Winterbirth

Chapter 2 Kyrinin

The army had made camp in a high valley. A sea of a thousand tents covered the grass, rock outcrops rising above it here and there. Hundreds of war-horses were tethered on the shallow lower slopes of the surrounding peaks. The sun stood above the head of the valley. Eagles and ravens drifted across its glare as they surveyed this vast intrusion upon their mountainous domain.

Gryvan oc Haig stood before the greatest of all the tents. He was resplendent in his finest garb: the crimson cloak of the Thane of Thanes, a cuirass of shining metal beneath it; a scabbard studded with gemstones at his side and his great-grandfather’s golden chain about his neck. His hands rested on the hilt of his sword. The point of the blade was pressed into the earth at his feet, as if to signify that the land itself had submitted to him. Kale and others of the High Thane’s Shield stood to either side. Hundreds of warriors were gathered before them in a gigantic semicircle. At its focus, kneeling before Gryvan, was Igryn oc Dargannan-Haig. The defeated Thane was yoked to a heavy log, rough ropes fixing his arms to it at the wrist. The skin there was rubbed away. Another rope held his neck more loosely.

Gryvan was regarding his prisoner with undisguised satisfaction. ‘Where is your pride now, Igryn?’ he asked.

Igryn made no reply. His head hung low.

‘Trussed like a common thief,’ mocked Gryvan. ‘A fate fit for atraitor, do you agree? For a faithless dog? For one who knows less of duty than the least of the masterless?’

There were cries of agreement and jeering from the ranks of the assembled army. Gryvan stilled the voices with a raised hand, and looked around the close-pressed warriors before him. He swept his gaze over them, and let them see in his eyes that he was one with them.

‘See what your enemy has come to,’ he cried out. ‘See the fruits of his arrogance. He is laid low by the strength of your arms.’

That brought forth enthusiastic cheering.

‘Lift up his head,’ Gryvan said to Kale.

Kale stepped forwards and seized Igryn’s thick red hair in a tight knot, wrenching his head back so that his battered face angled up towards the Thane of Thanes. His beard was matted and discoloured by dried blood. A recent wound stretched from temple to jawbone on one side of his face, the skin at its edges ragged and raw.

‘Your family came to my grandfather to beg his aid against the armies of Dornach, when you were nothing more than pirates and cutthroats,’ said Gryvan. ‘The price of that aid—of raising you up to be Thanes in your own right, of turning your little fiefdom of bandits into a Blood—was your pledge of loyalty to Haig and to Vaymouth. Better men than you, of Bloods that had a long history before yours was even a dream, see fit to honour that pledge. Yet you broke it, and thought to cast it off as if it were nothing more than a shawl. You have withheld the tithes that are owed to me, and given sanctuary to pirates, and imprisoned my Steward. Worse, we now find that you have so far forgotten your proper state as to buy Dornach men to serve in your armies against me. Have you nothing to say for yourself, Igryn? Are you impervious to shame?’

The captive Thane parted his lips in a crude smile. There was blood in his mouth.

‘Nothing,’ he said.

If Gryvan was disappointed he did not show it. ‘Very well. It is a long journey back to Vaymouth. Perhaps you will rediscover your tongue by the time we get there. Then we can discuss who might make a fitting replacement for you as Thane of these misbegotten lands.’

The High Thane lifted his sword and slid it back into its ornate scabbard, turning his back upon the kneeling figure. Kale released his grip on the man’s hair, and Igryn’s head fell forwards as he swayed upon his knees.

Gryvan beckoned Kale to him. He spoke softly, his words meant only for the master of his Shield.

‘I do not wish him dead. It will be useful to have a living reminder for those others who chafe at my bit in their mouth. The thought of Igryn rotting in a gaol may give them pause, at least for a time. But even a prisoner can be troublesome if he has some claim to a throne, so he must live yet be unfit to rule. The Kings knew the way of these things. Their Mercy served well in the past. It is time to renew that tradition. See to it tonight.’

As Igryn oc Dargannan-Haig was dragged away, the mood amongst the dispersing crowds was buoyant. Taim Narran kept his eyes down as he wove through the throng. He did not want to meet the gaze of some jubilant Haig warrior and be forced to pretend to feelings he could not share. He had come to see the humiliation of the captured Thane only out of a sense that he ought to witness the moment that so many of his men had died to bring about. Now all he wanted was the solitude of his own tent; failing that, if he must have company, let it be that of his surviving comrades. The men of Lannis had camped out on the fringes of the assembled army, keeping a wary distance from the far more numerous bands of Haig, Ayth and Taral warriors that made up the bulk of Gryvan’s force.

Passing by a row of great wagons, Taim was dragged out of his reverie by a familiar, irate voice. He looked up to see Roaric nan Kilkry-Haig berating the master of the wagon train. The Kilkry Thane’s son was shouting furiously, his face blushing with anger. The target of his fury maintained an impassive calm, and showed no obvious sign of being intimidated by Roaric’s status.

Taim sighed. The standing of the Kilkry and Lannis Bloods seemed to sink lower with each passing day. Poor Roaric understood that as well as anyone, yet his only response to the anger and pain that knowledge engendered was to grow ever more bitter and confrontational. It did not bode well for the future.

‘Roaric,’ Taim said quietly, laying a hand on the younger man’s arm.

Roaric whirled about and almost unleashed a further torrent of abuse. As soon as he recognised Taim he mastered himself and let out a long, deep breath.

‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered. ‘I thought you were another one of Gryvan’s lackeys.’

‘Walk with me,’ said Taim. ‘I have wine and good salted beef waiting for me. You’re welcome to share it.’

With a last vitriolic stare over his shoulder, Roaric allowed himself to be steered gently away. The heat in his cheeks slowly subsided.

‘I know it does no good,’ he said, as if anticipating a reprimand from Taim. ‘But they treat us with such contempt. That man has cut the food supplies I need for my wounded. He says everyone is treated the same, but I’ve seen no sign of Haig men going hungry.’

‘I can spare some supplies,’ said Taim quietly. ‘We’ve been hoarding them against the journey home.’

‘I was not asking for that,’ replied Roaric.

‘I know, but the offer is an honest one. Lannis and Kilkry stand together, remember?’

‘Thank you.’

They walked on a way in silence. A small audience had gathered around two men who were rolling on the grass, throwing ineffective punches at one another. As the combatants slithered sideways Roaric and Taim had to step around them. The crowd of onlookers cheered and called for greater effort, perhaps a little blood.

‘At least it’s all done,’ Taim muttered. ‘There’ll be no more battles, now Igryn is taken.’

‘No,’ agreed Roaric. He glanced almost nervously at Taim. ‘I have lost more than a thousand of my father’s men.’

‘You did not lose them so much as they were taken from you.’

‘Still, I am ashamed. I should have done more. My father will be horrified to see how few of us return. Perhaps if he had sent Gerain in my place . . .’

‘Lheanor chose you to lead, not your brother,’ Taim interrupted him. ‘He will not blame you for what has happened, and you should not blame yourself. If the Bloodheir had been here instead of you the outcome would have been just the same. Gryvan would have made sure of it.’

‘Oh, I know. In my heart, I know that. But what a pitiful state to find ourselves in! My family were High Thanes, and now here we are beholden to the whim of Gryvan oc Haig. We bow and scrape and run back and forth at his command. For a hundred and fifty years we led the True Bloods. It was Kilkry Thanes who stood against the Black Road when it appeared; it was us who had to keep the Bloods together when Gyre threatened to break everything apart. It’s Lannis that’s held our borders against them for a century or more, Taim. And what does Gryvan care for all of that? Nothing. Haig rules now, and that’s all that matters to him.’

‘Roaric...’ Taim began to say soothingly.

‘You know it’s true. Ayth and Taral are so tightly bound up with Haig they hardly deserve to be called Bloods any more. Now Dargannan’s broken and Gryvan’s got his eye on us. He’ll call himself king one day, or if not him his son. You’ll see.’

‘I don’t know what will happen in the future. What I care about today, what you should care about, is getting the men I have left back to their homes. Let Croesan and Lheanor decide what happens beyond that. Winter is here, Roaric. Get your men back to their warm fires and warm beds and loving wives. Time enough to be angry then.’

Roaric did not look wholly convinced but he lapsed into an acquiescent silence. Taim was half-tempted to put an arm around his shoulder. He might be a Thane’s son, but there was something of the child in Roaric’s raw anger and injured pride.

With the fall of night, the valley began to freeze. The air was crystal sharp. Despite the bitter chill, there was celebration through much of the camp. Gathered around glaring fires, small bands of men forgot the weariness in their limbs and sang, shouted and drank their fill. Here and there amongst the warriors danced women who had followed in the army’s wake all the way from Vaymouth. Dogs bounded from fire to fire and group to group, barking and chasing one another through forests of legs. Already, though it was yet early, there were slumped forms on the ground, where men had staggered away from the circle around a fire and succumbed to wine-induced slumber. The frosted night might yet claim a few lives spared by the battles of the last weeks.

Taim Narran made his way through this chaotic scene. He shrugged off efforts to draw him into each noisy crowd, and waved away the wineskins that he was offered. Such revels were familiar to him. As a young man, shaken and thrilled by his first taste of battle, he had been in Tanwrye for the days of excess that had followed the victory over the Horin-Gyre Blood in the Vale of Stones. It had not been the greatest of battles: a few thousand invaders, lacking the support of the other Gyre Bloods. Still, it had been intoxicating. The Lannis Blood had stood against their old enemies, traded blows with them and emerged triumphant.

Tonight, however, there was no joy or excitement in him. There was little of anything save a vague relief at still having his life and the distorted reflection of that relief: guilt at living on when so many of the men he had brought here did not. He was tired, in his heart as much as his bones.

He came to the tent of Gryvan oc Haig, and waited while one of the guards sought permission to admit him. As he stood there, stepping from one foot to another in an effort to distract himself from the deepening cold, he sensed eyes upon him. Kale was standing a short distance away, half in and half out of the shadows at the side of the tent, watching him impassively. For a moment their gazes met. It was Taim who looked away.

‘Come to beg scraps from the high table?’ asked Kale softly.

Taim tensed. The man’s words, and their cargo of contempt, ignited anger in his breast. He had thought himself the master of his feelings, but now found them suddenly leaking through the bars of their cage.

‘Have a care, Narran,’ he heard Kale say, as if the man could read his mind. ‘They say you are the best sword in the Glas valley, but you play in a larger game now.’

Another surge of hatred ran through Taim, and he found himself irrationally laying his fingers upon the pommel of his sword. But when he looked up, uncertain of what would happen next or of what he wanted to happen, Kale had gone.

By the time he was brought at last before the High Thane, Taim was surprised to find a great emptiness inside him. He had expected to have to struggle to master his anger, to bite back the words he longed to say to this man. Yet he was only weary, as if the brief confrontation with Kale had drained away his last meagre reserves of passion. In a way, he was thankful for it. He had advised Roaric nan Kilkry-Haig to hide his fury, and knew he had to live up to that advice himself.

Gryvan oc Haig was slouched across a spill of great cushions that had been laid out before his throne. He was gnawing idly at a leg of mutton, a golden goblet clutched in his other hand, as he watched a semi-clad dancing girl who bobbed and writhed in the centre of the tent. Behind the Thane of Thanes, flanking the empty throne, musicians were playing a sinuous tune upon lyre and pipes. They wore airy shirts of white damask in the style of the entertainers who attended the merchant princes of Tal Dyre. There were ten or fifteen people scattered around the edge of the carpet upon which the girl danced: captains of the Haig Blood’s armies, officials of Gryvan’s court, and warriors of Taral-Haig and Ayth-Haig. Each had before him a silver platter of meat, bread and fruit. There was no sign of Roaric. Neither the Kilkry nor the Lannis Blood had been invited to this gathering.

Gryvan detached his gaze from the dancing girl for a moment, and waved the tattered joint of meat he held in Taim’s direction.

‘Our Captain of Lannis-Haig,’ he called above the sound of the music. ‘Join us.’

Taim shook his head. ‘No, thank you, sire,’ he said, shifting to one side as the dancer came between him and the Thane of Thanes.

Gryvan gestured at the girl. ‘Stop that,’ he snapped. ‘Enough.’

The musicians fell instantly silent. The dancing girl stepped to one side and squatted down. Taim moved forwards without thinking, as if sucked in by the void she had left. The carpet beneath his feet was richly patterned with flowing loops of flowers and foliage. It was a strange, incongruous sight here in the wild mountains of Dargannan-Haig.

‘Will you take a drink with us?’ asked the High Thane.

‘Forgive me, sire, but I only came to speak with you. I did not know you had guests.’

‘Ha!’ laughed Gryvan, setting down his food and wiping his fingers on one of the cushions. ‘Of course I have guests! What else should I be doing on such a night as this?’

‘Of course,’ said Taim. He was uncomfortable beneath so many attentive gazes. He knew he had no friends here. It had been a mistake to come, but he had been thinking less than clearly since the slaughter at An Caman Fort. The companies of Lannis and Kilkry had battered their way into that fastness eventually, at the cost of two hundred or more lives. What had followed—the methodical massacre of every prisoner taken—had seemed just as wasteful. All the more so since only days later word had come of Igryn’s capture.

The once mighty Thane of the Dargannan Blood had been cornered in an abandoned shepherd’s hovel, with nothing left of his Shield save a handful of famished, exhausted warriors.

‘Well,’ said Gryvan, ‘if you will not join us, you had best tell me what you came to say.’

‘Sire . . .’ began Taim. A sharp groan interrupted him. Behind the circle of feasting captains and courtiers, curled upon a straw mat like a child in frightened sleep, was Igryn oc Dargannan-Haig. His back was to Taim and his knees were clasped up against his chest. Even so, Taim could see that there was a dirty bandage about his head. As he looked, the defeated Thane’s shoulders shook, and a shiver ran through his great body.

Gryvan glanced at his prisoner.

‘Ah yes,’ he said lightly. ‘You see, even our disobedient friend Igryn has joined us this evening.’

‘He seems unwell,’ murmured Taim. He knew what he was looking at. They had called it the Mercy of Kings long ago: the fate of lords who reached for the throne and fell short.

‘Sadly, yes,’ said Gryvan. ‘He has been parted from his eyes, the better that he might reflect upon his folly. Tell me what you want, Narran.’

The edge in the High Thane’s voice drew Taim’s attention smartly back. He cleared his throat.

‘I would like to take my men away, sire. In the morning.’

Gryvan raised his eyebrows. ‘We march in two days’ time. You know that. Just today I have sent riders to Vaymouth, to prepare a triumphal reception for us all.’

An utter silence had come over the room. The High Thane’s guests watched in rapt attention. Taim felt a heat rising in his face.

‘My men long for their homes, sire. They have wives to return to. So do I. Winterbirth has come, and it is a month’s journey back; longer with the wounded and sick we must carry with us. The weather in Kilkry and Lannis will be worse each day we delay.’

‘But what of the celebrations here?’ asked Gryvan with apparent concern. ‘Do your men not deserve the chance to rest, and to mark the victory they have shared in?’

The words pricked Taim, and he felt, at last, a faint stirring of that anger that Kale had woken.

‘Neither they nor I have the heart for it,’ he said.

The High Thane regarded him for a few seconds. He seemed on the point of saying something. Instead, abruptly, he relaxed back into his voluminous cushion.

‘Ah, what matters it now? Go, if you must. Take your men off. I will not prevent it.’

Taim found himself exhaling with a relief that he struggled to conceal. He bowed to the Thane of Thanes and stepped backwards.

‘Thank you, my lord. We will be gone before dawn.’

He turned to lift the flap of the tent.

‘Narran,’ said the High Thane quietly behind him.

Taim paused, partway out into the night and the cleansing grip of its cold air, and looked back. Gryvan was staring at him with narrowed eyes.

‘How many men will return with you to Anduran?’

‘Eight hundred, if you count those who may yet die,’ said Taim in a flat voice.

Gryvan nodded thoughtfully without releasing Taim from his glare.

‘Tell Croesan I asked, will you?’ was all he said.

By the time the boat ground its keel up against rocks and lurched to a halt, Orisian could not rise. His shirt was plastered to his skin by blood. His head was pounding, as if his heartbeat was seated there rather than in his chest, and he could not draw breath without sending shards of pain darting through his body. He coughed agonisingly and felt thick liquid bubbling inside him. He heard Rothe springing from the boat, boots crunching on a stony beach.

‘We must get away from the shore,’ Rothe said.

Orisian tried to say that he could not move. Only a vague mumbling came from his lips. They felt dry and ready to split. He ran his tongue over them but found that too was desiccated. Then Rothe had him around the waist and was lifting him out of the boat. Orisian cried out in pain.

‘Forgive me,’ he heard Rothe whisper.

Orisian could see nothing now save blurred patches that ebbed and flowed at the edge of his vision in time with his heartbeat.

‘I can’t see,’ he croaked into the darkness.

Rothe did not reply. They were moving, but Orisian could not tell anything beyond that. His flank was hot and wet, yet there was a cold numbness stealing into his hands.

