Fall of Thanes

II

Yvane was trembling, Orisian realised. They had paused beside a pool into which the waters of a stream plunged from a low cliff. Moss and ferns festooned the rock face, a miniature, verdant abundance still resplendent in the green that winter had stolen from the rest of the forest. These were no mighty falls. The column of water that churned down into the pool was slight by comparison with that Orisian had seen at Sarn’s Leap, long ago. Still the sound, the cold mist that drifted over his face, was enough to make him think of Inurian. Enough to prickle his heart with needles of guilt and shame. They had left the na’kyrim there alone, and he had died. He had died on his own. What a fearful, awful thing that seemed to Orisian now: that a man so gentle and so deserving of better, had died alone, amongst enemies.

Focusing his attention upon Yvane gave him a handhold with which to resist the tug of those lacerating memories. She sat crosslegged beside K’rina, who was curled into a ball, arms folded about her knees. As Orisian watched, Yvane held out one of her hands before her, the fingers spread. She stared at it. Even from a few paces away, Orisian could see that it shook. Yvane frowned in concentration. She was trying to still her hand, Orisian realised. She failed, and let it fall, palsied, into her lap.

“Is it bad?” he asked quietly.

“I can smell wolfenkind,” she replied. Her voice was somehow different. It had an attenuated fragility to it that was new. “The memory of them. I can hear them running through a forest far older than this one. It sounds like death.”

“It’s not long now,” Orisian said. “Another few days, that’s all. Then we can — ”

“What?” said Yvane sharply, glaring at him. “You really think it will be that easy? What is it you think is going to happen?”

Orisian stared blankly at her. She was changing, he thought. Bit by bit, she was becoming someone he did not know. Perhaps they all were.

“It won’t be easy for her,” Yvane muttered, looking down at K’rina. The other na’kyrim appeared entirely at peace, hugging herself into a safe, quiet ball.

Splashing behind him distracted Orisian. He twisted around. The warriors were along the edge of the pool into which the falls tumbled. Some were drinking its clear waters, others soaking tired and blistered feet. One had waded out, barefoot, into the middle of the pool. He stood there, unsteady on hidden rocks, arms outstretched as the spray from the waterfall threw shifting, tenuous veils across him. He was, Orisian saw to his alarm, weeping. He made no sound yet his face was contorted with grief, his cheeks bunched in anguish.

“Eagan, get out of there,” Taim Narran was saying.

The warrior gave no sign of having heard the command. He drew his arms slowly in, closed his hands over his face. He was shaken by silent sobs.

“You’ll not be fit for walking if you don’t come out of there,” Taim said, more sternly now. He was not angry yet, but there was urgency there.

Orisian rose to his feet. Eagan was entirely unresponsive to his Captain’s voice. Orisian could feel fear settling itself over him like a cape, and he did not know why. A flicker of movement drew his eyes up to the top of the waterfall. Varryn was there, tall against the pale sky. He and Ess’yr had been-as they always were now-scouting ahead, roving like hunting dogs through the forest. Now he stared down with the piercing, attentive eyes of a hawk. Even as Orisian watched, the Kyrinin set down his spear and unslung his bow from his back.

“Wait…” Orisian said, but he said it softly, and the words were drowned out as Eagan took a few lurching, splashing steps back towards the edge of the pool.

The warrior’s hands fell away from his face. With one, he began to tug helplessly at the thongs that bound the neck of his jerkin; with the other he reached out to Taim. No more tears fell, but still his expression was one of despairing horror.

“I can’t…” he gasped out.

He sounded very young to Orisian. He sounded like a distraught, helpless child.

“Get out of there,” Taim said.

He held out a hand. Eagan locked his grasp about Taim’s wrist and hauled violently, dragging him instantly face forward into the water. Taim vanished below the surface with a booming, hollow splash. Eagan surged up onto the bank and staggered back the way they had come. His sodden leggings spilled clouds of droplets. His naked feet, bleached by the cold of the stream, slithered on the wet grass.

“Wait,” Orisian shouted, moving to intercept Eagan.

Two of the other warriors took hold of their companion, grabbing handfuls of his collar and sleeves. He howled and threw one off. He struck the other on the cheekbone with the heel of his hand, and the man stumbled back.

