the sharp edge of the cold dulled. New scents drifted up from the forest floor: wet bark, rotting leaves.
Soon, much sooner than he had hoped, Taim was ducking to avoid branches that reached out across the dwindling trail the Fox had found for them to follow. The path narrowed to something only deer or boar might pass along without difficulty. Twigs and outstretched tendrils of ivy brushed Taim’s legs and the flanks of his horse, to the animal’s increasing displeasure. Behind him, he could hear men cursing as boughs grazed face or scalp.
And then there was a huge tree lying across the trail, coated in slick moss, a thin crust of half-melted snow lining the length of its trunk. To one side its great root plate had been torn out of the earth and stood now like the flattened, upraised hand of a giant. To the other, its branches had, in their crashing descent, crumpled a huge swathe of the woods into an impenetrable tangle of shattered timber, bent and bowed saplings. Its fall had torn a great rent in the otherwise inviolate canopy, a wound in the skin of Anlane. Taim felt the cooler breath of the sky drifting down onto his face. There was a fine drizzle on it. Rain, not snow, he thought. That at least was something to be thankful for.
He sighed and twisted in his saddle. Orisian was not far behind, waiting expectantly for word.
“We’re done with horses, I think,” Taim said.
They walked on in silence. The land folded itself in creases, humps and hollows around which tiny brooks trickled. There were outcrops of rock with trees growing from their crannies. Again and again, the path disappeared altogether, to human eye at least. Each time it did so, Ess’yr or Varryn would be waiting some little way ahead, almost invisible amidst the undergrowth and shadows until betrayed by movement, beckoning the laggard Huanin onward.
Taim sent two men forward: four more eyes, inadequate as they might be, to ward against surprises. Necessary as the abandonment of the horses had been, being on foot in such foreign terrain had darkened the already fragile mood. There was an almost palpable sense of vulnerability amongst the warriors. They had the skittishness of sheep, starting at every sound-real or imagined-and darting their eyes this way and that. Only two of the party did not seem to share this nervous trepidation, Taim saw when he glanced back over his shoulder. Yvane, who led K’rina steadily along. And Orisian. Whose calm was almost unnatural. Almost unsettling. He looked to Taim like a man whose burdens, whose fears, were becoming less rather than more. That Taim found troubling.
Ess’yr and Varryn and the two scouts Taim had sent out were standing together up ahead. As he drew near, Taim was at first unsure of what he was seeing. A spindly sapling had been cut off at chest height. The break was clean and angled: the work of a blade rather than of wind or heavy snow. It had left the thin, shortened trunk with a sharp point. And onto that point, and then down like thin cuts of meat impaled on a vertical spit, five small squarish pieces of some strange material had been forced. Like a child’s pretence at flags, Taim thought vaguely as he leaned closer, puzzled.
One of the crude pennants was torn and ragged where some animal seemed to have been gnawing at it. Another had some faded swirling blue insignia upon it. That shade, and those shapes, had a familiarity to them that he could not at first resolve.
Orisian, kneeling and lightly touching one of the scraps between thumb and forefinger, spoke the conclusion Taim’s own mind belatedly approached.
“Skin.” Orisian withdrew his hand without haste.
“Huanin and Kyrinin,” Ess’yr confirmed. Her distaste, disgust even, was evident.
Yvane brushed past Taim’s shoulder and squinted at the gruesome array of flayed squares.
“Ettanaryn,” the na’kyrim grunted. “Not of the usual sort, though.”
“What are they?” Orisian asked.
“When the a’ans roam far in the warm season, they mark the edge,” Ess’yr told him. “The furthest reach.”
“It’s an old way of marking the limits of hunting grounds,” Yvane grunted. “Clan territory, for those clans that still live by the oldest traditions. Not like this, though. Not with skin.”
“Huanin and Kyrinin,” Ess’yr observed quietly. “All fresh cut. No more than two, three days.” She flicked a fingertip at the palest fragment of skin, with its dull blue patterns. “White Owl kin’thyn. They cut the face from one of their own.”
