Fall of Thanes

VIII

Ess’yr scaled a mighty tree and crouched there, far above, in the crook of a branch. Sunlight had cracked the clouds and it spilled in pale abundance down through the boughs, patterning the forest floor with a web of shadows and ponds of light. It warmed the tan hues of Ess’yr’s hide jacket. Breathed life and lustre into her hair. Gazing up at her, Orisian squinted into the unfamiliar glare. He had to raise a hand to put a protective shadow over his eyes. How long since he had done that? He could even feel, when a beam of that light fell upon his cheek and his jaw, just a murmur of warmth in it. A whisper, presaging a new season. That heat stirred memories of other years in his skin. The only place it could not penetrate was the thick scar where a White Owl spear had opened his face. That remained cold and dead.

“Can you see anything?” he said. He did not call it out, for though she was high, she would hear him well enough.

“The valley.” Her voice came drifting down from the canopy, as natural as falling leaves. “I see your valley.”

The land sloped away on either side of them, to north and south. Southwards, sunwards, there was only Anlane, rolling to distant horizons. Northwards-Orisian turned that way now, though he could see nothing through the tangle of tree trunks and branches-northwards lay his homeland.

“How far?” he asked the treetops.

“Tomorrow,” Ess’yr replied. “Late tomorrow, we could be under an open sky.”

Murmurs passed amongst the warriors gathered at the base of the towering oak. Orisian could not read their tone. It might be anticipation, unease, even unrest. K’rina was seated with her back against the massive bole. Yvane was trying to ease water into her, trickling it out from a skin onto unresponsive lips. Neither was paying attention, of course. They had become almost a world unto themselves, just the two of them, bound together-and separated from the others-by their alloyed blood. It pained Orisian, but he understood it too. At some level, he understood it all too clearly.

He let his gaze ascend once more, tracing the line of the tree trunk up through the great spray of limbs, seeing her there. The dappled shade made her almost seem a part of the tree, or of the forest itself. Had he not known she was there, he would never have detected her. Then she moved, extending a long arm and shifting her weight smoothly so that her leg could come reaching down. She turned and bent her head to look for that next foothold, and for a moment her eyes met Orisian’s, and they looked at one another, she above and he below, through the fretwork of branches.

Then she was moving down, as easily as if she descended a stairway. As he watched her, Orisian had a sudden vision of a young girl-Anyara-in another tree, in another time, doing just this, but coming loose and falling, tumbling down, rattling from bough to bough all the way down. He could hear the sickening sound of it, and could feel the shock and lurching fear that had filled his child’s breast. Now, in Anlane, he lifted his hand to his mouth to still the very cry he had let slip all those years ago.

But it was Ess’yr, not his sister, who was coming down towards him, and he blinked his way clear of the vivid memory. He anchored himself with the sight of this graceful form moving with utter confidence back to earth. She jumped the last of it, landing lightly on the balls of her feet in front of Orisian. Her knees folded and she sank down onto her haunches, recovered her spear from where she had left it by the tree, and straightened. She wiped her free hand across her upper chest, leaving tiny fragments of loose bark on the hide.

“Late tomorrow,” she said quietly, and he nodded.

The sound of movement some little way ahead, down the dipping northern slope, drew every gaze and had men reaching for their swords, but it was only Taim Narran and the two warriors he had taken with him, struggling free of thick and brittle undergrowth.

“No sign of trouble,” Taim said as he came up towards them. “Varryn says some White Owl have passed along a trail down at the bottom in the last day or two, but they were moving quickly. And there was some smokesign from a long way to the east. Too far off to be much of a worry yet.”

“We’ve been lucky,” said Orisian.

From the corner of his eye, he saw the grimace of disgust that flashed across one of the warriors” face. He understood it at once. Eagan had died; had been killed by Orisian himself. No luck attended upon such a journey. How could such a thing have left him so unmarked that he should utter such foolish words? He was ashamed, but bewildered too. For a moment, he was unsure whether he had in truth killed Eagan. It had the quality of delusion, of nightmare, that memory.

“Not so lucky,” said Yvane, still squatting down beside K’rina.

Orisian looked sharply at her, wondering if-as she had sometimes before-she knew the pattern of his thoughts without his needing to say a word. But she was on another track.

“There shouldn’t really be any White Owls at all wandering around these parts at this time of year. They should all be cosied away in their winter camps, telling themselves tales and tending their fires. Don’t start thinking we’ve luck in our company. They might be busy hunting each other now, but a spear a’an will be just as happy to make our acquaintance if they stumble across us, I’m sure.”

