Fall of Thanes

V

Taim Narran could feel sweat slick on his back and shoulders beneath his shirt. Exertion made his face burn against the bitter air. Fatigue was building in his thighs. Yet still Orisian came at him. His Thane, less than half his age, battled on and on.

Taim retreated, a few quick steps back across the training ground, blocking sword blows with his shield as he went. Orisian came after him, on the very borders of control. It was often this way when the two of them fought. The longer the training bouts went on-and Orisian always insisted on extending them, pushing himself to his limits and beyond-the more aggressive the young Thane became, the more violent and unrestrained grew his attacks.

Taim let Orisian bear down on him, and twisted aside. Orisian went stumbling through and Taim gave him a smack on the side of his head with the flat of his blade as he went. To his credit, Orisian managed to keep his feet, staggering down almost to his knees before whirling about and surging up again.

The two of them battled back and forth. Servants had swept the training square free of snow, but the ground was still frozen, almost rock-like. Orisian’s knuckles, even his cheek, were grazed from earlier falls. Nothing dimmed his willingness to come forward again and again, but exhaustion was at last blunting the ferocity of his attacks. His shield was drifting low, his feet becoming a touch sluggish.

Enough, Taim thought. He dropped his own guard just enough to offer temptation. Orisian lunged. Taim sidestepped, and brought his own shield up in a slicing arc. He opened Orisian’s forehead with its rim. Orisian reeled, blood streaking down his face. Taim hooked a foot around the back of his knee, and sent him sprawling.

“We’re done for today,” Taim said, kicking his Thane’s sword away. “You’re not learning now, only exhausting yourself.”

Orisian struggled to his feet, wiping blood from his brow.

“I can carry on,” he said breathlessly. He looked around for his sword.

“Your mind’s not clear enough,” Taim said. He sheathed his own sword.

“You told me once I had to fight by instinct, not by thinking.”

“True enough, but that only works with the right instincts. Anger fouls them up. Fight angry, and you won’t fight long.”

Orisian looked downcast. “I know. I try.”

“You do. And for as long as you concentrate and keep calm, you fight well. But something happens. You start fighting something more than just me.”

Orisian stooped to retrieve his blade. He made a clumsy effort to return it to its scabbard, missing at the first attempt.

“You must get that wound cleaned and bound,” Taim said.

“Yes,” murmured Orisian. He grimaced at his Captain. “Did you have to hit me so hard?”

“Thought it might clear your head. It’s not much more than a touch. It’ll clean up fine.”

Orisian grunted, and walked slowly off towards the barracks. As Taim watched him go, he felt sorrow for the young man. He could not call it pity, for that was a sentiment Orisian would utterly refuse. Sorrow fitted better, in any case.

Taim was not certain what it was that came over Orisian when they trained. Some formless fury woke in him. Perhaps he became lost in the punishing rhythm of strike and counter-strike, parry and sidestep, and found himself battling against memories, or fears, or death itself. Perhaps each blow he aimed at Taim’s shield was, for him, aimed rather at the whole array of enemies, and of misfortunes, that had taken his father from him, and Inurian. And Rothe.

That last death had been the one that finally and fatally weakened the child in Orisian, Taim reflected as he stamped smooth a few of the deeper marks they had gouged into the hard surface of the training ground during their bout. The second shieldman to die in Orisian’s defence, and someone he had been wholly unready to lose. Nothing had been quite the same since then.

Taim shook the shield free from his left arm and took it towards the armoury. He walked slowly, for he was weary. And now that there were none to see, he allowed himself to limp. His thigh ached. Beneath his leggings, tight bandages covered the puncture marks and the prodigious bruise inflicted by that bone-encrusted Tarbain club. His weariness was not, though, so much of the body as of the mind and spirit.

Though he hid it meticulously from those around him, Orisian most of all, the days were taking a heavy toll. The fighting, the almost sleepless nights, the pervasive and insidious mood of despairing aggression. It all sapped his strength. And there was the sickening worry for his wife and his daughter, left behind in besieged Kolkyre. He had promised Jaen he would be there at her side when their grandchild was born. It would break his heart, and shame him, to fail in that promise.

