Winterbirth

Chapter 5 Vale of Tears

In the heart of Kolkyre, atop a mound ringed by a crenellated wall, rose the Tower of Thrones. A bleak grey spike of stone, it dominated the city that lay around it. For two hundred and fifty years this had been the seat of the Kilkry Thanes and from its chambers and council rooms they had, for much of that time, ruled over all the Bloods. The greater power now lay in Vaymouth, but the tower kept its name and the Thanes still dwelled within it.

The Tower of Thrones was already ancient when Grey Kulkain, who was to become the first Thane of Kilkry, made it his home and fortress amidst the chaos of the Storm Years. It came from a time before the Aygll Kingship was born; before even the last of the Whreinin, the wolfenkind, were slain and the Gods departed. Beneath the bustling streets of Kolkyre lay an older place, which here and there reached up through the surface of the city in the form of a derelict wall or a stretch of strangely paved road. The Tower of Thrones alone of all the works of that first city’s builders had survived intact. To some, its bleak perfection bore the mark of inhuman makers, and they called it, in hushed tones, the Spire of the First Race. For others, it had been the home of an unnamed human king who came long before the Aygll line, and whose reign and kingdom had passed from memory. Others still whispered of a forgotten na’kyrim lord who had raised it up with only the power of the Shared.

From a small, barred window high upon the tower’s western flank, Taim Narran could see over the city to the foam-flecked sea beyond. The wind was driving waves up Anaron’s Bay, piling them against the docks and quaysides of Kolkyre. Seagulls, grey-white curves against the dark water, were sliding across the wind. They were far away, and far below his lofty vantage point. There was a strange peace to be had from this distancing, Taim reflected, from being so aloof from the flow of events. He had been to Kolkyre many times before in his life, and until now its bustle and vigour—somehow more human and familiar than the chaos of Vaymouth—had been a pleasure. This time, his greatest wish was to be still, and separate, and apart from it all. He breathed deeply, savouring the sea tang borne up on the air.

A thick cough prompted him to turn away from the wide scene. Lheanor, the ageing Thane of Kilkry, was sitting and watching him. Long grey hair framed the Thane’s face. He was dabbing at his lips with a cloth.

‘Forgive me,’ said Lheanor, ‘I did not mean to disturb your reverie. It is a long climb to this chamber, and my old carcass protests.’

Taim smiled and shook his head. He gestured towards the window. ‘A beautiful view.’

‘It is. My father spent many hours here. It made him a touch morose; too much time to reminisce, I think. It reminded him of what we had lost.’

‘Yes,’ sighed Taim. ‘The past must be heavy here.’

‘Is there anywhere it rests lightly?’ Lheanor murmured.

‘Not in these days.’

‘You can tell a good deal about a man from what he feels when he looks out from a great height,’ the Thane said. ‘What do you feel?’

‘Nothing good. Not today. But it is, nevertheless, a beautiful view.’

He settled into a smaller seat beside Lheanor. They did not speak for some time. Taim’s eyes closed and he rested. It had been a long time since he rested.

‘I am sorry that our re-acquaintance has not been in better times,’ he heard Lheanor say, and looked round to the old man. ‘It was a sad enough sight to see you passing through on your way south at Gryvan’s bidding. I thought your return, and Roaric’s, would be a happier occasion.’

‘As did I,’ said Taim. ‘Roaric cannot be far behind me, though. The times may be dark, but at least he will be home.’

‘It’s a poorer home he’ll return to than the one he left. He had a brother then, before he went south.’ Taim averted his eyes. Lheanor’s grief was too painfully apparent. It leaked out in his voice, beneath the words. ‘And what of your home, Taim? I and my Blood have failed your lord, and you.’

‘No,’ protested Taim. ‘You are the only true friends we have. The failure is not yours. That blame lies elsewhere.’

Lheanor’s brow was furrowed. ‘Blame; yes, there should be blame. For this plague of loss. But blame will not breathe life back into the dead. Anduran is gone, half of Kolglas burned, Glasbridge threatened. The enemy must have been at the walls of Tanwrye for weeks now; even if its defenders still hold, they are far beyond our help. As your Thane and all his family must be.’

Taim pursed his lips and bowed his head. ‘I know. I came too late.’

‘Nonsense,’ muttered Lheanor. ‘You have driven yourself and your men to exhaustion getting here now. In any case, if you had come any sooner you would only have added your bodies to those already feeding the crows. Forgive me. I speak poorly. Your family is somewhere in the valley still, I know.’

‘You need ask no forgiveness of me,’ replied Taim. ‘Your son gave his life at Grive. You have already paid a terrible price for your friendship to my Blood. But . . . when I went south, Jaen, my wife, went to stay with our daughter’s family. In Glasbridge.’

The Thane sighed. ‘I did not know. Ah, I would rather not have lived to see times such as these.’

There was such a desolation, Taim thought, behind those weary eyes. Is this what is to become of us all now? Hollowed-out; bereft.

‘I try to keep hold of the hope that one of them may still live,’ Lheanor said. ‘Naradin, if not Croesan. Even the babe, perhaps. But my heart tells me it is a foolish hope. The hounds of the Black Road have done their work thoroughly. I know you loved Croesan’s life as well as you did your own.’

‘Better. He was a better man than me.’

‘One of the best. I will miss him. He and I often sat here, talking.’

‘Of what?’

‘What do old men always talk about? Our families. Our harvests, our hunting dogs, the price of furs and wool. He was not quite so old as me, so when I talked about aches and pains he could only listen. He did that well, though.’ Lheanor smiled a broken smile. ‘But we did talk of weightier matters, too. We thought our battles were to be fought against the pride of Gryvan and the Shadowhand; that their tithes and ambitions were a more likely threat than war out of the north, for the next few years at least. We hoped to die in our beds.’

‘The ambitions of the High Thane may be the greater danger, in the end,’ said Taim. ‘I heard rumours, on my way.’

The Thane of Kilkry gave no sign of being surprised at such a suggestion. He regarded his hands as they lay in his lap. Time had slackened and paled their skin, and patterned them with spots and blemishes. Lheanor ran one over the other thoughtfully.

‘Dangerous to place too much faith in whispers,’ he said without looking up, ‘but still I’d place more in them than in the Haig Blood. Lagair, Gryvan’s Steward here, always seems to be lurking at my shoulder these last few days. His words of condolence and concern are as hollow as a dead oak. Aid has been slow to come from the south; there’s no more than a hundred or two here even now. The word is that there are great companies mustering at last, in Vaymouth, but where were they when my son was facing the Black Road ? I should have sent every sword I command with Gerain. Perhaps I should march them out now, lead them myself.’

Only then did he look up and meet Taim’s sombre eyes.

‘My master in Vaymouth forbids it, though. He forbids me to avenge the death of my own son. I am commanded to await his armies. And I am afraid, Taim. A Thane should not admit to it, but I am. Somehow our enemies have brought the woodwights to their side, and if I march for Anduran, as my heart says I should, what of my villages, my people on my own borders? How has this come to pass, Taim, that Black Road and woodwight stand together against us? I never thought to see such a thing.’

‘Nor I,’ said Taim. ‘But then, I never thought to see any of this come to pass.’ He gave his head a single, sharp shake as if surprised at what he recalled. ‘I thought the fighting in Dargannan would be my last. I thought I was going home, and would never leave my wife again.’

The narrow door creaked open and Ilessa, Lheanor’s wife, entered bearing a tray of tiny cakes. She held it out to Taim. The warrior looked up at her with a weak smile. She wore her years with elegance, possessed of that altogether different kind of beauty that some women found in age.

‘I am not accustomed to being waited upon by the wife of a Thane,’ he said as he took one of the cakes.

She smiled. There was compassion in her eyes, a marvellous gentleness in her aged face. Taim had known Lheanor and Ilessa for much of his adult life, and knew that their feelings for him, and for Croesan and the others, were genuine and deep; strong enough to emerge even out of their own limitless sorrow.

‘And I am not accustomed to playing the waiting girl,’ Ilessa said, ‘but I thought it better that it should be me who disturbed you. You are much in demand. The High Thane’s Steward has been asking for you. He seems to think you and he have much to talk about.’

Taim grimaced. ‘Lagair can wait. I lack the strength to fence with one of Gryvan’s mouthpieces at the moment. I might say something better left unsaid.’

‘I told him I did not know where you were,’ said Ilessa. She set the tray down and smoothed the front of her dress.

‘In truth, I barely know where I am myself,’ murmured Taim.

‘How long will you be staying with us? I visited with your men this morning. They are weary.’

Part of Taim would willingly stay here, in this high, cramped chamber with only the sky and wind and gulls for companions, for weeks on end. That part of him had long ago been subjugated, though, by a warrior’s sense of duty.

‘Only a day or two, my lady,’ he said with an almost apologetic smile. ‘You know I must go on, to Glasbridge. Whatever is to become of me and my men, we cannot rest. Not yet.’

Anyara poked her head out from the hut and found an expectant group waiting. A cluster of Kyrinin children stared at her. They looked soft, pale and harmless. One or two of the younger ones shuffled behind their older comrades as her tousled head appeared. As Anyara hauled herself out on to the wooden boards and stretched the sleep from her limbs, the children backed a few yards further away before reforming their group. Beyond them, a woman paddled by in a little round boat of taut animal skins. Anyara watched as she coasted effortlessly off along the edge of the reedbeds. A flock of tiny birds burst from the reeds and went churning and chattering away. The lake wore a mirror calm. Scraps of mist hung over the water, obscuring the furthest shores, and the whole scene was eerily beautiful and still.

Anyara had not known what to expect of the vo’an. Now, after a night’s uneasy sleep, she was still unsure. Like everyone, she had heard tales of how the Kyrinin kept great bonfires burning night and day, or how their children never played but only practised the killing arts of bow and spear. Or how their old women ate the dead. She was tempted to remain in the hut they had been given and hide away from the unfamiliar sights and sounds and smells that lay outside. These were, after all, Kyrinin, and their kind had killed more than a few of hers over the years. But it was a belief deeply ingrained in her that fear—like grief, or pain—must be mastered, lest it become master in its own right. She did not want Orisian, and certainly not Yvane, to think she was unsettled by this place. So she went walking alone through the vo’an, and forced herself to hold her head up and look about her. The gaggle of children followed silently, attentively, in her wake.

She saw a young woman, perhaps her own age though it was hard to tell, dextrously gutting fish with a bone knife. A pair of men, barefoot and leaning on their spears, watched her go by from behind the blue turbulence of their tattoos. She heard lilting voices and from somewhere further away the casual, pitter-patter beat of a small drum being tapped. She smelled the smoke of small fires, meat cooking and the rich scent of the hides stretched over so many of the huts.

Few people paid her much heed, save the group of curious children. It did not feel threatening, but neither did it feel comfortable or entirely safe. She could not read this place as she was able, through birth and belonging, to read Kolglas, Anduran or even Kolkyre that she had only visited a handful of times. The Kyrinin knew she was out of place just as she did. They did not speak when she was close enough to hear, ignorant though she would have been of what they were saying. Their lack of interest in her was, she felt, as deliberate and conscious as any pointed stares would have been.

It was with some relief that she came to the edge of the settlement, where the platform met the shore. She stepped down on to the ground and walked a little way along the water’s edge. The children did not follow her. Tall reeds thronged the shallows and as she tracked a slight curve of the shore they cut off her view of the vo’an. Save for the smokesign in the pale sky, she might have been utterly alone in a wilderness. She found a place where the reeds gave way for a stretch and sat on a rock there, gazing out over the lake’s flawless surface.

Even as she watched, the morning’s thin mist parted and she glimpsed the towering peaks of the Car Dine to the north. She had the sense then of being in a borderland, poised between two worlds. Over the Car Criagar whence she had come lay the real world, of towns and markets and humankind. In the opposite direction, out beyond the Car Dine, lay something else altogether: the fearsome Great Bear Kyrinin; Din Sive, the most ancient forest in all the world, filled with shadows, and then the Tan Dihrin that touched the roof of the sky. Between this quiet lake and the Wrecking Cape which lay uncounted days’ journey to the north, there might not be a single human village or farm. She felt herself to be terribly small and fragile, the land and sky to be terribly unlimited.

She had felt something similar five years ago, when she emerged from the grip of the Fever into a world without her mother and her older brother. She felt unutterably vulnerable for months, poised between the tortured sleep of the Fever and a future which she barely recognised. She mastered that feeling in the end, along with the grief that could have crippled her. Now her strength was being tested again. She needed to hold firm, and not just for herself. It had not been just for herself that first time, either. Even then, in the wake of the Fever, part of it had been for Orisian.

She rose briskly to her feet. On impulse, she picked up a small stone and flicked it out over the water. She watched the ripples spreading out from its fall for a few seconds before turning back towards the vo’an.

She found Orisian and Rothe sitting on the edge of the platform outside the hut, their naked feet dangling down over the water. The sight was so incongruous—the probable Thane of one of the True Bloods sitting with his shieldman in the midst of a Kyrinin camp as casually as if they were on the harbour’s edge in Kolglas—that Anyara almost laughed.

‘What’s happening?’ she asked.

‘Nothing,’ said Orisian. ‘Varryn came to check on us, but he’s gone back to Ess’yr, wherever she is. We’re waiting for word.’

Anyara lowered herself down to sit beside them.

‘Where’s Yvane?’

‘Gone off,’ grunted Rothe. ‘On her own. Didn’t say where.’

Orisian was picking at a splintered crack in the planking. ‘She’ll be back soon, I’m sure,’ he said.

‘We’re trusting her a lot, for someone we hardly know,’ observed Anyara.

‘Indeed,’ agreed Rothe, ‘and the Kyrinin, too.’ To Anyara’s keen ear it sounded like a complaint born more out of habit than conviction. And he had not called them woodwights.

Orisian was unperturbed. ‘Well, Inurian did send us to her. I always trusted what he told me; I won’t stop now.’ He looked at his sister. ‘In any case, what choice do we have? We do need help, out here. We’d have been dead by now if it had just been the three of us.’

They lapsed into silence. Anyara had faith in her brother’s judgement; in most things, at least. Growing up amongst men, amidst warriors, could teach a great deal to a girl with the eyes to see, and Anyara had those. She wondered if Orisian was aware of the way he sometimes looked at Ess’yr. Perhaps he did not even know that his eyes followed her with a particular attention that, to Anyara, was instantly recognisable. She had seen men look at her that way in the last two or three years.

It was, though, not a look she had seen from her brother before. His interest in Jienna, the merchant’s daughter in Kolglas, had been embarrassingly apparent but it had been an unfocused, over-awed kind of fascination. There was little that was childish in the way he watched Ess’yr. It worried her. Any such union would be unthinkable to most of her race, but it was not Ess’yr’s inhumanity that bothered Anyara most. Rather, it was fear for Orisian’s feelings that stoked her unease. Ess’yr was too hard, too far from what he knew, to be a safe object of her little brother’s affection. And she had been Inurian’s lover. That was a river with dangerous currents, Anyara thought: one Orisian should have the wit not to swim in.

She could see signs of a change in her brother. He had always been a thinker, always able to see, or imagine, things she could not. But she had been the strong one, on the outside at least, since their mother and brother had died. Before that, it had been Fariel who shone most brightly. Now events were demanding something new of Orisian, and in response to that call he was perhaps beginning to unearth parts of himself that had long been overshadowed. He might be a good Thane, if he lived long enough. Even so, Anyara still saw in him the boy she had chased up and down Kolglas’ stairwells, and she was not at all sure that boy could fit Ess’yr into the puzzle his life had become.

Varryn came to fetch them an hour or so later. Wordlessly, he gestured for them to follow him into the heart of the vo’an. There, in an open space ringed by skull-adorned poles, Ess’yr was kneeling. A great, bizarre face woven of willow branches stood to one side.

