Fall of Thanes

IV

The cottage smelled of abandonment. The outside, the winter, had seeped into its fabric, softened it and made it no longer habitation but incipient ruin. There were browned leaves on the floor, blown in through open windows. Dark stains tracked the invasive waters that had found their way in through an unmended roof. It was cold and empty in the way only a place that had long lacked a fire in its hearth, and voices around its table, could be.

Orisian ran his fingers over the carved bowls that were still neatly stacked on a shelf and the bottles draped with cobwebs. The detritus of lives now lost or driven off. There were no bodies, at least. Orisian could remember all too clearly another woodsman’s cottage, on the slopes of the Car Criagar, where a good deal of blood had been spilled. That place had smelled much worse.

Ess’yr lay on a low, hard bed. Orisian saw in her something entirely new: a fragile vulnerability. Pangs of a powerful emotion swept through him, but it was no simple thing. He felt it acutely, but could not fully understand it. Guilt, longing, fear. All those things and perhaps more.

“Can I get you something?” he asked softly, not wanting to rouse K’rina from her torpor on the other side of the room. “Water? Food?”

“Nothing,” Ess’yr whispered.

He sat on the edge of the bed; felt the lightest of contact between the small of his back and her thigh. She appeared to be on the brink of sleep or unconsciousness. Her eyes, as she looked up into his face, would lose their focus now and again, and drift, then return to him and be sharp and clear once more. Even her intricate tattoos, the token of the lives she had taken, seemed to have lost some of their colour and faded a little into the pallor of her skin.

“You would never have been here if you had not found me that night,” Orisian said. “Winterbirth.”

He could see in her eyes that she heard him, and understood him, but she said nothing. If she felt pain, she did not show it. Now, as ever, she drew upon reserves of calm and composure he had seen in no one else, calm that exceeded the capacity of the world to assail it. It was, he suddenly realised, something precious beyond limit to him: that there should be someone near at hand who had within them that imperturbable strength, that resilient self-possession and balance. Someone, he thought, who had found that core of grace and peace and persistence that he had unknowingly been seeking himself since the Heart Fever stole the better part of his life away.

Inurian had had it in some measure. Ess’yr had it in abundance. Orisian looked at her and saw… he saw another world, another life. In those sculpted features and their unutterable grace he saw a world that should have been. One in which there had been no deaths, no Heart Fever even; in which there was still laughter, and companionship, and a lightness of spirit. He was not sure whether he was a part of that world he glimpsed. He did not know whether, in it, he would have found her. He did not even know whether what he saw came from within her, or within him, or from somewhere else entirely. But it was, despite that, utterly beautiful to him. It was filled with light, and that light shone in her alabaster skin, and in her eyes, and in her fine, frail lips.

He reached out carefully, and touched her. As he had imagined doing so often. He laid his fingertips on the curve of her chin, and felt a gossamer strand of her gleaming hair brush the back of his hand. Through his fingers he felt her warmth, and it seemed to him that that was a part of the light too. He leaned towards her, sinking as if towards a dream.

And her hand was on his chest, gentle but firm. The slightest roll of her head took her skin away from his fingers. He felt the pressure of her hand on his breastbone. It was not urgent, not hard, but it was calmly insistent. She slowly pushed him back and lifted his face away from hers.

“No,” she said, soft as the movement of a feather, and the light receded. What he had seen, that place, that possibility he had caught a distant sight of, faded. He felt alone and reduced. But he nodded, just once.

Ess’yr let her arm fall back to her side. She closed her eyes. Orisian rose from the bed and walked away. He could remember the light, just. He could remember how it had made him feel. But not what it contained. Not precisely what it was that might have been.

Outside the cottage he found a colourless world, desolate. The stumps of felled trees. The cold prickle of drizzle on the air. A muffled, sluggish silence.

Yvane was sitting on a stump not far away. She was picking dried berries from a clay pot she must have found somewhere inside, placing them one by one into her mouth. She watched Orisian as he emerged and stood blinking up at the featureless clouds. He turned away from her. There was a path beaten into the grass. He followed it to the side of a tiny stream running in a narrow cut between concealing clumps of grass and rushes. He knelt down and scooped searingly cold water over his face. It ran from his chin and bubbled on his lips as he breathed through it.

