Bloodheir

V

Glasbridge was a carcass of a town, its heart torn out by the flood waters of the Glas. The river had shrunk back into its old channel many days ago but there were still slicks of filthy water, knee-deep mud and piles of debris all through the once-busy streets. Most of the houses closest to the river had been cast down by the torrent; only a few that had been built of stone survived and even they were gutted and crumbling. The waves along the seafront lapped heavily, burdened by the flotsam that had been spewed out into the sea by the flood. And by bodies. Even now, the sea was still returning a few corpses each day to the city. They bobbed like bloated sacks along the harbour, pale and putrid.

Most of what the waters had not ruined, fire had claimed. Everywhere the black shells of buildings and their smoke-stained walls told a tale of destruction. The Black Road conquerors of Glasbridge had been too few in number to control the inferno once they had set it loose, and had been disinclined to make the effort. The town could be rebuilt if fate and fortune allowed them the opportunity. For now, all that mattered was that the remnants of the Lannis Blood’s warriors could not gather here, and the other Haig Bloods could not use the harbour to bring spear-forested ships ashore.

Few people — the old, the very young, the sick and infirm — could be seen out on the ravaged streets, scrabbling amidst the rubble in search of food, clothing or lost relatives. They shared their search with the dogs and seagulls and crows that fought over every scrap of food. Many bodies were still hidden beneath the wreckage. Packs of dogs dug them out; they and the carrion birds and rats consumed them.

It was snowing as Kanin oc Horin-Gyre rode into Glasbridge. Big, fat flakes drifted like the seed-heads of countless winter flowers. They were blanketing the whole Glas valley, concealing its scars. Without any wind to drive them the flakes bobbed down in a lazy dance.

Kanin’s horse trod carefully along the city street, stepping over the shattered remains of a trader’s barrow. Like every one of the forty warriors who rode behind him, the Horin-Gyre Thane was hunched down against the weather. He wore a thick woollen cloak, looted from Koldihrve. The snow had piled up on his shoulders. Only his hands, protected by thick gauntlets, emerged from beneath the cloak to clutch the reins. The band of warriors came into Glasbridge silently. This had been the home of their Horin forebears before the Black Road’s exile, yet they showed no jubilation at its recapture after so long. Kanin’s mood defined that of those who followed him, and his had been grim for many days now.

The riders came to the place where a fine stone bridge had, until the town’s ruin, vaulted across the broad channel of the Glas. Now only the stubs of the bridge remained, jutting out from either bank. The water flowing between those banks was turbid and dark. The river was still carrying vast amounts of soil that it had stripped from the fields upstream of Glasbridge. Workers had already thrown a makeshift crossing over it, laying rows of planks across a series of small, flat barges.

Half a dozen spearmen appeared from out of the snow. They challenged the riders. Kanin shrugged back the hood of his cloak, scattering snowflakes, and scowled at them.

“Do you not know your own Thane?” he growled.

The spearmen bowed their heads, begged forgiveness.

“Where is my sister?” Kanin asked.

Reunion with Wain lifted Kanin’s spirits for a time at least. He embraced her, held her shoulders with his great gloved hands. Around them, in the yard of a wheelwright’s abandoned workshop, his weary band dismounted and stood by their horses. The thick snow was crusting the animals’ manes.

“I’d not thought to see you for a time yet,” Wain said to her brother.

“We rode hard,” he replied, examining her features with a keen eye. “I looked for you at Sirian’s Dyke. I did not think you would be camped in Glasbridge already.”

Wain glanced away. “The Dyke was broken. That eased our path.”

Kanin already knew the tale of the breaking of Sirian’s Dyke, and the flood that had swept the road to Glasbridge clean of Lannis warriors and cracked open the town’s defences; it had been on the lips of everyone they had met since they had descended out of the Car Criagar. He did not need to hear Wain say it to know that she resented the glory Shraeve and her Inkallim had won for themselves by destroying that great dam. Horin-Gyre and the Battle Inkall would never be the easiest of allies, and in the case of Wain and Shraeve mistrust was sharpened to active dislike.