‘It’s a soulcatcher,’ Orisian murmured when he saw Anyara looking at it. ‘They think it protects them from the dead. It’s supposed to be one of the Anain.’

It disconcerted Anyara. The fact that the Kyrinin would invoke such sinister creatures as the Anain was too blunt a reminder of the chasm of difference that lay between her and them.

‘Stand here,’ instructed Varryn.

Without further explanation, he went to kneel at his sister’s side. He picked up a deerskin bowl that held a dark, viscous liquid. Ess’yr had closed her eyes. Her face was still, almost as if she was asleep. Varryn immersed the point of a long, thin needle in the liquid. He rolled the tool around the bowl, soaking it.

Anyara frowned in confusion.

‘The kin’thyn,’ Orisian said. ‘She’s killed her first enemy.’

Anyara grimaced as Varryn set down the bowl and moved closer to his sister, the dye-coated needle poised and ready.

‘He’s going to tattoo her?’ she said, almost disbelieving.

There was not so much as a twitch in Ess’yr’s face as the skin of her cheek was pierced. Varryn pricked out curling lines, the track of his work marked by beads of blood and dye. Slowly, the pattern took shape. There was something horribly fascinating about the process. This scarring of a woman would never be permitted amongst the Haig Bloods, yet here it was being enacted as a mark of respect. Anyara wondered how Orisian would feel about Ess’yr’s perfect skin being thus marred. When she glanced at him, his expression was one of such rapt attention that she was not sure he would think of this as a marring at all.

It lasted almost an hour. Varryn never faltered; Ess’yr never opened her eyes or made a sound. The blood flowed, the kin’thyn swooped and swirled its way across the skin. Kyrinin who wandered past sometimes paused to watch for a little while, but seldom tarried long. Though the children were more interested, even their numbers dwindled as the long minutes passed. Eventually Varryn sat back and set needle and bowl aside. He took up a cloth and carefully dabbed at Ess’yr’s face.

Ess’yr’s eyes flickered open. She gave her brother a simple nod and rose to her feet. She looked over to where Orisian, Anyara and Rothe were standing. ‘I thank you,’ she said. ‘What for?’ Orisian asked her. ‘For leading me to the kin’thyn.’

Blood was still flowing from the innumerable tiny wounds upon her face. She looked as though she had been mauled in some terrible fight. Anyara almost wanted to look away. Instead, it was Ess’yr who turned and strode off, Varryn following. Orisian gazed after them.

‘Lucky you,’ Yvane said from behind them, a fraction more loudly than was necessary. All three of them started.

‘How long have you been there?’ Anyara demanded as Yvane smiled with ill-concealed satisfaction.

‘Oh, not long. Lucky you, as I said. Most rare nowadays for Huanin to witness the kin’thyn being bestowed. An honour, I should say.’

Anyara realised that her hand had closed about something in her pocket. She fingered it for a few moments, and then an abrupt pang of guilt shook her as she realised what it was. Carefully she withdrew the short length of knotted cord and held it in her palm.

Orisian did not notice, but Yvane did.

‘Now where did you come by that?’ the na’kyrim asked. Orisian looked down at what Anyara was holding.

‘I’d forgotten,’ she said. ‘Inurian gave it to me, after we got out of Anduran. He said…’

‘...he said it should be buried,’ Orisian finished for her.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Anyara, and repeated, ‘I’d forgotten.’

Orisian gave the slightest shake of his head, and took the cord between finger and thumb. There was a kind of emptiness in his face as he turned one of the knots in his grip.

‘It’s what . . .’ he said, ‘it’s what the Kyrinin do if they’re afraid their body will not be properly buried.’

He held it up, and met Anyara’s eyes.

‘It’s his life. Each knot is a piece of his life.’

‘How do you know that?’ Anyara asked quietly.

‘Ess’yr and her brother made them before we left their camp.’

‘Should we bury it, then?’

Orisian did not answer at once. He held the cord as if it was some delicate piece of jewellery. She could not say why, but his expression made Anyara think of their father.

‘We should give it to Ess’yr,’ Orisian said quietly. ‘It is for her, I think. She will know what to do with it.’

‘He would have been thinking of you, when he made some of the knots,’ Yvane said to him. For once her tone was gentle, careful. ‘The knots may be events, or feelings. Or people. He will have put you into some of them, I am sure.’

‘Perhaps. I would like to know what they all are; what he was thinking when he made it.’ He held it by one end so that it hung loosely.

‘Even if he had lived, he would not have told you what the knots were,’ said Yvane. ‘It is a private thing, a conversation with death.’

‘I’ll take it to Ess’yr,’ Orisian said.

‘No.’ Yvane’s voice was still measured, but firm now. ‘He gave it to Anyara. That is important, in the way of these things. She is the one who should give it to Ess’yr for burial, if that is what she thinks it best to do.’

Orisian held the knotted cord out, and Anyara took it. She coiled it neatly in her hand.

‘Will you show me where Ess’yr is?’ she asked Yvane, and the na’kyrim nodded.

They walked silently through the vo’an. It was not far. Varryn was standing outside a low hut. He watched them approach and did not move aside from the entrance.

‘Be polite,’ murmured Yvane, hiding the movement of her lips behind a rub at her nose.

‘Varryn, is Ess’yr here?’ Anyara asked.

‘She rests,’ the warrior said.

‘Can I talk to her? I have something for her.’

‘Not now. She rests.’

‘It’s important,’ Anyara said. ‘I think she would want to see me.’

Varryn was unmoved. He reminded Anyara of a Thane’s shieldman on some grand ceremonial occasion, rigid with the importance of his role. She did not want to show him the cord—she thought it was something Inurian would have meant for Ess’yr alone—but it seemed the only way to gain admittance. She opened her fingers, exposing the cord in her palm.

‘It is Inurian’s,’ she said. ‘Ess’yr should have it.’

And she saw, for the most fleeting of instants, a reaction in Varryn’s face. Its presence was too brief, his features too subtly inhuman, for her to be certain of its nature. Perhaps annoyance, perhaps pain. He stared at the cord for a moment or two, then looked away. As she drew breath to ask him again, he moved. A soft prod in her back from Yvane told her not to wait for more of an invitation. She ducked inside the hut.

It was gloomy within. Dark furs and animal skins covered the floor. Grey feathers hung from the hut’s wooden skeleton. Ess’yr was lying down. Anyara crouched beside her. Although the poor light hid the worst of what had been done to the Kyrinin’s face, the swirling needle tracks were visible, as was her skin’s angry reaction. Ess’yr’s grey eyes looked out from a wounded visage.

Anyara offered her the cord.

‘It is Inurian’s,’ she said. ‘Orisian thought ... I thought it should come to you. For you to . . . bury.’

Ess’yr sat up carefully, protecting her injured ribs. She took the cord. She hardly looked at it, but closed it in her fist.

‘Thank you,’ she said, so quietly that Anyara almost did not hear.

It felt as though there should be something more to say. Anyara saw no emotion in Ess’yr’s face, but those knuckles were white, the pale fingernails digging into the palm of the hand. For the space of a few heartbeats Anyara hesitated and wished that this woman was less of a stranger to her; wished they had something more in common than loss. She rose and turned to go. As she reached for the door flap a thought occurred to her.

‘Could Orisian come with you? When you bury it, I mean. Inurian meant a great deal to him, too. It might help him.’

Ess’yr looked up. Kyrinin and Huanin eyes met, and there was a flicker of understanding in the gaze. It lasted only a fraction of a moment.

‘No,’ Ess’yr said. ‘It is not for Huanin to see. It is not . . . allowed.’

Anyara nodded, and went out into the daylight.

‘I am sorry,’ she thought she heard Ess’yr say behind her.

‘Thank you for asking,’ was all Orisian said when she told him. He did not seem surprised or hurt at Ess’yr’s refusal. Perhaps he knew what to expect, having seen more of the Kyrinin than she had.

Yvane stayed with them. She sat cross-legged outside the hut strengthening the seam on her jacket with a needle and thread she had borrowed from their hosts. She was absorbed in her task, and showed little interest in what Anyara and the others were doing. Orisian was subdued and Anyara thought it best to leave him with his thoughts. She dozed in the hut.

When she woke, feeling better than she had in days, Orisian and Rothe were sparring with sticks on the platform outside. Kyrinin children had assembled once more to observe this strange spectacle. Yvane was also watching, wearing the slightly mocking expression that Anyara thought was on the na’kyrim’s face a little too often.

Orisian was working hard. There was sweat on his forehead. Anyara knew what an effort her brother had to make when it came to these things. Now there was a concentration in his work that had never been there before Winterbirth.

The mock fight ended, and Rothe patted his charge on the shoulder.

‘Good,’ the shieldman said. ‘Better, at least. Your side?’

‘I didn’t really notice it.’

‘I did, though. You favour that side a little. It unbalances you. But that will pass.’

‘And your arm?’ Orisian asked, nodding at the bandages around Rothe’s wrist.

‘Sore. But it does not hamper me.’

‘Could you teach me?’ Anyara asked.

She expected Rothe to dismiss the idea out of hand. The warriors of Lannis-Haig did not teach women how to fight, even—especially—if they were the Thane’s sister. Instead the shieldman smiled, almost sadly.

‘Perhaps. It’s hardly fitting work for a lady, though.’

‘I’ve come across one or two people who were keen to kill me, these last few weeks. I wouldn’t want it to be easy for them, should I meet them again.’

Rothe nodded. ‘A knife would be better for you than a sword. Or a short Dornach blade, maybe. Perhaps when we are away from here, if you still wish it.’

Anyara noted that the shieldman glanced at Orisian with those last words. He wants his approval, she thought. My brother, the Thane. It was an idea it would take her time to get used to.

‘Swords are all very well, but they’ll not answer every problem,’ Yvane said. She had begun sewing once more, forcing the bone needle roughly through the hide.

‘Not all, but some,’ replied Rothe.

‘Blades were little use against some of the na’kyrim who lived long ago.’

‘A well-aimed bolt always has a use,’ muttered Rothe.

Yvane snorted. ‘Dorthyn Wolfsbane had his throat torn out by the last Whreinin of the Redjaw tribe. He laid his hands upon the wound and pressed it closed and made himself whole again. Then he split the wolfenkind open from belly to neck. No mere tale, that. Truth. What use your bolt then?

‘And when I was in Highfast, I once read a story of Minon the Torturer. If that tale be true—which I don’t claim it is—he was nothing until men broke his bones and took their knives to him. It was his very pain that unlocked the deepest wells of his power. What good a blade if it turns your enemy into something worse?’

Rothe shot the na’kyrim a dark look and disappeared into the hut.

‘Lacks the stamina for a proper argument,’ Yvane observed.

‘You don’t think Aeglyss is like Dorthyn or Minon, do you?’ Anyara asked. ‘I never saw him do anything . . . powerful.’

‘No,’ Yvane admitted without looking up from her work. ‘I shouldn’t think he’s anything like them. But you would do well not to forget he’s not like you, either. Inurian saw enough in him to worry about it. I think you Huanin have forgotten what it was like to have truly great na’kyrim amongst you. The only power you recognise now is the kind that lives in swords and Thanes and a rich man’s coin chest. Have you really forgotten what the world was like before the War of the Tainted?’

‘I know that the na’kyrim then were very powerful, if that’s what you mean,’ Anyara replied sharply.

‘Half the lords of the Aygll Kingship were na’kyrim, once. Oh, it was long ago, when the Kingship was still young and there were hundreds upon hundreds of my kind, but it’s true nonetheless. Armies marched behind na’kyrim captains. They could bend the Shared to any purpose; shape the world according to their will.’

‘But not now,’ said Orisian softly. Yvane glanced up, but Orisian was gazing out over the lake.

‘No,’ the na’kyrim acknowledged. ‘Not now. We are few, and have lost the secrets of those days.’

A Kyrinin woman brought them food. She set down bowls of fish stew and left without a word. The children wandered off, much less interested in the eating habits of their visitors than they had been in the game with the sticks.

As dusk drew in, they retreated inside the hut. Orisian became more and more restless.

‘We cannot delay here,’ he said to Yvane. ‘We have to move on.’

‘Tomorrow,’ agreed Yvane.

‘Will Ess’yr come with us?’ asked Anyara. She could see from the look on Orisian’s face that he had not considered the alternative. It was obvious Yvane had, however.

‘I’m not sure. Probably. I think she feels bound to see you safely to Koldihrve, at least. Varryn, I don’t know. He would not have come this far if Ess’yr had not made her promise to Inurian.’

‘The ra’tyn?’ said Orisian, and Yvane nodded.

‘Ess’yr promised Inurian she would get you and your sister to safety. It was a promise asked for, and given, in the knowledge that he was dying; that makes it a serious matter, in the Kyrinin way of thinking. Ess’yr is bound by it, Varryn is not—he’s more than a little dismayed that she gave her word, I think. But he will want to stay by his sister, perhaps.’

Orisian looked thoughtful. Anyara wondered how he would feel, when they were eventually—inevitably—parted from Ess’yr. Perhaps he was wondering that himself.

‘We will have to speak to them tomorrow morning,’ he said. Tell them we are moving on. It’s up to them what they do.’

There was food waiting for them outside the hut the next morning. No one save Ess’yr and Varryn had spoken to them in all the time they had been here, Anyara realised. The hut was provided, food appeared and its remnants were taken away, but not a word—hardly a glance—was given them. The children were the only ones to openly acknowledge their presence in the vo’an.

As soon as they had finished eating, Yvane rose to her feet. ‘I will see if I can find us some food for the journey. And find Ess’yr.’

‘I’ll come,’ Orisian said. Rothe would not let Orisian go without him, and Anyara had no wish to sit idly by. They all went.

The vo’an was quiet. It was a dull morning, with a lethargic feel in the air as if the valley was waiting for some change in the weather before stirring itself into life. They made their way to the centre of the camp, and came to the place where poles hung with skulls stood by the soulcatcher. There were few Kyrinin about, and none looked up from their chores as Anyara and the others drew near.

The calm was broken by a flurry of activity. Varryn came out from amongst the huts. Other Kyrinin warriors were striding behind him and Ess’yr was at his side, hobbling uncomfortably. Anyara caught the flash of sympathetic pain that crossed Orisian’s features at that sight.

‘Oh ho, this doesn’t look like a cheerful group,’ Yvane whispered.

Varryn swept by them.

‘We go now,’ he said.

Ess’yr paused a moment longer, her expression unreadable.

‘We are hunted still,’ she said. ‘There is another man, with a hound.’ She gestured back towards the great rise of the Car Criagar.

‘Let’s hunt him, then,’ said Rothe fiercely. ‘There must be a hundred warriors in the camp. We can…’

Ess’yr only shook her head and followed after her brother.

Anyara glanced at the knot of Kyrinin who now silently faced them. She felt, for the first time, a sense of threat.

‘Come along, then,’ Yvane said, and set off back the way they had come.

Orisian and Anyara hurried to catch up with her, Rothe lingering for a moment to ensure the Fox did not come after them.

‘No point in digging our heels in once they’ve made up their minds,’ said Yvane. ‘They’ll not want to get involved in arguments amongst Huanin. Probably blame us for bringing outsiders to their doorstep, as well. All in all, we have outstayed our welcome, I think.’

Orisian found the Vale of Tears a very different place to his own homeland. The valley was scattered with ramshackle farmsteads. They were smaller and more crudely built than those in the Glas valley, and stood amongst unkempt fields. The soil was heavy and wet; there were many little marshes and beds of rushes. The cattle that grazed the floodplain looked listless and morose.

Time and again, as they made their steady way down towards the sea, they passed by the ruins of abandoned farm buildings. Most were little more than rubble but now and again they would come across the full shell of a house, overgrown by moss and trailing plants. There had been more people here once, Orisian thought, a great many more.