‘Stay with me,’ he heard someone say desperately, very far away. ‘Stay with me, Orisian.’

Then he was lying upon some soft, yielding surface. For a moment his vision cleared. Trees were arching over him, bending down out of the night as if to lay their outstretched twigs on his face. He would have turned away had there been any strength left in him. There was a strange, harsh sound, which after a moment or two he remembered as the bark of a fox.

‘A fox,’ he murmured, wanting to laugh.

A shape loomed up. It was Rothe, leaning close.

‘What?’ said the man.

Then Rothe sprang away. Orisian heard a gasp, a sighing sound as if a wind had run through long grass, and felt the jarring impact of something heavy hitting the ground. Figures leapt over him where he lay: pale shapes that seemed detached from the earth. Ghosts, he thought.

The last thing he felt before he fainted was many hands upon him, lifting him up.

The Fever had left dark corners in Anyara’s mind. Now, five years on, the memory of the hallucinatory dreams of her sickbed was not quite so strong as it had been in the first weeks of her recovery. Still she was sometimes seized in the late evening by a sudden fear of falling asleep: a fear that she might not wake, might be lost forever in that fierce borderland of death where all dreams were nightmares. It had never occurred to her that the stuff of fevered delirium might pursue her out from that territory into the waking world. On the night of Winterbirth the air was thick with it.

She fell when Kylane thrust her through the open door of the keep. She regained her feet in time to see him set himself between Orisian and the Inkallim, and in time to see him beheaded. A strangled cry died in her throat as she was hauled back from the door by a burly merchant. He slammed the door shut and barred it. Cries and the clash of weapons bled in through the wood.

‘Hide! We must hide!’ shouted the merchant.

A small group of terrified townsfolk—those lucky enough to have been standing within reach of the doorway—were huddled at the foot of the stairs. The merchant turned upon them, waving his arms as if he was herding sheep.

‘Upstairs,’ he cried.

They scrambled up the stone stairway. The merchant grabbed at Anyara, seeking to drag her with him. She saw something in his eyes that lay between terror and fury, and was afraid of it. Instinctively, she slipped from his grasp and darted into the feasting hall.

It was deserted. When the fighting started the servants had scattered to the kitchens or whatever other place they thought might offer some sanctuary. The fire still burned. Food littered the tables: half-eaten joints of meat, scattered hunks of bread, here and there a tankard turned over in the rush to get outside and see the show.

She stumbled to a halt, held by the incongruity of this scene of interrupted celebration and the violent tumult she could hear out-side. A pounding at the door of the keep startled her. For a moment she thought it was someone else seeking refuge, and she started back. Then she heard a harsh voice shouting in an accent she barely understood, and a shiver of fear ran tingling through her back.

The barred door was strong, she told herself. It would hold for a time. She should find a dark corner to hide in until it was safe to come out. She snuffed out the faint inner voice that asked what would happen if it was never safe to come out. And yet she could not hide like a child. The need to see, to know what was happening, gnawed at her. Her father was out there, and Orisian. Out amongst the shouts and the ringing clatter of sword against sword.

She looked at the tall windows of the hall. They were raised up high, but if she put a bench beneath them, if she stood upon it and stretched up, she might be able to see out on to the courtyard. Frowning with concentration, she seized the end of the nearest bench and made to drag it across.

The window exploded inwards as if struck by a great stone. Shards of glass spun across the room, forming a glittering cloud that wreathed the dark figure flying through the air. Anyara jumped backwards. The bench fell from her hands. The Inkallim landed on one of the great dining tables, sending platters and cups skittering away to the floor. He crouched like an animal, balanced on the balls of his feet as he looked around. There was blood across his naked forearms. Splinters of glass glinted in his flesh. He fixed his eyes upon Anyara. She tensed to flee.

A second massive shape was silhouetted in the window, appearing in an instant and leaping into the hall. The first warrior sprang the moment Anyara’s attention was distracted. She spun on her heel and made for the doorway. Before she had gone more than a couple of strides a great blow on her back flung her forwards. Her feet left the ground and she flew towards a brazier that stood by the door. The impact ran through her, jarring her shoulders. Dazed, she felt a fierce heat enveloping her as the brazier crashed to the ground. She rolled away, scattering hot embers from her back. Her vision was spinning, but she sensed the looming shape of the Inkallim rising above her. There was a shaft of yellow light that must be the flames reflected in the blade of his sword. She kicked out at his legs. He danced back, avoiding the blow with ease. Before she could move again she felt a swordpoint pressing upon her chest and a strong hand grasped her hair, straining it against its roots. Her head was lifted and then smacked once, sharply, down into the stone floor. She felt a wet burst of blood on the back of her scalp.

‘Be still,’ hissed the Inkallim.

‘Let me go,’ she shouted.

Then she was being lifted, her arms locked behind her. Her nostrils were filled with the scents of burning, of blood, of sweat. The second Inkallim came up in front of her and grasped her face between thumb and fingers. He turned her head from side to side, examining her. He grunted and said something that Anyara did not catch. Her captor might have been made of stone for all the impression her struggles made. The two men exchanged a few more, almost whispered, words then wrestled her towards the door of the keep. They checked the stairway. The shadows were still. The second warrior lifted the bar on the door, and Inkallim poured into the building. They darted up the stairs, bearing slaughter with them in their grim eyes and already bloodied blades.

Anyara was thrown out into the courtyard. She tumbled down the steps and lay upon the cobbles, fearing to move lest her body should fail to support her. Someone seized her and raised her roughly to her feet. She narrowed her eyes against the glare of the flames that were consuming the stables. There were bodies scattered all around the castle’s courtyard. Pools of blood shone blackly, each alive with reflections of the fires. Smoke writhed around between the castle’s confining walls. The few horses had been brought out from their stalls, and Inkallim were wrestling to control them. The animals stamped and reared, shying away from the conflagration and throwing wild flame-cast shadows. At the foot of the far wall, a small cluster of corpses was gathered. Hunched at their heart, not quite fallen but slumped and bowed on his knees, was her father. Even as she watched, he seemed to be sinking, slipping down to the ground.

‘Father,’ she cried out. The hands that held her arm tightened painfully.

A group of Inkallim were coming towards her, blocking her view. They were dragging Inurian by the arms. With them came a lean na’kyrim Anyara had never seen before.

She kicked and struggled. Inurian looked up. Blood was pouring from a wound on his head and he could not stand.

‘Anyara,’ he said.

‘Quiet,’ the other na’kyrim snapped.

They hauled Inurian and Anyara to the horses. Inkallim were emerging once again from the keep, moving purposefully but without urgency. Anyara glanced up at the windows. They were all dark. She and Inurian were bound and thrown across the necks of two horses, warriors settling into the saddles behind them. A gust of wind spun sparks and smoke around the courtyard, searing her eyes. The horse skittered to one side and she almost slid off. A firm hand held her in place.

In moments the Inkallim had gathered. They were fewer than they had been at the start of the battle, but not by many. One of the women was shouting curt commands Anyara could not catch. Half a dozen of the Inkallim mounted the other horses, and they led the way out through the gate. The rest jogged in tight formation alongside the animals bearing Inurian and Anyara.

As they emerged on to the causeway, Anyara felt the sea breeze on her face. She strove to raise her head, but she was bouncing up and down with the horse’s trot and the strain on her neck was too great. She glimpsed the town ahead, though. It was brightly lit, not just by the torches and bonfires of Winterbirth but also by still greater blazes. Houses were burning. Above the splashing clatter of the horse’s hoofs upon the part-exposed causeway, the sound of screaming and shouting reached her ears. There was fighting in the town.

The dash up from the seafront was a chaos of cries, of plunging figures, of clashing blades. The Inkallim never broke stride, pounding up the narrow street towards the square, battering aside any townsfolk who blocked their path. Some of the town’s garrison, drawn by the sound of fighting in the castle and the faint sight of smoke rising from its battlements, had begun to make their way down towards the causeway. They were too few and taken too unawares to stand against the Inkallim. Even so, Anyara thought, the raiding party would emerge at any moment into the square, there to be surrounded and cut down. But they turned down a side street. Some of the Inkallim peeled off to hinder pursuit, and she heard screams and the ring of blades.

It grew darker as they moved away from the centre of Kolglas, then they passed by the beacon of a burning cottage and Anyara felt waves of heat washing over her and smoke rasping down into her lungs. She turned her face away. When she looked up again they had come to the very edge of the town, emerging on to the main road that ran south along the coast. Without any signal she could detect, the band of warriors broke away from the track and plunged into the black forest.

The fringes of the forest were open, kept clear of undergrowth by the town’s stock. As they went on the wildwood closed in about them. Twigs and tendrils clawed at Anyara’s cheeks. She pressed her face into the horse’s neck, feeling the massive muscles working rhythmically beneath its skin. In the last instant before she sealed her eyes, shutting out the horrors of the night if not those within her own mind, she caught sight of half-hidden figures running alongside them; no Inkallim these—lither, paler—but they moved too fast and the night-bound forest was too dark for her to tell quite what new piece of nightmare had risen up to join their flight.

That first night in the Forest of Anlane seemed to last an eternity. After an age, they paused and Anyara was set upright on the horse. Her bonds had torn tracks of stinging pain around her wrists. It was too dark for her to see clearly. The wind was rising, shivering through the leafless canopy of the forest above her. She looked around for Inurian, and saw a hunched figure seated in front of a rider a few yards away. Then the massive arms of her Inkallim captor embraced her as he took up the reins once more and nudged the horse on. She felt his chest pressing against her shoulders and tried to ease herself forwards. As the horse got into its stride she slid back and could not help but rest her weight against the warrior. They kept a steady pace, weaving through the ever-thickening forest. To Anyara, peering out over the horse’s bobbing head, it seemed that they were travelling blind. Trees loomed up out of the darkness, boughs leapt at her. Now and again at the very edge of her vision she saw people running ahead. Some were Inkallim, judging by their bulk. Others, more distant, were those same less substantial figures she had noticed before, lean and rangy shapes that ghosted silently through the woods. The realisation came that these were Kyrinin: woodwights of the White Owl clan were guiding the Inkallim through Anlane. Perhaps they too had set the fires in Kolglas that kept help from coming to the castle. The thought put an icy needle into her heart. She was in the hands not only of the enemies of her Blood, but of her very race.

As dawn’s first light began to bleed through the roof of the forest, the trees solidified out of darkness. They sloughed the night and gradually took on form and substance. Anyara’s thoughts had run off on pathways all their own, and she came to herself with a start as if roused from a waking sleep. She swayed on the horse. Her eyes, her back, her throat all ached and she feared she might fall at any moment. She looked about her. They were following a narrow, almost overgrown trail. Ahead of her, Inkallim were running in single file, keeping a steady, careful pace. She could see no sign of the Kyrinin. She craned her neck to try to see behind, and glimpsed other horses and riders before her captor slapped at her face.

After an hour or so, when the grey shades of dawn had become the clear light of day, the relentless pace slowed a little. The path widened. Anyara felt exhaustion and cold settled deep inside her. Although it was warmer now, the night’s chill had taken root in her body and would not relinquish its hold.

Another horse came up beside her and she turned to see Inurian seated in front of a smoke-blackened warrior. He looked pale and drawn. Blood had crusted his forehead and laid dark stains down his left cheek. Anyara started to say something, then bit her lip at the sound of a third horse coming up behind them. It drew level and she recognised the na’kyrim who had appeared after the fighting in the castle was over. He was a good deal younger than Inurian and to Anyara’s eyes his skin had a hungry pallor about it. His pale hair hung lifelessly to his shoulders.

There was excitement in the newcomer’s face as he leaned towards Inurian, as if the dawn, the flight and the warriors all around brought forth in him a feral joy.

‘My name is Aeglyss,’ he said.

Inurian fixed his eyes upon the path ahead.

‘You did not sense me, did you?’ Aeglyss said. ‘Nor did you get inside the minds of those Inkallim. I wasn’t certain I could hide their intent from you, you know. You, the great na’kyrim who can see a man’s thoughts. I promised the ravens I would do it, let them play out their little charade, but in my heart I didn’t know. But, see! I was the stronger, was I not? My gifts proved the greater.’

Still Inurian ignored him. Aeglyss seemed to relax a little, sinking back into his saddle and adjusting his hands upon the reins.

‘How old are you?’ he asked after a moment or two, his voice calmer now, more measured.

‘Old enough to have seen your kind before,’ Inurian responded. There was ice in his voice.

‘And what kind is that?’

‘Dogs that think they are wolves.’

Aeglyss laughed at that. There was a ragged edge to the sound, as of a man laughing at word of some disaster.

‘They would have killed you but for me, little man. The Children of the Hundred have no great liking for na’kyrim. They tolerate me only because they know I can help them. I saved you from their tender mercies, and you should not forget it. We will have much to discuss later.’

He glanced dismissively at Anyara, then kicked at his horse. It lurched forwards, trotting up the trail to the head of the column.

‘What a . . .’ Anyara started to say, but a sudden tensing of her guard’s arm warned her to hold her tongue. She looked across to Inurian and he had time to nod before the horses parted once more and he was carried ahead and out of sight.

They followed paths that Anyara often could not make out. The tracks wove through what seemed to be impenetrable undergrowth. They went fast, the Inkallim jogging along, the horses grouped in the middle of the column. The Kyrinin reappeared in the mid-morning. They drifted in and out of sight, running figures passing amongst the trees on either side without a rustle or a footfall. Haunting birdcalls, which Anyara did not think were made by any bird, ran through the forest every so often.

They stopped without warning, in early afternoon as far as Anyara could tell from the sun’s angled rays, beside a forest stream close-fringed by willows and alder. She and Inurian sat against rocks while their Inkallim guards drank from the stream. The warriors who had been acrobats bowed their heads into the water and rinsed the dye from their hair. It made Anyara think, absurdly, of villagers washing clothes by a mill-stream. Eddying clouds of amber and red swirled away down the current. Then began the meticulous task of re-dyeing. The warriors produced packets of powder from their belts and pouches. Mixed with water, it made a thick paste that they worked through their hair. It took some time. When they straightened, every man and woman had sleek black locks. Anyara looked away. The Inkallim, she remembered being told, wore their hair black in token of the birds that once accompanied the God called The Raven: Death.

A few Kyrinin came in and squatted with Aeglyss and some of the Inkallim, talking in hushed tones. Anyara could not help but catch her breath at their closeness. She had only seen Kyrinin once before, and they had been dead, brought out of the forest by the warriors her father had sent to hunt them down. The skin of these strange, fearful figures was so colourless it seemed almost translucent to her. The characteristics that Inurian had inherited from his Kyrinin ancestors were here before her in their purest form: fingers long and precise, tipped by uniform white nails; eyes of a flat, unnerving grey; fine, sharp-featured faces; pale hair that had an almost luminous sheen. Two of them bore markings she had heard described in stories. Thin blue lines ran in great, whorling spirals and curves across their faces like ferocious masks. If the tales were true, these were the tattoos worn as badges of honour by the most savage warriors of the Kyrinin. Only now, seeing them in soft conversation just a few yards away, did Anyara understand how truly unhuman these people were. As much as anything, the difference resided in their air of detachment and self-assured grace; the way in which they held themselves and the unspoken language of their movements and gestures.

After a minute or two the Kyrinin rose and headed back the way they had come, vanishing from sight.

‘Gone to check for pursuit,’ muttered Inurian. He seemed less haggard and drained than he had in the early morning.

‘They’ll not find any,’ he continued, talking as much to himself as to Anyara. ‘We’ve come too far and fast. None but other Kyrinin could keep to this trail and match our pace.’ He chewed at his bottom lip. ‘Where are we going, though?’

An Inkallim swordsman loomed up before them. He gestured towards Anyara with a deerskin pouch of water. She resisted the urge to shake her head. She was thirsty, and would gain nothing by denying it. The warrior held the pouch as she took a few sips. He offered it to Inurian as well, but the na’kyrim ignored it.

‘Not to a White Owl vo’an, surely?’ Inurian mused as the Inkallim strode away. ‘And not all the way to Kan Dredar?’

‘We’ll find out sooner than I’d like,’ said Anyara glumly.

Inurian glanced at her, as if only reminded by her voice that she was there.

‘That is true,’ he said. ‘That is true.’

‘Do you know where we are?’ Anyara asked him.

Inurian frowned. ‘Not with any certainty. We have been heading deeper into Anlane all the while, north and east. We crossed the track from Kolglas to Drinan in the night. It makes little sense, unless they mean to spend the winter here and I think even the Inkallim, with Kyrinin aid, would not choose to do that.’

Anyara sighed. She caught the eye of one their guards, who was glowering at her, and lowered her gaze.

‘They must be mad to even attempt this,’ she muttered. ‘Whatever it is they’re attempting.’

‘Not mad,’ said Inurian. ‘It makes sense, if you believe what they do. They have nothing to lose, after all. Failure only means death, and they cannot reach the world they crave without dying first. This world is hateful to them.’

‘Why are the White Owls helping them?’

‘That, I would be interested to know,’ muttered Inurian, ‘but I think our unpleasant friend Aeglyss will be a part of the answer.’