He sat there and looked back towards the cabin. It looked lifeless, even now. It looked as though it belonged to the brooding forest that waited just a little way up the slope. Yvane was walking towards him, still eating those berries as she came. He ignored her, and stared at the timber walls, the slanting roof, the collapsed woodshed, as if the cottage and its contents were a mystery he might unravel by examination; as if it held a secret truth. But his mind was empty. For the first time in days-weeks-there was a hollow silence in him. Nothing.

“She will probably live, if the wound stays clean,” Yvane said, looking down at him. “If she’s tended.”

He nodded but said nothing. The na’kyrim offered him the little pot and the last of the wizened fruits it contained. He waved it away.

“If Varryn finds the medicines he’s out looking for now,” Yvane added. “It’s not the best of seasons for it — ”

“She will live,” Orisian interrupted her.

Yvane sniffed. “Probably.” She lifted the pot and tipped its contents into her mouth.

“She will,” Orisian said.

Yvane bent and raised a handful of water to her lips.

“I hope you’re right,” she said, after she had swallowed it down.

Movement at the door of the cottage drew Orisian’s attention. K’rina came hesitantly out into the damp, stumbling, her arms folded across her chest. She made her way northwards over the dark grass. Yvane saw Orisian was looking that way, and turned to follow his gaze. She sighed.

“I’ll…” the na’kyrim began, but Orisian shook his head.

“No need. See?”

Taim and one of the warriors were coming, returning from their foray out into the fogs and rains of the valley. They trudged steadily and slowly up towards the cabin, adjusting their path without a break in stride to intercept K’rina’s weaving course. Orisian and Yvane watched the two burly men close on the oblivious na’kyrim and gather her up, turn her about and ease her back towards the bed she had risen from. They were gentle, as if they shepherded a sick child, or a simple one.

“Before we left Highfast, I spoke with Eshenna about K’rina,” Yvane said.

Orisian stood up. The movement dizzied him.

“She was a kind and gentle woman, from the sound if it,” Yvane went on. “Too kind and gentle, perhaps. She cared for Aeglyss, back there in Dyrkyrnon, when no one else would.”

“Don’t, Yvane.”

“No, you should hear this. Why not? She made good fish traps, apparently. And knew the best places to put them. She caught a lot of fish. She used to sing to the children. Old Huanin songs. Her parents were — ”

“Yvane…”

“Why don’t you want to know?”

Orisian could have left her, walked away from her and taken refuge in the cottage. But something in him would not permit that. Something chose to face her. They were both quite calm. For once, there was not the slightest trace of argument between them.

“Because it’s not knowledge I can do anything with,” he said to her.

“Her parents… Ah, I can’t remember their names. Eshenna told me, but it’s so hard to keep things clear now.” Yvane rubbed her cheek wearily. “But it doesn’t matter. The point is that she had parents, they gave her life. She was a child once, and grew, and lived and thought and hoped and wanted. All of that wasn’t for this. Not be made into… this. To be used.”

“I know. She had a life. I know that. She didn’t deserve any of this. But how many of our lives turn out the way we hope they will? Na’kyrim, Huanin, Kyrinin. We none of us deserved any of this, did we?”

“It’s her love for Aeglyss… Whatever’s been done to her, it’s hung on the hook of her love for him. She’s the moth to his flame, or maybe it’s the other way round now. But it started with love.”

“It’s too late for this, Yvane. This is where we are. There’s no going back, no unpicking what’s brought us here.”

“You’re taking her to her death.”

“We don’t know that,” Orisian snapped. “Unless you know more than you’ve told me, we can’t be sure. Do you? Have you kept something from me?”

Yvane returned his gaze sternly.

“I know nothing more than you,” she said. “But don’t pretend you understand less than you do.”

“I might have led us all to our deaths. All of us, Yvane. We could all die. Every one of us. Do you want to know the name of every man’s parents? What about Ess’yr? Shall we drag her from her bed, demand that she shares with us her family, her life? I don’t know the name of her mother or her father. I don’t know where she was born, where she has been. I don’t know… Shall we…”

He faltered, suddenly becoming aware of how his voice was rising. There was a dampness on his face and when he touched a fingertip to it, he was surprised to discover that he was weeping.