Varryn was already moving away, drifting silently ahead, deeper into the forest. Taim watched him go. It was a grim border they were crossing now. Whatever lay beyond it could only be horrific, if its limits were circumscribed by such tokens of mutilation. It was not, Taim expected, going to be a place welcoming of humankind.
“Eyes open,” he murmured to the men nervously gathered around. They were, all of them, staring fixedly at the limp squares of skin.
“Eyes open, hands ready,” Taim said more sharply, gesturing them onwards with a sweep of his arm.
They bedded down that night on a gentle slope amidst a stand of uniform, straight ash trees. There was to be no fire, of course. The only shelter from the persistent but thin mist of drizzle was the thick canopy of intermingled branches and a few holly trees clustered along one side of their campsite. It would be a hard, miserable night, Taim knew, but he doubted anyone had been expecting much sleep.
Taim unrolled the blanket that he would fold about himself to fend off the worst of the night’s chill. The ground was at least softened a touch by a thick layer of dead leaves. A strange mumbling distracted Taim from this unappealing prospect. Coming out of the darkness like the muted babble of a tiny brook: a faint and frail voice.
Taim followed the sound. It took no more than half a dozen paces to reveal its source. Sitting there, arms folded, legs crossed, his head sunken, was one of the warriors. Eagan. A young man-barely twenty-born in Grive. Son of a beekeeper, Taim remembered. He had fought well at Ive Bridge. Now he was lost in some waking dream. His senseless whispering was relentless, and strained despite its quietness. His head dipped and rose in shallow nods, as if keeping time with some beat in his ramblings that no one else could detect.
“Eagan,” Taim said softly, standing over the warrior.
There was no response, only that wordless rambling, rushing on and on.
Taim bent and put a hand on the man’s shoulder. Eagan looked up. His lips still moved, still danced, but there was suddenly no sound at all. In the deep gloom of the forest floor Taim could not see his eyes clearly but was almost certain he would have found no recognition there. He squeezed the shoulder more tightly.
“Eagan,” he said again.
And the man snorted. Shook his head once, sharply. Unfolded his arms.
“Sir?” Eagan asked.
“Stretch yourself out. Try to get some rest.”
Taim returned, thoughtful, to his own blanket. A little further down the slope, he could see the figures of Ess’yr and Orisian kneeling together in the leaf litter. The Kyrinin brushed dead leaves from the surface of a flat stone. She began to break apart one of the flat, round oatcakes they had brought as rations from Highfast, and spread the crumbs out on the sto
ne. Orisian did the same, copying her every action with an eerie precision.
Taim knew what it was. He had seen the Kyrinin perform this same small ritual before, making offerings to ward off the attentions of the dead. It was a part of their strange beliefs, and the amounts of food thus wasted were of no consequence, so Taim had never raised any protest. But for a Thane of a True Blood to share in the act? Watching them now, with their careful, measured movements and almost reverential manner, half lost in the shadow and darkness, it would have been possible to mistake them for two Kyrinin.
Taim lay down, flat on his back. He was glad that he was-he hoped-the only one to have seen Orisian in such close communion with the Kyrinin woman. It was unsettling enough for some of the men to note how clearly comforting and easy their Thane found Ess’yr’s presence, how attentively he sometimes watched her. For all the disarray and riot the world had fallen into, there remained boundaries that many would not willingly see crossed.
Taim closed his eyes, not in hope of sleep but in search of distracting, warming memories that might take him away, however briefly, from this cold forest. The wound in his leg, taken at Ive, ached dully. The muscle was stiff and sore. He reached for the image of Jaen’s face, the texture of her skin beneath his fingers, the knowing affection of her smile. And he reached too, with hand rather than mind, for his sheathed sword. He held it to his chest, and clasped it tight.