Occasionally they spotted a lone herdsman following along behind his cattle, tapping at their hindquarters with a switch. A hunter crossed their path once, leading a pony that bore the gutted corpse of a deer. He came into sight a hundred or so paces ahead of them, and paused to gaze in their direction for a moment. He was a strange, burly figure almost lost beneath the thick furs he wore. Rothe raised a hand in greeting, but the man did not respond and continued on his way towards a distant shack further out by the river.

They camped by a small grove of trees. Varryn found some kindling, and they soon had a fire alight. Ess’yr lowered herself to the ground with care. For the first few hours after leaving the vo’an she had moved well, almost recapturing the lithe grace that had been hers before she was injured. Her stride had shortened and stiffened as the day wore on.

Yvane emerged from amongst the trees, clutching odd, globe-shaped objects in her grubby hands. She smiled at the puzzled expression on Orisian and Anyara’s faces.

‘Earth mutton,’ she said. ‘Never seen it before?’

Anyara and Orisian shook their heads, but Rothe grunted softly.

‘Mushroom from underground. Used to be much sought after, that, when I was a child in Targlas,’ he said. ‘My father took me searching for it. Don’t think anyone goes hunting for it nowadays, though.’

‘Well, it’s still good food in these parts,’ Yvane said. ‘The Fox think it something of a delicacy. You should consider yourselves fortunate to be served with such food.’

She and Varryn sliced the fungus into thin strips, turning each one briefly over the fire before passing it out. The flavour was good, with a meaty hint beneath the taste of soil.

As they went on down towards Koldihrve, Orisian asked Yvane about the ruined farmhouses that dotted the landscape.

‘There were more people here once, and they made a better living from the land,’ she said.

‘That much I’d guessed,’ said Orisian pointedly.

The na’kyrim shot him a wry glance.

‘Losing a little of that great gentleness of yours?’ she enquired. ‘Might not be such a bad thing, so long as you don’t get carried away. Anyway, this was Aygll land before the War of the Tainted. Went wild in the Storm Years after the Kingship fell, and never got over it.’

They passed a dozen Kyrinin who were perhaps making for the vo’an on the lakeshore. Varryn exchanged a few soft words with them. From the direction of their glances, it seemed that Ess’yr was the subject of their discussion. One of the travellers produced a small packet from inside his tunic and unwrapped a bound bundle of twigs. Varryn accepted it with a nod of his head and the other Kyrinin went on their way.

When they rested for a time in the early afternoon, Varryn heated some water over a small fire. He dropped the twigs in and let them stew. A sharp, almost acrid, scent rose from the pot. Ess’yr drank the infusion down and afterwards a little of the paleness was gone from her cheeks and she walked with an easier stride.

That evening, when they bedded down a short way from the track, Orisian went and sat beside her. No one else seemed to be paying them any attention. He spoke to her quietly.

‘How are your ribs?’

She made a dismissive gesture with her hand. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I live still.’

Her tattoos were still livid, not yet settled into her skin. They were much less dense than those upon her brother’s face. A spiral swung around the swell of her cheek; fronds of dye cupped the corners of her eyes. It was almost beautiful. Only the first kin’thyn, Orisian supposed. More would come if she killed again.

‘Inurian always seemed to have a cure for any ill,’ Orisian said. ‘The same medicines you use, I suppose. He learned them from you? From the Fox, I mean?’

Ess’yr only nodded at that. She was looking at him now, with those still, strong eyes.

‘You sent your sister to me,’ she said. ‘That was well done.’

Orisian knew what she meant: the cord of Inurian’s life.

‘It was Yvane’s idea. It seemed right.’

‘You feel more clearly than most of your kind,’ she said and there was the slightest, gentlest of smiles on her delicate lips.

Orisian felt a breath of heat rising in his face. For the first time in many days, he had a glimpse of that Ess’yr he had seen before they reached Anduran: the one who looked at him as if he was Orisian, not just some Huanin. Her hand lay only the shortest of reaches from his own, her fingers pressed softly into the yielding moss.

‘You buried it in a dyn ham?’ Orisian asked.

There was only a fleeting pause. Anyone watching her less carefully than Orisian would have missed the momentary tightening at the corner of her eyes. He wanted to touch her in that instant—to offer comfort—but he did not.

‘No,’ she said. ‘He was na’kyrim. Only half of him was of the true people. But I found a place. I cut a good willow staff. It will leaf when the winter is over.’

‘Did you . . . How long did you know him for?’ Orisian asked her.

She thought for a moment, and he feared she was not going to reply; that, as so often when he asked a question she did not wish to answer, she would not hear it. She did, though.

‘Five summers ago. He visited my a’an. I saw him, but I did not speak with him until the next summer. He came back.’

‘And . . .’ Orisian had to suppress the urge to cough, ‘you loved him then?’

‘Well enough,’ was all Ess’yr said, as if he had asked how she liked their campsite. Orisian could not tell whether the question had offended her.

‘He was very kind to me,’ he said. ‘Always. I would have been very lonely if he had not been there . . . after the Fever. He was always there to talk to, about anything. I will miss him.’

And to his surprise she smiled again, the curling lines upon her face flexing themselves gracefully.

‘He loved you,’ she said. Her voice was so gentle, so careful of his feelings, that it gave him the will to take a further step.

‘What was it he said to you, by the waterfall? When Varryn was angry. I heard “ra’tyn”, and it seemed important. Did it have something to do with me?’

Her gaze flicked down, and he knew that he had reached too far. She gave no sign of anger, and did not shrink away from him, yet he felt the distance between them suddenly yawn. She was no longer Ess’yr, who he knew a little; she became the Kyrinin, who he knew hardly at all.

‘That is not spoken of,’ she said, and turned away from him, a slight rigidity in the movement the only hint of her injury. That, he knew, ended the conversation.

He stayed there for a little while, wrestling with frustration. She made him feel like a child. He knew she did not mean to do it, but still it cut him. His own shortcomings annoyed him more, though. There was some key, he thought, some turn of phrase or way of being, that he lacked. He could not quite close the gap. And yet, if asked, he could not, or would not, have explained precisely why it mattered to him; why he wanted so much to narrow that distance between himself and Ess’yr.

In the morning, they awoke to find Yvane still wrapped in her bedding, her breathing shallow and fluttering. Rothe, who had taken the last watch, said she had been thus for half an hour or more. She would not wake, not even when Orisian gave her shoulder a tentative shake. They spent long minutes in indecision.

‘We should get some water from a stream . . .’ Rothe was saying when at last Yvane returned to herself, sat up and glared at her audience.

‘What are you all looking at?’ she demanded, sounding a little groggy.

They busied themselves with the packing away of their simple camp and the sharing out of some food. Only after they were on the move, working their way along a sodden stretch of the track where thick rushes had all but overwhelmed the path, did Orisian ease himself to Yvane’s side and ask her what had happened.

‘Visited Koldihrve, as I visited Inurian in Anduran,’ she said. ‘Best to make sure of some kind of welcome. The place has few comforts to offer, but Hammarn will give us a roof over our heads at least. I think I scared him halfway to death. It’s a long time since he saw me like that; I think he’d forgotten. His mind has more holes in it than a mismended net.’

She clearly saw or sensed some doubt in Orisian, for she smiled at him.

‘Don’t worry. Hammarn is just an old, distracted na’kyrim. He can be a bit . . . unusual, but his heart is true enough. He’s a friend, and will be nothing but delighted to have so many visitors. That’s not something you could say for most in Koldihrve.’

Orisian did not relish the prospect of arriving in a town of masterless men. He could guess that there would be no warm welcome waiting there. Against that, though, he could set the thought that he was about to see a place where Huanin and Kyrinin lived peacefully alongside one another. He knew of no other place where such a thing would happen in these days. He had not thought of it before, but it was obvious that there would be na’kyrim here, and that knowledge quickened his pulse a fraction. Inurian and Yvane were the only na’kyrim he had ever known. The only other he had even seen—just for a moment—had been at Kolglas on the night of Winterbirth: Aeglyss.

‘Yvane,’ he asked, ‘do you know ... is Koldihrve where Inurian came from? I know his father was from the Fox clan, but I never knew where he grew up.’

‘No,’ said Yvane softly. ‘Inurian was born in a summer a’an in the Car Anagais. His mother . . .’ she paused and looked at him. ‘Best to leave that,’ she said. ‘It is not the happiest of tales. Don’t you think, in any case, that he would have told you himself, if he wanted you to know?’

Orisian gazed at the muddy ground passing beneath his feet.

‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘Perhaps he meant to tell me many things one day. He meant to take me with him into the forest, I think. Maybe even next summer.’

‘Perhaps he did,’ said Yvane. ‘I don’t think he would have taken any other Huanin, but you... yes, perhaps.’

She fell silent then, and they trudged along. Flakes of snow began to drift down from the flat, endless clouds. A flight of ducks whirred overhead like fat bolts loosed from some crossbow. Up in the forests on the edge of the Car Criagar a stag bellowed. It was a mournful sound. Some stories said that all the creatures of the world wept when the Gods departed, save the Huanin and the Kyrinin who were the cause of it.

Something else has passed away this time, Orisian thought. Let this night be a warm memory; let it be a seed of life. Those were the words his father had spoken on Winterbirth’s eve, as he had done every year for as long as Orisian could remember. But this time the memories of Winterbirth carried nothing of warmth. No seed—at least none with any good in it—had been planted in Castle Kolglas. If spring did come, it would break upon a world changed beyond recognition.

They came to a derelict barn, and rested there for a little while. The snow had turned to desultory sleet. The building’s roof was skeletal, its rotting beams exposed like the ribs of some half-decayed carcass deposited by flood waters.

Yvane dozed, huddled in her cloak. Rothe shared some food with Anyara. The two Kyrinin whispered to one another while Varryn applied a balm to the still raw tattoos on his sister’s face. Orisian could not settle and wandered listlessly around the barn. There was no sign of fire or storm or other damage. Like all the other abandoned farmsteads they had passed on their journey down the valley, it had been killed by neglect, not some sudden catastrophe.

He clambered into a gap in the wall. The stones were overgrown by a carapace of grey-green lichens. Orisian ran his fingers over them, testing their minutely intricate texture. The wind gusted, throwing a scattering of sharp sleet into his face, and he grimaced, turning his head away.

‘Keep under cover,’ called Rothe. ‘We don’t know who might be watching.’

Orisian took a step down from the breach. Something made him look outwards once more. He saw a group of figures standing twenty paces or so away: Kyrinin warriors, staring silently at him. Their faces were thick with the tattoos of the kin’thyn. For a few seconds he and they were motionless as the sleet swept across them. Then Varryn came soundlessly up to his shoulder, and brushed past him. Orisian watched as Varryn conferred with the newcomers.

‘What’s happening?’ Rothe asked from behind Orisian.

He could only shrug in reply.

After a few minutes, the band of warriors drifted away into the surrounding scrub and Varryn came striding back. His gait was purposeful, almost hasty.

‘What news?’ Orisian asked, but the Kyrinin ignored him and went to speak with Ess’yr. The language was incomprehensible, but for once the expressions upon their faces were almost eloquent. An intensity entered their eyes as brother and sister talked. There was urgency in their tones. Yvane had stirred herself, and as she listened to the discussion Orisian saw her begin to frown.

Varryn and Ess’yr came to some conclusion, and began rapidly to prepare themselves to move on.

‘Will we not wait for the weather to improve?’ asked Anyara, contriving a note of innocent enquiry.

‘No,’ Ess’yr said. ‘We go quickly now.’

‘What’s happened?’ said Orisian.

‘The enemy are coming.’

Yvane was thoughtful as they hastened to keep up with the two Kyrinin, who set a hard pace away from the barn.

‘The Inkallim?’ Orisian asked, but Yvane shook her head.

‘It seems there is war in mountains. Not just a raid: hundreds of White Owls have come north, from the sound of it. I’ve never heard of so many coming into Fox lands. It’s not how the Kyrinin fight their battles, not these Kyrinin at least. They prefer sneaking about in little groups.’

‘Are they coming this way, then?’

‘Probably. The greatest Fox vo’an is beside Koldihrve. The White Owls will want that if they’ve blood on their minds, and they must have a powerful thirst for the stuff for so many of them to come so far. It smells bad to me. Like everything else. If you’re not aboard a boat heading south soon you may not be going anywhere.’

A strange scene greeted them as they rounded a drift of alder trees and came at last within sight of the sea. Two very different settlements flanked the broad mouth of the River Dihrve. Upon its northern banks lay a chaotic jumble of houses and shacks, sheltering behind a crude ditch and dyke: the masterless town of Koldihrve . To the south of the river was a vo’an, a sprawling mass of tents and huts much larger than Orisian had expected. A long wooden trackway raised on poles connected the two settlements across the river. It might have been a vision from the distant past, from the time before the War of the Tainted, when the two races had more in common than distrust and bitterness.

And beyond the ramshackle roofs of Koldihrve was a sight more welcome, and more unexpected, still: the tall masts of a fine sea-going ship at anchor in the estuary.

Cerys, Elect of Highfast, ran a finger down the hem of her plain brown robe. It was fraying. She must mend it soon, as she had done several times before. Few amongst the na’kyrim of Highfast would have begrudged their Elect a new robe but Cerys preferred to set an example. The Thane of Kilkry-Haig still sent an annual boon of coin, and lesser gifts could usually be expected from Kennet nan Lannis-Haig—Inurian’s doing, of course—and one or two of the Marchlords on the northern frontier of Taral-Haig. All of that, however, went on food and the materials needed for the great tasks of chronicling and copying. There was little left over for luxuries such as new clothing. When Kilkry had been highest of all the Bloods, things had been easier. Nowadays Lheanor oc Kilkry-Haig must send an ever-growing tithe south to Vaymouth; he had less to spare for the secretive workings of Highfast.

The Elect let the hem fall from between her fingers. She was allowing idle musings to distract her from the demands of the present. Gently, she reached out into the Shared, letting her senses flow with its currents. She felt the presence of those she sought: the Conclave was gathered in the room that adjoined her own chambers here in the castle’s keep.

She did not relish the prospect of this meeting. Disquiet was abroad in Highfast, and it made people irritable and argumentative. There had been too many rumours circulating in recent days; perhaps that at least could be ended by this gathering.

She lowered her chain of office about her neck. It was very simply made—nothing but unadorned links of iron—as befitted what was a symbol of servitude rather than of elevation. To be elected as head of the Conclave lifted the candidate above others only so that the burden of preserving Highfast and its accumulated wisdom should fall more heavily upon their shoulders. The chain’s weight tired Cerys, and she never wore it save on official occasions such as this.

Soft conversations died away as she entered the meeting chamber. Every eye was turned upon her. She smiled more resolutely than she felt. There were five other na’kyrim present. She would call most of them friends, but that did nothing to dilute the air of tension that filled the chamber. Cerys took her seat at the head of the table and poured herself a beaker of water. A platter of thick-crusted bread was passed to her and she tore off a piece and swallowed it down. A small ritual going back two and a half centuries to the first days of the Conclave in Highfast: that hunger and thirst should be sated, lest their pangs distract from the deliberations to follow. Cerys had little real appetite these days, but the traditions must be respected.

‘Has everyone taken food and drink?’ she asked, and when all gave their nodded or murmured confirmation, she said, ‘Let us make a start, then.’

She turned to an old, frail-looking man seated beside her. His long hair was cloud-white and his eyes almost entirely misted over. The skin of his face was seamed by a thousand vanishingly fine lines. Olyn was beyond his hundredth year—aged even by the standards of the long-lived na’kyrim—and Cerys had hesitated over whether or not to burden him with the delivery of his ill tidings. Even if his body was failing him, however, his mind and his will were as strong as they had ever been. It was his own wish that he should be the one to repeat to the Conclave what he had whispered in the Elect’s ear two days ago.

‘Olyn has news that I thought all of you should hear,’ Cerys said. ‘Olyn, if you please?’

Olyn straightened in his seat and ran a swift tongue over his lips to moisten them.