They were quiet for a little time.

‘Inurian . . .’ Anyara said after a while, ‘my father...’

His arms tugged the bonds that held them, and she thought he wanted to reach out to her. The cords would not yield.

‘I am sorry, Anyara. We tried to guard him, but there were too many.’

‘Orisian?’

‘I don’t know. I would have given anything to prevent this, but I was too slow, too mistrusting of my own instincts. What gifts I have were not enough. I knew something was amiss, but. . . somehow Aeglyss blunted the edge of my perceptions. I’ve never before wished for a greater, or different, strength in the Shared, Anyara. Now I wish for nothing else.’

He hung his head. Anyara almost wanted to turn away, so clear an echo did his pain find in her.

‘And it is only days ago that I warned your brother against wishing for what is not,’ Inurian said quietly.

They sat together in silence, each of them longing in their own way for the world to be other than it was.

They slept that night in a narrow clearing, stopping long after dusk had fallen. Anyara and Inurian were kept apart. She huddled down, resting her head against a grassy tussock. Grief and despair were writhing in her and she felt close to tears. That she would lock in. They would not hear her cry. A coarse blanket was thrown over her, but it did little to obstruct the mounting cold. She thought that the numbing pain in her wrists and hands, the hard ground and damp grass, the creaking of the trees all around, would keep her from sleep. Instead, her exhaustion flooded up from within and carried her off in minutes.

Time and again she came partway awake, shifting to ease some building pain in her back or arms. Strange sounds, filtered through the veil of drowsiness, reached her: the plaintive call of an owl; the flap of wings above the trees, and once the lilt of soft, unintelligible voices whispering close by. When someone kicked her awake, before dawn had even begun to erode the darkness, the blanket had slid away from her and she could hardly move, so stiff and sore was her body. She felt as if she had closed her eyes mere moments ago.

They made Anyara and Inurian walk for a while that morning. A rider—one of the female Inkallim—went before them, leading them by ropes. Whenever they tried to talk to one another she would tug at their bonds. Anyara felt as weak as she had in the first days after the Fever had broken. They had been given nothing save water since being seized from the castle, and her head was light. She stumbled along, and fell now and again. Each time she was dragged along the trail a short distance and Inurian shouted at the rider ahead until she reined in her horse and allowed Anyara to struggle back to her feet.

Aeglyss came and rode behind them for a stretch.

‘Did you sleep well?’ he asked.

Inurian straightened his back and walked on. Anyara looked over her shoulder.

‘I’m hungry,’ she said.

‘No doubt,’ said Aeglyss, but his eyes were fixed upon Inurian. ‘Did you sleep well, I asked.’

Still Inurian paid him no heed.

‘I need some food,’ insisted Anyara.

‘Your hunger is not so bad,’ said the na’kyrim at length, in a voice now gentle, slow and deep. The sound of his words soothed Anyara in some strange way. ‘It is not as great as it was. A strong girl like you could go on without eating for hours yet, days even. Think instead of the fall of your feet. Let that rhythm be your only thought. Your legs are strong. Pay no heed to your hunger.’

Anyara felt her sense of herself shift a little. Aeglyss was right: there was an easing tempo in the rise and fall of her steps. They were steadier now. She did not stumble any more. She lost herself in the feeling of walking, and heard the rest of what was said distantly and without real understanding.

‘She should be quiet for a time,’ said Aeglyss. ‘My voice has always been one of my better features. I can be very . . . persuasive, but she is particularly easy.’

‘She is exhausted,’ snapped Inurian, ‘and weak from hunger, and shock. It is a childish trick, and one I doubt you could play upon someone wakeful and healthy.’

‘Ah, but I can, I can. I am stronger than you think. But at least now you have something to say. I thought I would have to continue talking to myself.’

‘I am sure you would not find that too great a burden.’

‘Come now, Inurian. We should not bicker, you and I. We are na’kyrim together. Our kind has enough enemies without fighting amongst ourselves.’

‘This is not a fight I started, and I would rather not be reminded that we are of the same kind.’

‘But we are,’ said Aeglyss urgently, ‘we are. I saved you, did I not? Kept the ravens from killing you? The girl they were content to take alive, but you they would have killed in a moment if not for me. Na’kyrim must stand by one another, for no one else will.’

‘Forgive me if I do not thank you for saving me from murderers you brought with you.’

Aeglyss gave an exasperated sigh. ‘I wish only your friendship, Inurian,’ he said. ‘You have seen what I can do. The Shared wakes strongly in me, you can see that. But I am still young; I have more to learn. I have heard there is no one with greater knowledge of the Shared than you. Some people speak highly of you. That is why I came to Kolglas, you know. The Inkallim came for the Thane’s family. I came for you.’

When Inurian did not reply, Aeglyss went on, now quietly insistent.

‘You could teach me. And I could lend you my strength. How many have you known who could oppose your own insights as I did? I could raise us both up. And I have powerful friends. Without me, the White Owls would never have agreed to help the Gyre Bloods. None of this would have been possible without that help. Horin-Gyre is in my debt. When all of this is done, I will be one of the powerful myself. You could be a part of that.’

‘Leave me be,’ said Inurian.

Aeglyss said nothing for a few moments, then, ‘Very well. You will think differently in time. Girl. Anyara!’

The sudden sharpness of his voice jolted Anyara. She lifted her head, which had grown heavy. Her eyes were clear, as clouds she had not been aware of until that moment parted.

‘Are you hungry, girl?’ Aeglyss asked.

And in that instant, the hunger was back, gnawing more than ever at the pit of her stomach and sucking the strength out of her limbs. She almost lost her footing and fell. Inurian was looking at her, concern and some kind of pain in his face. She tried to smile, but could not be sure whether she managed it. She risked a brief glance behind. Aeglyss was gone, fallen back out of sight.

‘I was almost asleep,’ she said.

‘Not exactly,’ replied Inurian gloomily before a harsh tug on the ropes reminded them of the wisdom of silence.

They marched on over ever rougher terrain. Long, low ridges ran through the forest, and the company followed trails up and over them. They crossed tiny streams and wove around the great boulders that dotted the slopes. The forest was open, a mixture of birch, pine and lichen-armoured oak. Anyara was sure they must still be within the lands of her Blood, but she saw no sign of either stock or men. Herders would only come so far into the wild lands in the summer, and then only if they could find no grazing closer to home.

Some time after noon they did come across some men of Lannis-Haig. It brought no cheer. They were angling down a slope towards a brook that Anyara could hear gurgling over rocks ahead. When they came to the stream, she saw that there had been a hunters’ camp here. It was ruined now, the tents cast down, the cooking fire doused. The three men who had made it lay there, all dead. Anyara stared at them as they walked past. One of them lay on his back, his blank face upturned, his tongue poking out from between his lips. He was young, perhaps sixteen. Orisian’s age. She felt a tightening in her throat and looked away.

Not long afterwards they were hauled up on to horses once again, and the company increased its pace. Anyara’s stomach was by now growling with such insistence that it was almost painful. She found herself struggling to keep at bay tendrils of sleep. The enclosing arms of the Inkallim rider kept her from slumping to the ground. She was drowsily aware that they were climbing, rising up some steady slope.

Later, only half-conscious, she felt a breeze on her face and strong hands pulling her from the horse. She was thrown to the ground, unable to move. Her leaden eyes opened and she saw clouds scudding across a dimming sky. For the first time in what seemed an age, no branches hemmed in her view. Far, far above, an unbridgeable distance from the patch of rough ground upon which she lay, an eagle glided serenely over the forest. She fixed her eyes on it for a time, and could almost imagine her thoughts riding its great wings away into the stillness.

Around her, the Inkallim were making camp for the night. They had halted in a high clearing near the crest of a ridge. The land rose, for this short space, above its mantle of trees like the back of a whale breaching the surface of the sea.

Then Aeglyss was kneeling beside her. He leaned over, his face filling her vision. She stared into his grey eyes and saw nothing there. He rolled her and cut her bonds with a knife. Sudden pain and waves of heat pulsed through her hands. The skin had gone from her wrists.

‘Stand up,’ said Aeglyss, hauling her erect.

She staggered. A supporting arm appeared around her waist, and she found Inurian at her side.

‘Look,’ said Aeglyss.

She did not understand what he meant and in her utter exhaustion she stood there, letting her weight fall against Inurian. His arm tightened about her and held her up. Then Aeglyss laid a hand upon her shoulder and squeezed.

‘Look,’ he hissed, pointing.

She followed the line of his outstretched arm. The forest fell away beneath them, sweeping off down a long slope and out over the flatter ground beyond. She was looking across the roof of Anlane, and felt dizzy at the sight. The trees stretched almost to the limit of what she could see, but there was, far off to the north, the grey suggestion of open ground and still further out, so faint it was more a shading in the light than anything else, there was a line of mountains towering above the earth: the Car Criagar, looming over the Glas valley.

‘What?’ she asked, hearing the word as if it had been uttered by someone else.

Inurian’s arm tightened again, and she wondered why.

‘See the smoke,’ said Aeglyss.

Again, she looked. And she could just make out, rising from somewhere in the space between the forest and the mountains, a black smudge of smoke climbing up. It occurred to her that there must be a very great fire somewhere by the river.

‘I don’t understand,’ she muttered.

‘You will,’ Aeglyss laughed, and walked away.

She looked up at Inurian’s face. He was staring northwards, then he sighed and bowed his head.

‘I think I know where we are going, now. It is Anduran, Anyara. Anduran is burning.’

The air was filled with the stench of acrid smoke. The wind gathered it up from the town and danced it around the castle. The sun was a pale disc behind a veil of grey. Croesan oc Lannis-Haig gazed up towards it, watching the ashes of Anduran spiralling into the sky.

He was standing atop the castle’s main keep. Somewhere beneath, in the hall, his advisers and officials held council. All of them had climbed to this vantage point when they first smelled the smoke. He had sent the others back after a few minutes. He alone stayed, held fast by the sight of his city burning. There were flames here and there, spouting up from amongst the buildings. Mostly, there was just the smoke. It seethed like an immense exhalation of the earth itself. Strangely, there was hardly a sound save the distant crackle of fires and the occasional groaning roar as some building surrendered. No screams, no cries, no pounding of feet along the alleyways. That eerie absence put an extra morbid twist into Croesan’s sadness. It was as if the city had already been dead, and this was just the cremation of its corpse.

They had been in the grand new hall upon the square when the messenger arrived. Croesan had been as happy as he could remember for a long time, filled with a lightness of spirit, an anticipatory excitement, that belonged more properly to children. The hall was filling with hundreds of people, all laughing, all chattering as they awaited the start of the great feast of Winterbirth. Then the messenger had come and turned it all to dust.

The man had ridden without pause from Tanwrye, bringing word of an army coming down through the Stone Vale, of the renewal of the bloody dance between the Black Road and the True Bloods. It had been more than thirty years since the armies had last marched. Then, aged seventeen, Croesan’s own first taste of battle had been beneath the walls of Tanwrye, riding with his father and brother to drive back the forces of Horin-Gyre. As he heard the words of the haggard messenger, surrounded by the luxurious accoutrements of a feast that would never now happen, Croesan was returned for an instant into the skin of that youth he had been. Nothing had changed, in all the years that had passed. The Thane must once more ride out from Anduran and face his Blood’s old foe.

Within an hour of the messenger’s arrival, two hundred men—half of those garrisoned in the city—had marched out from Anduran’s northern gate and Croesan’s riders were spreading through the farmland around the city, raising his people to arms. In a couple of days, he could have another half a thousand men ready to make for Tanwrye. But it was not to be.

In the depth of the night, one of his shieldmen had come to find the Thane. He was shut in a high room of the keep, talking with Naradin and with his captains. They were making plans that would never be enacted.

‘There is a farmer outside, my lord,’ the shieldman said gravely. ‘We sent him away at first but he came back, and has others with him now, telling the same story. Otherwise we would not have…’

‘What are you talking about?’ Croesan demanded. His earlier good humour was long gone, swept away.

A dishevelled man with matted hair and a scrawny beard pushed partway through the door, restrained by shieldmen.

‘The Black Road, sire!’ he shouted. ‘It’s marching out of Anlane! Thousands, burning farms, burning homes.’

There were mutters of disbelief around the table. The Thane’s shieldmen were bodily lifting the farmer from his feet and bearing him backwards, out of the chamber.

‘My own farm, there on the forest’s edge, is gone, lord!’ the man cried.

‘You say there are others who tell the same story?’ Croesan asked.

And soon enough all believed it. Farmworkers and herders, woodsmen and hunters were arriving in Anduran, all of them flying from the destruction of their homes and lands. In the first few hours of darkness, an army had come out from beneath the forest’s silent canopy on to the open fields. Somehow, by some unimaginable means, the enemy had crossed all the wild and trackless immensity of Anlane, through the domain of the savage White Owl Kyrinin, and brought an army to within reach of Anduran itself: an impossibility had come to pass.

Whole families poured into the city through the night, loaded on to carts or riding on scrawny horses, fleeing their homes and seeking safety. In the darkness, fear worked its way into hearts. Rich and poor, mighty and humble alike came to the conclusion that their best hope lay in flight. By winter’s first dawn the road south to Glasbridge was in its turn filled with a steady stream of townsfolk. And by that same dawn there was an army in sight from the walls of the castle.

Croesan had known then that the town at least was lost. Tanwrye was his Blood’s great bulwark against the Black Road : its strength had always been relied upon to block the route through the Vale of Stones. Anduran’s own walls were in poor repair, half of its garrison—already reduced by the demands of Gryvan oc Haig—was on the road for Tanwrye. Croesan’s castle might be held against assault; Anduran itself could not.

That too was when he understood that he, and his Blood, had after all unlearned things they once knew. Peace had worked a malign flaw into their memories. They had forgotten that to stand against the implacable Black Road required a fire in the heart and in the blood to match that which burned in the northerners; that their guard could never be dropped. Croesan had thought himself mindful of the dangers. Now, breathing in the ashes of Anduran, knowing that half the inhabitants of the city had fled in terror before the enemy was even sighted, he tasted the cost of misjudgement.

The Thane was roused from his black reverie by the sound of someone coming up behind him.

‘You should not stand so exposed within sight of your enemy,’ said Behomun Tole dar Haig. ‘I saw crossbows down there earlier.’

Croesan grunted. ‘They’re too busy setting fires,’ he said.

Behomun stood beside him for a moment, gazing out across the rooftops, through the haze. ‘They will regret their actions when the rain and cold come.’

‘They are not foolish,’ muttered Croesan. ‘They have spared the barns, and many of the houses. They know what they are doing.’

‘I came to see if you would return to the council. It is becoming a trifle overwrought below. Your people would benefit from a firm hand to guide them.’

‘My people once more, I see. They belong to Gryvan when he needs them to fight for him in the south, but they are mine again now.’

Behomun shrugged. Since the siege began, something of his insouciant arrogance had left him. ‘That was no part of my meaning,’ he said softly.

‘Perhaps. But this should never have happened. The High Thane thinks of the south, always the south. He drools over the riches of the Free Coast and Tal Dyre like a fox in a lambing field. When Kilkry ruled, the other Bloods sent men here, to our lands, to guard against the Black Road . Now it’s our warriors who are summoned to the south. There’s the result: a sky filled with the smoke of our homes.’

‘There’s no point in you and I debating the rights and wrongs of it, and in all honesty I would have little heart for it. My own family is trapped here just like yours. What’s done is done.’

‘It is done,’ echoed Croesan distantly.

‘The town could not be defended,’ Behomun said, guessing the Thane’s thoughts. ‘We would likely all be dead if you had made your stand upon the walls instead of here in the castle.’

‘I know that well enough. Too many are dead in any case, though.’

‘You could not have taken more in. Every corridor is choked with families. There are more people than horses sleeping in the stables.’

Croesan nodded. It was a strange thing, to find Gryvan’s Steward so devoid of argument and conflict.

‘You could have left,’ he said, looking Behomun in the eye.

‘True, but I am Steward of the Thane of Thanes here. I had some notion of duty.’ Behomun glanced wistfully towards the west. ‘It was probably a foolish choice. Now I must trust to your walls to keep my wife and children safe.’

‘I hope they do so,’ said Croesan.

‘It cannot be long before relief comes. Lheanor will come from Kolkyre, or your own people from Glasbridge and Kolglas. The Black Roaders have over-reached themselves, however much they preach humility. There are no more than a few thousand of them in the city. So long as Tanwrye holds, and we do the same here, they will go no further south.’

‘Oh, yes. They will lose this war. But my Blood has already paid too high a price for the victory.’ Croesan shook himself as a shiver ran through his back. ‘Come, we had best go down. I have indulged myself by remaining here. I have duties too.’

As they made their way northwards, down from the high ground through the ever-thickening forest, Anyara found herself watching the back of the female Inkallim walking in front of the horse. She had never dreamed that she would set eyes upon one of them. The Inkallim—warriors and acolytes, executioners and assassins—were the stuff of whispered childhood tales. Lack of sure knowledge about them had allowed such an accumulation of rumour and myth that they had become, in the minds of those living south of the Stone Vale, colossal, gore-drenched incarnations of death itself.