“Let’s get out of this,” Kanin said, gesturing towards the snow-filled sky. “It’s been snowing or raining on me from the moment I left Koldihrve. I’ve had enough of it.”

“What happened, then?” Wain asked once they had settled in front of the fire in the absent wheelwright’s house. “I know it cannot have been all that you hoped, or you’d have told me already.”

A young girl — orphaned or abandoned in the chaos of Glasbridge’s fall and now pressed into service by Wain — brought them bread and bowls of mutton stew. There were ugly burns on the backs of her hands, a legacy of the conflagration that had come after the flood. Kanin tore the bread into chunks and dipped them in the unappetising stew.

“We cornered the Lannis children in Koldihrve. The boy and the girl were both there. I had…” He stretched a hand out towards Wain, closing his fist on air. “I had him within my reach, as close as you are now. But they escaped us. A Tal Dyreen trading ship carried them away.”

“You’ve got yourself a trophy, I see,” Wain said with a nod at Kanin’s brow.

The Thane put a hand to the long, half-healed cut there.

“A woodwight broke her bow on my head,” he muttered. “I’d’ve had the Lannis-Haig brat otherwise. I was so close, Wain. So close.” He shook his head.

“It’s done,” his sister said. “There’s no point in regretting fate’s path.”

Kanin made a vague effort at a smile. Wain’s resilience, her steadfast adherence to the creed, had always been a staff he could lean on. He knew she was right, and that he should mimic her calmness in the face of misfortune, but it had never come as easily to him. He had promised his father that the Lannis-Haig line would be extinguished. If fate would not permit him to fulfil that promise, he could not help but regret the fact.

“What of the White Owls?” Wain asked. “Cannek claims his Hunt Inkallim have seen bands of them coming back out of the Car Criagar these last few nights, crossing the valley.”

Kanin shrugged. “I stayed clear of the wights as much as I could. They fought the Fox at Koldihrve. Won, I think, but I didn’t linger. How do things stand here?”

“At our high tide. We’ve reached the outermost limit of what is possible. I’ve less than a thousand swords left.”

Kanin rubbed his eyes. It had been far too long since he had slept properly. Even now, beside a vigorous fire, he could still feel the cold and damp of the Dihrve valley and the high Car Criagar in his limbs; in his heart, almost.

“No word from Tanwrye?”

“It is held against us still.”

“And Ragnor oc Gyre has not seen fit to march to our aid?”

“There has been no reply to our messages.”

“We’re spent, then.” Kanin set aside his bowl and stared at the dancing flames. “As you say, it’s the high tide of our good fortune.”

“Shraeve has set the townsfolk to building a ditch and dyke across the road from Kolglas.”

Kanin grunted. “She thinks we can hold the road against all the armies of Kilkry-Haig? With a thousand swords?”

“Who knows what she thinks? She tells me nothing any more. It hardly matters. Fate has given us this much; no more or less.” Wain’s eyes, as she regarded her brother, were clear, placid. “It would not break my heart to come to the end of my Road here, like this. The Book of Lives has been as kind to us as we could have hoped, has it not? And we have followed the course it laid out for us willingly. Nothing more could be asked of us.”

Kanin had wanted more. He had wanted their victories to be only the first, opening the way for all the armies of the other Bloods; he had wanted the Lannis line extinguished, in the name of his father. He had wanted to be able to die without regrets. Was that desire truly such a failing?

Wain put more wood on the fire: the spokes of a cartwheel that would never be made.

“I am minded to wait here,” she said quietly. “Wait for our enemies to come and face us. I do not think we are fated, you and I, to limp back to Hakkan and die in our beds. If I’m right in that, I will die content.”

Kanin stared at the orange heart of the fire. He had no great longing to see Hakkan again. It would be a poor kind of ending to struggle back across the Vale of Stones, defeated. More life would be no great boon after that.

“Yes,” he murmured. “Content.”

He wanted it to be true, but his heart remained uneasy.

The next morning was overcast. The snow had stopped in the night, and soon after dawn a thaw of sorts had begun. Kanin and Wain went out on the road south along the coast, at the head of thirty riders. Puddles lay all along the track. The sea lapped against the rocks and stony strands that lined the shore. Streams ran gurgling through culverts under the road, hastened by melt water.