Orisian nodded. Beats of pain were taking hold in his temples. He could feel himself drifting again, something in him trying to separate itself, to sink away and turn to other thoughts, other dreams. The forest around him, even the ground beneath his feet, was beginning to seem unreal and thin. If he reached out, he thought, he might pierce it; put a rent into the world and see what lay beyond it.

He shook himself and began to walk downhill. He was frightened to look into the faces of the men he needed to follow him, fearful of what he might see there.

“Let’s cover what ground we can today and tonight,” he said. “Then tomorrow we’ll see. We’ll see where we are, and what to do.”

“All right,” Taim was saying briskly behind him. “You heard. There’s nothing to be gained by lingering here.”

For a time, as the day dwindled into dusk, Ess’yr walked alongside him.

“I had forgotten… until just now, I had forgotten the first man I killed,” he said softly to her. “Do you remember? You were there.”

She did not reply, but he could tell from the way she held her head, the way she curbed her stride to match his own, that she would listen, if he talked. It was not easy to do so, for his thoughts grew less clear and less easily herded with every passing hour. But she would listen, and there was no one else he would be so willing to speak to.

“The Tarbain I-we-killed,” he said, “at the cottage in the Car Criagar. He was the first, and I had almost forgotten what that felt like. How it made me feel. Now, I have killed another man-Eagan, his name was Eagan-and there was almost no burden to it. He was one of my own men, one of my own Blood, and his death had too little weight to it.”

“It was necessary,” Ess’yr said quietly. “Varryn saw. He told me.”

“Perhaps. I don’t know. There’s a lot I’m not sure about. It was not something I ever wanted… I never wanted to be able to kill men and have it be so… light.”

The ground was falling away slowly but steadily beneath their feet. Anlane was gradually diminishing itself around them, yielding pace by pace to the pull of the great valley that lay to the north. It was as if the very shape of the earth conspired to draw them down towards whatever waited by the Glas, in Kan Avor.

“I think of the life I lived once,” Orisian murmured, watching the green grass and the broken, withered leaves, “before my mother and my brother died, and it’s as if I’m on a ship, and that life is an island, falling away behind me. I can’t reach it. I can see the sunlight on it; I can hear waves breaking on its shore; I can remember, almost, how good it felt to be there. But I can’t reach it. It’s further away every day.”

“Where does your ship go?”

“What?”

“This ship you are on. Where does it go?”

“I don’t know.”

“All journeys have the same ending.”

“Do they?”

“You call it the Sleeping Dark. We call it Darlankyn.”

“I suppose so. I hope not yet, though. Not yet.”

She was quiet for a time, and Orisian fell into the rhythm of his own steps. He could hear-acutely, it seemed to him-the fall of his feet, the rustling of the fallen leaves beneath them, the soft sighing of grass under his heel and against his shin. Yet he heard nothing of Ess’yr. She moved through this place in silence, as if she had no substance. He wondered for a moment, without alarm or distress, whether she might not be an entirely imagined presence, summoned up by his wandering mind. Perhaps the real Ess’yr was somewhere up ahead, hunting and tracking her way through the forest with her breath; perhaps he walked now with the Ess’yr he longed for, not the one who was.

But she spoke again, and she spoke of things his mind could surely not have woven for itself.

“There is some kind of return in every journey, in every life. When the God Who Laughed made my people-all my people, all Kyrinin-he walked across the world and came, at the end, back to the place where he began. There are mountains, in the lands of the Boar clan now: they are Eltenn Omrhynan. First and Last, perhaps you would say. They are the knot in the circle of his journey, the beginning and the end. An important place to us. But what he did on the journey was more important. In the shape made he upon the land, he spoke a truth. Endings and beginnings are smaller things than the movement between them, and the manner of it.”

“That sounds like Inurian,” Orisian said, and though once he might have regretted reminding her of her lost lover, now that hardly seemed to matter.

She said nothing at first, and they strode on, side by side, beneath the leaning, leafless trees of Anlane.

Then: “It does.”

“Do you think of him often?” Orisian asked. “I do, now.”

“Yes,” she said very softly.

Orisian felt gentle sorrow walking between them, like a friend: not separating them but linking them.

“He would not want us to remember only the ending of him, I suppose,” said Orisian. “It was the movement that came before that mattered. And the manner of it.”

“Yes,” said Ess’yr again after a few heartbeats, a few paces.

And then she lifted her head and looked towards the sun, and lengthened her stride and moved on ahead of him, returning to Anlane’s embrace. Orisian watched her go this time without any pangs of regret or trepidation. This did not feel-as so many such moments had in the past-like a parting.