Ranks of shields greeted him as he entered the armoury. They hung from the wall in overlapping rows. To call the place an armoury was overgenerous, in truth. It was little more than a storeroom, and a poorly ordered one at that. The shields might be neatly displayed, but spears were piled lazily and loosely against one wall. There were quivers of arrows in one corner, their flights frayed and broken. Taim hung his shield with the others. He closed the door behind him and made for the barracks.

What he wanted, with all his heart, was to be with his family, in front of a warming fire, talking of idle and foolish matters. But no matter how fervent that desire, Taim could contain it-much of the time, at least-within a sealed and silent chamber deep within himself. There were other promises that bound him, and even at the cost of a broken heart, he could not turn aside from them. He had pledged his life to the Blood, to the service of its Thane. For Taim that remained the greater part of what gave his life meaning.

There was a blinding white sun in the sky, unfettered by clouds for the first time in days. But its light seemed more to expose the world than to illuminate it. It sharpened every edge, bared everything beneath its cold wash.

As Taim walked along Ive’s main street his nostrils were filled with the smell of wet ash. He passed by a long stretch of houses gutted and tumbled by the recent fires. Every detail, every seam and stain of the charred timbers, every smoke scar smearing across the stonework, was clear, precisely delineated by this acute winter light. He could hear an argument somewhere, a man and woman raging at one another. He could hear a baby crying too, off in another direction. In the raw, despairing need of that wail he sensed the expression of something deep. Something of the tune to which the world now danced.

He found Torcaill at the town’s edge, standing with a dozen of his men. They were watching a band of townsfolk struggling eastwards across a field, leading a pair of mules that bore huge packs.

“There are scores of them leaving now,” Torcaill muttered. “They think Ive’s finished.”

“They’re right,” Taim said. “Where are they going?”

“I don’t think they know that themselves. Most head east, hoping to lose themselves in the mountains or the woods.”

“They’ll have a hard time of it out there. Bad weather, not enough food.”

“They will. Worse than hard, a lot of them. But it’s their choice. If they lack the spirit to fight for their town, their Blood, they must bear the consequences.”

Taim glanced sideways at the younger man. Torcaill’s vehemence was striking, and his eyes as he watched the departing townsfolk gleamed with a cold contempt. That anger that lurked beneath so many surfaces now was there, unforgiving, judging.

“They want to live,” Taim murmured. “Keep their families, their children, alive. There’s no shame in that. They’ve already seen indisputable proof that we can’t keep the Black Road out of their town. If I wore their clothes, I’d do the same.”

A flock of birds shot up from a copse beyond the field. They sprayed out in all directions from the treetops, then veered back together and went arrowing together out of sight into the east.

“How’s your leg?” Torcaill asked.

Taim shrugged. “Wound’s not gone bad so far. Any word from the scouts?”

“Half of them have disappeared,” sighed Torcaill. “Killed somewhere out there, or fled perhaps. As for the rest… there’re Tarbains burning farms half a day west of here. The army you fought on the south road is still there, camped at some village. There’s another, bigger, in the hills to the west. My men saw their fires last night. They could be on us tomorrow, if they choose.”

Taim nodded. “We’re finished, then. Here, at least. If we stay, we’re done.”

“Perhaps.” Torcaill’s assent was grudging. He wanted to fight. “Have you talked to Orisian about it?”

“He knows it as well as we do. He wants to meet with us, all of us, this afternoon. After the oath-taking. I think he’ll tell us then what he means to do.”

Torcaill pushed forefinger and thumb into his eyes, grinding away the tiredness Taim knew must be lodged there. Nobody was sleeping well.

“They’re to go ahead with that, then?” the younger man asked heavily. “The oath-taking, I mean?”

“Why not?” Taim said.

Torcaill shrugged, but made no reply.