They found Shraeve a little way outside Glasbridge. She and two dozen of her Inkallim were watching while enslaved townsfolk laboured. A ditch had been cut from the top of a shingle beach, across the road and on for two hundred or more paces inland to a rocky, wooded spur.

Running his eyes over the crowds of sullen labourers, and the low bund they were piling up with spoil from the ditch, Kanin recognised that Shraeve had chosen a good place for her works. Inland, low wooded hills and hummocks — outliers of the great mass of Anlane, further to the south — would hamper any marching army and provide ample opportunities for ambush. Anyone seeking to enter the Glas valley would have no choice but to attempt that rough ground or fight their way over Shraeve’s barrier.

“It’s as good a place as any to make a stand,” Igris, leader of Kanin’s Shield, muttered.

“It would be, if we had the strength to hold it,” Kanin said, and nudged his horse on.

Shraeve herself was standing atop the rampart of sodden earth. She had her back to them as Kanin and his company drew near, her two sheathed swords crossed over her spine. He noticed that Wain drifted away, allowing her horse to slow and veer down onto the shore. Another sign, he assumed, that her patience with the ravens of the Battle was exhausted.

Shraeve turned. She looked down on Kanin with unreadable eyes.

“Welcome back, Thane.”

“You have been busy,” he said, encompassing the length of the embankment with a sweep of his arm.

She nodded. “We have many hands to put to the task, unwilling as they are.”

“What will prevent them riding around your little wall, when they come?” he asked, indicating the wooded rising ground to the left. “It may be difficult for them, but we haven’t the numbers to stop them.”

“I will settle for making it difficult,” Shraeve said, with a hint of contempt. “I expect nothing more than to make the attempt, and let fate decide. Have you come to tell me that is not enough for you? Do you mean to crawl back into the north?”

There was nothing new in her arrogance, Kanin thought — that was, after all, an attribute shared by every one of the Inkallim — but she had acquired a brazen, confrontational energy. Wain had warned him that since Anduran, Shraeve had been growing ever more assertive, more willing to challenge any authority that was not her own.

“No,” he said, “that is not what I came to tell you, Shraeve.”

He pointed at a nearby woman, struggling to carry a small collection of rocks cradled in her arms, slipping on the mud facing of the bank.

“These people are mine. Glasbridge is mine. These are Horin-Gyre lands, and this is a Horin-Gyre war, unless and until Ragnor oc Gyre claims it for his own. So, I thank you for your efforts in breaking this ground and raising this wall, but you may leave the task to us now. We will finish it. We will hold it.”

Shraeve glared at him. She was fierce, this raven, but Kanin was resolute. If there was to be no glorious and lasting triumph in all of this, he could at least ensure that the glory of honest, faithful defeat belonged to Horin-Gyre. His Blood had earned that much.

The Inkallim sprang nimbly down from the bund and stood beside Kanin’s horse. She clapped her hands together, shaking dirt from them; she must have been digging and building herself.

“As you wish. From the Children of the Hundred to the Horin-Gyre Blood, this ditch, this bank: a gift. Finish it quickly, Thane. The Hunt killed scouts creeping up from Kolglas in the night.”

She waved an arm above her head and began walking back up the road towards Glasbridge. From all along the length of the embankment, the other Inkallim silently left their posts and began to follow her.

“At least you will not have to hold it for long,” Shraeve called over her shoulder.

“What does that mean?” Kanin shouted after her as Wain rode up from the beach to his side.

“Have you not heard? Your messengers must be slow. The Battle is marching, coming to join you. The air about your head will be thick with ravens soon. We will see then, Kanin oc Horin-Gyre, whose war this is.”

Stone walls ringed Tanwrye, and from them ramparts curved out across the southern entrance to the Stone Vale like the outstretched fingers of a monitory hand. Their turrets, battlements and ditches blocked almost all the width of the pass. Tiny outlying forts studded the hillsides around, sentinels to watch over the track and the turbulent river that ran side by side out of the north. It was a formidable defence, and more than once it had proved itself against the Black Road. This time it was being tested to its limits. Most of the outer ramparts, and all of the isolated fortlets, had already fallen.