“She will live,” Yvane said quietly.

“I…” Orisian mumbled, hearing the words as if someone else spoke them, “I… was born in Castle Kolglas. I learned how to hawk with my sister and my brother, along the shore. My mother sang. It was the greatest happiness… It was like joy when she sang. Her name was Lairis. My father’s name was Kennet. And my brother’s… my brother’s name was Fariel.”

He shook his head.

“We die,” he said. “We all die. Known or unknown, mourned or unmourned. All that we are, and all that we have been, passes. We all come to that same end, and it’s neither just nor deserved nor glorious. You don’t need me to tell you that, Yvane. And you know as well as I do, better than I do, that all of this-Aeglyss, everything-all of it has to stop, somehow. If it doesn’t… if it doesn’t we’re all lost.”

A brief fire in her eyes-the heat of anger-and sudden venom in her voice. “And it’s always na’kyrim, isn’t it, who pay the price? Every convulsion, every war, whatever its cause, it’s na’kyrim who get crushed in the middle of it. Too strange, too different… too feared…”

She lifted a hand to her brow, wincing in pain or distress.

“I’m sorry,” she muttered. “I’m sorry. It’s… I lose track of myself… I can’t tell what’s his, what’s mine. There’s so much hurt to draw on. Or perhaps it draws on me, on all of us. But I know… I do know. She’s all we-you-have. There’s nothing else to set against what he’s become.”

“Then why? Why fight against it? Why make it hard?”

“It should be hard, don’t you think?” she said at once, with just a hint of that old combative note. All her own that, none of it borrowed from the Shared. “That’s all that’s changed, now that Aeglyss has loosed his poison in the Shared: it’s made it easy. It’s taken away everything that should be there, all the restraints and hesitations and sympathies. It’s freed us all to surrender to the darkest of our instincts, the most painful of our memories. And I don’t want it to be so easy.”

She lifted her hands as if to beg for his understanding, but then let them sink back.

“He’s made of the Shared, the whole, something that separates us all, turns us inwards, and leaves us with nothing for company but our anger or grief or fear or hate. The one thing that binds and unites us, and he used it to divide us. He made us alone.”

Her voice fell as she spoke. She seemed suddenly so much older and more fragile than ever before that Orisian almost reached out to take her hands. Yet comfort felt like a lie to him. It had no place here or anywhere. And perhaps that was of Aeglyss’ making as well, but even if so it made the bleak thought no less certain, no less tenaciously rooted in his mind.

“You stay here, with Ess’yr,” he said. “There’s nothing more you can do. I’ll… I’ll take K’rina. No, not take her; I will only follow where she leads now, Yvane. I’ll force nothing on her, just keep her safe, as the Anain who fashioned her can no longer do. Justly or unjustly, the need-the desire-is in her. All I will do is give her the protection she needs to fulfil it. If that is a cruelty, and cold… I don’t know. It seems to me that it’s the smallest of the cruelties that lie ahead down other paths any of us-all of us-might follow.”

“Do you know where we are?” Orisian asked Taim softly as they stood together in the doorway of the cottage.

The warrior frowned out at the landscape slowly emerging from the thinning mists. A heavy dusk was gathering, settling itself across the dank, still valley, but in this last slow hour of the day it was yet possible to see some way over the grassland and the fields. A solitary owl-not white but pale like sand-was ghosting its way through the murk. There was no other movement. No sound.

“I’ve an idea,” he said. “South of Grive. Kan Avor can’t be more than a day’s walk, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“It is. But it’ll be a night’s walk.” Orisian grunted. “We’ve become creatures of darkness. I fear daylight more than the shadows now. And there’s no time to wait, in any case.”

Taim glanced back into the gloomy interior of the hut. Yvane was crouched at Ess’yr’s bedside, applying a fresh poultice of the herbs Varryn had brought back from the forest. The Kyrinin himself stood behind her, watching every movement with a dark intensity on his face.

“She can’t travel any further,” Taim said.