“Orisian is Thane of our Blood.” Taim turned away, heading back into the town’s heart. “Those who wish to take the oath in his name have the right. The duty.”

“But we’ve no Oathmen, have we?” Torcaill called after him. “They’re all dead. Or lost.”

“I’m to do it,” Taim said as he walked, perhaps too softly for the other man to hear. “I’m to wield the knife.”

The boy was eight years old. Small and nervous. Perhaps more than nervous, for he paled as his gaze settled upon the knife held in his mother’s open palm.

“In the name of Sirian and Powll, Anvar and Gahan and Tavan and Croesan, the Thanes who have been; of Orisian oc Lannis-Haig, the Thane who is now; and of the Thanes yet to come, I command you all to hear the bloodoath taken,” Taim intoned. The words sat strangely in his mouth. They were ancient, weighty words that only Oathmen should speak. “I am Thane and Blood, past and future, and this life will be bound to mine. I command you all to mark it.”

The boy was looking up at him now, eyes wide. Taim tried to smile at him, but found the expression difficult, as if it knew it did not truly belong in this moment. He turned instead to the mother, and held out his hand.

“The blade is fresh-forged?” he asked her. “Unbloodied? Unmarked?”

“Never used,” she murmured, and passed the short simple knife to him.

Behind him, Taim could hear feet scraping on the floor as someone shifted position. Not Orisian, he suspected. The Thane had worn a solemn demeanour from the moment this woman first came to him asking that her son should take the bloodoath. The first time his name would be at the centre of this, the ritual heart of his Blood, and it was happening in exile from their rightful lands, in a hall borrowed for the occasion, with a mere warrior playing the makeshift role of Oathman. In the shadow of uncounted deaths. Not how any of them would have wished it to be, yet there was a weight to it, an importance. Taim felt it as much anyone, perhaps more than most. He tightened his grip upon the blade, and moistened his lips. He took hold of the boy’s wrist and gently twisted it to expose the white skin of his underarm.

“You will give of your blood to seal this oath?” he asked the child.

A moment’s silence, and then the boy whispered, “I will.”

“Speak up, boy,” Taim said softly. “Let them hear you.”

“I will.” Louder this time, but still tremulous. Good enough, Taim thought.

“By this oath your life is bound to mine,” he said. “The word of the Thane of Lannis is your law and rule…” His tongue stumbled to a halt. Something had gone awry, and after a moment he realised what it was. Lannis-Haig, of course. It should have been Lannis-Haig. But something hardened in him, and he went on. “Your law and rule, as the word of a father is to a child. Your life is the life of the Lannis Blood.”

He heard the softest of murmurs amongst the onlookers. Some, at least, had noticed his omission. None raised any protest. Such was the nature of the times.

Taim drew the blade across the boy’s arm. He felt the briefest, instinctive tensing of the muscles, the slight tug against his firm grip. The child looked away. It was a shallow cut, and clean. A neat line of blood swelled out, but did not run.

“You pledge your life to the Lannis Blood?” Taim asked.

The boy nodded once, still averting his eyes.

“You must say it,” Taim murmured.

“Yes.”

“You bend the knee to the Thane, who is the Blood?” Taim released the boy’s arm. He set his thumb against the flat of the knife, smearing a trace of the child’s blood across it.

“I do.”

“Then none may come between you and this oath.” Taim stared at the thick fluid smudged across the dull metal. Such small things, this deed, these words, yet containing so much. Containing within their narrow bounds as much of his own life, as much of his history and meaning, as anything could. The mother must have thought the same, to seek out this moment for her son. Fleeing from horrors, she had found herself in an unknown town, destitute, amidst chaos; yet there too she happened to find her Thane, and from that turn of fortune she sought to give her child this boon. Perhaps the boy would not recognise it for the gift it was. Perhaps that would only come later; perhaps never.

“None may come between you and this oath,” Taim said. “By it you set aside all other allegiances. The Blood shall sustain you and bear you up. You shall sustain the Blood. Speak your oath.”

The boy looked up from his wound. And Taim found he could smile at him now, an honest smile of reassurance and encouragement.