Anyara wondered how many this lean, wiry woman who marched before her had killed. Women did not take up arms amongst the Haig Bloods. Her father had once told her that necessity had made it commonplace throughout the Bloods of the Black Road, not just amongst the Inkallim: they needed every warrior they could find in the early years of their exile beyond the Vale of Stones, when there had been wild Tarbain tribesmen to subdue and pursuing armies of the Kilkry High Thane to repel. Whatever the reason, it was proof of the cruel demands the Black Road made of its followers.

They halted for a while and Anyara sat with her back against a tree. She and Inurian were kept apart. One of the Inkallim brought her some dry biscuits. He freed her hands so that she could eat. When he was gone she turned them this way and that, examining the raw weals about her wrists. They hurt, but it was nothing she could not bear.

She rested her head back against the tree trunk. Looking up through the naked branches, she watched the passage of heavy grey clouds across the sky. Rain was coming. The days after Winterbirth were often rain-soaked in the Glas valley. She was distracted from her thoughts by a dark flash of movement high in the tree beneath which she sat. She angled her head to try to catch its source. Almost hidden in the very crown of the tree, she saw a black bird hopping from one branch to another: a crow. She looked away, only for something to make her turn back. The crow sat there, patiently riding a branch’s movements back and forth. It came to her, with absolute certainty, that this was Idrin, Inurian’s crow. She opened her mouth, and closed it again, not knowing what to do. She looked for Inurian. He was sitting thirty or more paces away. He was watching her. She raised her eyebrows at him, wondering how to convey her news. She could not be sure, but she thought there was the faintest hint of a smile on his lips then and, so fast it could easily have been missed, a flicked wink of one eye as he turned away from her.

The hours flowed into one another. She lost her sense of direction. The stars were obscured at night and the sun hidden during the day by banks of cloud. She shivered, and ached, and slept poorly. Occasionally, Aeglyss would ride alongside her and watch her in provoking silence. She struggled to ignore him, and would not meet his strange, half-human eyes.

In those long, lonely hours on horseback, she found herself prey to bleak thoughts and imaginings that she could not fend off. Her father had laughed that night in the feasting hall, when the jugglers had played their part. He had been happy. She could see his face when she closed her eyes. She could see his slumped figure as well, propped limply against the castle wall. She had not seen Orisian’s body in the courtyard; it could have been there, nevertheless.

Inurian was somewhere behind her on the trail, and a longing to be near him filled her. Orisian had always been closer to the na’kyrim than she had. Somehow the knowledge that Inurian, perhaps alone in all the world, could see into her heart and lay bare the pain and fears she held caged there had made her keep some distance between them. For all that, he had never been anything other than kind and now he was all she had left. He alone remained of all the people who had filled spaces in her life.

In the afternoon they unbound Anyara and Inurian and at last let them sit together while the horses were watered at a stream. She pressed her face into his shoulder. Still she would not cry, but the contact met a raw need in her. Inurian was massaging and probing at his right knee. He left off to put his arm around her shoulders.

‘Be strong a while longer,’ he said.

‘Yes. I know, I know.’

‘You noticed Idrin, then.’

Anyara smiled at him. It was better not to talk about all the other things that teemed in her thoughts.

‘Has he been following us all the way?’ she asked.

‘Oh, yes. He has always been stubborn. It is a trait of crows in general which he has refined to its purest form.’

‘When we were young, we used to tell each other that the Inkallim could turn themselves into crows,’ Anyara murmured.

‘Perhaps you had heard people calling them ravens. An easy confusion for children. But no; the Whreinin and the Saolin were the only races made with the talent of shapechanging. The Anain have no true shape at all, and so cannot be counted.’

‘I half-thought the Inkallim were just a story anyway,’ Anyara said wearily.

‘A pity they are not.’

They were quiet for a little while after that. Anyara found other recollections of childhood fears drifting into her thoughts: the debris of long evenings she, Orisian and Fariel had spent trying to scare each other with whispered tales.

‘Is Aeglyss like one of the na’kyrim in olden days?’ she asked. ‘The ones that were so terrible?’

Inurian shook his head slowly.

‘No, I don’t think so. That was all a very long time ago, Anyara. There’s no need to fear something so long gone. Aeglyss is strong, certainly: the Shared seethes around him. But I don’t think he really knows how to use it. There are so few of us now, we’ve forgotten most of what the na’kyrim knew all those years ago. There’ve been no great masters of the Shared for a good three centuries, not since the years after the War of the Tainted. Anyway, the tales of them have probably been bloated by fear and by the passage of time.’

‘Well, I hope no more stories will be coming to life,’ Anyara said.

‘I hope so too,’ replied Inurian. There was a distance and seriousness in his tone that made her want to shiver. He sensed it, and gave her a broad smile.

‘Do not worry,’ he said. ‘No more stories.’

Soon after, their captors came and dragged them once more to their feet.

A steady rain had been falling for the two hours since the Inkallim made camp. They were spread along the edge of a field of rough grass, with a scrawny copse of alder trees behind them. The few Kyrinin—ten or twelve—who had stayed with the party after they left the sheltering forests of Anlane had taken cover beneath the trees. A scattering of crows was huddled in the branches above, waiting for the rain to pass.

The Inkallim had set up makeshift awnings as soon as they came to a halt, hacking down thin saplings from the copse and spreading capes and canvas sheets between them. They were clustered beneath them now, talking softly, cleaning their weapons and chewing on biscuits and dried meat. They held little pots out to collect the rain-water, and drank from them. Their horses were tethered at the edge of the copse. Inurian and Anyara had been left, their hands and feet bound, to sit without protection upon the dank grass. Their hair and clothes soaked through, they watched the few cattle that were listlessly grazing out in the centre of the field. Anduran was less than an hour’s walk away. The rain-blurred shapes of the city’s buildings were dimly visible to the north. There was no smoke there now; the fires must have been dampened down.

Aeglyss wandered across to them and squatted down, ignoring the rain. Inurian lowered his eyes and stared at the patch of ground between his feet. .

‘What’s happening?’ demanded Anyara. ‘Why have we stopped?’

‘We are to be met by Kanin nan Horin-Gyre. It is an honour,’ smiled Aeglyss.

‘The Horin-Gyre Bloodheir? They’re the ones doing this? Well, he could just as easily have met us in Anduran, beneath a roof.’

Aeglyss shrugged. ‘Who knows why the powerful do the things they do? I am told he wanted to meet us outside the town.’

‘He’ll only kill us anyway,’ muttered Anyara. ‘Probably wants to do it out of sight.’

‘Oh, not you, my lady,’ Aeglyss assured her. ‘He was content to have some of your family taken alive. He can find a use for you, I am sure, or his sister will. If you want to fear someone, I would choose her.’

He glanced at Inurian, who was pointedly ignoring the exchange.

‘Your friend here may be another story, naturally. The Bloodheir may well prefer to see him dead. Unless I can dissuade him, of course.’

With a show of boredom, Inurian looked up. ‘None of the Gyre Bloods are renowned for their clemency. I doubt such as you can sway him.’

‘Such as I? I brought the White Owl clan to his Blood’s side. If the White Owl had taken up their spears against him instead of being his guides and feeding him, how could he have brought his army through Anlane? Without me, he would not now be camped at the gates of Castle Anduran. I think you will find that the Horin-Gyre Bloodheir remembers his friends.’

‘The White Owl will not thank you for what you have done,’ Inurian said.

‘What do you care, Fox?’ snapped Aeglyss. ‘They’ll thank me well enough when the Lannis Blood is gone.’

Inurian looked over towards the dour group of warriors gathered beneath the awnings.

‘Better Lannis than the Inkallim and the Bloods of the Black Road . The White Owl will learn that soon enough.’ He turned back to Aeglyss. ‘Was your mother or your father of the White Owl?’

The younger man hesitated, taken unawares by the question. For a moment it seemed that he might not answer.

‘My mother,’ he said. ‘And my father was of the Horin-Gyre Blood, so have a care what you say, old man.’

Inurian regarded him for a moment. ‘You must have been born not long after the battle at Tanwrye thirty years ago,’ he said. ‘Your father escaped into Anlane after the Horin-Gyre army was defeated? He was taken by the White Owl?’

The blow came too quickly for Inurian to avoid it. Aeglyss struck him hard across the side of the face, knocking him to the ground. Anyara lunged at Aeglyss, but he pushed her away. Inurian lay there for a few seconds, then righted himself. Blood oozed from the corner of his mouth. It was washed away by the rain.

Aeglyss laid a single finger upon Inurian’s chest. His eyes were brimming with cold anger. Anyara could see a muscle clenched so tight in his jaw it might have been a rod of iron laid over his bones. She had a terrible, momentary sense that the na’kyrim was about to burst and spill some awful, burning spirit of anger and hatred over them.

‘Better not to speak of things you know nothing about,’ Aeglyss hissed, and rose to his feet. ‘Let’s wait and see what Kanin wants to do you with you,’ he called over his shoulder as he stalked back to join the Inkallim.

Anyara turned to Inurian, a look of concern on her face. Inurian spat inelegantly.

‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘His parentage would appear to be a sensitive subject.’ He leaned a little closer to Anyara. ‘Have a care of that one. Whatever happens to me, keep away from him. He may be more dangerous than I thought.’

‘He seems dangerous enough already,’ Anyara muttered.

Inurian shook his head. ‘It’s mostly bluster. Beneath the surface, he’s all bound up in a knot of anger and pain. He is poisoned by it. Nevertheless, there is more power in him than he knows. When he’s angry like that, I can feel the Shared in him like a thundercloud. If he knew how to draw upon it, he would be capable of a great deal.’

‘In any case,’ said Anyara with forced lightness, ‘nothing’s going to happen to you.’

Inurian smiled at her. ‘Just remember. Stay away from him.’

There was a sudden flurry of activity amongst the Inkallim. They were getting to their feet. Peering out through the grey rain, Inurian and Anyara could just make out a group of riders coming towards them across the farmland.

‘It’s Kanin,’ said Inurian. ‘The Bloodheir is coming.’

The heir to the Thaneship of the Horin-Gyre Blood was a tall, strong man in his late twenties. His heavy black hair was matted down by the rain. It gave him a roguish, rather bedraggled look. Had Anyara not known who he was, she might have thought him handsome. Instead, she felt the stirring of hatred. Of all the Bloods of the Black Road, it was Horin-Gyre, with its strongholds at the northern end of the Vale of Stones, that had always posed the greatest threat.

A dozen warriors of his Shield had come with the Bloodheir. Their mail hauberks rang softly as they dismounted. They tied their horses at the edge of the copse, ignoring the Kyrinin amongst the trees, and came back to stand in a loose group behind Kanin nan Horin-Gyre.

Aeglyss went to greet the Bloodheir. Kanin brushed past him without even meeting his gaze. He looked around, his sharp eyes running over the Inkallim who were coming one by one from beneath their shelters, the Kyrinin warriors now getting to their feet amongst the trees, and finally Inurian and Anyara, bound upon the wet grass. He smoothed his hair back from his face with a leather-guantleted hand, watching the prisoners intently.

‘Who is the halfbreed?’ Kanin asked. His voice was strong, imbued with the instinctive authority that was his birthright.

‘Kennet’s counsellor,’ said Aeglyss eagerly. ‘We thought he might be of some value.’

Kanin walked towards Inurian and Anyara. His warriors followed. He knelt on one knee and took Inurian’s chin in his hand, forcing his head around so that their eyes met.

‘I have heard of you, I think. Inurian, is it?’

Inurian remained silent. Kanin released him and turned to Anyara.

‘The Thane’s niece, I presume,’ he said. There was a hint of suppressed mirth in his eyes and the set of his mouth. ‘A pretty prize.’

Anyara scowled at him.

‘But not in a pretty mood, it would appear,’ said Kanin as he rose to his feet. ‘You had better accustom yourself to new arrangements. This valley is returning to its rightful owners.’

‘You have tried that before, and failed,’ said Anyara tartly.

The Bloodheir laughed. It was a rich sound. ‘Not this time. This time the past will be buried.’

He turned towards the Inkallim. ‘Kolglas?’ he asked.

One of the warriors stepped forwards, all languid precision and restrained power.

‘Burned,’ he said.

‘And Kennet and his son?’

‘The Thane’s brother is dead. The boy escaped across the water, but was wounded. He is probably dead by now.’

A tiny moan escaped Anyara’s lips. Kanin ignored her.

‘Probably,’ he said, sarcasm tingeing his tone. ‘So a child has escaped the famed Battle Inkall. All the Lannis line was to be dead or taken. That was important.’

The Inkallim’s mouth tightened.

‘We answer to Shraeve. She commands the Battle Inkall here, not you.’

For a moment, the two men faced one another in the drizzle. Watching them, Anyara understood more clearly than before that the Inkallim were something more than just warriors. This man glaring at the son of the Horin-Gyre Thane did so with the silent will of an equal, drawing upon some strength, some core, that removed any need for deference.

Kanin relaxed and wiped his face. ‘Very well. You’ll find Shraeve somewhere by the market square. You can tell your story to her. At least we have the Thane and his brood shut up in his castle.’ He shivered, then smiled at Anyara and Inurian. ‘This weather of yours is inhospitable. We had best get you to shelter in the city. I’ve picked out fine accommodation for you.’

He turned on his heel and made to remount his horse. He stopped abruptly, as if remembering something inconsequential that had slipped his mind until this moment. He looked at Aeglyss.

‘I do not want the White Owls to come any further, halfbreed. Tell them if they are seen any closer to the city than this, we will treat them as our enemies.’

Aeglyss blinked, starting almost as if he had been struck.

‘I thought . . .’ he began.

Kanin raised his eyebrows in mock surprise. A flicker of contempt slipped into his voice as he spoke.

‘You would not be so rash as to argue with me?’ he asked. ‘The White Owls have what they wanted—the Lannis Blood broken—and we have no further need of them.’

‘Your father said…’

‘Do not overplay your hand, halfbreed. My father lies in his sickbed in Hakkan, and I carry his authority here. This is Horin-Gyre land now, and I will not have wights wandering freely across it. You may enter Anduran if you wish, but not them.’

‘The White Owl will be . . . disappointed,’ said Aeglyss. ‘Others—some of their leaders—are not far behind us. They will wish to meet with you, to confirm the pledges made by your father. The settlements in Anlane are to be razed, a gift of cattle and iron made. I promised them these things on your behalf, as your father wished.’ Anyara noted a strange, soothing kind of resonance slipping into the na’kyrim’s voice.

Kanin’s expression suddenly darkened and he took a resolute step closer to Aeglyss.

‘If I thought, for even a moment, that you would seek to play games against me with your voice, halfbreed, I would split your skull. I know well enough what tricks you are capable of. You may have clouded the minds of the woodwights with your sweet tones, and since they have served my needs because of it, I’ll not complain. But do not make the mistake of thinking you can attempt the same with me.’

The rain was growing heavier. Kanin wiped the gathering drops from his brow and shook his head a little. He spared a glance for the Kyrinin watching them from amongst the trees.

‘When you promised my father you could bring the wood-wights to our side, he made an agreement with you. Now it is over. I want nothing more to do with your savages and I will certainly not be summoned to meet with them. Look at them: forest folk dressed in animal skins. If they want cattle, have them take these.’ He gestured towards the animals grazing a short distance away. ‘If they want settlements razed, let them do it themselves, but I warn you, if they burn a single building within a day’s march of Anduran, I will kill you and then hunt them down. If they are disappointed tell them to remember that we will be lords of Anduran soon. We make unforgiving enemies.’

Aeglyss opened his mouth to speak, but Kanin was already swinging up into the saddle.

‘I have more important matters than this to occupy my time. See that the woodwights do not follow us,’ he said to one of the shieldmen at his side, ‘and bring the girl and the other to me in Anduran.’

With that, the Bloodheir spurred his horse violently, and it bounded forwards across the field. Three of his band went after him. The others remained, staring at Aeglyss, who looked around hesitantly. The Inkallim were already bundling up their equipment. A few of the Horin-Gyre warriors rode over to Inurian and Anyara. The bonds around their ankles were cut and they were hauled on to horseback.

‘Wait,’ cried Aeglyss after Kanin’s disappearing form. ‘Give me Inurian, at least. You have no need of him.’ No one paid him any heed.

Anyara’s last glimpse of the na’kyrim, as she was carried towards the rain-shrouded city in the distance, was of a lone, shrunken figure gazing after them. She wondered, now that he appeared so forlorn and impotent, how he had ever intimidated her. Behind the na’kyrim the White Owls were coming out from beneath the shelter of the trees, closing upon him.

A single black crow rose from amongst its fellows roosting in the copse and flapped lazily through the rain. With a few long sweeps of its wings it turned and followed towards Anduran.

The city was not as Anyara remembered it. Her Blood’s proudest creation had been battered by a ferocious storm. Most of the farm buildings on the outskirts were intact, although they had an abandoned air and a feel of incipient decay. There were no people to be seen, no lights in the windows, no smoke rising from chimneys. It was a hollow landscape.