‘The crows have been uneasy this last little while,’ he said in a wavering voice that ill matched the clarity of the thoughts beneath it. ‘I have spent much time in the roost, to soothe them. I have slept there on some nights when they have been particularly restless. Four nights ago, I was woken by a great clamour. When I sought its cause, I found that one long gone had returned. Idrin. Inurian’s companion.’

There was no sound greater than an intake of breath in the room, but Cerys felt the undercurrent of regret. None would fail to understand the meaning of the crow’s return. It extinguished, irrevocably, any faint hope that Inurian might still be alive.

‘That is a great loss to us,’ murmured Alian, a beautiful, slight Woman. Her head was bowed as she spoke. She would have been too young to have seen much of him when Inurian dwelled here, Cerys thought, yet she feels her life is reduced by his death. Everyone feels that, and rightly.

‘We do not know what has happened, but there is no doubting that Inurian is gone,’ Cerys said. ‘I have reached out for him—I know others have done the same—and there is no sign. It is, as Alian says, a great loss. He chose to leave this place, but he left his mark upon it just as it did upon him.’ She glanced at the keeper of crows. ‘There is more that I wished Olyn to share with you, though.’

‘It leads us away from the certain,’ croaked the old, blind man. ‘I believe that I . . . caught the moment of Inurian’s death. There was an instant, a few days ago—I had sunk myself into the Shared—when I think I felt his passing. He ceased to be a presence in the Shared, became a part of its memory.’

‘That must have been painful,’ said a tall man whose pale hair was tied back in a braid.

‘It was, Mon Dyvain. It was. But there was more to it: another presence, faint and obscure. I do not think Inurian was alone when died. One of us was there. A na’kyrim.’

That took a moment or two to sink in. Eshenna broke the contemplative silence. She was the youngest of the Conclave, and had risen to its ranks after being in Highfast for only four years. Her speed of thought and talent in using the Shared had much to do with her rapid elevation, but so did her background: Eshenna had come to Highfast from Dyrkyrnon. That na’kyrim sanctuary deep in the marshes of the Heron Kyrinin was a world away from the austere and disciplined atmosphere of Highfast. Only the hidden Inner Court of the Adravane Kingship held a greater concentration of gifted na’kyrim than Dyrkyrnon.

It was Eshenna who, of all the members of the council, gave Cerys most cause for concern. The woman had a fire in her that Highfast had not yet turned fully to its own ends. She was as passionate as any in her studies and researches, but the outside world still called to her more strongly than was quite fitting for one of the Conclave.

‘Forgive my slowness, Elect,’ Eshenna said, ‘but we should be clear about what is being said. Are we to take it that Inurian was killed by one of our own kind?’

Cerys sighed. ‘As Olyn said, we have left certainty behind. But it seems . . . possible.’

‘It’s hard to believe,’ Eshenna said. ‘It must be a long time since na’kyrim killed na’kyrim.’

‘It happened in Koldihrve, years ago,’ said Olyn. ‘Before that, as far as I know, one would have to go back another two centuries or more, to the early Storm Years. Hyrungyr killed at least two na’kyrim on behalf of Amgadan the Wheelwright, who held the castle at Asger Tan. Of course, it was not uncommon before that, during the Three Kingships and the War of the Tainted.’

Mon Dyvain was tapping the ancient wood of the table distractedly.

‘Ancient history come to life, then,’ he murmured.

‘I think so,’ agreed Cerys. ‘Some of you know already, but perhaps others do not: when the Dreamer spoke of Inurian’s death, he also referred to someone else. A man, whose presence in the Shared Tyn seems to find . . . unsettling.’

‘Then it must be true,’ Eshenna said at once. ‘Surely it’s clear that this man—this na’kyrim—the Dreamer spoke of is responsible for Inurian’s death.’

Cerys regarded the younger woman in silence. There was little more to say.

‘What must we do, then?’ Eshenna asked.

‘There is nothing to do but watch and learn, and seek to understand, as our duties here demand,’ said Alian.

It was well concealed, and perhaps the others did not notice it, but Cerys caught the slight twitch in Eshenna’s face as the young na’kyrim suppressed an instinctive, dissenting, response.

‘You are most likely right, Alian,’ Mon Dyvain was saying, ‘but there are complications here. We know Anduran has fallen to the forces of the Black Road . We know Inurian—peace to him—is dead. The two can hardly be unconnected.’ He looked around at the other Conclave members. ‘Well, it must be so, must it not? There is a na’kyrim, a murderous one, in the service of the Black Road .’

‘It must be so,’ agreed Eshenna. Out of the corner of her eye, Cerys could see Olyn nodding glumly.

‘But why would a na’kyrim serve the Black Road ?’ continued Mon Dyvain. ‘They are not famed for their affection toward us.’

‘Who is?’ Alian asked quietly.

Cerys held up a calming hand.

‘Let us not be too hasty with our assumptions,’ she said. ‘I share your instincts in this, but true understanding may be hindered by rushing to judgement.’

Mon Dyvain inclined his head to acknowledge the soft rebuke.

The Elect’s gaze lingered upon one of those who sat around the table: Amonyn. The muscular, elegant man had said nothing so far. That was his way. He listened, and he thought, and he was never anything other than calm. He was also, by the fine margins on which such judgements rested, probably more powerfully imbued with the Shared than anyone else in Highfast. Cerys had seen him quieten a wailing child with a single soothing touch, and bring back from the very edge of death a Kilkry-Haig warrior crushed by falling rocks on one of the mountain trails. She had, for a long time, loved him in the distant, ill-defined way that came easily to the forever childless na’kyrim, and they occasionally found solace in one another’s arms.

He stirred beneath her questioning look.

‘Has the Dreamer spoken again?’ he asked.

‘He whispers and mumbles. His rest certainly seems disturbed, but the scribes have caught little of it. Nothing of consequence.’ .

Amonyn bestowed a rather sorrowful smile upon her.

‘Then I think there is little enough that we can do. It is best to hold fast to our solitude and silence. With the one exception: perhaps Lheanor oc Kilkry-Haig should be told of our suspicions.’

Cerys smiled. They thought alike, she and Amonyn.

‘With the Conclave’s consent, I have a message ready to be carried to the Thane,’ she said. ‘It tells him that we believe there to be an unknown na’kyrim in the Glas valley and that it is possible—only possible—that he or she is working in the service of the Black Road . We owe the Kilkry Blood that much for maintaining the safety of Highfast for all these many years. What good the warning may do Lheanor, I do not know.’

‘And that is all we do?’ asked Eshenna.

‘That is for the Conclave to decide, but I would propose that for now we watch the Dreamer closely and study his words; we remain alert to any further disturbance in the Shared. That, as befits the purposes for which Highfast was first given over to the na’kyrim by Kulkain oc Kilkry, we wait and we observe and we learn.’

The Elect saw the doubt in Eshenna’s eyes. Not outright disagreement, but doubt at the least. She turned to her right. ‘Alian?’ she asked.

‘Wait and watch,’ said Alian without hesitation.

‘Wait and watch,’ agreed Mon Dyvain, and Olyn and Amonyn. And, after only the slightest of pauses, Eshenna.

After the Conclave had dispersed, Cerys retired once more to her austere chambers. She was weary. She carefully lifted the chain from around her neck and returned it to its oak casket. She was the ninth person to hold the office of Elect in Highfast; she often wondered if all those worthy predecessors had felt as unequal to the task as she sometimes did.

The Elect’s reverie was disturbed by a gentle rapping at the door. She had half-expected it.

‘Come in, Eshenna,’ she called out.

The youngest member of the Conclave entered with a proper air of humility.

‘Forgive me for intruding, Elect,’ she said.

Cerys dismissed the apology with a wave of her hand and gestured for Eshenna to take a seat.

‘It is no intrusion, Eshenna. Being alone with my thoughts is not so restful as once it was. That is true for many of us at the moment, I fear.’

Eshenna smoothed her plain dress across her knees. Her troubled mood was as clear as a scar upon the pale skin of her face.

‘What was it you wanted to speak with me about?’ Cerys asked.

‘Nothing, I think, you do not already know, Elect. I have no wish to question the decisions of the Conclave, but...’

‘But you chafe at the thought of inaction. Of patience,’ Cerys finished for her.

‘As I said, nothing you do not already know.’

‘I know, too, that you mean well, and that your doubts are honestly held. But what is it that you would have us do, exactly?’

‘I am uncertain, Elect. Yet my heart asks for more than simply to wait and watch. I know that Inurian left this place before I arrived, but since I came here I have heard nothing but good of him. Does his death not deserve more of an answer than this? Might not one of us go north, to try to discover what has truly happened?’

‘One of us, such as you?’ asked Cerys with an arched eyebrow.

Eshenna met her gaze with no outward sign of embarrassment.

‘I can conceal myself well enough to pass unnoticed by another na’kyrim, if I am not expected or sought. I would not fear to make the attempt, Elect.’

‘No, I am sure you would not. When Grey Kulkain bade Lorryn come to Highfast and establish a library, and a place of study, he said that he wished him to gather and preserve knowledge, understanding, memory. He had seen how every time tumult swept across the world—the end of the Whreinin, the fall of the Kingships—much of what had gone before was carried off and lost. He and Lorryn hoped that this place would be a storehouse and refuge for knowledge, so that whatever befell the peoples of the world not everything would be forgotten. They were great men, and that was a fine hope. It still sustains me, and all of us here. And you, I believe?’

‘Of course, Elect.’

‘So we hide ourselves behind these thick walls,’ Cerys said. ‘We keep ourselves from the gaze of the Huanin in whose lands we dwell. Forgive me if it sounds a foolish question, Eshenna, but why is that?’

There was only the slightest of hesitations before Eshenna’s soft-voiced reply.

‘Because they fear and mistrust na’kyrim, Elect. Because not all share the tolerance that the Thanes of Kilkry have shown us.’

‘Indeed. Highfast is not only a place of learning. It is haven, too, for our kind. A refuge from the . . . harshness with which both Huanin and Kyrinin are wont to treat us. Just as Dyrkyrnon is. There are few places where such as you and I can live in peace. Would it surprise you if I said I understood the reasons for that? That, sometimes, I can almost sympathise with those who need so little encouragement to turn upon a na’kyrim in their midst.’

She saw, and felt, the surprise her statement provoked.

‘Terrible things were done to many, many na’kyrim after the War of the Tainted, in the Storm Years and since. You know that as well as I do, Eshenna. You know, but perhaps do not consider so much, that terrible things were also done by na’kyrim themselves before that. Orlane, imprisoning the mind of a king and making him betray his own people. Long before him, there was Minon the Torturer; Dorthyn, who bent all his will and strength to the utter destruction of the wolfenkind, of an entire race. Many of them, Eshenna. Many whose gifts became terrible weapons. The Huanin remember Orlane most clearly, and revile his name most bitterly, but he was not the only one, or even the worst.’

‘I do not quite understand, Elect,’ murmured Eshenna.

‘It is my responsibility to preserve Highfast and what it contains. The power of the Shared is unwisely used if it is used to interfere in the arguments of the Huanin. We might mean only to do good, but we would nevertheless only remind the humans of what it is they fear.

‘If there is truly a na’kyrim out there amidst all the slaughter in Lannis-Haig, serving the Black Road, now is not the time to risk Highfast’s tradition of discretion. The Kilkry warriors on the battlements above swear their oaths of secrecy, but there’s no stilling so many tongues. There are already many more people who know we are here, and what we do, than you might imagine. If it becomes common knowledge that a na’kyrim is aiding the Black Road, who is to say that some of the anger that follows—and it will follow—may not be turned on us? It would be better not to remind the world of our existence.’

‘Yet,’ said Eshenna, ‘if it were true that one of the na’kyrim is repeating the errors of the past, does it not fall to us, even more so than to the Bloods, to oppose that error and rectify it?’

Cerys gave a curt laugh. ‘Nimble, Eshenna. But not nimble enough to sway me. It has taken centuries to gather the wisdom that is recorded here in our books and manuscripts and scrolls. I would not risk that for the sake of correcting another’s mistake. Not until we know a good deal more than we do at present.’

‘You must excuse my obstinacy, Elect. Still, I would have thought that the death of one of our own demanded more of an answer.’

‘Eshenna,’ Cerys said levelly, ‘I grieve for Inurian. But we deal in manuscripts here. In study and memory. Not judgement; not execution. My counsel, and that of the Conclave, is patience. We will wait, and we will watch. If it comes to seem that it is right, and best, for us to do something more, no doubt we will. I cannot keep you here if your heart calls you to leave. Highfast is not a prison. But I must ask you, so long as you wish to remain here, to put your trust in the wisdom of the Conclave, and follow its decisions.’

Eshenna bowed her head. ‘Of course, Elect,’ she said as she rose to leave.

The door was almost closed behind her when Cerys said, ‘I would regret it, Eshenna, should you ever choose to leave Highfast. We do need . . . other views to leaven our traditions, sometimes.’

‘Thank you, Elect,’ she heard Eshenna say, and then the door clicked shut.

Cerys sighed and ran her fingers through her hair. How sweet a few days of peace, and a few nights of undreaming sleep, would be. She knew she was unlikely to be granted them. Still, there were smaller respites to be found. She opened a cabinet and took out the scented candles that she burned only rarely, and on very particular nights. Amonyn would come to her this evening. They had not spoken of it, but she knew he would come. Tonight they would offer one another what comfort they could against the clamour of the outside world.

Within the walls of Gryvan oc Haig’s Moon Palace were stored riches beyond the dreams of all save the most avaricious of souls. There were gemstones from the Karkyre Deeps and the Hills of Far Dyne, bars of solid Kilkry-Haig silver, bale upon bale of the finest furs the northern forests could offer, and vials of Nar Vay dyes worth more than gold. And there were treasures from further afield too: the most delicate, detailed copperwork from Tal Dyre; silks and velvets smuggled out of the far south; pearls the size of bird’s eggs from the oyster fields of the Dornach Kingship. It was wealth enough to make a man fall into a stupor of amazement and desire. As Mordyn Jerain watched his counters at work cataloguing the plunder gathered from Dargannan-Haig towns, it was not precious stones or jewellery or gold coin that he saw. It was power, and influence over the will of men. Mordyn kept his own hoards sealed behind heavy doors and thick walls in his Palace of Red Stone, his personal army sequestered in its barracks. The Chancellor had long ago realised that many of those in Vaymouth had lapsed into a common kind of reasoning: their judgement of what to do in any given situation had become a simple question of what was most profitable for them. He was not one to decry such frailties. Everyone must have some rule to measure their actions against; some had chosen coin, and that gave the Shadowhand the means to influence them.

The Tal Dyreen turned away and left his men to their work. He climbed up through the intricate stairways and passages of the palace. Even as a youth fresh off his father’s ship from Tal Dyre it had been obvious to him that the house of Haig stood upon the threshold of enormous power. Now, for all the uncertainties of the situation, he could smell the possibilities afresh. The Dargannan-Haig Blood, an obstreperous child ever since it had been created by Gryvan’s grandfather, was broken and would soon be tamed. Lannis, the least of all the Bloods but a long irritation nevertheless, was routed. Even Lheanor oc Kilkry-Haig was weakened and bound now, in time of war, to remember where his proper allegiance lay. All that remained was to drive off the Black Road madmen, and Gryvan could at last turn his full attention upon the prizes to the south: the masterless towns of the Bay of Gold, Tal Dyre and the Dornach Kingship itself. The High Thane might yet, in his lifetime, shape the greatest kingdom the world had ever seen out of these possibilities, and Mordyn would be there at his side as he had always been.

He found Gryvan oc Haig in one of the terrace rooms on the southern side of the palace. The High Thane was reading through papers of some kind, attended by an expectant gaggle of scribes. A songbird chirped in a tall cage wrought from fine threads of precious metal. A flask of wine stood apparently forgotten on a table at the High Thane’s side.