“I can’t,” Eagan cried. “We can’t!”

Orisian stepped in front of him and stretched out his arms to block Eagan’s path.

“It’s all right,” Orisian said, the stupidity, the inadequacy of the words ringing in his ears.

His eyes met Eagan’s, and he knew in that instant that the man was lost. That something in him had given way. He saw something else there, in those wide and desperate eyes, and it set his hand moving towards the hilt of his sword before his mind recognised it. Beyond Eagan, Taim was rising, water pouring from him.

“No,” said Orisian as his sword began to slide from its scabbard.

Eagan’s own blade was slipping free as he staggered towards his Thane, as heavy and inevitable as a falling tree. There was a thud, and a spasm of distraction twitched across Eagan’s face. The feathers of an arrow trembled above his shoulder. The shaft had come in steeply, from the top of the waterfall, to lance down into his back. It was not enough to stop him, though it gave Orisian time to get his sword free and raise it to block Eagan’s ragged swing.

Orisian staggered back.

“Eagan!” another of the men shouted as he came up behind. Confusion and anger and shock writhed together in that single word.

Eagan spun around, and his sword spun with him. It took his comrade high on the side of the face, and the man fell leadenly back, his eyes wide in surprise as the blade streaked his blood across the air. Another arrow darted down and found its target, but Eagan did not fall.

He turned back towards Orisian, raising his sword above his head as if to bring it bludgeoning down. He gave out a strained keening, a grief-stricken, doomed wail. Orisian drove the point of his sword up into his stomach, under his ribs. Eagan was struck abruptly dumb. He dropped his own weapon and slumped sideways.

Orisian stared down at him, listening to his shallow, faltering breaths. Eagan’s eyes were open. They stared at the grass into which his head was pressed. The spaces between his breaths grew longer and longer.

Taim came striding up from the pool, hair pasted across his forehead, water still falling from his chin and the cuffs of his jerkin.

“Stand back, sire,” he said to Orisian.

Taim kicked Eagan’s sword away and knelt to look into the man’s face.

“He’s finished,” Orisian said bleakly.

Taim only nodded as he rose to his feet once more. Eagan was not breathing any more. Nor was the man he had struck with his sword. The others were all standing motionless, with the waterfall splattering away behind them, staring either at the dead men or at Orisian. In every eye that was upon him Orisian detected-or thought he detected-accusation. He looked up to the head of the falls. Varryn was still there, silhouetted, unstringing his bow. Orisian nodded once towards the Kyrinin warrior. Varryn simply turned away and disappeared from sight.

“Not long now,” Orisian whispered to no one but himself. “Please.”

The dead White Owls were strewn all along the eastern flank of a long, low, forested ridge. The trees were sparse along the crest of the ridge, and many of the corpses lay exposed to the sky. They were not alone. Ravens spiralled overhead, croaking in protest at this interruption to their feasting. As Orisian trod carefully between the bodies, a buzzard swept heavily up from a nearby tree and glided away over the canopy. The thin snow that persisted on this higher ground was patterned with innumerable tracks: the prints of the men and women and children who had died here intermingled with those of their killers, overlaid by the marks of the eaters of the dead. Several of the corpses had been opened or gnawed. Fox and crow and bear had been busy.

Orisian did not know what to think. He had never seen so many Kyrinin dead. Although these were notionally his enemies, and their clan had taken Rothe’s life and made war upon Ess’yr’s people, he could not help but lament the transformation of so much grace and power into sanguine ugliness. Without life to animate them, the bodies looked ungainly. Pathetic almost, with their disordered, frozen clothes, their scattered bundles of belongings. He could make no connection between these sad shells and the Kyrinin he had seen, and known, and fought in the weeks since Winterbirth.

Yvane and K’rina lingered further up the slope. The bulbous bare rocks almost hid them from sight. Taim and his men were moving amongst the bodies, each following a solitary, silent path from corpse to corpse. Looking for what? Orisian wondered. There was no life here, not even its faintest residue. Taking the measure of death, perhaps. Feeling its texture, learning afresh its look.

Ess’yr and Varryn were coming up towards him, emerging from the deeper shadows down there in the thick forest, where the dead and the tree trunks and the dark ground merged into uniform gloom. Varryn’s expression filled Orisian with an imprecise, all-encompassing regret. The Kyrinin was not smiling, but his eyes gleamed with restrained excitement.