As they entered into Anduran itself the scent of wet, burned wood filled her nostrils. Gutted skeletons were all that remained of many houses. Rubble had collapsed across the roadway in places. The horses stepped over bodies not yet cleared away. A charred, black-crusted arm reached out toward Anyara from across a thresh-old. A single white sheet, stained by smoke, hung soddenly from an open window. A buzzard sat upon the remnants of roof timber, watching them go by with its head cocked on one side.

They wove their way through the streets, drawing ever closer to the square and to the castle beyond it. There were no more bodies. The dead had been gathered up from these streets. There were still dogs and crows, though, haunting the alleys. There were warriors too, picking their way through the ruins in small groups, gathering what little loot remained. Anyara caught sight of one group, clambering over the wreckage of a house like rats on a body, that differed from the others. They wore furs and hide breeches, and their matted hair was bound into braids with leather thongs. They stopped for a moment to watch the riders pass, then returned to their searching. When they called to each other it was in a harsh tongue that made Anyara think of dogs. They must be Tarbains, she thought: the wild tribesmen of the north who had been there long before the Black Road arrived. If Kanin had brought them south too, little in the Glas valley would escape despoliation.

The buildings that had once lined the southern side of the market square were gone, reduced to piles of blackened debris. One of the fires must have been started there. It had consumed even the bones of the merchants’ houses, the shops, the warehouses. Beyond, the square itself was crowded. Ranks of horses were tied along one side, sullen guards watching them from beneath the shelter of overhanging roofs. A train of mules, weighed down with sacks of food and bundles of weapons, was crossing the open expanse. Some thirty caped spearmen escorted it. On the square’s western side, a blacksmith’s shop was a hive of activity, giving out the roar of fanned flames and the pounding of hammers.

The castle was visible over the rooftops to the north, half-shrouded by the curtains of rain. It was silent and still. Anyara had almost expected there to be a battle raging. Instead it was as if war itself had huddled down to wait for better weather.

Kanin nan Horin-Gyre had occupied the largest house left standing on the edge of the square, the home of a fur merchant who had left in such haste that a bale of fine marten fur still lay on the floor at the end of the dining table. Kanin was seated on it when Anyara and Inurian were brought before him. A handful of hard-faced warriors were lounging around the room, some perched upon the edges of the table, others leaning back in the expensive chairs.

There was a young woman there too, perhaps five years older than Anyara. She wore a light vest of delicately wrought chain metal. There was a golden chain about her neck, and thick, glittering rings upon her fingers. Her hair was long and blackly sleek, like strands of spun obsidian. When Anyara looked at her, she saw only a cold, dead arrogance and contempt.

‘Welcome,’ smiled Kanin. ‘I have found a throne, as you see.’ He ran his hands through the dark fur beneath him. ‘Worth more than the one Croesan sits upon in his castle, I imagine. Had this been my house, I would not have left such booty behind.’

‘It is your house, now,’ the woman pointed out.

‘Indeed. I suppose it must be,’ Kanin glanced at Anyara. ‘Forgive me. You have not been introduced. This is my sister, Wain. And Wain, this is Anyara, the daughter of the late lord of Kolglas.’

Wain nan Horin-Gyre inclined her head in mock respect. She was turning one of her rings, round and round on her finger. ‘A pleasure,’ she said.

Anyara made no response, striving for an air of disdain despite being soaked to the skin and covered in scratches and dirt.

‘Do not mind her rudeness, sister,’ said the Bloodheir, rising to his feet. ‘She has had a trying journey. I don’t suppose Inkallim and wood wights make for the kind of travelling companions she is used to.’

That sent a ripple of wry laughs running around the others in the room. Anyara felt hemmed in, beset by a pack of wolves too well-fed to kill her but too enamoured of her suffering to let her go. Fear and anger vied for supremacy within her. Anger won.

‘At least I had no choice in keeping their company,’ she snapped. ‘You have chosen ravens and woodwights as allies, and Tarbains too. Would none of the other Bloods come with you? Horin-Gyre has even fewer friends than I knew.’

Kanin smiled at her. She saw his teeth. ‘We have those we need, it seems, to break you. And I’ve seen no men of Haig on the walls of Croesan’s castle; no Kilkry horsemen in your valley. Where are your friends, my lady?’

‘Coming,’ said Anyara.

‘As are ours,’ said Wain with the kind of calm certainty Anyara wished she felt herself. ‘Gyre will be here before Haig. Do you think us fools, playing at children’s games? We have watched you for a long time, child, while the Heart Fever ate up your people, while your warriors were called away by Gryvan oc Haig. We have watched and waited for the right time. This is that time.’

‘I do think you fools,’ Anyara shouted. ‘You’ll die here. Whether you fear it or not, death…’

‘Not before you,’ Wain interrupted her. ‘Or your father. Did he fear death?’

‘Enough pleasantries,’ Kanin said. Anyara’s outburst had not unsettled him in the least, although she thought there was an acid edge to Wain’s glare. ‘I have little stomach for them at the best of times. Our guests had better be shown to their sleeping quarters. The town gaol. I hope you will find it to your liking.’

Guards moved to march the two prisoners out.

‘A word to you before you go, halfbreed,’ said Kanin, raising an admonitory finger to Inurian, acknowledging his presence for the first time. ‘I imagine that you possess some of the little tricks of your kind, though I think Aeglyss once told me that yours is a paltry kind of talent. Still, we will keep guards out of your way, I think, and trust to bars and stone to hold you. Be assured that your young companion will be watched, though. She will die the instant there is any suggestion of trickery. If that happens your own death will be unpleasant. You may become a useful gift to someone one day, but do not make the mistake of thinking I value your life any more than that of a dog.’

‘Such a thought would never cross my mind,’ murmured Inurian.

‘Excellent. Now I am afraid I must send you on your way. Should we meet again, perhaps some time in your uncle’s prison cells will have blunted that tongue of yours, Anyara.’

He gave an exaggerated bow in her direction. She took a step backwards, shying away from the gesture, and cursed herself silently for the reaction. She caught a contemptuous curl at the corner of Wain nan Horin-Gyre’s mouth as she was ushered out of the room.

Anduran’s gaol lay off the long, broad Street of Crafts that passed from the square through the town’s northern quarter towards the castle. As she and Inurian were marched towards it, through rain that was now hard and sharp enough to sting her scalp, Anyara stepped over and around the flotsam left in the wake of the town’s foundering. As well as the fragments of broken and burned homes, the road was littered with debris dropped by fleeing townsfolk or looting soldiers: here a child’s straw dolly, there a single cloth glove, a matron’s cap, a baby’s shawl. All were sinking, or had been trodden, into rivulets and puddles of dirty water.

The enemy lurked in many of the buildings, sheltering from the rain. Grim, hostile faces regarded Anyara and Inurian from doorways. Once, from the upper floor of one of the houses, someone threw a half-eaten hunk of bread that bounced off Anyara’s shoulder. She trudged on.

The gaol had the look and feel of a fortress or barracks in miniature. Anyara and Inurian were led through the gate in the long outer wall. Within, two separate blocks of cells lay on either side. Tight, metal-barred windows fixed the newcomers with a gloomy gaze. Guardrooms and sleeping quarters were attached to each of the blocks, but the house of the head gaoler stood alone. A group of Horin-Gyre warriors had gathered outside it. They were watching as the bodies of two young men were cut down from the makeshift gibbets that flanked the building.

It was a moment or two before Anyara realised that she and Inurian were being separated. Their captors were steering them apart, Anyara towards the cells on the right and Inurian to the left.

‘Inurian,’ she called.

He was looking at her with something close to anguish upon his face.

‘Be strong,’ he said. ‘It is not over yet.’

Anyara managed a nod, and then someone was pushing her head down and forwards as she was forced through a low doorway and swallowed whole by the gloom of her prison.

Later, cast down upon the hard floor of a narrow cell—the door slammed shut and barred, drops of rain splashing in through the tiny window high in the wall—and with no one there to see, she wept at last.

Lheanor oc Kilkry-Haig had been arguing with the High Thane’s Steward for some time. Lagair Haldyn dar Haig was not the worst Steward Lheanor had been forced to deal with in his time. Since he became Thane of his Blood, there had been three holders of that office, and by the end of his tenure the second—Pallick—had been almost impossible. Even Gryvan oc Haig had eventually accepted that the man’s presence in Kolkyre served nobody and had sent him instead to Igryn oc Dargannan-Haig’s court. It was without great surprise that Lheanor later heard that Pallick had been thrown into a gaol cell by Igryn. He sometimes wondered if the man’s appointment to the post of Steward in Dargannan lands had not been a deliberate ploy to provoke Igryn to rebellion. Gryvan oc Haig, or his Shadowhand, were certainly not above such manipulations, and although few men could singlehandedly cause a revolt through their obstinacy and arrogance, it was probably not beyond Pallick.

By comparison, Lagair’s failings were limited to indolence and an all-encompassing indifference to the concerns of others. It made arguing with him a thankless task. Lheanor was an old man, and he found the effort wearying. He was thankful that his son, the Bloodheir Gerain, was here with him, to share the burden.

‘I am not disputing your right to act,’ the Steward was saying. For some reason he was not looking at the Thane, or at Gerain, but staring vacantly at the fire burning in the grate. ‘I merely insist that you refrain from marching your entire army into the Glas valley until we first have a better idea of what exactly is happening there and second, have word from Vaymouth regarding the High Thane’s intent.’

‘We already have riders on their way to find out what is happening,’ replied the Bloodheir levelly, ‘but whatever the details, you cannot deny the need to act. You have seen the same messages we have: more than a hundred people from Kolglas and the villages around there have already crossed our borders. Others are on their way. Kolglas itself has been attacked, the castle and half the town burned, and Kennet nan Lannis-Haig has been killed. White Owl Kyrinin are looting farms, and Inkallim are loose in Anlane. Inkallim, Steward! If the ravens of the Black Road are fighting pitched battles as far south as Kolglas, how can you doubt that disaster threatens?’

Lagair scratched at the side of his nose, frowning with concentration.

‘If there is one thing I have learned in all my years,’ the Steward said—and Lheanor groaned inwardly at this repetition of a phrase Lagair used with self-important frequency—‘it is that the obvious conclusions are not always proved correct by subsequent events. I mean, think on it for a moment. Kolglas has been raided, not captured. The entire Battle Inkall numbers no more than a few thousand, to the best of our knowledge, so they can hardly be planning to march all the way to Kolkyre on their own. No, this looks more like a piece of clever hubris, to me. A few Inkallim have somehow managed to sneak to Kolglas, kill the Thane’s brother and have now snuck off back to Kan Dredar or wherever they call home. At the same time they’ve managed to stir up the wood-wights, which I freely admit is surprising but hardly a disaster.’

Gerain was hiding it well, but Lheanor could see that his son was only a few minutes away from losing his temper. The Bloodheir had a generally equable temperament—certainly in comparison to his brother Roaric—but was quite capable of the occasional ill-judged outburst. There had probably been enough talking in any case.

‘Well, we shall know the truth of all this before too long,’ Lheanor said quietly.

The Steward glanced up and gave the Thane a vacant, pointless smile.

‘Our finest scouts are on the road even now, and we’ll have their reports within a day or so,’ Lheanor continued.

‘Yes, lord,’ agreed Lagair. ‘Quite true. A day or two’s patience will cost us little.’

‘There’s a difference between patience and inactivity,’ Lheanor said. ‘Whatever the uncertainties, I am entitled to do as I see fit to protect my own borders, and to see to the safety of the Lannis Blood as well. You would not expect me to stand by while another of the True Bloods faces . . . well, whatever they are facing.’

Lagair looked doubtful but held his tongue.

‘I will look forward to hearing the High Thane’s opinions on the matter—no doubt you already have detailed reports on their way to Vaymouth—but in the meantime, I shall take such action as seems to me wise and prudent. I can assure you,’ Lheanor said with studied clarity, ‘that I will not go so far as to march my entire army into the Glas valley. You’ve made it clear you, and therefore Gryvan oc Haig, would disapprove of such a step, and as it would in any case be the act of an idiot, I am happy to promise to refrain from it.’

‘Yes, very good,’ said Lagair. His expression suggested he put little value on Lheanor’s promise.

‘Of course,’ the Kilkry Thane said, ‘if, once we know what is actually happening, it no longer seems idiotic, then I will march my entire army wherever I wish. Since it is, after all, mine. That part of it which the High Thane has left me with, at least.’

After the Steward had gone, Lheanor took a private meal with his son and his wife, Ilessa. They were all subdued and their mood communicated itself to the servants, who stepped lightly around the table and took care to stay out of sight until they were needed.

There were close ties of friendship and history between the Kilkry and Lannis Bloods. Kennet nan Lannis-Haig had been a frequent, and well-liked, visitor to Kolkyre before the Heart Fever. Lheanor had never known him as well as he knew Croesan, but had believed him to be a good and reliable man. It meant nothing to Lagair Haldyn—and nor would it to the High Thane the Steward served—but for Lheanor and his family, Kennet’s death was cause for great sorrow. All the more so if it was truly the work of the hated Bloods of the Black Road .

Gerain was uninterested in his food. He took only a few desultory mouthfuls.

‘Will you let me go?’ he asked.

Ilessa looked up from her platter to her son, but his gaze was fixed upon Lheanor. For a moment or two, the Thane seemed not to have heard the question. He prodded at the meat in front of him, his brow furrowed.

‘How many men do you want to take?’ the Thane asked at length.

‘Only two or three hundred,’ Gerain replied at once. He sounded eager, though he was trying hard to maintain a level tone. ‘My own men: none from the border watches or the castles. Just my own company.’

Lheanor sighed and gestured for one of the attendants to remove the unfinished meal before him. He poured himself some wine. A little of it spilled, his hands made slightly unsteady by age.

‘Still no word from Roaric,’ he murmured. ‘We’ve heard nothing from him for . . . what? Two weeks?’

‘Three,’ Ilessa said quietly.

‘We cannot just sit and wait, no matter how much the Steward may complain,’ Gerain said. ‘You told him as much yourself, Father. Out of all the Bloods, Lannis is the only one we can truly call our friends.’

‘You think I don’t know that?’ The Thane could not keep irritation out of his voice, but his expression showed that he immediately regretted it. He half-raised a placatory hand. ‘What times we live in. Both my sons must go into harm’s way? You’ll allow me to regret that.’

‘They are their father’s sons,’ said Ilessa. ‘That is why they do as they do. When you were Gerain’s age you would have been the first to ride out.’

The Thane returned her gentle smile. They had married young, Lheanor and Ilessa, too young almost to understand what they were doing. Neither had ever suffered even a moment’s regret. They had grown old together as willingly as any two people ever had.

‘I remember well enough,’ Lheanor said. His blood had sometimes run hot when he was young. When he was Bloodheir he had been at least as eager, as fired by passion, as Gerain. Looking back from the lofty vantage point of his now advanced years he could not remember when caution—something that could almost be called fear, even—had started to erode that youthful vigour. Perhaps it had been the moment he became Thane.

‘I’d not seek strife, but if it comes looking for us we cannot turn away from it,’ said Gerain. ‘Let me go.

Perhaps Croesan does not need our aid. Perhaps all I can do is tell him we share his sorrow at Kennet’s death. But if he does need our aid—our spears—it would shame us to wait for Gryvan oc Haig’s permission before giving it.’

‘You’d find no one in all our lands, except Gryvan’s own Steward, to disagree with that. It does not change the fact that he is High Thane. We must tread with care, that is all. I will tread carefully around Gryvan and his Steward; you take your men to Kolglas, and you tread carefully there. I want both of my sons alive to celebrate next Winterbirth here with your family.’

Orisian struggled up from unconsciousness as if waking from a viscous sleep. He was being carried through the forest on some kind of stretcher. He thought hazily about moving but his body was unresponsive. His gaze jolted in time with the stride of whoever was carrying him. The peeling trunks of birch trees loomed one after another across his vision and passed away. He saw a carpet of rough grass, dark green moss and fallen leaves. Out of the corner of his eye he caught the fleeting image of tall, pale figures walking. There was no sound. It was like a dream. He felt dull, throbbing pain in his side. He could not imagine why it should be there, but it mounted to a stabbing fire that surged and retreated in a remorseless rhythm. He slipped away again into a dark place.

Later he opened his eyes but still could not shed the stupor that clung to him. Voices had roused him. He saw, and heard without understanding. There were sounds, in turn like the chattering of squirrels, the croaking of crows or the movement of leaves in the breeze. He was being carried past strange bulbous tents. He saw a woman crouched in a doorway, her face with its delicate, impassive features trying to tell him something he did not understand. An animal hide was stretched upon a wooden frame. He smelled woodsmoke. Children flurried by. Like something out of nightmare or hallucination, there was a great face woven of boughs and twigs that leered at him. There was a pole thrust into the earth, with deer skulls fastened to it one above the other. They watched him with their dead sockets as he went past and his own eyes faltered and closed beneath their mournful gaze.