“I am Tollen Lanan dar Lannis-Haig… dar Lannis… son of Cammenech and Inossa. By my blood I pledge my life to Lannis. The word of the Thane is my law and rule; it is the root and… and staff of my life. The enemy of the Blood is my enemy. My enemy is the enemy of the Blood. Unto death.”

“Unto death,” Taim said. He pressed the hilt of the oathknife into the boy’s hand, and watched those thin fingers close about it. “Unto death.”

“I didn’t know there were so many of our people in Ive,” Torcaill said, after they had retired to a table in one corner of the barracks’ main hall. Many of those who had gathered to witness the taking of the oath had dispersed. A few remained, scattered around nearby tables, taking grateful advantage of the food provided by the town’s Guard.

“So many?” Orisian said. “Less than a hundred, if you leave out our warriors. A handful, no more.”

“True enough,” Torcaill persisted, through a mouthful of dry bread, “but they’ve come a long way to reach here. There could have been fewer. Far fewer.”

“I suppose so,” Orisian murmured.

Taim watched him as Orisian absently scratched at the scar across his cheek. He looked tired, but there was a certain stillness to him now, a settled quality that seemed new. Perhaps the boy-Tollen-had not been the only one offered an anchor by the taking of his oath.

“Those who’ve come so far already will have to move on again now,” Orisian said quietly. “We should spread the word that their flight’s not finished yet. It’s not safe for any of us to remain here.”

“No,” Taim agreed. He kept his voice low too, recognising Orisian’s instinct to keep such conversation from uninvited ears. Yvane and Eshenna, he noticed, were maintaining a studious, and somewhat contrived, inattention. The two na’kyrim, though they sat at Orisian’s side, paid no heed to his words.

It might well be that these na’kyrim already knew more of his Thane’s thoughts than Taim did himself. He had the sense that Orisian had deliberately excluded him, and Torcaill, and all the other warriors, from much of what passed between the three of them. He neither regretted nor resented that fact. A Thane could take such counsel as he saw fit, and Taim was in any case all but certain that their discussions concerned matters he understood-and desired to understand-nothing of.

“Ive is lost-and so are all who remain here-as soon as the Black Road chooses to make it so,” Orisian said.

“It is,” Taim confirmed. “Tomorrow or the day after. Soon, in any case. Erval tells me the fighting men are already slipping away; fleeing with their families. The only thing that’s delayed the end so far is that the Black Road seem to be losing discipline just as we are. But with or without leadership, they’ll overrun us.”

Orisian nodded. “I mean to take K’rina north.”

A horrified expression instantly appeared on Torcaill’s face.

“North?” the younger warrior gasped. Taim hissed at him, and extended a monitory finger. Out of the corner of his eye, he could already see heads turning at some of the other tables.

Torcaill spoke more softly when he went on, but he did not disguise the disbelief, the disapproval, in his voice. “We’d be stepping from storm into fire if we go north. What safety could we possibly find there?”

“How much can we find anywhere?” Orisian quietly countered. “There’re Black Road armies to the south and the west; too many for us to cut our way through. Nothing to the east but mountains, hunger and cold. Miserable as it is, that’s the best chance for most of these people, but it’s not for us. You want your Thane wandering off to starve in the wilderness? Chased off by the Black Road?”

“But what’s to the north?” Torcaill muttered.

“There’s Highfast,” Orisian said quietly.

“We don’t even know if it’s still standing,” Torcaill said. “It could have a thousand Black Road swords inside it.”

“No,” Orisian replied. He remained entirely calm in the face of Torcaill’s hostile tone. “There were some captives taken in the fighting. Most were killed by the townsfolk, but Erval’s men got one or two into their cellars. I had him… I had him find out what they knew of Highfast.” Orisian failed to suppress the grimace of discomfort-or guilt, perhaps-the words cost him. He looked not at Torcaill but at Taim. “I thought I… I thought we needed to know.”

