Bloodheir

III

Beyond Highfast, the road that Orisian and the others followed soon sank into decrepitude. It snaked across a saddle between two rocky peaks, then down a steep valley. As it went, it crumbled. Its surface grew ever more pitted and broken. Water and frosts and rock falls had eaten its fabric away over the years, reducing what must once have been a great highway to an uneven, unreliable track. Once, in the time of the Kingship, there would have been many traders and travellers following this route through the Karkyre Peaks and on towards Drandar. Now the hamlets and inns that lined the way were ruins; the road stumbled pointlessly in its decay towards a wilderness of hills, forests and Kyrinin lands.

Orisian rode at the head of the column with Rothe and Torcaill. The band of warriors that followed was somewhat reduced. Orisian had ordered four of them sent north by way of Hent to find Taim Narran at Kolglas and tell him what was happening; Torcaill had picked out another half-dozen and sent them ahead as outriders. Though an undisputed part of Lheanor oc Kilkry-Haig’s domain, these were wild lands. Orisian did not ask whether it was Kyrinin or human bandits that Torcaill feared, but it hardly mattered. They saw no living thing save birds and occasional wild goats silhouetted on the ridges high above the road.

They made good time on the first day. Only once were they delayed: a cascade of water plunging down from the heights had cut away a swathe of the road, turning it for some little distance into the bed of a churning mountain stream. The horses crossed easily, if hesitantly, enough. Yvane, still obstinately refusing to ride, grumbled and moaned about her wet feet.

By the time dusk was coming on, they had almost escaped the Peaks. The valley that carried the roadway down had opened out. Trees and shrubs now lined the gentled river. Grass and rushes sprouted amongst the rocks, even in the midst of the road. Ahead, dark in the faltering light, woodlands could be seen scattered across lower ground.

They camped on the valley floor, far enough from the river’s course that no sudden flood would catch them unawares but close enough that spindly alders could give them some shelter from the wind that had followed them from the Peaks. While Torcaill’s men set up their few simple tents — not enough to shelter everyone — and lit fires, Orisian went to find Ess’yr and Varryn. They were filling waterskins from the river. As Orisian drew near, Ess’yr threw back her head and poured a stream of water into her mouth. It splashed across her chin and ran down the smooth sweep of her neck. She wiped her lips and held the skin out to Orisian. He shook his head.

“No, thank you.”

The two Kyrinin had their spears with them, and Varryn his bow.

“You don’t plan to rest tonight,” Orisian said, disappointed. He had hoped to speak with Ess’yr, share food with her perhaps as he had done before, when they crossed the Car Criagar. Catch fish, he thought, as they had once done at a tiny stream in those distant forests.

“We need less rest than Huanin,” Varryn said, standing up. He tied the fat waterskin to his belt. “And the enemy may be near.”

“I don’t think so,” murmured Orisian, still watching Ess’yr. There was a life, an energy, in her now that he had not seen for some time. That part of her that had been so oppressed by confinement in Kolkyre and Highfast was stirring again, remembering itself. She moved quickly, precisely, as she sank the mouth of her waterskin below the surface, then raised and stoppered it.

“But you cannot know,” Varryn said. “We will know, because we will see with our own eyes.”

Orisian smiled, despite himself. “Of course. I’d sooner trust your eyes than those of Torcaill’s scouts, in any case.”

Ess’yr stood up, pushing the hair back from her face with both hands.

“You’ll be back before morning?” Orisian asked. “We plan to move on as soon as there’s any light.”

Ess’yr nodded. “Long before.”

“Good.” Orisian gestured at the river. “I’ll see if I can trick some fish out of there, the way you showed me.”

Ess’yr glanced at the water slipping by. She gave Orisian a smile — a momentary, faint thing — and bent to pick up her spear. “It is good to break a fast on fish,” she said.

After the two Kyrinin had drifted off into the deepening darkness, Orisian did make a brief attempt to feel out some fish lurking under the soft bank of the river. The icy-cold water was discouraging, and he very soon began to feel foolish. Here he was, a supposed Thane, scrambling about on a river-bank trying, and failing, to catch fish to please a woman who probably thought of him as nothing more than a chance companion. He sat on a hummock of wiry grass and silently berated himself.

“Feeling a bit solitary?” Yvane said behind him, making him jump.

“I’m fine.” He stood up and brushed dirt and fragments of grass from his legs. “How are your feet?”

“Warm. I toasted them by one of the fires. You might want to come and join us. Eshenna and your man Torcaill are liable to be calling each other names soon. Not good for the harmony of the camp.”

“Harmony doesn’t seem to be anyone’s first concern these days,” Orisian muttered as he followed her back to the tents.

In the midst of the encampment, around the largest of the fires, twenty or more men were sitting cross-legged. They were quietly consuming their meagre rations while Torcaill and Eshenna argued across the flames. Rothe, standing at the very edge of the pool of yellow firelight, looked almost amused.

“Enough,” Orisian said without waiting to hear what the subject of the disagreement was.

Torcaill clamped his mouth shut. Eshenna looked more inclined to continue the dispute but satisfied herself with taking a mouthful of hard biscuit.

“What are you arguing about?” Orisian asked Torcaill.

“She says we are moving too slowly,” the warrior replied. “I say it’s not safe to move faster. Not during the day and certainly not at night.”

Orisian glanced at Eshenna. The na’kyrim returned his gaze but said nothing.

“Will you walk with me?” he asked her, and led her away from the fire. Yvane followed, as did Rothe a little way back.

“It’s not easy for some of these men, you know,” Orisian said once they were out at the furthest limit of the fire’s light. “They have never known a na’kyrim, never had to trust anyone not of their own kind. Most of them would rather be heading north, to fight for their homes and families.”