Mordyn cleared his throat from a respectful distance. Gryvan looked up, smilingly set the document aside and dismissed his attendants. The Chancellor bowed.

‘It is fortunate you came, Mordyn,’ said the High Thane. ‘I was minded to send for you.’

The Chancellor made to reply, but was distracted by a movement at one of the great open windows that looked out over the terrace. He felt a twinge of irritation as he realised it was Kale, the Thane’s shieldman, who had been lurking there unseen. He was like some ageing hound unwilling to be parted for even an instant from its master. Mordyn set the distraction aside and smiled at Gryvan.

‘I am at your disposal,’ he said. ‘The tallying of your recent gains is all but done, and no longer needs my close attention.’

‘The least of my gains, that loot,’ said Gryvan. ‘I find the thought of Igryn safely locked away in my dungeons sweeter than any amount of gemstones. But that is not what I wished of you this afternoon. What word from the north?’

‘Nothing new. Most of the valley remains in the hands of the Black Road . Lheanor has, it seems, managed to restrain himself and waits patiently for our armies. If what Lagair tells us is true, the Thane seems to have lost some of his wilfulness, since the death of his son.’

‘You still say it is only the Horin-Gyre Blood that has taken the field?’

‘Them and the White Owl Kyrinin. There is no report of any other forces, save a handful of Inkallim. And the ravens are most likely there to keep an eye on Horin-Gyre as much as anything else.’

‘Very well. Aewult marches for Kolkyre tomorrow, with ten thousand men. So long as he only faces Horin-Gyre, I think we can be certain of a speedy resolution.’

‘I imagine so,’ Mordyn murmured. His misgivings about the Bloodheir related not to his prowess on the battlefield but to how he might deal with the aftermath, and with Lheanor oc Kilkry-Haig.

‘And Croesan and his spawn, what of them?’

Mordyn studiously placed a troubled expression upon his face.

‘No word. All the signs would suggest that not one of Croesan’s family has survived. We cannot be certain of it yet, though.’

The High Thane, by contrast to his Chancellor, could not keep a smile from his lips. The bird was singing in its cage, the melody spilling out between the golden bars.

‘We are fortunate, are we not?’ Gryvan said. ‘Dargannan and Lannis laid low in a single season. We must give some thought to the future of the Glas valley, once the present situation is resolved. Perhaps we need no more Thanes ruling in Anduran, especially now that it appears there are none to lay claim.’

The Chancellor nodded graciously in assent, concealing his disquiet. He could hardly do otherwise, since he had himself long ago planted in Gryvan’s mind the idea that a Blood could be unmade just as it could be made. The Aygll Kings, in olden times, had their Wardens who wielded the monarch’s authority in the furthest parts of the Kingdom. Why should a High Thane not use his Stewards in the same way? But that had been for later, after the Free Cities on the Bay of Gold, and Tal Dyre, had been added to Gryvan’s domains. Taral and Ayth might be subdued and subservient, but until Dargannan, Lannis and Kilkry had been securely and permanently ground down the time would not be right for pulling down the edifice of the Bloods.

‘And no Thanes in Dargannan either, perhaps,’ mused the High Thane.

‘We must be careful not to overreach ourselves,’ said Mordyn.

‘Oh, of course,’ agreed Gryvan with a nonchalant wave of his hand, as if the Chancellor’s caution was some fly to be warded off. ‘Not yet, I know. Not yet. But we must always be thinking ahead, must we not? You are the one who always tells me that our future glories depend upon our actions today, tomorrow.’

‘They do.’

‘It is important that events in Kolkyre and the Glas valley go well. That however things fall out once the Black Road is driven back, they do so in a manner favourable to us.’

Mordyn waited patiently for whatever was to follow. It was obvious that the High Thane, in his clumsy way, was preparing the ground for a suggestion—a command, more likely—that his Shadowhand was not going to like.

‘My thought is this,’ Gryvan said, leaning forwards with an almost conspiratorial air. ‘You should go with Aewult to Kolkyre. You will be valuable to him. A guide.’

One less disciplined than the Chancellor might have let some hint of his dismay show. The Bloodheir was the last person he desired more time alone with. And scurrying around trying to temper the edge of his ill judgement would be wearying. The Chancellor’s mind sifted the options in a moment. There were only two, and his every instinct said the first—trying to change the High Thane’s decision—would not work. So, he reasoned with a heavy heart, it must be the second.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I will offer the Bloodheir whatever assistance I can.’

‘Good.’ The Thane of Thanes seemed genuinely pleased, perhaps even pleasantly surprised, at Mordyn’s acquiescence. ‘I know, Mordyn, you have your differences with Aewult. I do not blame you. He can be impulsive, careless. A little harsh, perhaps. But he will be Thane after me, as sure as fawns follow the rut. He has much to learn, and I can think of no better teacher than you.’

‘I will need a little time to put matters in order,’ the Shadowhand said, with the slightest of bows, ‘and to placate my wife.’

Tarawould not be pleased, and her displeasure could be fearsome. She would not accompany him—she was too fond of her comforts to exchange them for wintry Kolkyre—yet his absences pained her more with each passing year. They hurt him as well. When he had been young he might have scoffed at the prospect, for the marriage had been at least partly driven by self-interest on both their parts, but virtually without their noticing it, powerful bonds had grown between the two of them. She had almost died in losing, for the second time, a child of his before its birthing time. The fear he had felt then, as he glimpsed a future without her, had been enough to drive the desire for a son out of his mind. He would never again risk the loss of that which was most precious to him.

The High Thane brushed the bars of the birdcage with a finger. The prisoner hopped a little closer on its perch and leaned forwards, half-spreading its wings. When it realised no food was being offered it began to sing again.

‘Stupid, these birds,’ Gryvan murmured, then smiled and shrugged his shoulders. ‘My wife likes them. What can I do? We are all slaves to those we love.’

It was on the eve of his departure that a young manservant came to find Mordyn. He was in his reading chamber, perusing reports from his informants at Ranal oc Ayth-Haig’s court in Dun Aygll.

‘What is it?’ Mordyn demanded irritably.

‘There is a messenger here, my lord,’ the youth said as he bowed. ‘Not an official one: someone we’ve never seen before. She insists on speaking only with you, and will not leave. We have her in the guardroom. She is . . . unclean.’

‘I am not in the mood for messages. Send her away.’

‘Yes, lord. She did say . . . she did say you would hear her out. She said she brought word for the supplicant.’

Mordyn hung his head in thought for a moment.

‘You said unclean. How so?’

‘The King’s Rot, my lord. Foul…’

‘Very well. Has she been searched?’

‘The guards say she is unarmed, lord.’

Mordyn went to the guardroom as much out of curiosity as anything. For Torquentine to send his precious doorkeeper in person, the message must be of some import.

When he reached the guardroom, he sent everyone away and sat before Magrayn alone.

‘I never thought to welcome you to my home, doorkeeper,’ he said.

She wore her hood pulled far forwards, keeping much of her face in shadow. How the guards must have cursed when they pulled that hood back, Mordyn thought.

‘I will not linger,’ she rasped. ‘I think your men find my presence unsettling.’

‘I imagine you’re right. Let me hear your master’s message, then.’

‘His exact words: I hear you are bound for Kolkyre, noble Chancellor. There is a man I have heard of, in Lheanor’s city. A wretch; worse than that, a leech. Ochan by name, a usurer by nature. And a dealer in stolen goods, a smuggler, a blackguard of the vilest ilk. It would be to the good of the Bloods and all honest traders if he were brought to justice, yet it seems he is under the wing of some protector. There would be no debts between us, should your presence in Kolkyre coincide with this Ochan’s fall.’

Mordyn laughed. ‘So I am to be the long arm of Torquentine’s revenge upon some minor rival, am I?’

Magrayn remained quite still and quite silent.

‘Well, go back and tell your master I will consider it. But make him no promises; be clear on that, Magrayn. No promises. And compliment him on the skills of his eavesdroppers. It’s only a day since I decided to go to Kolkyre, after all.’

When Torquentine’s doorkeeper had departed, Mordyn remained for a minute or two alone in the guardroom, a faint smile playing across his lips. One had to admire Torquentine’s presumption. It took a considerable amount of self-confidence to seek to use the Chancellor of the Haig Bloods thus. Still, Mordyn would think on it. There might be some merit in exerting a little of the High Thane’s authority in Kolkyre; bringing down someone Lheanor’s own people had allowed to prosper would be an elegant demonstration of the Haig Blood’s primacy.

Koldihrve, Orisian could not help but think, stank. Of fish and freshly butchered meat, of smoke and stagnant pools, of filth: smells he knew well enough from Kolglas, but here they had a different intensity. It was noisy, too. The muddy, puddled streets were filled with shouting and cries. Ear-grating singing assaulted them when they passed by a half-derelict tavern.

There were wild-looking men leading mules laden with furs and carcasses and baskets of turnips; old, crumpled women talking animatedly in doorways or through windows. Scrawny dogs loped up and down, noses to the ground and eyes darting nervously this way and that as if haunted by a lifetime of stonings. The houses were rough and ready, many of them little more than wooden shacks thrown up with whatever timber had come to hand.

Varryn and Ess’yr had parted from them before they entered the town, making for the vo’an on the other side of the river. Ess’yr had promised to find them later. Orisian noted the curiosity with which the town’s inhabitants watched them pass, even without Kyrinin walking alongside them. There were many frowns, and words muttered behind hands.

‘Old Hammarn lives down by the water,’ said Yvane. She proceeded down Koldihrve’s streets utterly oblivious of the unpleasant distractions that assailed them, and the questioning, unfriendly looks cast their way.

They passed by the rotting corpse of a dog half-hidden beneath a wooden boardwalk. A small group of children, their clothes ragged and their faces smudged with dirt, yelled abuse at them, and fled in a squall of laughter when Rothe cast them a black glare.

Even the sea, when they came to it, was a grey and leaden thing compared to the ever-shifting expanse that washed the edge of Orisian’s homeland. The water slapped disconsolately upon the muddy shore. There were small boats lying at strange angles here and there, hauled up out of the water and tied down. Koldihrve stood at the highest reach of a long and snaking estuary that protected it from the storms of the open oceans, so there was no need for the protective breakwaters of Kolglas and Glasbridge. There was only a handful of crude wooden jetties. The huts that lined the top of the beach were rickety affairs, half of them made of drift-wood.

What caught Orisian’s attention more than all this, however, was the ship rocking gently at anchor two or three hundred paces offshore. It was, he was immediately certain, one he had seen before: the Tal Dyreen trading vessel that had been berthed at Glasbridge before Winterbirth. It looked absurdly out of place in this miserable backwater.

Old Hammarn’s house was one of the more respectable ones running along the shore. A wattle and daub fence protected it from sea breezes and spray, and the building itself was a solid-looking construction of heavy, if weathered, timbers.

Hammarn himself was a dishevelled, almost shrivelled, man with straggly hair of the purest white. His face had aged in a way that must surely be his Huanin blood coming to the fore: it was deeply lined and pock-marked. For all his evident years, he bobbed about with the nervous energy of a youth.

He welcomed them in to his little house with cheerful enthusiasm, and almost before they had crammed themselves into its single, chaotically full room he was rooting around in a pile of odd sticks and driftwood. With a flourish he emerged clutching a short, thick piece of wood and thrust it upon Anyara.

‘Woodtwine,’ he exclaimed in a crackling voice. ‘Finished last week. One of my best, I think, I think.’

Anyara, a little taken aback, turned it slowly in her hands. Orisian peered at it, and could see delicate carved figures spiralling around the shaft.

‘Saolin, you see,’ Hammarn said as he jabbed unnervingly at the object with a crooked finger. ‘The change runs around the wood. Starts with the seal, ends with the horse.’

‘I ... I see,’ said Anyara.

‘Old craft, woodtwining. Much practised by fishermen in these parts in the Kingtimes. Saolin a common theme, but this is a piece twine, not a story twine. Need more wood for a story twine, ‘less you have a fine touch. Good one this, though, I think. The best came from Kolkyre, of course. In the old days, that is.’

‘Hammarn,’ said Yvane softly. The old man looked from face to face, as if unsure who had spoken. He grinned expectantly at them all, baring uneven teeth blotched with brown. He had the look of a child courting congratulation.

‘Be calm for a moment, Hammarn,’ Yvane said. ‘Your guests have come a long way’

‘Ah,’ said Hammarn, cowed. ‘Yes, yes. Not often I have visitors here. Much too exciting.’ He shuffled his feet and looked more hesitantly at Anyara.

‘No harm done,’ she said. She smiled as she held the wood carving out to him. He took it back with a courteous nod.

Orisian glanced around. The hut’s interior was filled with wood and clothing, stones and all manner of odds and ends scavenged from the beach. A lathe rested against one wall, almost hidden beneath a pile of dirty sailcloth. A weary-looking fishing net, apparently unused in years, was draped across another wall. He could hardly imagine that there was room here for all of them to bed down, if that was what Yvane had in mind.

After a deal of searching, Hammarn found them some bread. It was only a little stale. They chewed it in silence for a while. Hammarn ate nothing himself, but watched them, his jaw moving soundlessly in imitation. Orisian cast a more careful eye over his surroundings as he worked at breaking down the bread’s stubborn resistance. Hidden here and there amongst the chaos were things that stirred his memory and gave the place an unexpectedly familiar feel. A sack of netting hung in one corner, filled with clay jars and pots, all tightly sealed: the same strange herbs and powders that Inurian had so assiduously collected? Behind the lathe was a pile of thick, leather-bound books so musty and mouldy-looking that they could not have been opened in years. The place was almost a decayed, disintegrating version of Inurian’s room back in Kolglas. Perhaps Hammarn had once had that same sharp curiosity Inurian possessed. The signs of such a past were here, as if Hammarn had brought with him into the final years of his life all the baggage of another person entirely.

Yvane was watching the track of Orisian’s eyes.

‘Age brings wisdom to some; for others it bears different fruit,’ she said. The words were gently spoken, and the older na’kyrim only chuckled at them.

‘Old Hammarn, yes. Or Hammarn the Quiet.’ He winked at Orisian. ‘Quiet, you see, I am. I can smell the Shared, but never touch it, never. Five quiet in the Shared, five waking. In Koldihrve, that is. And old I surely am; really quite old.’ The last words he spoke faded into silence as he was overtaken by some stray thought.

‘I thought there were eleven here?’ Yvane said, and her voice brought Hammarn back to himself.

‘Ah, indeed,’ he said sadly. ‘Brenna fell asleep in the very hour of Winterbirth, two years gone. No waking from such an ill-omened slumber.’

Yvane nodded. ‘It is a long time since I was here. Who is First Watchman, Hammarn? We should speak with him, I suppose. Strangers always cause a stir.’

‘Oh, still Tomas,’ said Hammarn, and distaste was apparent in his tone. ‘Vile Tomas,’ he whispered conspiratorially, ‘but tell not I said it.’

He looked earnestly at them, and Orisian found himself nodding in assent.

‘He’ll know you’re here well enough,’ Hammarn mused.

Yvane grunted and glanced at Orisian and Anyara. ‘Unless Tomas is a changed man, it would probably be better if you kept out of his way. Koldihrve is a rough place, and unlikely to be any gentler if they know they have the ruling line of Lannis-Haig in their midst.’

‘Not changed a whit,’ Hammarn was saying. ‘Always vile. No friend of the Glas valley, that’s for certain.’ He cast a nervous glance at Yvane, and hesitated before continuing. ‘A fool, but not a great friend of yours either, sweet lady. Not sure he’d be best pleased to see you.’

Yvane frowned, but realisation quickly followed. ‘Still angry? It’s been, what, four years?’

Hammarn shrugged and grinned.