“Such things must be done sometimes,” Taim said in response to the anguish he saw in those young eyes. It seemed the kindest service he could offer his Thane at that moment. But he wondered where within him Orisian was finding the will to issue such commands. The youth he had once known would never have done so, he thought.

“And you trust their word?” Torcaill muttered.

“If they lied, they took the truth with them to the Sleeping Dark. But those who questioned them didn’t think they were lying.”

“So Highfast has not fallen?” Taim asked.

Orisian shook his head. “They all say not. And whatever rumours have been brought by the Kilkry folk who’ve sought refuge here say the same thing. It makes sense. Why would the Black Road spend any effort on it? It has no great garrison; it guards no road, or harbour, or farms. They know-everybody knows-it’s all but impossible to take by siege, no matter how feebly defended.”

“I thought…” Taim murmured, glancing towards the two na’kyrim, “I thought its defences had already been breached.”

“It was breached by something no walls could keep out,” said Yvane flatly without looking up. “And by something that would leave those walls intact once it departed.”

“What if it didn’t depart?” Torcaill demanded, that provocative edge still sharpening his voice.

Yvane turned slowly, twisting not just her neck but her shoulders round to fix the warrior with a hard, cold stare.

“There were… we felt deaths-na’kyrim dying-on that one day, but not since. We don’t think everyone died. Not every light was snuffed out. Whatever disaster befell Highfast, it was not done to capture a fortress, or win a battle. It may not even have had anything to do with your bitter little war. There are other kinds of struggle. Hard to believe, I’m sure, but true nonetheless.”

Torcaill narrowed his eyes, but lapsed into angry silence.

“Still,” Taim said to Orisian, “Highfast… Once there, we might find there’s no way out.”

And he saw, in Orisian’s eyes, a moment of distraction, of concealment. Of shutters being closed, locking away words that might have been spoken. Anything he says is only part of what’s in his mind, Taim thought. There is more to this, perhaps, than Highfast.

“I see no safety whatever way we turn,” was what Orisian did say. “We’ve already almost lost Yvane and Eshenna and K’rina. Can we keep them safe, or the Kyrinin, even amongst those who are supposed to be our friends? I don’t think so.”

“But your people need their Thane, sire,” Torcaill said. “They need to know that he’s — ”

“I have no people!” Orisian snapped. The sudden anger was transitory, but it startled Torcaill. He winced.

“A few dozen homeless wanderers?” Orisian went on, his composure reasserting itself. “That’s no Blood. And our handful of swords can make no difference when Gyre and Haig are throwing thousands against one another. I can make no difference. I’m no warlord, no hero. Croesan, or Naradin, or Fariel even; any one of them might have been fit to lead armies in the field, and fight great battles alongside their men. Not me.”

He did not sound apologetic or ashamed; he merely spoke a truth he believed.

“You have Captains to do that for you,” Taim said quietly.

“Yes, I do. Great ones. But I don’t have the armies for them to lead. Our Blood is broken, Taim. Our people are dead, enslaved or scattered; our castles are overthrown. We are exiled from our lands.”

“Sooner or later, Haig’s strength will tell.”

“Will it? I don’t know. The war against the armies of the Black Road: perhaps it’s not the one that really matters. Or not the only one, at least.”

“Aeglyss, you mean?”

“The world’s changing around us. You feel it, don’t you?” Orisian looked questioningly at Taim, and at Torcaill. “Can’t you feel the twisting of things in your heart, your mind? I don’t sleep, so dark are my dreams. If I walk in Ive’s streets, in every eye I see tinder, waiting only for some spark to turn it into a raging fire. I killed-and you did, Torcaill-Kilkry men who had no thought save to shed blood. They’re supposed to be our allies. It’s all slipping away into chaos.”

He had been leaning forward in his chair, tightened by an urgency, a fierce desire to convey what he saw and felt. Now he slumped back.

“It may be that when we seized K’rina, we broke a thread in a pattern that was being woven. It may have been a mistake. I need to see if it can be undone. Anyway, Torcaill, I’ll only ask you to come as far as Ive Bridge. Once we’re sure the way to Highfast is clear, there’s something else I’ll want of you.”