When he saw again, there was a face close to his: dusk-grey eyes looking into his own; fragile skin so close he could have laid his lips upon it. He felt the warmth of someone’s breath upon his cheeks and brow. He was inside, beneath a curving roof of deer-skin. Somewhere very far away he thought he heard a voice he knew shouting his name. It fell silent and as he was laid down upon the ground he lost consciousness once more.

He returned, at first, without knowing who he was. He blinked and turned a little towards the faint light. The movement was enough to trigger pain in his side. He grimaced at it, wondering why he should feel such a thing. The pain eased into an ache and he lay still for a time. His memories came slowly back, but they were unreal and he could not sort truth from dream, or nightmare.

He was looking up at the roof of a strange tent: a broad sweep of animal hide on a framework of poles. Furs were lying over him, filling his nostrils with a musky scent. Once more, he tried to turn his head to look towards the light that was filtering in from somewhere to his left. He was braced for the pain; still when it came it brought a gasp out of him. He lifted his lead-heavy hand and put it to his side. There was some kind of dressing there, warm and moist against his skin. He was taken by a fit of coughing that filled his chest with fire and sent blurring flickers of light across his vision. He watched them dancing inside his eyelids as dizziness swept through him.

Then there was someone inside the tent with him, laying a cool palm upon his forehead and lifting the furs to look at his bandaged flank. He looked into a face from his dreams: a beautiful, pale-skinned face, framed by yellow-white hair, from which clear grey eyes regarded him. The hand upon his brow was withdrawn, and he glimpsed spidery fingers tipped by long, white nails. The thin lips moved.

‘Be still,’ came a voice that was as light and floating in Orisian’s ears as a breath of summer wind.

Kyrinin, some small, clear part of his mind murmured to him. The thought drifted away, unable to find any purchase upon him.

‘Rest,’ he heard her say, and he did.

Fariel was there, in a half-waking, half-sleeping place. His dead brother stooped in the doorway of the tent. He was a handsome, almost beautiful, young man now. He held his long hair back from his eyes as he leaned forwards.

‘Walk with me,’ he said, and Orisian rose and followed his brother out into the evening.

The forest was bathed in low sunlight, the trees throwing sharp shadows across the grass. Butterflies flitted from light to shade and back to light again. His brother waited for him, holding out a hand.

‘Let’s go down to the sea,’ he said, and Orisian nodded. The trees stood far apart, and they made their way down towards the waves. The water was shining. The two of them stood side by side and looked out to the west. The great globe of the sun was just touching its rim to the horizon. A warm breeze was blowing in.

‘It’s beautiful,’ said Orisian, and Fariel smiled.

‘Very,’ he said.

‘You’ve been gone a long time,’ Orisian said.

His brother picked up a stone and threw it far, far out. He wiped his hand on his tunic.

‘Not so long, and not so far away.’

‘No, I never thought you were very far away,’ Orisian said.

They started to walk along the shore. Birds above them called with voices almost human, mixing alarm and loss.

‘I’d like you to come back,’ said Orisian.

‘I can’t. I’m sorry,’ said Fariel without looking at his brother.

‘Are you alone? Is . . .’ Orisian’s voiced faded away.

Fariel laughed gently. ‘Yes, she’s with me. And Father.’

That brought Orisian to a standstill. He stared at the back of Fariel’s head as his older brother walked on a few steps before stopping and turning. Orisian felt a sickness stirring in the pit of his stomach. Gulls were screeching in the air, the sound of screams. The sun was sickening and taking on a red hue.

‘Father?’ he echoed. Dark shapes were at the corner of his eyes, dancing, taunting.

Fariel pointed out to sea and there, impossibly close, was Castle Kolglas. It was a burned-out shell with smoke still rising from its broken windows, sections of its walls cast down and crumbling, its gates torn asunder and lying like flotsam at the water’s edge. As Orisian watched, a great block of stone toppled from the battlements, crashed on to the rocks below and splashed into the sea. He reached out with his arms, as if he could touch the shattered castle. He felt dizzy. Deep inside his head, he saw his father, blood trickling from the side of his mouth, the hilt of a massive knife protruding from his chest. He gagged.

‘You’d forgotten,’ said Fariel.

Orisian bowed his head. ‘What should I do?’

‘I can’t say,’ replied his brother. ‘No one can tell you that any more. You’ll have to decide for yourself.’

Orisian looked up. Fariel shook his head sadly. He seemed to be further away, out over the water. Orisian could not make out his features any more.

‘Wait,’ cried Orisian, rising to his feet, ‘don’t go.’

Fariel said something, but Orisian could barely hear him now.

‘Where’s Anyara?’ shouted Orisian.

His brother faded into the bright demi-circle of the setting sun.

‘Don’t leave me,’ Orisian said.

He felt himself falling backwards, slumping down towards the earth. He fell into something soft and sank into it.

‘Don’t leave me,’ he whispered once, and then all was dark.

When he woke it was with the feel of the faintest touch upon his face. As his eyes focused, he found his gaze returned by the young Kyrinin woman looking down at him. She smelled of the forest, of warmth. Soft fine strands of her hair were brushing his cheek. He moved his lips soundlessly.

‘Be at ease,’ she said in her wondrous voice as she straightened up. ‘The worst is past.’

‘The worst,’ he repeated.

‘You saw death and came back.’

The dull pain in his flank registered upon his still-cloudy thoughts then, as if to confirm the truth of her words. He stirred, trying to ease aside the furs that lay over him. She laid a restraining hand on his, gentle but firm. Her clear eyes fixed him with a constant stare. There was no imperfection in them, he saw, no flaw in the pure field that surrounded her tiny pupils like a ring of polished flint. Inurian’s eyes had not been so perfect. They had had a touch of the human in them. Many things came back to Orisian then, too many to gather and shape. There was a flicker of panic in his breast as if a slumbering bird had woken.

‘Where’s Rothe?’ he asked.

‘Rothe?’

‘My shieldman. He was with me when ... he put me in the boat.’

‘The big man. He is here. He lives.’

She was examining the features of his face. He felt uncomfortable, sensing the touch of her gaze.

‘Where is he?’ he asked.

‘Here,’ she repeated.

‘I want to see him.’

She rose, towering above him. ‘Wait. I will ask.’

Orisian slid a hand across his stomach. It felt empty, partly from hunger, partly from the bitter, violent memories that were grasping at his thoughts. One took his attention for a moment.

‘Fariel,’ he breathed.

She turned, almost out of the tent. She looked back at him.

‘I did not hear,’ she said.

‘I dreamed of Fariel,’ he murmured.

‘Your brother,’ she said.

Orisian made to ask how she knew his brother’s name, but the flap of deerskin was already settling back into place behind her.

Rothe came, and Orisian had to hide the surprise that surged up within him. His shieldman looked different. Some of the bulk had gone from his frame; his face was thinner; his eyes, in the instant before they lit up at the sight of Orisian, were burdened. Orisian caught sight of tall figures outside as Rothe entered. They did not follow him in.

Rothe laid a broad hand upon Orisian’s shoulder.

‘It is good to see you again,’ the older man said softly. ‘I feared…’

Orisian struggled to sit up, but Rothe pressed him down.

‘Lie still,’ he said. ‘Don’t tire yourself.’

‘I’m all right,’ said Orisian.

‘Perhaps, perhaps. Still, it was a bad wound you took, and it would be better not to test it yet. Who knows what harm the wights’ meddling might have done?’

Orisian fingered the bandaging around his chest. ‘They put this poultice on me,’ he said.

‘Best not to wonder what may be in it, then,’ grimaced Rothe.

‘How long has it been?’

‘Seven days, Orisian.’

‘Seven days! I thought two or three, perhaps. I can hardly remember any of it.’

‘Seven. And moving much of the time. We only arrived here three days ago. They would not tell me what was happening, all the while. Not once have they let me see you. And they took my sword away, my sword I’ve had for half my life.’

Orisian noticed for the first time that there were bruises, almost faded now, upon Rothe’s cheek and brow, and a thin red line where some wound across the bridge of his nose had started to heal. He could guess how hard the man had tried to come to his side.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘at least we are together again now.’

‘Together as prisoners in a woodwight camp. I tried to get us to Glasbridge, I truly did, but I’ve no skill with boats and the currents were too strong. They carried us to the Car Anagais. The wights took us almost the moment we landed.’ A pained expression passed across the shieldman’s face. ‘Forgive me, Orisian, for bringing you away against your will. I had no choice. I could not let you go to your father.’

‘You’re my shieldman, and you saved my life. Should I forgive you that? I was . . . well, let’s leave it. Do you know where we are now?’

‘Hard to say. There was no break in the forest all the way we walked. I would say somewhere in the Car Anagais still. Perhaps the southern slopes of the Car Criagar, but I don’t think we covered that much ground.’

Orisian thought on that for a few moments. ‘What are we going to do?’ he wondered.

‘Wait until you are a little more healed. Hope these creatures do not take it into their heads to kill us before we have a chance to escape.’

‘These must be the Fox clan, though,’ said Orisian. ‘They would have no real reason to harm us. They’re not like the White Owls...’

‘The thoughts of a woodwight are no more human than his eyes. Never trust them, Orisian. We must guard one another here.’

Orisian wanted to say that it would be all right, that this was the clan of Inurian’s father, but he knew it would make no difference to Rothe. The shieldman had been a fighter in the service of the Lannis Blood all his life, and throughout that time there had been two constant stars to steer by: the threat of the Gyre Bloods in the north, and that of the Kyrinin who filled the forests around the valley. Even Orisian, knowing that Fox and White Owl were not one and the same, could not keep the tales of massacred woodsmen and of families burned in forest huts wholly from his mind.

The Kyrinin woman came back then. Tension snapped into Rothe’s eyes and arms at the sound of her entry, though he did not turn round.

‘Enough talk,’ she said. ‘Both come out.’

‘He should rest,’ said Rothe, still refusing to look at the woman.

To Orisian’s surprise, she laughed: a rich, musical laugh like none he had heard before save perhaps, in a way, from Inurian. Rothe was scowling.

‘Enough rest,’ she said. ‘He is well.’

As she came forwards to help Orisian rise, Rothe interposed himself. He wrapped a powerful arm around Orisian and eased him up and out of the bed. The woman held out a cape of thick dark fur. Rothe snatched the cape and laid it around Orisian’s shoulders.

‘Are you strong enough?’ he asked.

Orisian thought about it. Although he felt weak and rather frail, there was not so much pain and his body seemed to agree with the Kyrinin woman that he had rested enough. His muscles were stale and ready to stretch themselves.

‘Yes,’ he said.

Still resting much of his weight on Rothe’s encircling arm, Orisian followed the woman out into daylight. His eyes had forgotten its feel and he had to squint against the glare, but the instant touch of a breeze upon his face and of the cold air upon his skin was like diving into a cool pool on a hot day. It woke him. He blinked and inhaled deeply, shaking his head a little. The woman was watching him with an amused smile upon her lips.

The sunlight was coming in low and clear from the west. A dog bounded past, yelping as it crossed from light to shade and back again. A small gang of children were in close pursuit, laughing and shouting. When they caught sight of Orisian and Rothe standing outside the tent, they stumbled to a halt and stood in a tight knot, staring at them. Orisian’s eyes followed the dog as it ran on and vanished between some huts.

He was in a great camp of the Fox Kyrinin. Domed tents made of hides and skins dotted the forest floor, spreading as far as he could see amidst the trees. Kyrinin were moving amongst them. There were dogs, and a few goats wandered through the camp idly picking at grass or bushes. It was a bright, brisk winter’s day, and the scene had a peaceful feel to it.

Then he saw the object standing not far from the hut he had rested in. It was shaped of intertwined twigs and grasses supported on a frame of poles: an intricate weaving which suggested, rather than portrayed, the image of a face. He remembered it from his ill dreams.

‘What is that?’ he asked.

The woman followed his gaze, but did not respond.

Kyrinin were gathering now. They drifted up as if in answer to some silent summons to stand in a wide semicircle, watching Orisian and Rothe. Many of them carried spears. Rothe shifted uneasily. The woman said something in her own tongue, and there were a few slight nods amongst the crowd. The children’s view of the strange visitors to their camp had been obscured by the arriving adults and they slipped through the forest of legs to the front once more.

‘Hungry?’ asked the woman.

Orisian nodded. The crowd parted without a sound. As they passed through the ranks of Kyrinin, Orisian felt unease filling him, as if it had leapt the gap from Rothe’s body to his own. Intense grey eyes were fixed upon him. These people, so close he could touch one simply by reaching out, were not as he had imagined they would be. He had thought, when he pictured them in his daydreams, that they would be delicate, almost frail. For all the grace in their lean frames, there was a muscular strength and confidence too. Even their silence was more presence than absence. He was glad of Rothe’s arm about him, which seemed then as much protection as support.

Beyond the ring of Kyrinin, the woman brought them to a small fire. A girl was turning a hare on a spit. Fat fell into the flames, hissing and snapping. The girl danced away as they approached.

‘Eat,’ said the woman.

Orisian lowered himself to the ground and sat cross-legged. The scent of the meat woke a ravenous hunger in him. Rothe lifted the hare from over the fire and laid it on a stone. They picked scraps of meat from its carcass. Orisian could hardly eat fast enough to meet the need within him. Food had seldom tasted so sweet, and with the warm cloak about him and the air so sharp and fresh he felt, for the first time since he had woken, something like himself. Only when the hare had been reduced to a pile of greasy bones did he pause. He tried to wipe away the juices from around his mouth. They clung to him.

He looked up at the woman standing to one side.

‘How do you know my brother was called Fariel?’ he asked.

There was no reaction in the Kyrinin’s expression. ‘Inurian spoke of him,’ she said, then turned away.

‘You know Inurian?’ he called after her.

She went to the watching crowd and began speaking to some of them. A skinny dog came and made a grab for one of the bones. Rothe waved it away. It growled balefully at him before sitting down just out of reach and fixing the remains of the meal with an obsessive stare. Orisian looked into the centre of the fire. He had asked Inurian to let him come on his journeys into these hills many times. And now here he was, amongst the people the na’kyrim had known and visited. He had strayed, through a night-mare, into the secret part of Inurian’s life he had always been so curious about, and Inurian was not here with him. Nothing was as he had hoped it would be.

‘She’s coming back,’ muttered Rothe.

‘You must go in again,’ the woman said.

Rothe and Orisian were parted. The enforced separation brought a thunderous rage to Rothe’s face.

‘It’s all right,’ Orisian called after his shieldman, though he was not certain of the truth of that. To his surprise, the woman followed him into the tent, and watched as he lowered himself on to the sleeping mat once more. She squatted at his side.

‘Do you know Inurian well?’ he asked her.

‘You must speak with In’hynyr tomorrow,’ she said.

Orisian looked blank.

‘The vo’an’tyr. The . . .’ She grimaced, apparently frustrated in her search for the right words. ‘She is the will of the vo’an.’

‘I see,’ said Orisian dully.

‘Some wish to send you to the willow.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘To take your lives.’

‘Why?’ asked Orisian.

‘You are Huanin. Perhaps not friends to the Fox. Some say you should not be here.’

‘But we were brought here,’ protested Orisian. ‘We did not choose to come.’

‘You would be dead if I did not bring you. The needed medicine was here.’

Orisian pressed his hands into his eyes. Perhaps Rothe had been right. There was nothing but danger here. The woodwights were savages after all, their thoughts twisted in strange patterns.

‘The vo’an’tyr will send for you.’ She rose and made to leave the tent.

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Will you be there tomorrow?’

The woman shook her head.

‘Will they speak my tongue?’ asked Orisian.

‘In’hynyr has often wintered at Koldihrve.’

For a moment Orisian was puzzled, then he understood. Koldihrve: the settlement of masterless men at the mouth of the Dihrve River beyond the Car Criagar. It had the reputation of being a wild, dangerous town, all the more so because the Fox Kyrinin had a winter camp on its edge. It was the one place Orisian had heard of where Huanin and Kyrinin still lived side by side.

‘That is where you learned it as well?’ he asked.

‘Enough questions.’ She made for the doorway.

‘What is your name, at least?’ Orisian said.

‘Ess’yr,’ she said.

With that she was gone and Orisian was left alone. After a time—a dead space in which thoughts ran unhindered and chaotic around his head—for no one reason that he could name, but for all of them, he found there were tears in his eyes.

They came for him early in the morning. He had been awake a little while. The sound of dogs barking outside had woken him before dawn, and dark thoughts had kept him from sleep once roused. When the Kyrinin entered the tent he was examining his wound, having peeled away the dressing. There was an angry red weal, but it seemed to be healing. He had no time to replace the poultice. Silent Kyrinin warriors led him out of the tent.

A wetting drizzle was falling, as much a heavy mist as rain. Beneath its veil, the vo’an was a silent, muffled place of indistinct shapes. They crossed through a part of the camp he had not seen before, rising up a slope to a grove of trees where one shelter stood apart from the others. There was a patch of bare earth before it, into which tall poles were driven. One had a column of deer skulls attached to it, another the pelts of beavers, a third was twined around with boughs of holly. They sent him inside alone.