‘I had a disagreement with this Tomas the last time I was here,’ Yvane explained. ‘One of the fisherwomen bore a na’kyrim baby, and he was making a lot of noise about wanting to know who the father was. He was, and no doubt still is, drunk on his little scent of power, and I told him so. He didn’t take it kindly. Well, makes no odds to me if I never see the loathsome man again.’

She looked pointedly from Orisian to Anyara with an almost mischievous smile. ‘And if you should run into him, you can always just pretend to be the children of a woodsman from Anlane or somewhere similar. Shouldn’t be a difficult lie: you’ve collected enough dirt and scratches to pass for beggars.’

Anyara and Orisian looked down at their hands and garments. It was true enough, of course. Grime covered their skin; their clothes were filthy and full of rents. Their travels since Winterbirth had left marks outside just as they had within.

When he asked for somewhere to wash, Orisian was directed to a tub of icy water outside, against the seaward wall of the hut. As he made his way to it, he noted a pair of bulky men leaning on quarterstaffs in the road. They watched him quite openly as he disappeared behind the shack.

He pulled off his tunic and dunked his head into the barrel. The water was an invigorating shock and set his face tingling. He shook his head, chill droplets spraying his shoulders and back and making him shiver. He scooped handfuls of water on to his chest and neck and rubbed at the ingrained dirt.

Looking out over the crude fencing, he could see the Tal Dyreen ship rocking gently at its anchor. None of the other vessels along the shore could match it. One or two of them might be fit for the journey around Dol Harigaig to Kolglas or Glasbridge, but at this time of year, when the cold winds came in hard on the coast from the empty reaches of the western oceans, none would be a fast or truly safe choice.

The Tal Dyreen vessel was an altogether different proposition. It could carry them south with ease, and it must be bound in that direction anyway. There was nothing to the north save Kyrinin clans. The far distant ports of the Black Road Bloods were guarded by storm, ice and the Wrecking Cape, and even the seamen of Tal Dyre did not dare follow that route.

As he gazed out, a fish-hawk arrowed into the water between land and ship. It vanished for a moment in a plume of spray, then its great wings were levering it skyward again. As it beat away, empty-clawed, it shook itself and shed a shower of seawater.

‘No luck,’ said Hammarn behind him. ‘Poor bird.’

The na’kyrim offered Orisian a cloth to dry himself with. ‘Found it,’ he said, as if in explanation of something.

‘There are men watching your house,’ Orisian said as he scrubbed at his hair with the cloth.

‘Yes, yes. Saw them. Sent by Tomas. Men of his Watch, his club-men. Told you, didn’t I, he’d know you were here.’ He gave an exaggerated laugh. ‘They’re not here to watch me, that’s sure.’

Orisian patted his arms and chest dry. Since Hammarn did not seem overly concerned about the clubmen, he saw no point in spending his own worries on them. He nodded in the direction of the ship.

‘Do you know where the captain is?’

‘Captain? Oh yes, very grand. They’re Tal Dyre, you know. Sniffing about after furs, rooting about in our stores.’ He cast a glance over each shoulder, leaned a fraction closer to Orisian. ‘Don’t much take to them, myself. Not to Tal Dyres, I mean. Always coin, with them, never value. They’ll not take my woodtwines. No coin in it.’

‘Never mind,’ said Orisian. ‘You’d not want to sell them to someone who didn’t appreciate them anyway, would you?’

Hammarn gave him a broad grin. ‘Right,’ the na’kyrim said. ‘Quite right.’

‘Do you know where the captain is?’ Orisian asked again as he handed the damp cloth back. ‘On his boat or onshore?’

Hammarn shrugged. ‘Couldn’t say. Well, onshore I’d say, since I saw him here yesterday. But now? Who knows? Alehouse, most likely.’

‘We’ll look for him there, then.’

‘Yes,’ Hammarn agreed emphatically. ‘You won’t . . . you won’t let the sweet lady meet Tomas, will you?’

The look of concern on the old na’kyrim’s face was acute.

‘Yvane? Well I don’t think she wants to, does she? It doesn’t sound as if it would be a good idea.’

‘No, indeed. She’s a fine lady, but ... a fine lady. A good friend, no doubt of that, but not quite gentle. Can be rough. Got stickles on her tongue, if you know what I mean?’

‘I do,’ smiled Orisian.

‘Good, good. Wouldn’t like trouble. I do like it quiet.’ He shot a sudden, curious look at Orisian. ‘Not going to be trouble, is there?’

‘I hope not,’ said Orisian.

‘Ah. Good. Only I hear things, you know. There’s talk. The Fox aren’t happy, not at all.’

‘We heard there are White Owls in the Car Criagar.’

‘Oh, yes. Yes, them, but worse too. Mail shirts and crossbows, horses. That must be trouble, mustn’t it? When the Road’s on the march?’

Orisian felt a twist in his gut, and wanted for a moment to take hold of the na’kyrim.

‘You mean the Black Road ?’ he asked. ‘You mean they’re in the mountains too?’

Hammarn nodded glumly. ‘The Black Road, yes. That must be trouble, mustn’t it?’

Yvane, after a display of reluctance, allowed Hammarn to take her off to visit some of the other Koldihrve na’kyrim. Orisian went with Rothe and Anyara to find the Tal Dyreen captain. All of them noted, without saying anything to one another, the thickset men armed with staffs who openly followed them as they made their way back into the centre of the town.

Warm air carried stale smells out from the gloomy interior of the drinking house. There were places much like this in the poorer quarters of Glasbridge or Anduran, but neither Orisian nor Anyara had ever been inside one. It was not the sort of establishment a Thane’s family would frequent. They paused on the boardwalk in front. Rothe stepped forwards without hesitation.

‘Try not to look anyone in the eye,’ he muttered over his shoulder. ‘But don’t make it obvious.’

Anyara rolled her eyes at Orisian.

There were few customers within, and several of those that were present were slumped in stupor or asleep over tables. A tired-looking serving girl, thin and sallow-skinned, watched them enter but made no move to greet them or offer them anything. The floor-boards creaked beneath Orisian’s tread.

Edryn Delyne was less opulently dressed than when Orisian had last seen him in the harbourmaster’s house at Glasbridge. Then, on that pine-scented, wine-warmed night before Winterbirth, the Tal Dyreen had been a picture of elegance; now he wore the clothes of a working sailor. Still, his hair was clean and bright, and his beard was as neatly cropped and pointed as it could be.

He was sitting with two of his crew, nursing a pitcher of frothy ale. For just an instant, there was a flicker of surprise in his face as he recognised Orisian.

‘An unexpected meeting,’ the trader said. The clipped tones of the Tal Dyre cant spilled through into everything he said. ‘And if my eyes read the resemblance right, this might be the sister that I heard of? The last place to find the Lannis-Haig house, this.’

Orisian looked around hurriedly, but no one was paying them any attention. The couple of townsfolk within earshot were in no condition to eavesdrop. Nevertheless, he saw that Rothe was keeping a surreptitious watch on the inn’s other patrons.

‘I would be grateful if you kept our names to yourself,’ he murmured. ‘We are not known here, and it would seem best if it stayed that way.’

One of Delyne’s pale eyebrows twitched in wry amusement.

‘Ill at ease amongst these masterless folk, are we? Some sense in that. Few friends here for Lannis-Haig strays.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Orisian. ‘But we hope we shall not be here much longer. I was surprised to see your ship here, too. I thought you would be long gone on your way back south by now.’

‘Ah, would that I was,’ said Delyne with an elaborate sigh. ‘The music and warm breezes of Tal Dyre are a sweet thought, but trade’s an unforgiving master. No rest, no ease, for me and mine until all that needs to be done is done. Since we last met, I ported in Kolkyre. And what did I find in that noble city? A great desire for fine fox fur; the Furriers in despair at the shortage of material. And there am I knowing there’s furs to be had in cold Koldihrve, at a price no man would grudge. So one last run it is, in winter’s very teeth, before turning for home.’

‘You’re heading south soon, then,’ said Orisian, trying to sound casual.

‘Back to Kolkyre,’ the Tal Dyreen nodded. ‘Not what it once was, some say, but I say a fine city still.’

‘And might you have room for passengers?’ asked Anyara. Orisian sank back in his chair and watched as the Tal Dyreen captain ran frank, appraising eyes over Anyara’s face.

‘A load of pelts and hides in my hold,’ he mused. ‘Little comfort for the likes of you, my lady.’

‘We’ve had no comfort since Winterbirth, captain, and could do without it for a while longer.’

Delyne gave her a brief smile. Orisian noticed for the first time how white his teeth were.

‘Aye, no doubt. I heard some little whispers before I left Kolkyre: that ungentle times were come to your lands. Sad days. Still, space taken by you is space untaken by money in the making. A pretty mascot for a voyage you are, but there is none matches the beauty of coin.’

Orisian almost winced, beset by a premonitory image of Anyara emptying the Tal Dyreen’s pitcher over his head, but her warming smile barely flickered.

‘We understand, of course,’ she said. ‘You must be paid for board and lodging. That is only fair. We will turn our gratitude into hard coin, once we were safely back in harbour.’

Delyne looked around, taking in as if for the first time the smoke-blackened walls and the splitting and splintered floor-boards. He nodded thoughtfully.

‘Yes, a cold harbour this for fine folk. Tight corner, too. The wind tells me swords and spears come this way. A tight corner true enough, when there’s no boat here fit for the hard pull around the headland. No boat but one, at least.’

Anyara took the sea captain’s hand in hers, clutching it tight. ‘Indeed. We are in your hands, captain.’

Delyne gently eased himself free, ‘Well. Where is it you’re heading for?’

‘Kolglas, or Glasbridge,’ said Orisian. ‘It matters more that we go quickly than which one we make for.’

The Tal Dyreen took a long drink of ale, and licked the froth it left behind from his lips. He put on a gloomy face.

‘Off my track, those are. Not my planned course at all.’

‘Bring that jug with you,’ Orisian said. ‘We’ll fill it with silver after you put us ashore.’

After a moment Delyne gave the slightest of shrugs.

‘I’ll find a berth, of course, for Lannis-Haig. I cannot be waiting for you, mind. Been here a day longer than wished already, waiting for promised goods. They should be here tomorrow, or perhaps the day after, and we’ll be off sharply then.’

‘We are in some haste,’ said Orisian. ‘Gold instead of silver in that jug if we leave tonight.’

The Tal Dyreen affected a look of regret. ‘I’ve men ashore to be gathered. And the passage out to open water from here’s a narrow one, not kind to a vessel the size of mine. By choice I’d not attempt it in the dark. For that gold, though, I’ll take her out tomorrow, whether my holds are full or not. The tides will be friendly in the afternoon.’

Orisian felt a surge of frustration at the thought of another night’s delay. But if a Tal Dyreen said he feared to sail these waters in the dark, it must be right to listen.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Send for us. We’ll be at the house of a na’kyrim called Hammarn.’

‘Truly, it is remarkable company Lannis-Haig is keeping in these times,’ smiled Delyne. ‘One more matter for agreement: I’ll put you ashore wherever you wish, but only if I see safety all about me. A sniff of trouble upon the breeze and I’ll not risk one board of my ship or one hair off my men’s heads. Not for a hundred jugs filled with coin. You’ll ride with us all the way to Kolkyre if I say so.’

The deal was struck and Edryn Delyne took his crewmen away.

‘I remembered him rather better from Glasbridge,’ Orisian said.

‘He probably didn’t have so clear a chance of making a profit then,’ said Anyara. ‘You know what they say: a Tal Dyreen scenting gold is like a bear smelling honey. Best not to come between the two of them. In any case, it makes him reliable, doesn’t it?’

‘I’d sooner trust to something other than greed,’ sighed Orisian, ‘but it’s a safe enough bargain. Tal Dyreens wouldn’t do much trade in Glasbridge, or Kolkyre for that matter, if it was known he’d abandoned us here. He’ll be a loyal friend, if for no other reason than that.’

‘They also say that the only women safe around a Tal Dyreen are the dead and the dying, and the dying only sometimes,’ Rothe observed.

Anyara shrugged at that. ‘I can look after myself.’

Orisian smiled at the confidence in her voice. Anyara’s mood was lighter now that they were drawing closer to safety. The shadow beneath which they had toiled really might be lifting a little, and for the first time in weeks hope did not seem quite such an unreasonable thing.

No more than half a day’s march from Koldihrve, on the northern flank of the Car Criagar, a small hill rose from the thin forest. It was dotted with a few scrawny trees. Kanin had set up his camp on the short turf beneath these ragged sentinels.

The march over the mountains had been hard and fast, though plagued more by cold and snow than by the arrows of woodwights. There had been no sign of the Fox that Kanin had feared might impede their progress. That, he knew, was because of the hundreds of White Owls surging through the Car Criagar. There were corpses in the forest—tokens of the struggle between the clans—but the cresting wave of savagery was always somewhere ahead of the Horin-Gyre company. Some of the dead Kyrinin they found were mutilated or dismembered. There were men, women and children strung up in trees or impaled upon the ground. A part of Kanin was disgusted at the thought of marching in the tracks of blood-frenzied woodwights. Only the greater need kept his feet on the path: until the children of Kennet nan Lannis-Haig were taken, the task he had promised to undertake was incomplete. The butchery the White Owls spread through the forest served that promise, speeding his descent upon Koldihrve.

On the treeless high ground of the Car Criagar a snowstorm had lashed at them. A slide of rock and snow carried off a few victims. There had been no rest on those hostile slopes, so now, with the peaks behind them, he had ordered a brief pause on this lonely hillock. He did not want to blindly lead weary warriors still further into unknown lands. He sent messengers and scouts racing ahead and waited to see what word they might bring back.

The Thane—he still was not accustomed to thinking of himself as such—was seated on a dusky brown rug, breaking his fast on the same biscuits and gruel that fed his warriors, when a tired-eyed man came scrambling up the hillside and fell to his knees before him. It was one of the sentries posted on the camp’s outskirts. Kanin calmly set down his bowl and wiped his lips with his cuff. He waited for the man to speak.

‘There is an Inkallim here, lord. One of the Hunt. He would speak with you.’

That caught Kanin’s attention.

‘Bring him to me, then.’

The man, when he came striding up out of the forest, was accompanied by a great, thick-jawed hound. The beast loped heavily along at its master’s heels. They never leash those creatures, Kanin thought. However ruthlessly trained they were, the Hunt’s dogs always had a feral, threatening air. Of course, if they were leashed it might make people less intimidated by them, and that would not accord with the Hunt’s desires.

The Inkallim was relaxed and casual, but that could not hide the signs of a hard journey. He was pale and gaunt, befitting a man who had seen little of rest or food in several days. As he halted before Kanin his hound sat at his side and fixed its dark eyes on the Thane. Kanin did not rise from his rug, and after a moment’s pause the Inkallim squatted down on his haunches.

‘Lord,’ the man said.

‘You are one of Cannek’s?’

‘Of the Hunt, yes. Two of us came on the trail of the Lannis-Haig girl, up over the tops from the falls where the halfbreed was killed.’

‘And?’

‘There are six of them. Two wights, a na’kyrim, a Lannis warrior, the girl and a youth: most likely her brother.’

Kanin grimaced and rubbed at his eye in frustration.

‘So you’ve failed to kill them,’ he muttered.

‘My companion made an attempt, as they descended from the mountains. It was unsuccessful. I thought it best to follow at a distance, rather than risk my own death and the loss of their trail.’

‘Of course. Where are they now?’

‘They entered Koldihrve this morning. Had I not seen your approach, I would have pursued them and made another attempt in the town.’

‘Igris!’ Kanin shouted, clambering to his feet. His bowl of gruel toppled as he went, spilling its contents across the rug. The Inkallim’s hound sprang to its feet and growled.

Kanin’s shieldman trotted up from his post a short distance away.

‘Find a rider, with a fast horse,’ the Thane snapped. ‘They’re to make for Koldihrve. I want a message given to whoever passes for a ruler there: the Black Road is coming, and if the Lannis-Haig children are not delivered up to me I will raze the town to the ground, I will slaughter their stock and drown every child of their own in the river.’