“You need ask nothing of me, sire,” the warrior said sharply. “Only command. Your will governs us in all of this.”

He clearly meant what he said, despite his earlier truculence. Orisian only nodded, and Taim thought he saw a hint of sadness in the set of the Thane’s mouth. There were burdens there still, in the making of choices on behalf of others and the exercise of authority. However hard he tries, Taim thought, whatever cruelty he might permit in his name, this one will never have quite the cold instinct for it. He will never sit easy on a throne. But then perhaps Orisian did not, after all, truly believe there was any throne left for him to sit upon.

They each went their own way from that table: Orisian to speak with Ess’yr and Varryn, Taim to see what supplies he might buy or otherwise acquire without arousing alarm or suspicion amongst their Kilkry hosts, Torcaill to ready the warriors. Taim got no further than the outer yard of the barracks before he became aware of soft footsteps trailing him. He turned to find Yvane drawing near, stern-faced.

“Your Thane folds in on himself,” she said. “Withdraws. He feels himself alone and adrift, and in response makes himself so. There are shadows, calling him into themselves.”

“He has been roughly treated by the world of late.”

“For many years, I think. I don’t condemn him. All I say is, these are dangerous times for those with flaws in their armour. The houses with cracked foundations are the first to fall in a storm.”

“I didn’t know you were a master builder,” Taim muttered. “Or an armourer, for that matter.” The na’kyrim’s manner irritated him, though he recognised her intent. She did, he believed, feel a certain sincere concern for Orisian. As far as Taim could tell, the young Thane was uniquely honoured in that regard, since no one else save other na’kyrim seemed to merit it.

“He needs friends,” said Yvane, “and may need them still more before long. Your hothead of a swordsman was part right: we are stepping from storm into fire, but this storm isn’t one we can leave behind. It goes with us. Inside us.”

“Have you advised Orisian against it, then? If you think this leads us into…”

“Ha. You can be certain there’s none less eager than me to revisit whatever’s left of Highfast. But Orisian follows his instincts. And he may be right. Perhaps the only way to calm this storm, quench this fire, is from the inside.”

“Well, then. I’ll walk at his side, wherever he goes.”

“I know. You seem to have the calmest head around here, the least open to the poison that’s leaking into so many others. That’s good. I don’t know what it is that anchors you, but whatever it is, I hope it’s stubborn enough to last. Stay close by Orisian, if you care for him, and watch him. If his sight becomes clouded, he’ll need those whose eyes remain clear.”

“There’s nothing wrong with his sight,” Taim said, bristling at the implied lack of faith in Orisian’s resilience, or his judgement. “Anyway, you’ve never seemed shy of making your opinion known. Don’t you plan on being there, to polish his eyes for him?”

And the sudden sadness in her pale face-harbinger, it seemed to him, of a desolate despair that the na’kyrim barely held at bay-startled him into shame at his bitter tone.

“As I said,” Yvane sighed, “these are dangerous times for those with flaws in their armour. But we na’kyrim, we have no armour at all against this. We’re all flaw, our heads wide open to it. Believe me, I fear for your beloved Thane, but I like my own chances a good deal less than his. There may come a time when the very last people he should be listening to will be those who’ve woken to the Shared.”

She hung her head, as if momentarily defeated by the darkness of possible futures. Taim had never seen her give such an unguarded impression of vulnerability. He felt an urge to reach out and put a comforting hand on her arm, but he did not. He suspected there was enough prickly pride left in there to make any such gesture inadvisable.

“Just watch him,” she murmured. “Help him if he needs it, and if you can. That’s all I’m saying.”

“It doesn’t need saying,” Taim said gently. “I’d never do otherwise.”

Yvane nodded once and turned away, disappearing into the barracks. Taim looked after her, filled for a moment or two with an impotent sense of foreboding, not just for Yvane or Orisian, but all of them. Everyone caught in this churning maelstrom.