“You are their lord, are you not?” Eshenna asked. “It should not matter to them what is easy and what is not.”

Orisian shook his head. “They know me little better than they do you, and they’ve not much more reason to trust me. No one ever thought I would be Thane, Eshenna. Not them, not me.”

The na’kyrim shrugged and folded her arms across her chest. “I only wanted them to understand,” she said. It was no apology, but her tone was subdued.

“Understand what?”

“That there is urgency here. K’rina is not far. I can hear the sound of her mind, close. But if there are White Owls hunting her too, they will not stop in the night. They will not rest. If they reach her first, and take her back to Aeglyss, all this effort will have been wasted.”

“I know.” Orisian sighed. “For these men, these are difficult things to understand. They know nothing of the Shared, had never heard of Aeglyss until they left Highfast. It’s not the world they live in.”

“It is now,” muttered Yvane behind him. “They just don’t know it yet.”

Orisian glanced at her over his shoulder. “That might be true but, if so, they’ll have to learn it for themselves. I can’t make them believe it just by telling them it’s so.”

“The Shared is in chaos,” Eshenna whispered. “It shudders at the movement of the Anain. And Aeglyss himself is there, not just the stain of his corruption, but his mind itself: reaching out. K’rina is at the centre of this. I know it.”

“Is that true?” Orisian asked Yvane.

She shrugged. “Couldn’t say for certain. I’ve no great talent for sifting out the patterns. If you’re asking me whether my head aches worse every day, whether I feel a shadow spreading, then the answer’s yes. If you’re asking me whether I think I should have stayed behind in Highfast, the answer’s maybe. That should tell you something.”

“Whatever the truth is,” Rothe said from out of the darkness, “you’ll not persuade Torcaill to move any further now. Not at night. If there are White Owls out there, we’d all be feathered with arrows by dawn. The blacker the night, the more numerous the arrows.”

Orisian regarded his shieldman for a moment: a dark mass with the flames of the fires leaping behind him. He was right. Even Orisian knew that only the direst, most overwhelming need would persuade warriors of his Blood to confront Kyrinin at night, when human eyes and ears were at such a disadvantage. They had been skirmishing with the White Owls in Anlane, and even with the Fox, for generations, and had learned the lessons such experience taught.

“I’ll speak to Torcaill at dawn,” he said to Eshenna. “We’ll make as much speed as we can tomorrow. That’s the best we can do.”

In such poor light, he could not see her face clearly, but he did not doubt there was frustration there.

Orisian was awake when Ess’yr and Varryn returned. He had hardly slept at all, disturbed by the hard ground beneath him, the intermittent patter of rain on the tent and Rothe’s snoring. When at last he drifted off into shallow sleep he was soon awoken, startled by the piping calls of some birds flying over. Unable to recover the threads of slumber, he struggled out stiffly from beneath the coarse blanket and left the tent on his hands and knees. Rothe stirred behind him, but did not fully wake.

Outside, the slight lightening of the eastern sky said dawn was near but not yet breaking. Others — a few weary warriors — were also awake, shuffling through the near-darkness, trying to restart fires, or just standing in the fine misty drizzle with blankets and cloaks wrapped about them. There was no sound save an occasional cough, the crackle and hiss of wet wood resisting feeble flames, the soft voice of the invisible river.

Orisian drank from a waterskin hanging outside his tent. He was standing there, wondering whether to get back beneath the shelter of canvas, when the Kyrinin came out of the gloom. They appeared amongst the tall, thin alder trees as sudden and silent as deer emerging on the edge of a forest. Both of them were soaking wet, their hair matted down and heavy, their clothes darkened by the rain and covered in muddy stains.

Varryn went straight to the large fire at the heart of the camp and squatted down beside it. The warrior who was feeding twigs and kindling into the faltering flames regarded this Kyrinin newcomer uneasily, perhaps suspiciously, but said nothing. Ess’yr paused at Orisian’s side.

“Did you find anything?” he asked her softly.

“We saw sign of the enemy. Half a day towards dawn from here, by human pace.”

“Coming this way?”

She shook her head. “They do not seek us. Not yet.”

“But you did not pursue them.” Orisian glanced across at her brother, silent and thoughtful by the fire. “I feared you might not return, if you found sign of White Owls you could hunt.”

“There will be hunting soon. And killing.”

It was an incomplete answer, Orisian knew at once. He could not tell whether it was some subtle sign in her tone or expression that betrayed her, or whether he had come to know just enough of how her — and her brother’s — mind worked to anticipate her evasions.

“Do you think I am still in need of your protection?” he murmured, unwilling to allow anyone else to hear these words. “You think your promise to see to my safety not yet done with?”

Ess’yr returned his intent gaze, and for a moment he was captivated once again by those flinty eyes and the depths of grace they seemed to hold. The pale blue lines tattooed across her face were faint in this pre-dawn light; they almost danced with a life of their own at the corners of his vision. He could think of nothing else to say.

“Did you catch fish?” she asked him.

Orisian blinked. “What?”

“In the river.”

“Oh. No.”

She dipped her head, drawing his eyes down to her waist. A single silvery fish hung there, tied to her belt with strands of woven grass.

“I knew you would not,” Ess’yr said.

The derelict road bore them on down the valley, in amongst clumps of trees and long stretches of wet, boggy ground. Behind them, the Karkyre Peaks were hidden by thick grey clouds of mist and rain. The horses were subdued, discouraged by the foul weather. Those who rode them were little more enthusiastic, but at Orisian’s urging Torcaill did keep them to a steady, remorseless pace. Ess’yr and Varryn trotted along parallel to the column of warriors, drifting in and out of sight as the drizzle thickened and then slackened off again. They kept up easily with the horses.

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.