The air within had a cloying, herbal intensity that was almost tangible, as if someone had pressed a cloth dripping with scent across his nose and mouth. He wrestled with a sudden wave of nausea. A bright fire burned in the centre of the tent, and a crowd of Kyrinin were seated around it. As he stepped in, all turned to look at him. One of the women rose and reached for him. He shrank away from the touch. She grasped his shoulder and pressed him down. He sank to the ground. The oppressiveness of the air seemed a little less, and his head ceased to spin. The woman put a small wooden bowl into his hands.

‘Drink,’ she said.

He lifted the bowl to his lips, and winced as he tasted the hot, bitter liquid it contained. He did not dare to put it aside, since he had no idea what had significance here and what did not. Somewhere inside him, not as far beneath the surface as he would have wished, there was a small boy shivering with fear and loneliness. He knew a time had now come, perhaps the first time, when he could not allow that boy to be a part of his thoughts. He rested the bowl on his knees and looked around with what he hoped would pass for composure.

There were perhaps twenty Kyrinin crammed into the tent, facing and flanking him in tight ranks. Here and there, on the faces of both men and women, he could make out the fine, curling facial tattoos that he thought were supposed to mark out warriors or leaders. In the War of the Tainted, he had heard, the Kings’ warriors had cut the skin bearing such brands from the faces of dead Kyrinin, to prove what dangerous enemies they had slain.

Opposite him, across the shimmering flames, was a small woman, older than most of the others. She was wrapped in a cloak of some roughly woven material decorated with black and blue swirls. There were bold streaks of red slashed through the silvery hair that fell across her shoulders. Her features were sharp but there was a furrowing in the skin at the corner of her eyes and mouth that betrayed the passage of years. Her flat grey eyes were fixed upon Orisian.

‘I am In’hynyr. I am the vo’an’tyr,’ she said, her voice a light, reedy sound that had a thread of iron within it.

Orisian nodded. The liquid he had swallowed had left a burning track down his throat and into his chest.

‘We will talk,’ said In’hynyr.

‘As you wish,’ replied Orisian faintly. He was at a loss to know what else to say, or whether he should be saying anything at all.

‘There are five vo’ans of the Fox clan this season,’ In’hynyr said, ‘which is a good number. This place we are in now is a good one. The Sun-facing slope with rich forests. There is food to be gathered here. The forest is generous. This season is the first we have had a vo’an here since my first child was carried on my back. She has many children of her own now. It has been a long wait for the Fox to return. When there was a vo’an in this place before, Huanin from the valley saw our fires and came to seek us out. We led them over rough ground and steep valleys. We traded killings with them and they went away. You are from the valley, thicklegs and heavyfoot?’

‘I ... I am from Kolglas,’ stammered Orisian, caught unawares by the sudden question. In’hynyr’s voice had a rhythmic, lulling quality to it that distracted him from the meaning of the words being spoken.

‘Why have you come to this vo’an?’ asked In’hynyr.

‘I was wounded. I was brought here. Ess’yr said . . .’ Orisian replied. He tried to continue, but In’hynyr gave a sharp sniff and spoke over him.

‘It was known in the Fox clan that there would be war in the valley this season. Our spear a’ans in the summer returned from the lands of the enemy with word of a Huanin army. They said the White Owl, who are carrion-eaters, would make war upon the people of the valley alongside this army. The White Owl, who have no memory, make themselves the servants of the Huanin. That is good. They shall suffer for it. It is good, too, that there is war in the valley. If there is war in the valley, we shall be left in peace. So we returned to this vo’an after many years.’

Orisian was struggling to follow all that was being said. If the White Owls had given aid to the Inkallim, it might explain how they had reached Kolglas. With Kyrinin guides they might have come undetected through Anlane. Yet it seemed an impossible alliance. The White Owls were no friends of humans, and the Bloods of the Black Road certainly none of Kyrinin.

‘This is a good vo’an,’ In’hynyr was continuing. ‘We shall come back here next season if all is well. The a’an of Yr’vyrain found you and the big man by the water. Ess’yr of that a’an wished to make you well, and brought you here. We gave leave for that, for death had your scent. You are made well now.

‘It is a grave matter that you and the big man have come here. When the clans were younger, when the City shone like the sun, one of the Huanin came into a vo’an of the Fox, by an ice-free stream in a valley of oaks. He was lost. He was given food and shelter. But he was foolish, and spoke of foolish things like a child who knows not how to be still. After a time the people told him to go. And because the Huanin heart is hot and their thoughts are like fire, he was angry. He took earth in his hand and cast it upon the torkyr and cursed the Fox. For this, he was taken and sent to the willow. This did not heal the wound.

Many of the people in the vo’an sickened and died in the next summer. The flames from the torkyr they carried with them were made unclean by his anger.’

‘You want to kill me because of something that happened hundreds of years ago?’ asked Orisian, striving to keep the tension that was knotting his stomach out of his voice.

‘This man was sent to the willow a thousand and a half years gone,’ In’hynyr corrected him. ‘When the wolfenkind still cast a shadow in the world. When the Fox lived nearer the sun, in kinder lands. But his name is not forgotten. I know the names of the people who died of sickness in the summer that came after. They are not forgotten. We sing for them still. We do not forget. Do you? Do the Huanin forget the past?’

‘No, we don’t forget, but ... I am not the same as that man. His mistake ... his foolishness ... is not mine.’ Orisian felt lost. A decision was being forged out of arguments he did not fully understand. He felt powerless. The thought went through his mind that Fariel would have known what to say, what to do. And Inurian would have. He was uncomfortably hot. The walls of the tent pressed in upon him.

‘We know that there can be good as well as evil in the Huanin,’ In’hynyr said. ‘At the place you call Koldihrve there is peace between Huanin and Kyrinin. There can be good in the people of the valley, too. Two summers gone, a youth from the a’an of Taynan was hunting. He was foolish, and a boar wounded him. A man from the valley found him and cared for him. He made him well, and the youth returned to his a’an. By this we know that there is good in the people of the valley. Do you have this good in you?’

‘I would help someone if they were hurt,’ said Orisian. ‘As Ess’yr has tried to help me. Not all Huanin think ill of the Kyrinin, just as not all Kyrinin think ill of us. I wish the Fox no harm.’

‘You do not wish the Fox any harm,’ said In’hynyr, as if testing the truth of the words by their taste. She paused, and an intense silence descended. Orisian glanced from face to face. Blank eyes met his. There was no connection to be made with these people; they regarded him with the detachment of a slaughterman picking a sheep for the knife.

‘Ess’yr tells us that you are high amongst your people. You are one of the rulers,’ said In’hynyr.

‘No,’ said Orisian, ‘not really. My uncle is the Thane. Inurian is my friend...’

Again, the curt sniff. He wondered if In’hynyr was displeased. He had thought Inurian’s name might buy him some friendship here. It did not appear to work. He cast about for something else that might serve better. It might not be true, he thought, that Fariel would have known what to say. He had not talked to Inurian about the Kyrinin, as Orisian had often done; he had never imagined visiting a Fox camp, would never have even thought such a thing to be possible. He would not have seen any difference between Fox and White Owl.

‘My family is no enemy of the Fox,’ he said. ‘And we are no friends of the White Owls.’

‘The man in the castle in the valley fights the White Owl. That is good. Have you also made war on the enemy in Anlane?’

‘I have not fought them myself, if that is what you mean. Warriors from my home have, when they raided against our people in the forest. Rothe, the man who is with me, he has fought them. He is an enemy of the White Owl.’

Orisian was starting to feel sick again, from the heat, the heady smell inside the tent, the weariness he could feel in his bones.

‘All hands are against the Fox,’ said In’hynyr. ‘We are a small clan. Eighty a’ans. The White Owl, who swarm like bees, are five times as many. Your kind fill the valley like mice in the grass. We are a small clan, but we hold against our enemies. To hold, our sight must be clear like the fox, and our thoughts sharp. Ess’yr felt duty to you, and we allowed her wish to aid you. Our duty is to the vo’an. Is the vo’an safe?’

‘I wish only to return to my own people. I will not tell anyone where the vo’an is. Neither will Rothe, if I tell him not to. We just want to go back.’

He could speak no more. There was a throbbing behind his eyes. Everything he had ever heard about the Kyrinin, every tale of butchery, was milling about in his head demanding attention: children killed in their beds in farmhouses; the torture of warriors captured in forest skirmishes. Yet still he clung to the notion that tales were only tales, and they were not about him, here, now. He could not believe that he had escaped the horrors of Winterbirth only to be condemned to death by this small old woman with red in her silver hair.

‘Drink,’ said In’hynyr. For a moment Orisian looked at her, not understanding, then he recalled the small wooden bowl still resting on his knees. Hesitantly, remembering the drink’s astringent taste, he raised it to his lips and sipped. The liquid had cooled a fraction and though it still tasted harsh it did not burn so fiercely. His head cleared a little. The oppressive heat seemed to lift itself from his face.

‘What is your promise worth?’ In’hynyr asked him.

Orisian paused, searching for some form of words that might make the connection he needed with this woman.

‘It puts a duty on me,’ he said. ‘As you bear a duty to the vo’an, as you say Ess’yr felt some duty to me. My promise is a duty I owe to myself, and to you.’

‘Where will you go?’

‘Go? I...’ He hesitated. Where would he go? His father was gone, perhaps Anyara and Inurian as well. And Kolglas was far away, if Rothe was right about how far they had travelled. ‘I would go to Anduran first,’ he said. ‘To my uncle, the Thane. If what you say is true, my people must make war against the Black Road and the White Owls. I must be a part of that.’

Somewhere within the tent, hidden amidst the shadows, someone had begun to sing. It was a soft, chanted song, so low and deep that it was like a distant murmur. Orisian could not even be sure whether there was a single voice or more. He could hear no words within the song. It had a funereal sound.

‘I mean the Fox no harm,’ he said again. ‘I am not your enemy. If there is war, it will be against other Huanin and against the White Owl. Not the Fox.’ He could think of nothing more to say.

For a long time, no one said anything. There was only the song, flowing around him. He lowered his eyes and stared at the bowl cupped in his lap, and the liquid within. Its heat was fading quickly. A few fragile wisps of steam rose towards his face.

‘Leave us,’ said In’hynyr at last.

Fighting back a surge of relief, Orisian scrambled to his feet. In his eagerness to take his leave he ignored the pain in his side. Only as he made for the opening in the side of the tent did doubt reassert itself.

‘Will we be allowed to leave the vo’an, then?’ he asked.

‘We will think on it,’ was all In’hynyr said.

He sat cross-legged in the tent’s doorway for long hours. They had given him a cloak of marten fur that had a powerful scent as if it was freshly stripped from the animals. He needed it, since each day turned the air a little crisper.

Two weeks, and a lifetime, ago this would have been a dream realised for him, to be in the midst of a camp of the Fox. Even now, despite the gnawing memory of what had brought him here, he was aware of an otherworldly peace and calm in the camp. The Kyrinin moved about with precision and balance, whether adult or child. The oldest of them, shrunken and even a little stooped, retained a natural grace Orisian had never seen in his own kind. The adults were tolerant of the packs of children that darted to and fro amongst the tents. They watched, sometimes joined in with their wrestling and chasing. Orisian never heard any voices raised in anger or excitement.

Showers passed, along with the scudding clouds that bore them, but for much of the time the sky was bright. Sunlight would fling the stark shadows of leafless trees across the camp and set the grass glowing green in memory of summer. Flocks of small birds chattered through the vo’an. The Kyrinin came and went. They hunted, gathered firewood, prepared meals just as any villagers might.

But amidst the familiar there were the reminders that he was far from what he knew and understood. The great face woven of boughs, standing like a sentinel watching over the heart of the vo’an, unsettled him. Once or twice he saw Kyrinin lay their fingertips upon it and murmur some words. The poles decorated with the skulls of various animals were sometimes, when the light caught them just so, menacing. Perhaps most unnerving of all, he would sometimes notice one of the Fox standing quite still amongst the tents, staring at him. When he returned the gaze there was none of the discomfort a human might show at being so caught out. Always it was Orisian who looked away first.

Once or twice a day he and Rothe were allowed to pass some time together. Rothe’s hushed conversation was filled with concern for Orisian, and with plans for escape as soon as the two of them were strong enough. Orisian knew they could not get away if the Fox opposed it; their safety relied on reason and patience, not flight. In his heart of hearts, Rothe must know the same. Perhaps he spoke of escape only because he thought it was what Orisian needed to hear to keep his spirits up. If so, they were equally guilty of imperfect honesty, for Orisian had not told the shieldman about his audience with the vo’an’tyr. It would not help for Rothe to know their fate still hung so precariously in the balance. Not yet, at least.

Ess’yr visited him often, sometimes bearing food, sometimes to check his wound, sometimes for no particular reason he could grasp. He came to look forward to the sight of her. Though she seldom smiled, there was an undercurrent of goodwill in her manner. Still, she talked in strange circles, as In’hynyr had done, and he always felt that he missed half the meaning of her words.

Sometimes she would answer his questions. How many people were in the vo’an? he asked; two or three hundred, she told him. Seven a’ans, which would disperse once more in the spring. Where was the rest of her family? Her parents had gone to the willow. Her brother was hunting in the Car Criagar.

Then when Orisian posed a question that trespassed beyond whatever unseen boundary hedged their conversation, she ignored him, or walked away. She would not discuss his and Rothe’s fate, nor would she talk of Inurian. And when he asked about the great, unearthly face of twigs and branches that gazed across the camp she only shook her head a touch. He learned to tread with care.

At night, he lay longing for sleep amidst the strange smells of the Kyrinin tent, listening to the alien sounds of forest and camp. In those loneliest of hours, in the grip of darkness, he fought a losing battle against the images and memories that jostled within his head. They were of Castle Kolglas on the night of Winterbirth. But the person he longed for most, whose absence hurt more than any other, was someone lost long before: Lairis, his mother. The hole she had left in his life was as cavernous as it had ever been, the wound exposed afresh. He held the furs of his bedding tight about him, as if they were her arms.

On the morning of the fourth day since he had awoken, when Ess’yr brought him a bowl of watery broth, he sensed that something had changed. There was a lightness in her manner that had not been there before. He asked if In’hynyr had made some decision, but Ess’yr ignored the question.

‘My brother is back,’ she said. ‘He will see you.’

The tall, lean hunter Ess’yr later ushered into Orisian’s hut was more imposing than any Kyrinin Orisian had yet seen. In the mere act of entering, without a word being spoken, the space became his. His long silvery hair had an almost metallic sheen to it. His taut face was covered by an intricate swirl of dark blue lines tattooed into the skin. The smoke-coloured eyes remained impassive, but the corner of his mouth gave the faintest of twitches at the sight of the Huanin youth crouched on the sleeping mat.

‘My brother,’ said Ess’yr. ‘Varryn.’

‘I am Orisian,’ he said, wishing his heart had not picked up its beat.

The tall Kyrinin angled his head and narrowed his eyes. Orisian felt impaled.

‘Ulyin,’ Varryn said, and swept out into the morning.

Ess’yr gazed after him, scratching once at her cheek with a white fingernail. Orisian cleared his throat. ‘What does ulyin mean?’ he asked.

‘A baby bird; no feathers. They fall from nests.’ She looked at him. ‘Bad hunting,’ she said and went after her brother.

He saw Varryn again that afternoon, when Ess’yr shepherded him out of the tent and over to a fire where a bowl of stew was waiting. As they sat side by side, eating in silence, her brother joined them. Orisian watched him out of the corner of his eye. Caution vied with curiosity for a while, as he took in the dense tattoos that scarred the Kyrinin’s skin. Eventually he set his bowl down and turned to Varryn.

‘What...’ Orisian hesitated for a moment. ‘What do the marks mean? On your face?’

Ess’yr spoke before her brother could reply. ‘This is kin’thyn. Threefold. Very few have the third.’

She murmured something to Varryn. Orisian was struck anew at how her voice danced when she spoke in her own language; as if a stream flowed in it. Varryn gave a nod of assent to whatever she had asked him.

‘I can tell you how he won the kin’thyn. He agrees. Do you wish it?’ she said to Orisian.

‘Yes, I would like that.’

‘The first kin’thyn when he was thirteen summers.’ There was something almost reverent in Ess’yr’s tone. ‘He was in a spear a’an of Tyn’vyr, crossed into White Owl lands. They hunted the enemy for five days. He put an arrow in an old one from behind a tree. The second when he was fifteen. A spear a’an of the enemy came near. He opened one of them with a knife. Then many summers before the third. Kyrkyn called a spear a’an, and they went across the valley, went deep in enemy lands. They found a family by a stream, and sent them all to the willow. Varryn took the fire from their camp. They ran for the river, but the enemy was as wolfenkind behind. Many fell. Kyrkyn, and ten more. Five came out from the trees and back. Varryn carried the fire with him. Only for this is the third kin’thyn given. For the enemy’s fire.’

Throughout the telling, Varryn had regarded Orisian with a fixed, emotionless gaze. It made him want to turn away. Instead he asked, ‘How do you cross the valley into Anlane so easily? Without us, my Blood, knowing you are there?’