“No. Yvane will stay with her, tend her. It’s… it’s probably for the best in any case. I wouldn’t want her… either of them…”

Orisian let the sentence fade away. It was a fruitless thought. All thoughts seemed fruitless, defeated by the unfathomable obscurity of the future. It was as if an endless bank of sea fog lay across his path, impenetrable to foresight. He found he did not fear it, though. He almost welcomed it, for the promise of release it offered. Its dark, unknowable embrace could be no more harsh, no more painful, than that of the present or of his memories.

“Owinn is the only one left, I think,” said Taim. He nodded towards the young warrior seated on a tree stump, methodically cleaning the blade of his sword with a handful of wet grass. “The other two haven’t returned. We may have lost them. Or they’ve lost themselves.”

“Is he…?” Orisian was unsure how to ask the question, but Taim understood anyway.

“He seems calm. Untouched. Can’t be certain, of course. Nothing seems certain any more. But so far I’ve seen nothing in him to make me fear for him.”

“He can stay, then. Guard them. I would go alone, Taim, if I thought I could. I’d take no one but K’rina. But if we find trouble…”

“I know,” Taim said levelly. “I wouldn’t stay, even if you commanded me to.”

“I’m sorry,” Orisian said. “I truly am.”

Taim smiled. There was great weariness in it, yet Orisian was struck by how easily it seemed to come to the warrior’s lips. There was nothing forced or pretended about it.

“Enough sorrow already,” Taim murmured. “It mends nothing. Now we just see what happens.”

Orisian went to stand over Ess’yr. Yvane had moved away, crushing roots with the heel of her hand on the scored, frayed surface of an old table. Varryn remained, though, looking down at his sister. He stared at her with such concentration, with so knitted a brow and such narrow eyes, that it seemed he might almost imagine he could heal her grave wound by strength of will alone.

Ess’yr herself was awake; conscious, if only distantly so. Her eyelids were heavy.

“We will have to leave you here,” Orisian said to her. He did not bend towards her or reach for her, or do anything to close the distance between them. There was no bridge to lay across that gap now. He knew that. He could never draw any nearer to her than this, never know any more of her than what he already did. It was a terrible loss to him, that fading away into nothing of possibility. He could not even say whether he was capable of bearing it, for the burdens on his heart no longer differentiated themselves one from the other. They merely pressed down, a single, slow pressure that one day, he knew, would become insupportable in its collective weight.

It took her a moment or two to focus on his face. He wondered what she saw but could read nothing in her gaze.

“Taim and I will take K’rina a little further. As close as we can to wherever it is she wants to go. Tonight.”

At first he was not sure she could even hear him. Her lips, her eyes, remained motionless and placid. But then she moistened those lips with the tip of her tongue.

“Go well,” she whispered.

He nodded. It seemed wholly insufficient, yet there was nothing more in him to say. Nothing that the sadness within him would permit to rise to his lips, at least. To leave now would be to leave an ocean of words unuttered; to attempt to make words of the ocean would do nothing to drain it. He turned away.

“I think Inurian would find it good, what you do,” he heard Ess’yr say in that frail voice. “He would find it wise.”

“I hope so.”

He felt a powerful need to be outside, free of the confinement of that cottage. The rain might be gone, the mists cleared, but the cold air of the descending night still bore enough moisture to make its touch soft and fresh. He closed his eyes and lifted his face towards the sky.

He did not know how long he stood thus. No thoughts, none of the turbulence that had grown so familiar, troubled him. He simply stood, face uplifted, until the softest of movements at his side drew him back.

“My sister…” said Varryn, uncharacteristically subdued and hesitant “… my sister asks that I go with you.”

Orisian frowned.

“Stay,” he said. “Watch over her. She may need you.”

Conflicting emotions disturbed Varryn’s smooth features, like the shadows of the roiling clouds passing overhead. It was a momentary perturbation; he set his jaw firmly, pushed his chin out a fraction.

“No,” the Kyrinin said. “I will go with you.”

“Why?” Orisian asked, but Varryn had already turned and was ducking his head under the cabin’s lintel.

Orisian stared after him briefly. Then the sound of that owl, calling its melancholy notes out across the valley, drew him back to the soft night. There was nothing to see. Darkness had all but engulfed the land now. And when Orisian looked out into it, he saw not so much the absence of light as the absence of everything. A waiting void.