“It is good,” Varryn said as they drew near.

“No,” Orisian said. “No, it’s not.”

Ess’yr held out the bloodied stub of an arrow. It had been broken off halfway along the shaft.

“White Owl,” she said. Orisian was glad not to hear her brother’s eagerness reflected in her. But nor did he hear any trace of sorrow, any hint of distress at this slaughter.

“The enemy kill each other. Like a snared beast, they tear at their own legs. Their own bodies. It will make our path easier.”

“Easier,” Orisian echoed. He stooped down to the dead White Owl girl who lay at his feet. Half-dusted with snow, she was face down. Her arms lay neatly in at her sides, one leg bent, the other quite straight. She was small. No more than ten years old, he guessed. He picked up a little bow from where it had spilled out of the bedding roll she had been carrying. Like a toy, he thought. And remembered that he had seen the same thing in the hands of a Fox child, long ago by the banks of the River Dihrve.

“Let’s keep moving,” he said. There was a foulness about this place. He wanted only to leave it far behind.

As the two Kyrinin trotted down into the next broad vale in Anlane’s endless undulations, Orisian noticed one of Taim’s warriors staring after them. There was no warmth in the man’s fixed gaze. No sentiment at all, in fact, save mistrust. Suspicion. We’re all snared now, Orisian thought. Every one of us.

Across the moors north of Dun Aygll, the host of Black Road spread. It splintered and crumbled, like a vast flock of birds that had ridden fierce winds but found them, in the end, too potent and been scattered by them. It consumed everything it encountered: farms and villages and the fragile remnants of the Haig army. And it consumed itself. Tarbains hunted stragglers of any ilk, slaughtered and stripped them. Parties of Battle Inkallim rode back and forth across the bare and sodden land, seeking to reassert control over this vast beast, only to find it ungovernable. As often as not, they encountered nothing but madness and frenzy and feral bloodlust. Where they could not impose order, they imposed death instead, for there was a kind of madness upon many of them as well.

The masterless villages on the eastern shore of the Vaywater, where no Blood and no Thane held sway, turned on one another. The fishermen and goatherds and hunters and weavers laid down the tools of their crafts and took up knives and axes and spears instead. They fought over disputed fields and over stolen goats. They paid no heed to other concerns, and one settlement-Karlakan-was thus taken unawares when a wandering band of Heron Kyrinin, straying perversely far from their territories, descended upon it in the night. By dawn, blood was running down into the waters of the great lake and curling away in stained eddies.

In Koldihrve, at the mouth of the Vale of Tears, the men of the town hunted na’kyrim after nightfall.

The Heron and the Hawk, who had planted peace staffs along their boundaries only one season ago, disinterred all the grievances that had been so recently buried. The young men and the young women took up their spears once more. They raided, as they had done before, but this time they went not in their tens but in their scores, and wherever the spear a’ans went, they left not even the youngest of children or the frailest of elders alive.

And in Anlane the White Owl Kyrinin made war upon themselves. A few who had doubted all along the intoxicating promises of the na’kyrim Aeglyss, and found themselves dismayed by the fierce passions that now seemed to rule their fellows, spoke out. And were slain. The last of them was cut apart on the hard ground before the lodge of the Voice herself. But the killing, and the dissent, once begun did not stop. Though many of the warriors were long gone, venturing far beyond the clan’s territory to assuage their lately rediscovered martial pride and hunger for the blood of their people’s myriad enemies, enough remained to fight over every trifle, and even the least warlike, the youngest, the oldest, the most infirm, found enough passion burning in them to lift a spear or set arrow to string.

The dyke had been broken, and through the breach came flooding every resentment and division. Rumour and accusation spun all through Anlane like seeds upon the wind. Vo’ans began to break apart, families and warbands taking to paths that would normally remain untrodden until the summer, many neither knowing nor caring whether they were fleeing or pursuing, hunter or hunted. The wise chanted in their tents, questing after truth, but no answers came. Only fear and confusion. But still they chanted, and hoped for clarity, while outside and everywhere in the Thousand Tree-Clad Valleys the bloodshed continued.