There was a corpse in the street outside Jaen Narran’s house in Kolkyre. She stared down at it from one of the upper windows. Some youth-sixteen or seventeen, she judged-who had been killed in the night. Dogs came nosing about. The few people who ventured out from their homes disregarded both the dogs and the human carrion that attracted them. They seemed wilfully blind, as if a surfeit of horrors and troubles had left them incapable of acknowledging another.
Jain leaned out and shouted at the dogs. They looked up at her, still stretching out towards the dead flesh of the youth. She beat the open shutter with the palm of her hand, but the dogs did not fear her. They turned back to the corpse, sniffing at it. Jaen took the bowl of water from beside her bed and slapped its contents out towards the beasts. They loped away then, without panic. They would be back, she knew.
An old man walking stiffly down the street had stopped to watch. He stared up at her now, puzzlement on his face. Jaen glared at him, then withdrew, pulling the shutters closed behind her.
The killings and the fighting and the fires and the cries came mostly at night but, like some rot slowly expanding beyond the darkness that had formed it, they colonised each passing day more aggressively than the one before. All of Kolkyre had taken up arms, and though the greatest hatred was reserved for the Black Road army encamped outside its landward walls, there was too much of it to be entirely absorbed by that single, inaccessible foe. The anger found other outlets for its immense unspent reserves, and turned the city in upon itself.
Jaen heard all the tales from the servants in the Tower of Thrones, or from the homeless Lannis folk she supplied with food and blankets and firewood: murder and thievery, feud and suspicion. Those who hailed from lands beyond the Kilkry or Lannis Bloods were dead by now, or hiding behind barred doors and closed windows, too fearful to dare the unruly, hostile city streets. Those who were wealthy had turned their homes into fortresses, protected by hired clubmen. The Guard fought brief wars against gangs of the hungry and the desperate and the mad. Order was never more than a transient presence, liable at any moment to be rent by some new upwelling of chaos.
Jaen thumped down the rickety stairs, letting her feet convey her frustrations to the boards. Her daughter Maira was there, leaning back in a cushioned chair. Though the child in her was yet too small to swell her belly, she rested a hand there nevertheless, gently protective. Her husband Achlinn was hanging a pot of water to boil over the fire, hissing at the heat of the glowing embers.
“You rise earlier every day,” Jaen said to her daughter.
Maira smiled. It was an exhausted smile, but contented too.
“I don’t sleep, and I’d sooner be up than lying there awake. Not that Achlinn thanks me for it.”
Her husband grimaced in mock demonstration of his suffering. He was a gentle man, Jaen had always thought. Good enough, just, for her precious daughter. This placid scene was enough to blunt Jaen’s ill humour.
“Are our guardians awake?” she asked.
Maira nodded towards the door in the rear wall.
“They went to get a little rest. I told them it would be all right. I feel bad, each of them having to stand watch over us for half the night like this.”
Jaen grunted. “Too bad for them I need to go to the Tower this morning, then. One at least’ll have to do escort duty.”
The two gruff Guardsmen had been assigned their protective responsibilities by Roaric oc Kilkry-Haig himself. At first Jaen had thought it unnecessary and faintly embarrassing. Now she valued their taciturn presence. Part of her regretted her refusal of the Thane’s offer to take up residence in the Tower of Thrones itself. She found its austere isolation, looming over the rest of the city like an intrusion from some other, entirely unconnected place, unsettling, and had preferred this comfortable billet in a house much closer to the quarter where the displaced people of her own Blood had settled. But each day-and more particularly night-here amidst the city’s gradual disintegration made her doubt that decision more. On Maira’s behalf, if not her own. Perhaps the time had come to seek the security of the Tower’s impregnable stone.
The corpse had gone by the time she ventured out onto the street, following cautiously behind her scowling guard. Someone must have dragged it away. She was glad. There was a dog sniffing the ground where it had lain. The animal looked up at her with a disappointed expression as she passed.