Iavin Helt dar Lannis-Haig was cold, down to the marrow of his bones. He had been at his post on the north tower of Tanwrye’s wall since not long after nightfall. It had been snowing for most of that time. Winterbirth was long gone, and the peaks within sight of Tanwrye had been cloaked in their white winter vestments for days. Iavin hunched his shoulders, pushing the fur collar of his cape up around his ears. His hunger made it all worse. Staring out at the fires of the Black Road army, he could not help but wonder whether the besiegers fared as poorly as Tanwrye’s defenders. By rights they should be even hungrier, colder and wearier than Iavin and his comrades, but in all the weeks of the siege there had been no sign of a weakening in the will of their enemy. Rather, it was Lannis-Haig hearts that were flagging.

The shortage of food was not the only thing grinding spirits down. Sickness was prowling the town, picking off the youngest and the oldest, the weak and the wounded. The youth who had shared Iavin’s watch since the siege began had died just two nights gone. Firewood was running short. Families were burning their chairs, their bed frames and roof timbers in their hearths.

The hardships of the mind were just as severe as those of the body. More than a week ago, just out of bowshot but within clear sight of the walls, a company of Horin-Gyre warriors had erected two huge poles. Spiked atop them were two heads: the heads, if the shouts of the enemy were to be believed, of Croesan, Thane of the Lannis-Haig Blood, and his son Naradin. Iavin could not be certain if it was true — his eyesight was not sharp enough to recognise those crow-pecked features at such a distance — but most within Tanwrye were inclined to believe it. After all, if Croesan still lived, he would have brought an army to their relief by now.

Iavin brushed snowflakes from his collar. An old woman had given him gloves — gloves that had once belonged to the husband the Heart Fever took from her, as it had taken both of Iavin’s parents — and without them he suspected his hands would have been too cold to hold his spear. He rolled his shoulders, trying to loosen the stiff muscles.

A point of light where there should have been none caught his eye. To the north, high up and far out in the heart of the Vale of Stones, a torch was burning. All else in that direction was utter darkness. There was no moonlight on this cloud-bound night. The yellowish fragment of fire bobbed like a solitary bright moth. Iavin blinked, suspicious that his cold and exhausted eyes were playing tricks. But the light remained, and one by one others appeared.

Iavin heard a muffled call from somewhere along the wall, and answering shouts. He was not imagining it, then. Others were seeing the same thing. Even as he watched, any last vestiges of doubt were dispelled. A long tongue of fire was slowly winding its way over a saddle in the pass. Scores of torches, carried by scores of hands, were coming south through the falling snow.

Horns sounded to call Tanwrye’s captains to the walls. There were signs of movement amongst the besieging army, too. Figures passed to and fro in front of the campfires, orders were shouted. And the torches flowing out of the Vale of Stones were in the hundreds now. Iavin watched the fiery river in a kind of numb amazement. It was almost beautiful, this vision of light and fire in the winter’s night; it would have been beautiful, had it not told him that death was coming for him, and for everyone in Tanwrye.

At dawn, they were still coming. Thousand upon thousand, company after company, the Black Road was flooding through the Vale of Stones. The rocky, snow-covered ground around Tanwrye was already thick with tents and with seething crowds. A constant rumble of noise drifted up and over the besieged town, like a never-ending peal of distant thunder.

Every warrior who could still walk had come to the walls to witness this gigantic assembly of their foe. Iavin Helt should have been resting by now, his watch long done, but nobody expected any rest today, unless it was the final, unending kind offered by the Sleeping Dark. He glanced down the line of grim-faced men that stretched along the top of the wall. There were not nearly enough of them to withstand the coming storm.

It was not only the number of these newly arrived foes that had stilled any hope in the hearts of Tanwrye’s defenders, but their nature. Sometime in the night, amidst that river of blazing torches out of the Stone Vale, the Battle Inkall had arrived. So many of their great raven standards were now visible in the heart of the enemy camp that older, more experienced men than Iavin had shaken their heads in disbelief and despair. Tanwrye’s garrison included some of the finest warriors the Lannis-Haig Blood could muster; not one of them thought himself a match for the ravens of the Battle Inkall.