Igris nodded and turned away.

‘And break camp,’ Kanin shouted after him. ‘Everyone is to be mounted and ready by the time that messenger is on his way. I want us within sight of Koldihrve by tomorrow’s first light.’

The walls of the Lore Inkall’s Sanctuary at Kan Dredar enclosed a forest. Hundreds of pine trees stood within their bounds, carpeting the ground with more than a century’s needles. They filled the great enclosure with the scent of their sap and the air had a close, embracing feel that only the strongest of winds could disturb. There was seldom any sound beneath their dark green canopy, save the twittering of the small birds that flocked to their shelter in winter or the tolling of a bell to mark some ritual observance. The city in the valley below—the sprawling stronghold of the Gyre Blood—rarely made its presence known. Even the most bullish children of Kan Dredar knew better than to venture over the granite wall of the Sanctuary.

This was Theor’s domain, and had been his home for all save the first few years of his life. His parents were a distant memory, almost washed away by time. He had been only five or six—he could not be certain which, since no precise record was kept—when they handed him over to the Inkallim in exchange for a few silver coins. Many others entered the Inkall in the same way. Theor, when he thought of his mother and father at all, was grateful for their decision.

Today, many more people than usual were moving from building to building amongst the Sanctuary’s trees. As well as Theor’s robed Lore Inkallim, there were warriors of the Battle and grim-faced stalkers and trackers of the Hunt. Such activity was only stirred up by the few formal ceremonies of the year or, as now, by the gathering of the Firsts in the Roundhall. Theor knew that it was a pale echo of what was happening beyond his walls: Kan Dredar was in ferment, the people roused by rumours of great victories won in the south. The talk on the streets and in the markets was of nothing else.

Theor walked alone towards the Roundhall. When these meetings were held, the Firsts came and went without their attendants. The oaken doors of the hall stood open, awaiting him. A single servant was sweeping the tiled floor of the wide, circular chamber. At Theor’s arrival, the man quietly left, averting his eyes. The hall was simple, undecorated. A pool of yellowish light fell from candles burning on a central stand. Three chairs were arrayed around its edge. Theor sat and waited.

Nyve of the Battle was the next to enter. Theor’s friend walked silently to his chair. They did not look at one another. Avenn came last. The First of the Hunt was a lean, taut woman, several years younger than the two men. Her face, framed by straight black hair, was pock-marked with the scars of a childhood disease. As she took her seat the doors swung shut and the Firsts were alone in candle-light.

‘Beneath the unclosing eyes of the Last God all is seen,’ Theor breathed.

‘For his eyes are the sun and the moon,’ the others said in unison.

‘And he sees my heart and my will.’

‘There is only the Black Road .’

‘Only the Road.’

‘Only the Road,’ Nyve and Avenn repeated.

Tiny echoes from the hall’s bare stone walls filled out their voices.

‘Ten men were found, crossing the Vale of Stones,’ Theor said. ‘They were Horin-Gyre. Old warriors, long settled on farms in the Olon valley; farms they abandoned to go to war.’

‘There have been others,’ said Nyve, ‘even from Ragnor’s own garrison here. Three deserters were garrotted this week. They claimed they meant to go south. Anduran’s fall has set many to dreaming of the homeland, and of the Kall.’

‘The Kall is for the Lore, not the people, to pronounce. This is not the promised renewal.’

‘As you say. None would question the Lore’s primacy in such a matter.’

Theor turned towards Avenn.

‘Do you have the answers we sought, First?’

‘In part, I think.’ Her accent was precise, curt: a relic of an impoverished upbringing in the Fane-Gyre mountains. ‘The message that Vana oc Horin-Gyre’s people found on the High Thane’s courier is in a cipher we have not seen before. We cannot read it.’ She saw the disappointment in Theor’s eyes, and pressed on quickly before he had a chance to speak it. ‘But the cipher’s form and structure are familiar. No one of Horin-Gyre would have recognised it for what it is; it’s fortunate that Vana was willing to pass it to the Hunt. I am told it is most likely a variation on those that Gryvan’s Shadowhand introduced in Vaymouth.’

‘And the messenger himself?’ Theor asked darkly. ‘What did he have to say?’

‘He told us as much as he knew before he died. It was not easy to break him, but we found his limits. Although he did not live long enough for us to test him repeatedly, we are confident he told us everything he could. He was bound for Dun Aygll, in the guise of a shepherd. There, he knew only that he was to pass the message to a stallholder in one of the markets.’

‘It is not much,’ murmured Nyve.

‘It is enough,’ Theor said.

Avenn nodded. ‘We deal in likelihoods, in possibilities. But the Hunt’s judgement is clear: Ragnor oc Gyre corresponds with the Haig Chancellor. Perhaps with Gryvan oc Haig himself.’

‘They are one and the same, Gryvan and his Shadowhand,’ Theor asserted. ‘The Chancellor holds the reins of the Haig Bloods just as much as the High Thane does.’

‘In most things, that is true,’ the First of the Hunt agreed. ‘Well, then,’ sighed Theor, ‘the time has come for us to make some decisions. The ice is breaking beneath our feet; we must rush onwards, or turn back.’

‘Agreed,’ Nyve rumbled. ‘Our High Thane seeks to play the Bloods against one another. The Horin lands have been all but promised to both Gaven and Wyn should Kanin fail to return, so they will not demur if Ragnor withholds his aid. Our Bloods have lost their vigour; forgotten their heritage. Wealth and power in this world please them more than the prospect of the next, and Ragnor fears his wealth and power will be at risk if he tests himself against Gryvan oc Haig. Only Horin out of all of them has kept the creed at its very heart, and now Angain is dead and his son will be abandoned.’ He shook his head in puzzlement. ‘It is surprising that the Gyre Thane should so far forget himself.’

‘It is not so long ago that the Inkall aided a Gyre Thane in humbling Horin-Gyre,’ Avenn pointed out softly.

‘Those were different times,’ Theor said, ‘and Ragnor’s father a different man. He had no secrets from us. He needed none, since his will ran in the same riverbed as our own. What was done then in the Stone Vale strengthened Gyre, and in those days that meant it strengthened the creed. Our loyalty is first to the creed, second the Gyre Blood and only third the High Thane—the man—himself. If the needs of the first two now dictate it, the last may be set aside.’

‘We have long known that Ragnor holds us too lightly in his regard,’ said Nyve. His gaze was wandering over the tiled floor like a man who had dropped some coin and lost it in the pattern. ‘It has been clear for a long time that there might come a moment such as this, when we must decide whether to put our hand more firmly upon the tiller. I take it we are agreed, that something is wrong . . . rotten . . . when victories such as those Kanin nan Horin-Gyre has won elicit no response from the High Thane?’

Theor and Avenn both nodded.

Nyve rocked his head to one side. Still he did not look up. ‘Vana oc Horin-Gyre is not Angain’s widow for nothing. She is already gathering fresh forces. She may send them to her son’s aid even if Ragnor forbids it.’

Avenn’s voice betrayed an eagerness when she spoke. ‘Given encouragement, there are many who would march, whether or not Ragnor wishes it.’

For the first time, Theor thought he knew what was fated to follow from this meeting, the role they were to play in the unfolding of fate’s pattern. He had never doubted the shape of Avenn’s instincts: the Hunt always found itself leaders with a taste for the Road’s most dramatic twists and turns. Nyve he had not been so certain of. His old friend was harder to read, not given to haste or precipitous action.

‘How many more swords can Vana put in the field?’ Theor asked.

Nyve glanced at Avenn, silently acknowledging that she might know something he did not. The Hunt had an eye and an ear in every corner of every Blood.

‘No more than another thousand,’ Avenn said. ‘They are the last, unless she were to leave Hakkan itself defenceless.’

‘Not many,’ said Theor. ‘Whatever happens, we should at least strive to preserve the Horin-Gyre Blood. They must be protected if the creed is to be strengthened rather than weakened by all of this. They are a beacon others can look to, especially now that they have achieved the impossible.’

‘They are,’ Nyve agreed. ‘All would depend upon the commonfolk. Put enough fire in the bellies of his people and even a High Thane cannot disregard it. What does the Hunt say, Avenn?’

‘We can stir the villages. Dozens have already gone across the Stone Vale. There is a fervour not seen in many years: feasting and bonfires and telling battle tales. My people could set talk of glory loose in every meeting hall, every farmyard; light a fire the Thanes could not restrain.’

‘Even with every sword Horin-Gyre can muster and an army of commonfolk alongside them, Kanin could not stand against the full weight of Haig,’ Nyve observed. He was methodically massaging his crooked fingers. ‘He will be consumed. As, it seems, Ragnor wishes.’

‘All might be different, were the Battle to march,’ Avenn suggested.

Neither Theor nor Nyve replied at once. Nyve’s kneading of his fingers did not pause, as if he had not even heard what Avenn said. Theor regarded the First of the Hunt thoughtfully. She was impatient, always eager to moving on. Perhaps it was for the best. They all knew this was the crux of the decision that must be made.

‘That would remove all restraint,’ Nyve observed quietly.

‘Perhaps that is what is required,’ Theor said. His tone was gentle, conversational. He would not compel his old friend into this. In times such as these, unanimity was important. ‘If Ragnor oc Gyre has made agreements with the Haig Thane; if he would rather see the Horin-Gyre Blood broken than risk open warfare with Haig; if he prefers playing games of worldly power, and the warm safety of his throne, to seeking the creed’s rightful dominion over all people—if all of this is true, then perhaps the time for restraint has passed. War forges a people as the furnace does a sword. It will restore our people’s temper. And if the Battle marches, nothing Ragnor can do will stop the fire we set. Thousands—tens of thousands—will follow.’

‘That’s true,’ Nyve said quietly, ‘that’s true.’ He lapsed into silence.

Theor thought it best to leave the First of the Battle to his ruminations. He turned to Avenn.

‘Tell me, do you remember a conversation we had three years ago? I believe it was at the wedding of the Gaven-Gyre Bloodheir. You made some mention of a woman you had in Kolkyre. A blade, you called her, poised over our enemy’s heart.’

She smiled. It was a wolfish kind of expression, Theor thought.

‘I remember it well. I am surprised you do, Lorekeeper.’

‘Oh, I find I remember a great many things as I get older. It’s perverse, but there you are. If we are to abandon ourselves to fate, shed all restraint, I wonder if the time might not have come to let that blade fall?’

‘Gladly, if it is our united will,’ said Avenn, with a sideways glance at Nyve. ‘That is one death that would fill our people with belief. Once that head rolled, it is unlikely that anyone could prevent conflagration: not us, not Ragnor, not Gryvan oc Haig.’

‘We choose how we meet fate, not what that fate is,’ Theor said. ‘If it is written that we are to succeed in this, we will do so no matter what dangers or obstacles may seem to bar our way. I do nothing without full consent, but I say the time has come.’

Nyve laid his hands like crumpled cloth in his lap. ‘The Battle will march.’

So it is done, Theor thought. For good or ill, we put ourselves in fate’s balance; we face a tumultuous future. ‘We are agreed, then. The Battle will march, a Thane will die and the people will rise. Let it be as it is written.’

‘As it is written.’

‘As it is written.’

They left as they had come: one by one, alone. Avenn went first, striding out into the day’s white light. Theor and Nyve did not speak as they waited for her to disappear from view, but before the First of the Battle followed her out of the Roundhall Theor laid one hand upon his shoulder and let it rest there for a while.

Theor retired early to his private chambers that night. He sent away his servants and dressed himself in his night robes. He opened the carved box at his bedside and removed a scrap of seer-stem. The herb had blackened his lips over the years, and they tingled faintly now, anticipating what was to come. He lay down and slipped the stem into his mouth. He worked carefully at it with his teeth: crushing and squeezing, not breaking it apart. The dark juices oozed out and that familiar, comforting numbness began to spread over his tongue and lips. Slowly, slowly it would spread through his jaw and over his scalp and eventually seep into his mind. Then the visions would come. Sometimes, there was the precious sense of patterns emerging from the chaos of events and lives.

None save the Lore Inkallim were permitted the use of seerstem. Others, lacking the discipline of a lifetime’s schooling in the creed of the Road, could be led astray by the sights the stem offered. The key was to understand that it was not the future that was contained in these fleeting, formless visions, but the past and the present. When Theor dreamed seerstem dreams, he saw all the thousands of paths that had been followed to bring the present into being; he saw, in all their multitudes, the countless tales—finished and unfinished—that the Last God had read from his Book of Lives. But he did not see what was yet to befall those travelling that vast, intricate Black Road .

As he waited for the seerstem to take its effect the First of the Lore watched the flame on the candle by his bed. He was possessed by a vague unease. The weeks and months to come were likely to bring a war greater than any there had been for more than a century. That in itself did not concern him. The Kall would come only when all humankind was bound to the creed of the Black Road ; such unity could only be achieved through war and conquest. As the Kall itself was inevitable, so too was eventual victory, whatever the outcome of the present strife.

The roots of Theor’s disquiet lay rather in regret. He had thought, when Ragnor first ascended to his throne in Kan Dredar, that he would make a good High Thane. In those early years he had seemed of one mind with his late father: dutiful, secure in his adherence to the creed and to the primacy of its advancement. Somehow, Ragnor had instead become merely a ruler, consumed by the meaningless day-to-day business of power. And they—all of the Inkallim, but most of all Theor himself—had failed in their responsibilities. They had allowed the rot to set in. Once, it might have been cut out with nothing more than a child’s woodworking knife; now it would require a sword. Had he allowed the vigilance of the Lore to slip? Was he to blame that they had come to such extremity? In the end, it did not matter. This was the course they were fated to follow. But still, it could not hurt to ensure that no one had any further excuses to forget that the creed was the light that guided all things. When the Battle marched south, it would be fitting for a party of the Lore Inkallim to accompany it.

The seerstem’s tingling touch reached behind his ears, worked its way into the bones of his skull. He rested his head on the pillow and closed his eyes. Shapes were beginning to move on the inside of his eyelids. He stilled himself, forcing all thoughts from his mind. He waited to see what would come.

Taim Narran could not be sure what was being destroyed on the other side of the door. Judging by the sounds that filtered through the heavy oak, it was something substantial. Out of respect for Roaric nan Kilkry-Haig’s feelings—and perhaps, if he was honest, out of trepidation—he waited until the noise had subsided before entering.

Lheanor’s one surviving son—the Bloodheir, now—stood in the middle of the small room. Fragments of wood were scattered around him on the stone floor. A chair leg still hung, forgotten, from his limp hand. Roaric’s head was bowed, his eyes closed, his shoulders slumped. The Thane’s son had returned from the south only this morning. He had brought even fewer of his men back alive from Dargannan-Haig lands than Taim had. To be greeted with the news of his brother’s death at Grive would have been too much even for one of less tempestuous nature, Taim thought.

Roaric had not registered Taim’s presence. He stood quite still, lost in the numb fog of grief. Taim hesitated. He was not sure that he could offer anything to the young man; or that it would be welcomed, even if he could. They had been comrades, though, in Gryvan’s war; friends amidst a storm of hostility.

‘Roaric,’ he said softly, then, when there was no response, again more loudly: ‘Roaric.’

The younger man looked up, his eyes wild and bleary. They drifted over Taim, swung around across the window.

‘I am sorry,’ Taim murmured. ‘You deserved a better homecoming than this. We all did.’

Roaric let the chair leg slip from his fingers. It clattered to the floor. He walked to the window, unconsciously kicking aside the detritus of his rage as he went.

‘They’ll bleed rivers of blood in answer for this, the Black Road,’ he said thickly. He planted his hands on either side of the window, stared out over his father’s city. ‘I should have been here.’

‘We both should have been.’