A crowd had gathered at the gate in the low wall encircling the mound from which the Tower of Thrones needled its way up into the sky. The guards were beset by showers of shouted demands, interspersed with aimless and vitriolic abuse. Following her doggedly determined escort, Jaen could hear people crying out for access to the Tower’s food stores, accusing some family or other of riot, clamouring for an immediate sally against the besieging forces of the Black Road. She hunched her shoulders and ducked as she was jostled this way and that. Jagged words teemed about her head like an army of angry wasps.
Entering into the gardens beyond the gate was a relief. Jaen sighed and shook her shoulders. Matters were definitely taking a turn for the worse. She resolved, as she ascended the path towards the Tower, to bring Maira and Achlinn here that very afternoon. The city outside this mute and ancient fastness felt entirely too volatile.
Ilessa oc Kilkry-Haig was waiting, as expected, in her chambers. Jaen was surprised to find Ilessa’s son, the Thane Roaric, already there, and in full and heated flow.
“They betray us,” the Thane was saying. “There’s no other description… no other word does justice to their treachery.”
He saw that Ilessa’s attention had been drawn elsewhere, and looked over his shoulder. Jaen, standing in the doorway, dipped her head.
“Forgive me, lady,” she said. “The maid did not tell me you had company. I will wait outside.”
“No, no,” said Ilessa, beckoning Jaen. “I told them to admit you as soon as you arrived. We are almost done here. It will do no harm for you to hear this, anyway.”
She returned her gaze to her son, challenging him to dispute her invitation to Jaen. The Thane seemed unconcerned. Barely interested, in fact. He was entirely focused upon his own furious thoughts.
“Not a single supply ship’s berthed in two days. And the Captain of the last to reach us was quite clear: Gryvan’s forbidden any vessel to dock here, and he’s got his own and Tal Dyreen hulls on the water to make sure his ban is observed.”
“We’ve stores enough to last a while longer,” Ilessa said. Her tone was measured, in contrast to Roaric’s bluster.
“But only a while,” the Thane growled. “And
only if we keep them tightly controlled. People will get hungry. They’re already in a foul temper. In every kind of unreasoning, foul temper. I’d have Gryvan by the neck if he was here, High Thane or not.”
He made a fist of his hand, his knuckles whitening as he crushed the life out of an imagined throat.
“Fortunate that he’s not,” Ilessa murmured.
“The day will come. This will all be over eventually, and then I’ll have — ”
“I? I?” snapped Ilessa, her composure cracking a little. “It’s not just you, Roaric. You’re the Blood, all of it, now. Think of it. If you want anything to be left of it when this is all over, you need to see clearly what must be done now, not give yourself over to fancies of future vengeance.”
Roaric frowned but held his tongue.
“If food supplies need to be rationed, so be it,” Ilessa said. “We need to plan for that. And we can still run small boats-smugglers’ boats-along the coast and maybe out to Il Anaron. They might slip through Haig’s fingers.”
“It won’t be enough,” Roaric said darkly. “But you see to it, if you think it worth your time. I’d sooner fight for our freedom than creep about like cowed outlaws. We’re alone now. Black Road on one side, Haig on the other. Both wanting to tear us down, break us down. Well, I won’t permit it! Yes, I’m Thane, if that’s what you want to hear. And I’ll be a Thane, a Thane with a sword in his hand and fire in his belly.”
He brushed past Jaen without acknowledging her presence. Ilessa stared after him. She looked to Jaen like a woman grown accustomed to desperate sadness; still burdened by it, but used to it.
“He turns all his grief into anger,” Ilessa said quietly.
“He has a lot to grieve over. A lot to be angry about.”
“He does.” Ilessa gestured towards a bench in the bay window. It was overlaid with a beautifully woven carpet. “Sit with me.”
Jaen did as she was bid. She had come here, as she did almost every day now, to talk with Ilessa about the needs of the hundreds of Lannis folk caged within Kolkyre’s walls alongside its natives. But that seemed a matter for another time.
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