Iavin’s stomach was knotted and growling. He could not tell whether it was hunger or fear. His throat felt tight, his mouth dry. His mind had emptied itself of thoughts, as if it too had been numbed by the night’s awful cold. Hidden behind heavy clouds, the sun climbed the sky. The day grew no warmer, the light no less subdued. Eventually, in the late morning, surges of movement spread through the Black Road camp. Like some great beast bestirring itself, the army rumbled into motion.

The assault was controlled, precise and overwhelming. It rolled on through the afternoon. The few stretches of outlying wall and palisade that had still been held by Tanwrye’s defenders were stormed one after another. A few survivors made it back to the main town walls; most of their comrades died at their posts.

Without pause, the Black Road host pressed closer and closer to the town. Beneath a sheltering cloud of crossbow bolts and arrows and stones, ladders were brought to the walls. So thick and relentless were the flights of missiles that those on the battlements who were not struck at once could only hunch down and press themselves against the stone, trying to ignore the cries and pleas of the less fortunate. Iavin, crouched low atop the tower, clenched his eyes shut. A hand was gripping his ankle. He knew it was an old man called Hergal, who had risen from his sickbed to come to the wall just that morning. He was already dead.

“Get up, get up!” someone was shouting.

It took a great effort of will, but Iavin opened his eyes and looked around.

Men were surging past him, going to meet a black-haired woman who was vaulting over the parapet. Her jerkin and breeches were dark leather, studded with metal. Iavin rose to his feet. It seemed absurd and impossible that the Inkallim — the infamous ravens of the Black Road — were here, within a few paces of where he stood. Hergal’s dead hand fell away from his ankle.

The woman ducked inside the first warrior’s blow, then drove upwards. She clamped one hand on his throat, stabbing her short sword into his stomach with the other. In a single movement she heaved the dying man backwards, knocking another warrior aside. She wrenched her sword free and spun to kick someone in the groin.

Iavin lunged at her with his spear. Her flank was exposed. He would strike her in the stomach, on the left side. He could see it happening, see her dying, in his mind’s eye. Yet she rolled away and the spearpoint glanced off her hip bone. Somehow — Iavin could not understand how — she turned so quickly that she had hold of his spear before he could recover. She was far stronger than he had ever imagined a woman could be. He let go of the spear and fled as more dark-haired figures spilled over the wall.

He ran blindly down from the tower and into the town, without a single glance back. A captain he did not know was gathering men beside a well. He seized Iavin’s arm, arresting his flight so abruptly that both of them almost fell.

“Stand your ground!” he shouted in Iavin’s face. “Arm yourself!”

Iavin reeled, his mind still a blur of noise and images. Someone thrust a short sword into his hand and he stared down at it. There was blood already on the blade.

“With me,” the captain was crying now, and Iavin was caught up in the rush and carried back towards the walls.

There was fighting on one of the ramps that slanted up to the battlements. No sign of Inkallim here, Iavin vaguely recognised as he pushed up with the others to join the fray. He fought against men who wore the ordinary woollen clothes of farmers or artisans, half of them armed with nothing more than clubs or small axes. The ramp was narrow, without the room for skill or precision. Iavin pushed and stabbed at whatever body appeared before him, concentrated only on not losing his footing on the incline. Time drifted.

There was a sharp blow on his head and for a moment he could see nothing. He could hear himself shouting, perhaps screaming, and felt some blade sliding across his arm and opening it. His sight leaked back as he was crushed against the low wall that bounded the ramp.

Then, “Back, back!” he heard.

The press of bodies shifted and swayed. Iavin was suddenly freed and he stumbled, slithering, down the ramp. He sprawled across a corpse and gagged at the corrupt stench of blood and opened guts. He scrambled to his feet and staggered off down the cobbled roadway. He was panting, heaving air into aching lungs. He could taste bile in the back of his mouth.