The question was directed at Ess’yr, for Orisian had assumed her brother would not understand, but Varryn rose to his feet, setting aside his bowl though it was still half-full of steaming stew.

‘Huanin do not know,’ he said. He walked off, pausing after a few steps and half-turning. ‘Eyes and ears are thick and heavy. Like your legs and feet.’

Orisian watched the Kyrinin’s back as he stalked away.

‘Varryn does not like Huanin too well,’ said Ess’yr.

‘No,’ Orisian agreed. ‘You don’t seem to feel the same way.’

‘I do not love your race. But Inurian speaks well of you. Of you.’

Orisian forgot all about Varryn. Here was a momentary chink in the shield Ess’yr maintained against questions he longed to ask.

‘You know him? Inurian, I mean. He has been to visit your camps?’

‘I saw you, with the big man, and I knew you. I saw you before, three summers before, with Inurian in a boat. Close to the shore. You did not see me, but he knew I watched. He made a sign.’

‘We never landed on the Car Anagais,’ Orisian said, thinking quickly, wondering how to make the most of Ess’yr’s willingness to talk. ‘I always wanted to come with him into the forest. I knew he was coming to your camps, and I wanted to go with him. He always put me off.’

Ess’yr looked him in the eye. ‘Why do you want to come to us? Huanin do not come to a vo’an.’

‘I know many of my people do not like the Kyrinin. They are afraid, I suppose, but it has never been like that for me. I just . . . I just wanted to see what your camps were like. To see how you lived. It’s hard to explain, but for the last few years I have often wanted to ... to be somewhere else than my home. Somewhere different, new. And I wanted to see where Inurian comes from, and where he went on his journeys, I suppose.’

‘He is important for you.’

‘Yes. He has been very kind to me in the last few years.’

Ess’yr brushed a hair from across her face. The gesture was so casual, so inconsequential, that for a luminous instant Orisian was held by it and freed of all the world beyond that sculpted hand and its languid movement. Ess’yr was quite still for the space of a few breaths. Then she stood up as if arriving at some conclusion.

‘Come. I will show you. Perhaps Inurian wishes it.’

She led him out of the vo’an. As they walked in silence, she ahead and he behind, Orisian reflected that Rothe would have seen this as a chance to escape; to overpower Ess’yr and flee. It was not something Orisian considered for even a moment, though. He doubted he could best the Kyrinin woman even if he tried, and in any case Rothe remained alone in the camp. His shieldman would view it as a grave failing, Orisian knew, but he could not possibly leave Rothe behind. There was, as well, his sense that he owed Ess’yr a debt. He might have died had she not found him and brought him here.

They came to a place where the ground levelled out. The earth was boggy and moss-covered and gave beneath Orisian’s feet. Ahead stood a dense grove of willows. From somewhere amongst the trees came the sound of trickling water. Ess’yr drew him to a halt a short distance from the willows. A few small birds, startled by their approach, darted deeper into the thicket. Orisian opened his mouth to speak. Before he could do so he found her thin finger touching on his lips, as light as air.

‘Breathe lightly,’ she said. ‘Speak soft. This is not your place. You are watched.’

Orisian waited for Ess’yr to explain.

‘This is a dyn hane. A place of the dead. The body goes into the earth. A willow staff is planted in the hands. If it buds, the spirit will go to Darlankyn. If it does not bud, they remain. Then they are kar’hane: the watchers.’

Peering ahead, Orisian could see that amongst the dense-packed, curving trunks and branches of the willow trees were scattered a few thin, leafless poles that must be the unregenerated burial staffs of Kyrinin. The sight of them made him imagine ghostly eyes upon him. The countless branches of the living willows brushed sighingly together. Each tree, he realised, marked the grave of a Kyrinin, its roots entwined about their bones in the soft earth.

‘Sent to the willow,’ Ess’yr said softly.

A cold grave, thought Orisian to himself, in wet ground by a forest stream. He had long known that the Kyrinin buried their dead instead of burning them as his own people did. He could not remember ever hearing about the trees, though. It occurred to him that he might, when riding with his father or with Croesan’s household on the hunt, have passed by such places as this. How many hundreds of Kyrinin might have lain in their dead slumber beside his horse’s hoofs?

‘The kar’hane do no harm, if you have goodwill,’ she said as they walked back towards the vo’an.

‘And those who are not of goodwill?’ asked Orisian.

Instead of answering his question, Ess’yr said, ‘Inurian likes the dyn hane. He names them places of peace. This is why I show you.’

‘Thank you,’ Orisian said to Ess’yr.

As they made their way into the centre of the vo’an, she directed his gaze toward the face sculpted out of branches. As always, it appeared sinister to him, as if a writhing mass of snakes had been suddenly frozen in place.

‘You ask what that is. It is...’ Ess’yr paused, searching for a word or phrase that did not come easily to her lips, ‘... a catcher of the dead. It is anhyne. An image of the Anain.’

In the moment she uttered the words he could see it, and wondered why he had not guessed it before. The Anain were unlike all the other Races; closer to the Gods, as some would have it. If they had a form at all, which many claimed they did not, it was that of wood, bough and leaf come to life. This, the unknowable thought of the green earth coursing through the forests and wild places of the world, was what the Kyrinin had sought to represent.

Everything Orisian knew of the Anain was half-legend, gleaned from tale and rumour. There were no more than a handful of stories of humans who had encountered one of them and almost all had dark endings. One of those tales every Huanin or Kyrinin alike knew well: at the end of the War of the Tainted, when the Kings had cast down Tane and crushed the strength of the greatest Kyrinin clans, the Anain had roused themselves. They had raised a vast forest—the Deep Rove—where there had been none before, swallowing up Tane and all the lands about it. It set a wild, impenetrable barrier between the human armies and the Kyrinin fleeing away into the east. It, as much as the siege and breaking of Tane, had ended the bloodshed. And here, in the peaceful heart of the vo’an, was a representation of that awful power, watching over the playing children and the wandering goats.

‘What does it mean?’ asked Orisian, finding himself speaking in hushed tones.

Ess’yr frowned slightly. It was a strange sight upon her normally undisturbed features, as though some bird had passed for a moment across the sun and cast a flicker of shadow over her face.

‘If the body does not come to the dyn hane, the... spirit will not rest. The anyhne is the guard against this. It brings the Anain close. They guard against the restless dead.’

The restless dead, Orisian thought. That was a fit name for them. He did not believe in ghosts—not the kind he understood Ess’yr to mean—but there were other ways for the dead to be restless.

‘I didn’t know there were any Anain here,’ he said.

‘They come before the eye in few places. What you call Deep Rove. Anlane where the enemy is. Din Sive. But the eye is not all. They fill the green world. You do not see them, but they are here.’ She would say no more after that. It was enough to leave Orisian wrestling for hours with a sense, still more acute than what he had felt before, of being watched. No matter that Ess’yr said the Anain were a protection, he had no wish to lie beneath the gaze of such legends. That night he craved the stone walls of Kolglas, their solidity and unchanging presence, in a way he had not for years.

Orisian was woken by hands that stripped the furs from over him, and urgent voices that tore at the slumber clogging his ears. His first instinct, still half-asleep, was to struggle and fight against the bodies that seemed to crowd in upon him. There were too many, and he abandoned any resistance. He was pulled and pushed out into the cold night. Blearily he looked around.

A great crowd of Kyrinin was gathered before his tent: so great that he thought every man, woman and child of the vo’an must be assembled there. They stood in silence, their eyes fixed upon him. Those who had roused him melted into the crowd, leaving him standing alone, still a little unsteady. The forest was bathed in radiant moonlight, casting an ethereal glow over the colourless faces that confronted him. He looked up and saw a great white full moon hanging in the sky overhead.

Rothe was pushed roughly forwards to join him. The shieldman looked more awake and alert than Orisian felt.

‘Stand close by me,’ he growled as he stood upright and took Orisian’s arm in a tight grip. ‘Show no fear.’

Orisian looked around the wall of motionless bodies that faced them. There was no sound save the rasping hoot of an owl somewhere out in the woods. He had the powerful sense that he and Rothe did not belong here, that they had somehow strayed from the waking world and passed into another place. Something was happening, or about to happen.

‘Say nothing,’ he whispered to Rothe, realising that his shieldman was more likely to make a mistake in this moment than he was himself.

The crowd parted, opening a narrow pathway for an advancing figure. Bare feet showed beneath the hem of a straight hide dress. Strips of fur hung from the shoulders of what must be a Kyrinin woman, but the face that looked upon Orisian and Rothe was that of a great fox. As the head turned this way and that, he could see the bonds that held the mask in place. They lay over long strands of grey hair, marked with streaks of red, that shone in the moonlight. It was In’hynyr, Orisian realised. The recognition did nothing to soften the savage aspect of the mask when she turned back to stare at him. In her left hand she bore a tall staff to which were tied a dozen tiny animal skulls. The bones clicked against one another as she moved. There was an elongated instant of tension as the vo’an’tyr faced the two humans, then she swivelled round and spread her arms. She stood thus between them and the host of Kyrinin for a few seconds. Her voice, when she began to speak, was muffled beneath the fox mask but that only made it sound all the more eerie as it spilled out across the clearing. She spoke in the Kyrinin tongue: a tumble of words that sounded almost like an incantation.

‘Be ready for anything,’ murmured Orisian.

In’hynyr spoke on, and every eye was upon her. She shook her staff and the little skulls it bore chattered. Her voice rose and fell. Her breath steamed, rising up as if drawn to the lambent moon.

The fox-face spun about with a cry and In’hynyr thrust an arm towards the two of them. Rothe flinched. Orisian did not stir. He had done what he could to save them when he spoke to the vo’an’tyr; he knew nothing could now change whatever was going to happen. In’hynyr fell silent and a whisper ran through the crowd. Heads were bowed here and there. First one by one and then in small groups, the gathering began to fray and disperse. The Kyrinin disappeared, sinking into the darkness. In’hynyr backed away, keeping her masked face towards Orisian and Rothe, for a few strides and then turned and walked off, alone. In the space of a few breaths, only Ess’yr remained of the throng. She stood regarding Orisian. Rothe’s hand was lifted from his arm, and he heard the big man exhale deeply. Ess’yr came towards them.

‘What happened?’ asked Orisian as she drew close.

‘The vo’an’tyr spoke,’ Ess’yr said. ‘You may leave. Tomorrow. One day more, and you will be sent to the willow. I will come for you in the morning.’

At dawn there was a heavy fog laid across the camp. Orisian stretched outside his tent. He had slept little after the gathering had dispersed, tossing and turning for much of what was left of the night, his mind too crowded to allow any rest.

Rothe strode up out of the fog. He grinned at Orisian as he drew near.

‘Freedom beckons, then.’

Orisian returned the smile. ‘So it seems.’

‘I never thought we would get out of this with our hides on our backs,’ Rothe said, ‘but here we are. This will be a good tale to tell.’

Orisian looked around the vo’an. The shifting veils of fog muffled all sound and half-concealed the few figures moving about. The smell of smoke hung in the damp air. It was a muted end to the tale of their sojourn here.

Ess’yr arrived. She held up a pair of scrawny, skinned carcasses. ‘Break your fast,’ she said.

He and Rothe watched in silence as Ess’yr spitted the squirrels over a small fire. As they sat there waiting, Varryn appeared. He stood beside them, leaning upon a long spear. Rothe regarded the Kyrinin warrior with unconcealed hostility.

‘This is Varryn, Ess’yr’s brother,’ Orisian said. Rothe grunted and turned his eyes back to the fire. Varryn showed no sign of even recognising their existence. Even when Ess’yr said something soft to him, Orisian detected no flicker of a response. Perhaps Ess’yr saw something he did not, for she seemed unperturbed.

‘Where do you go?’ she asked Orisian.

He glanced at Rothe, aware that he had not discussed the matter with him. ‘To Anduran,’ he said. ‘The city in the valley.’ His shieldman nodded.

‘It is close, isn’t it?’ Orisian asked Ess’yr.

‘Not far,’ she said. ‘We guide you to the forest edge. I and Varryn.’

‘No need,’ said Rothe, glaring at Ess’yr.

‘It is best,’ said Varryn. ‘Our people are in the forest. They may think you the enemy. End with quills in you like a porcupine. We take you fast and safe.’

Rothe looked as if he was struggling to restrain himself. ‘I am sure we can find our way,’ he said through lips clamped so tight that the words had to battle for their freedom.

‘My brother... plays,’ said Ess’yr. ‘But he is right. We will take you by ways that mean you cannot find this vo’an again. We will take you by ways that are safe. We will take you so that we know you have left Fox lands. For these reasons, the vo’an’tyr says we take you. That is how it will be.’ And that was the end of any debate.

A black expression settled over Rothe’s face, and Orisian reflected that a journey with the shieldman and a proud Kyrinin warrior in the same party was not going to be an easy one.

‘We prepare,’ Ess’yr said. ‘When you finish, come to the edge of the vo’an. The east.’

She and her brother left Orisian and Rothe to pick apart the squirrels. The shieldman muttered in dire tones about the fool-hardiness of trusting Kyrinin.

‘We’ve no choice,’ murmured Orisian. ‘I don’t think they’d look kindly on refusal. It won’t be for long, anyway. They’re only trying to protect themselves; making sure we can’t find our way back here too easily.’

Orisian sucked at a bone. Unnoticed, children had gathered around them. He glanced up to find a dozen or more, come to take a last look at these strange visitors to their home. Rothe tossed the remnants of his meal on to the fire and rose to his feet. The children shuffled to one side to open a path for him.

The two of them made their way to the edge of the camp as they had been instructed. Nobody paid them any heed. They passed a pair of old women cracking nuts on a stone anvil. A younger girl was stretching the still wet and gory hide of a deer across a drying frame. She did not even look round as they walked by.

Ess’yr and her brother were seated together at the fringe of the vo’an where the last few tents were spread thinly. Small packs lay beside them, and spears, arrow-filled quivers and bows. Standing in front of them, waiting with a still patience no human child could have achieved, was a young Kyrinin girl. She was watching as Ess’yr and Varryn fed long strips of leather through their hands, knotting them at regular intervals along their length. Afraid to interrupt the air of intense concentration that pervaded the little group, Orisian stood to one side with Rothe. The shieldman’s sword and scabbard were on the ground. Without waiting to be invited, he picked it up and began to examine it in the minutest detail.

Each knot was precisely tied and moistened with a touch of saliva before being pulled tight. Like beads upon a necklace, knot after knot was added to the strips. Finally, at almost the same moment, both of them seemed satisfied with their work. Each passed their piece of leather to the child. She took one in each hand and walked off.

Ess’yr turned to Orisian. She brought out a thin knife from inside her jacket. It was made for throwing, with a smooth wooden hilt that lacked a crosspiece.

‘This was in you,’ she said, holding it out to Orisian. ‘You have no weapon. Take this.’

He took it and slipped it into his belt. It reminded him of his wound, and he felt the flesh there ache for a moment, but it was better to have this knife than none.

‘An Inkallim blade,’ said Rothe almost admiringly. ‘That’s a rare trophy to carry.’

Without a word, Ess’yr and Varryn rose, took up their packs and weapons and headed into the forest. Orisian and Rothe glanced at each other. Rothe shrugged. They followed the Kyrinin away from the vo’an.

Only after they had been walking for a few minutes could Orisian bring himself to ask Ess’yr what the knotted leather cords had meant.

‘One knot is one thought,’ she told him. ‘Thought of people, of times, from the life. It is done before a journey. If our bodies do not return, the cord goes to the dyn hane and is buried. It will bind our spirits to the willow. We will not be restless.’

The two Kyrinin set a demanding pace. The forest was open, with broad stretches of grass between the stands of trees. Every few hundred strides they would pass an ancient oak tree in some sheltered spot. Often their route would change direction beneath the branches of one of the oaks, and Orisian suspected that the Kyrinin were navigating by these gnarled trees, using them as markers on some map they carried in their heads.

‘How far is it to Anduran?’ he called ahead to them.

‘Not far,’ was all Ess’yr replied, without even turning round.

They came to a more difficult stretch, where a swathe of trees had fallen and a dense thicket of saplings had sprung up around their corpses. Varryn led the way straight into the undergrowth. Orisian and Rothe found it difficult to fight their way through. They emerged, scratched, on the other side to find the Kyrinin warrior awaiting them, leaning on his spear once more, as if he had been standing thus for hours.

‘A speared boar is not so loud,’ he said.

Rothe looked grievously affronted in a way that might have made Orisian smile had he not feared that words between these two might turn into something more physical. The shieldman had, in any case, no opportunity to respond. Having delivering his rebuke, Varryn spun on his heel and was off once more.

‘A speared boar ...’ muttered Rothe. ‘That it should come to this . . . following woodwights through the forest like children. I wore a beard before that . . . that wight was a bulge in his father’s breeches.’

‘It is a sad day,’ Orisian agreed, ‘but we had best keep up nevertheless.’

They strode after the two Kyrinin, pressing on along the southern flank of the Car Criagar towards Anduran.