Iavin found himself in a small market square. He looked around. There were thirty or forty other warriors close by, some kneeling with spears and shields readied. A great block of sheds stood nearby. For the goats and sheep, Iavin remembered, that they bought and sold here. There was a massive stone-built hay barn, too. He was at the very heart of Tanwrye. There was nowhere else to fly to from here.

They came howling and boiling out from the side streets: Tarbain tribesmen, covered in bone and stone talismans. They swept up to the knot of Lannis-Haig warriors, flowed around it and embraced it like the flooding sea taking hold of a rocky outcrop. Iavin hacked and slashed. The clatter of weapons and stamping of feet, cries of horror and fury, all swelled and filled his ears. He felt blows against his arms and chest, flickers of pain carried away on the anger that seethed in him. Then on his side: a smack and a sudden numbness. He saw the blade darting back, saw a blur of his own blood. Darkness came rushing up, reached for him and flung its veil across his eyes.

Iavin still heard the terrible cacophony as he fell, but in a moment it too dissolved into the dark. His was only one amongst the many deaths on the day Tanwrye, the bastion so long believed to be impregnable, fell.

All through the Antyryn Hyr, the Thousand Tree-clad Valleys, the White Owls were moving. Messengers had gone out from the great vo’an at the heart of the forest, racing along the secret ways that Kyrinin feet had trodden for hundreds of years. From every one of the clan’s winter camps, they had summoned a spear a’an to come. So the White Owls ran beneath the leafless canopy of Anlane and a cloud-thick sky. They came silent and swift to answer the Voice’s call.

Five lifetimes ago, thousands of the White Owl had fought and died in the War of the Tainted. Only the Heron, Bull and Horse had fielded greater companies against the seething masses of humankind. The Huanin, who lived in a waking dream of their own splendour, might imagine that such strength was gone for ever. If so, they were misled by their own pride-fattened ignorance. The warband that had crossed into the Car Criagar to hunt Fox had been but a fraction of the clan’s spears. The vast deeps of the Thousand Tree-Clad Valleys held numbers unguessed by the Huanin. Many hundreds of warriors were on the move as the winter deepened and the first full snows of the season began to fall.

Rumours ran with the spear a’ans, twisting and thickening, feeding off one another. There was a na’kyrim, it was said, child of a long-dead White Owl mother. A man who had been on the clan’s Breaking Stone, the great boulder the Walking God had left behind, and — unthinkably, impossibly — had not died. Instead, the whisperers said, he had been changed. It was because of him, and because of what he had become, that the spears were now gathering.

The ground in front of the Voice’s lodge was hard and bare, sculpted by the touch of thousands of feet over many years. Song staffs, entwined with skulls and feathers and ivy, stood there. The people gathered before them, facing the lodge. The woven anhyne looked on from one side. The smoke of the ever-burning torkyr, the constant flame of the clan, drifted from behind the lodge.

Not all had gathered outside the Voice’s lodge, but many did. They came because they wanted to see and hear this na’kyrim who had stirred up such tumult; some because they thought this man must die before his presence caused more chaos, others because the scent of his power filled their hearts and minds with a febrile hope.

The na’kyrim lifted his head as he emerged from the lodge, casting his half-human eyes over the crowd. At the touch of that gaze, every man, woman and child felt a prickling of their skin, a drying in their throat. The na’kyrim was frail and drained, still ravaged by his long hours on the Breaking Stone, yet his presence was potent; arresting. It reached inside them, like an invisible hand.

He advanced slowly, carefully. The Voice came behind him. She walked with her head down.

Aeglyss took a great, deep breath as if flushing out his lungs with the clean air of the vo’an, the cleansing smoke of the torkyr. One of the kakyrin, the keepers of bones and stories and memories, stepped forwards from amongst the throng. He was an old man, the twofold kin’thyn tattoos on his face faded and weathered. His necklace of bone and owl feathers rustled as he walked. He stood in front of Aeglyss, but the na’kyrim ignored him.

“Is he not to be returned to the Breaking Stone, then?” the kakyrin enquired levelly. It was impossible to say whose answer he sought. He was examining Aeglyss through narrowed eyes.

“It’s not… I can’t be,” Aeglyss murmured.

“Is he mind-sick?” the kakyrin asked.

“Perhaps,” whispered the Voice. She took a few paces closer. “But it is a strange kind of mind-sickness. The Breaking Stone could not contain his spirit. Do you not feel it? He thickens the air with power. The White Owl have not had a child such as this in half a thousand years. Longer.”

“He betrayed us before. Made false promises. His words, his lies, they are more potent than anything you or I might utter. He can make nets out of words, to cast over our minds.”

“He says he was the one betrayed, by the Huanin of the Road. He says the false promises he made were made at their behest, and that he thought them to be true when he spoke them. The thought is in my mind that I believe him in this, and it is my own thought, unsnared in any net of his making.”

“You think he will give the clan back the strength it once had?”

“He may. We were mighty once, before the City fell. None then would have dared to steal our lands, fell our trees, drive our hunters from their summer grounds. We have been less than we were for a long time.”

The kakyrin sniffed. “As has every people, of every land.” He shook his head. His necklace rattled. “I see only a part-human whose mind has rotted.”

Aeglyss cupped the old man’s face in his hands. The kakyrin started backwards, but Aeglyss held him fast and the impulse to recoil seemed to fail almost before it had taken hold. The kakyrin began to groan. Aeglyss shook. His eyes rolled up slowly until the pupils were hidden.

“Do you see?” he rasped. “Do you see?”

The kakyrin ’s legs went slack. He slumped, only Aeglyss’s grip on his face keeping him from falling to the ground.

“Do you see?” Aeglyss demanded again, more distantly this time. The crowd of onlookers seethed; there were cries of anger, alarm.

“Release him,” the Voice said to Aeglyss, putting a hand on his arm. She spoke the words not as a command but softly.

Aeglyss blinked and looked down at the old woman, then at the man. His hands fell back to his sides. The kakyrin slumped to his knees, and swayed there.

“Have you harmed him?” the Voice asked.

“No,” breathed Aeglyss. “Not so much as you harmed me by placing me on the Stone. But I have forgiven you. Forgiven all of you.” He called it out loudly. “If I’ve been broken, it was only to be made afresh. Thus, I forgive you.”

“All the world,” the kakyrin was mumbling. “All the world.”

A warrior stepped out from the crowd, his spear levelled at Aeglyss, dark intent fixed in his eyes. The na’kyrim held him with a flashing, savage glare.

“You are my mother’s people,” cried Aeglyss, and the warrior shrank from the cry. “You are my people. My heart beats in time with yours, and whatever mistakes there have been in the past are done with now. Forgiven, forgotten. I am not as I was, and the White Owls shall not be as they were. Together we shall make such a beginning as the world has never seen. All things can change. If I will it.”

Children wailed in distant huts. The bravest of warriors felt tremors in their hands; the wisest of heads spun; the keenest of ears rang with endless echoes of anger and hunger.

“Have I not already given you the blood of the Fox to bathe your spears in? Has this not already been a bitter season for your enemies? More warriors now wear the kin’thyn than the clan has seen in a lifetime.”

There were cries of assent, some dazed, some eager. There was weeping too, in the great crowd.

“If I will it,” Aeglyss repeated, “all things can change. Let your will run with mine. I shall be the strength in your arms, the swiftness in your legs. You shall be the spear in my hands. I will bind the Huanin of the Road to us with bonds they cannot break; I will bend them until their arms serve our purposes. Long enough we have suffered. Long enough we have been less than we once were. Now all the world will be set into two camps: those who are friends to the White Owl and those who are enemies. And our enemies shall fall. They shall crumble. It is…”

He faltered, cast his stare up towards the flat sea of cloud. A thin, icy snow was beginning to fall. The na’kyrim sighed and fell to his knees. His head tipped back and he stared into the bleak, unbounded expanse of the sky.

“I shall be servant to all your hopes and dreams,” he said quietly. “I shall make them real.”

Though he spoke softly, all heard. And many felt belief unfolding itself in their hearts like a dark flower.