‘I was proud when my father gave me charge of our armies to march south. Proud! And look at this now. All but a few hundred of the men who marched with me are dead. My brother’s dead. We’re nothing but shadows of what we once were, Kilkry and Lannis. We’re like sickly children, our strength leaking away from a thousand little sores.’

‘It’s not over yet,’ said Taim.

‘No?’ Roaric snapped. He spun away from the window and glared fiercely at Taim. The emotion lasted only for an instant, though. As soon as he saw Taim’s face Roaric’s own anger sank away. He only shook his head.

‘There will be a chance for us to give answer for what has happened,’ Taim said levelly.

‘Perhaps,’ murmured the Kilkry-Haig Bloodheir. ‘Perhaps.’

‘I leave for Glasbridge tomorrow. I wanted to see you, offer my regrets and good wishes, before I left.’

‘I am sorry to intrude.’

The soft voice from the doorway surprised both of them. Ilessa, Roaric’s mother, stood there. There was an awful pain in her face, Taim saw, when she looked at her son. She fears for him, he thought.

‘There is someone here I think you will wish to see, Taim Narran,’ Ilessa said. ‘Will you come with me?’

Taim glanced at Roaric, but the younger man had turned away, almost as if he was ashamed to meet his mother’s gaze. With a heavy heart, he followed Ilessa out and down the spiralling stairway that formed the spine of the Tower of Thrones .

‘Boats are coming to the harbour,’ Ilessa said as they went. ‘They’ve taken flight from Glasbridge; it’s fallen, Taim. Destroyed.’

A groan escaped Taim’s lips before he could restrain it.

‘All is not ill tidings today, though,’ Ilessa said quickly. ‘Come, in here.’

She ushered him through a doorway, but did not follow. He wondered why for a moment, then his eyes fell upon the room’s sole occupant: a slight woman seated at a table. At that sight, Taim’s breath caught in his throat and his mind was swept clean of all that had crowded it. Tears sprang to his eyes as she rose from the table and he went to embrace his wife.

‘I feared for you,’ he said as he crushed her to him and felt her arms about his waist. Here was light and hope amidst all the gloom, and he could do nothing more than cling to her.

‘And I for you,’ Jaen replied in an uneven voice. ‘You have been gone too long this time.’

‘Yes, far too long.’ And that was all he could say for a little while.

She told him, later, of Glasbridge’s end; of the still, misty morning when a wild flood came out of the north. The Glas became a wall of water roaring down the valley. It swept across the camp of warriors outside the town’s northern gate, gathering a cargo of dead men and horses. It piled up against the palisade and the bridges, hammering at them with trees and boulders and corpses carried by the surge. The water swelled and foamed until it tore the great timbers of Glasbridge’s stockade out of the earth. The wall of oak that had guarded the town’s northern flank was ripped away and carried down to the sea. The flood rushed through the heart of the town. And at last, almost upon the stroke of noon, the stone bridge that had spanned the mouth of the river since the days of the Aygll Kingship broke and crashed with a defeated rumble into the foaming waters.

There were hours of chaos, of noise and fear and anger. At dusk the army of the Black Road came in the wake of the flood, and then there was nothing left but fear.

Taim’s wife, his daughter and her husband fought their way to the docks and in the mad tumult of the waterside managed to buy their way on to a little fishing boat. The vessel, labouring beneath a mass of frightened families, struggled out into the estuary. Looking back as they drew close to Kolglas, they had seen the night sky lit by a diffuse orange glow, and they knew that Glasbridge was afire.

Through all this grim tale Taim felt only relief and the lifting of a great burden. His wife and daughter were delivered to him out of the slaughter that had consumed his homeland. Beyond hope, the darkness had seen fit to allow him this one ray of light. When they lay that night in one another’s arms for the first time in so long, he found that he still had the capacity, for a time, to believe in—and to accept—sanctuary.

Orisian and Yvane were sitting on the shore behind Hammarn’s hut. The na’kyrim was scraping dirt from beneath her fingernails with a twig. Orisian was watching Edryn Delyne’s ship. Torches had been lit at bow and stern as dusk began to fall. Now and again their light flickered as somebody moved in front of them.

Somewhere out in the gathering gloom a seabird screeched. The cry was not one Orisian recognised from Kolglas. It sounded like the voice of a deserted land. The small boats lying on the mud, and tied to decrepit little jetties, had an abandoned air about them.

‘No sign of Ess’yr yet,’ Orisian said. ‘Or Varryn. I thought they might have come to find us by now.’

‘They might have problems of their own, now the White Owls—maybe even the Black Road—are loose in their lands. Anyway, there’ll be time enough in the morning, if they’ve not come to us by then. You said the ship sails in the afternoon?’

Orisian nodded. Yvane was digging at her fingernails with greater vigour. It was obvious she had more to say, and he did not have to wait long to hear it.

‘You understand something of the weight the Kyrinin place upon death and the dead?’

‘Something.’

‘They feel the eyes of the dead upon them. They put food out to keep away the restless dead, and have their soulcatchers to snare the ones they can’t put off. This ra’tyn that Ess’yr has taken on is an oath that may not be broken, because it is given to someone on the brink of death. If she failed that promise, the failure would keep the dead one from his rest and shake him into such anger that no amount of food,.or chanting, or drumming would keep him from her. No matter how much he loved her when he lived. It’s a serious matter.’

‘And Varryn doesn’t approve,’ murmured Orisian.

‘No. He never liked Inurian in the first place, I would guess. Most Kyrinin think little better of na’kyrim than they do of Huanin; I expect Varryn was. . . distressed at his sister’s involvement with one of them.’

‘Still, he’s helped her to see her promise through.’

‘He loves her. And she must have loved Inurian to make it in the first place.’ She cast aside the stick and scratched at her upper arm. ‘You understand, then. Ess’yr will die for you if need be, because of that promise. For no other reason. That is the beginning and end of why she has come so far with you, why she has stayed close.’

Orisian looked intently at the na’kyrim. She pretended not to notice his gaze.

‘No other reason,’ he said, and Yvane gave a quick, emphatic nod.

‘None,’ she said. ‘It’s enough, isn’t it?’

‘It’s enough.’

‘Good. Tomorrow, then. In the morning, you can say your farewells.’

Orisian knew perfectly well that he might never see Ess’yr again once Koldihrve was behind him, and he would be lying to himself if he pretended that thought mattered not at all. Her presence—however distant it might sometimes be—had woken, and now nourished, something deep inside him.

‘It won’t go well for them, will it? If the White Owls come this far, and the Black Road ?’ he said.

Yvane folded her hands into her lap.

‘It may not. The Fox has never been a large clan. Not many warriors. The townsfolk might help them, but you can never be sure with Koldihrvers. They’re not usually the kind of people to put themselves at risk on another’s account. But who knows? It’s only those Black Road brutes who think the future’s carved in stone.’

‘This is madness,’ muttered Orisian with sudden bitterness. ‘None of this would’ve happened if we hadn’t come here.’

Yvane’s hand twitched, as if she wanted to swat away his thought, but it stayed in her lap.

‘Be careful,’ she said. ‘Guilt’s a dangerous thing. Whoever’s fault this is, it’s not yours, or your sister’s. Fox and White Owl, True Bloods and Black Road: these are old battles. They began long before you were born. Most likely, they’ll still be raging long after we’re all gone.’

A faint shout from the Tal Dyreen vessel drew his eyes up, but there was nothing to see. It was getting darker all the time; the shipboard torches stood out more brightly than ever. One moment he longed to be back at Kolglas or Glasbridge, hungered for the chance to do something more than run from his enemies; the next he was afraid of what he would find there, of what it would mean to be Thane at a time of war. It could have been Fariel; but for the Heart Fever, it could have been Fariel who had to face this. That would have been better for the Blood.

He sighed. He had no wish to dwell on such things.

‘You are coming with us, then. On the ship?’ he asked.

Yvane wrinkled her nose. It was a sharp, uncharacteristic gesture.

‘Seems the wisest course. Much as I like my solitude, I’m no fool. Neither the Vale of Tears nor the Car Criagar seem the most appealing of places at the moment. Can’t say I’m overjoyed at the prospect. I’ve never met a Tal Dyreen, but from what I’ve heard of them I doubt I’ll find them pleasant company.’

‘What will you do afterwards?’

‘Thank my good fortune that I’ve made it out of all this,’ she said with a shrug. ‘Curse Inurian for sending you in my direction. Perhaps go to Highfast, which is what he wanted of me all along. Inurian often got his way in the end, I seem to recall.’

‘Can’t you just . . . visit them as you did Hammarn, though?’ Orisian asked. ‘If all Inurian wanted was that they should be told about Aeglyss, about what was happening, can’t you do it that way?’

Yvane laughed. She gazed out towards the horizon.

‘If I turned up like that in the Elect’s chambers, I’d be slapped away and cast out before she even bothered to find out who it was. I’ve no wish to repeat my experience of trying to eavesdrop on Aeglyss. They’re more than a little protective of their privacy in Highfast: uninvited guests, even other na’kyrim, don’t get a warm welcome. They’re frightened, Orisian. All of us are, deep down. You pure-blooded folk have made sure of that, over the centuries.

‘Anyway, even if I was given the chance to announce myself, the mere mention of my name . . . well, let’s just say I didn’t leave there on the best of terms. Oh, they loved Inurian, of course. When he took his leave, it was all kind words, reluctant partings. When I went, it was arguments and ill wishes.’

‘You didn’t like Inurian very much, did you?’

‘Ha! There’s some precious youthful innocence. To imagine that it’s all as simple as like or dislike; love or hate. Inurian and I never did decide which side of the line we fell upon.’

Sudden noise from Hammarn’s hut had both of them rising sharply and turning. There was shouting, the pounding of a fist on wood. Orisian went first, around to the front of the shack. Three men stood in the roadway: two of them torchbearers, the third a red-faced man with a dented iron helm on his head and a spear in his hand. This third was facing Hammarn, who was struggling to block the doorway with his slight frame. The old na’kyrim was agitated, hopping from foot to foot.

‘Not a way to treat guests,’ Hammarn was spluttering, ‘not at all. Cracking at doors in the dark.’

His sideways glance in response to Orisian’s appearance made the red-faced man turn around. He had a patchy beard spread sparsely over a scabbed chin. The glare he fixed on Orisian was almost contemptuous.

‘This one?’ he demanded.

‘A guest,’ Hammarn said irritably before anyone else could reply. ‘This is Ame,’ he told Orisian.

The leaden glumness which he put into the phrase, as if he was announcing the arrival of an unpleasant affliction, might have made Orisian smile at another time, but he was tired and had a heavy heart.

‘Second Watchman,’ Ame said gravely. If he had hoped Orisian would be impressed he was disappointed.

‘What’s happening?’ Rothe snapped from over Hammarn’s shoulder. The shieldman’s abrupt, and bulky, emergence from the shadows within the hut had the two torchbearers taking a nervous step back. Even Ame looked momentarily alarmed before he snapped his attention back to Orisian. He jabbed at him with a stubby finger.

‘You’re wanted at the Tower,’ he said.

‘Tower?’

‘Where Tomas holds court,’ muttered Yvane.

‘He’s wanted, you’re not,’ Ame growled at her. ‘You’ll keep out of sight, unless you’re a fool.’

‘My pleasure,’ Yvane said acidly.

Rothe had pushed past Hammarn and stepped on to the road. He was a good head taller than Ame, and leaned uncomfortably close to the Second Watchman.

‘Not clever to throw orders around without knowing who you’re talking to,’ he said.

‘It’s all right, Rothe,’ Orisian said quickly. ‘There’s no point in starting arguments. Not now. You and I’ll go with them.’

He was worried for a moment that they would insist that Anyara came—they must know she was inside, as they’d been watching so closely—but Ame seemed satisfied. He was trying to stretch himself, Orisian noticed, to close the gap a little on Rothe’s height.

They went through the dark town in silence. There was nothing left of the day now; the only light was that seeping out between window shutters. Koldihrve was quiet. The air bore the faint smell of meat cooking over a fire.

Ame walked ahead of them, a hint of ungainly swagger in his stride. The First Watchman’s abode was the only stone-built structure in the whole town: an old, fragile-looking round tower that stood all of three storeys high. A wooden hall and house had been built around it at some time, leaving the tower like a stubby stone finger jabbed up through their midst.

Orisian and Rothe were left to wait in a small, musty room. Voices leaked through from the adjoining hall; Koldihrve’s Watch ate and drank well, from the sound of it. Rothe had the look of a man with only a small store of patience left.

‘I’ll talk to this Tomas and we’ll get back to the others,’ Orisian said. ‘It won’t take long.’

His shieldman gave his beard a distracted scratch. ‘It’s not right to have masterless men dragging us this way and that as they like,’ he muttered.

‘We only have to keep them happy until tomorrow. Nothing else matters but getting safely on that ship.’

Ame returned. He had shed his helmet and swapped his spear for a hunk of fat-soaked bread. He gestured at Orisian with it. ‘The First Watchman’ll see you.’

Rothe rose as well, but Ame waved him back. ‘The guard dog can stay here, I’d say.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Rothe.

‘I’ll talk to him,’ Orisian told him. He was surprised at the still calm he felt within. This all felt unimportant, a small detail in the journey to Delyne’s ship; just something that had to be shuffled aside to clear their path. ‘Wait for me here.’

Rothe looked doubtful, but settled back on to the bench.

The First Watchman’s chamber was simple and sparsely furnished. Tomas himself was a wiry, knotted man who sat low in his chair and regarded Orisian with a sharp eye. There was a wolf’s pelt stretched on the wall behind him. Tomas pointed at a stool.

‘Way I hear it, there’s trouble in the mountains,’ Tomas said as Orisian was sitting down. His breathing had an uneven edge to it, the air pushed out from his lungs through bubbling phlegm. ‘White Owl and Fox at each other like stoats. That’s no great surprise, but what I hear is it’s different this time. Humans up there, too. Now the Fox don’t know much about such things, but I’m First Watchman, and I know a thing or two. So when they tell me there’s Huanin out there, with women marching alongside men, I think Black Road to myself. Strange times, that the lords of Kan Dredar are wandering in the Car Criagar, seems to me.’

‘We fled from them,’ said Orisian, unwilling to say any more than he had to. ‘It’s only luck and chance have brought us here. Some Fox Kyrinin guided us. We would have been finished without them.’

He added the last as an afterthought, hoping that it might carry some weight here, where Huanin and Kyrinin lived with only a river between them. The First Watchman ignored it.

‘You’ve the voice of a Lannis boy.’

‘My name is Orisian. I’m from Kolglas.’

Tomas nodded slowly, as if he had already known as much. It was bluff, Orisian decided; a self-important gesture. It seemed very unlikely that Tomas would know the name of Croesan’s nephew.

‘Not just Kyrinin you travel with,’ the First Watchman continued. ‘Yvane, my Watch tells me.’

‘We met her in the mountains,’ Orisian said.

‘Poor company you keep. But I always say the oathbound’re short on judgement.’

Orisian started to reply, but Tomas ignored him and continued.

‘So who else? Fox, na’kyrim; what about the others? A girl, I heard, and a man big enough to be half bear.’

‘My sister,’ Orisian said. ‘And the man’s a woodcutter. He was working for my father.’ With each passing moment he was less inclined to tell Tomas exactly who he was; the worst of the man’s hostility was kept just out of sight, but Orisian could see more than enough of it to make him cautious.

‘Oh, yes? Well, if you say so. We keep out of other folk’s business here. No one’ll trouble you if you give us no cause.’

He coughed and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

‘Each of your Thanes, when he’s fresh come into his rule, sends messengers trying to persuade us to take his oath. We pay them little heed, and they don’t stay long. One sent gifts a while ago; Tavan, if I remember right. I’ve still got the sword my great-uncle had from his men. Pretty enough on the wall, though I’d have more use for a good bear trap, truth be told. Man who brought it went away with a ringing in his ears. My great-uncle wasn’t a man to play pretty with words.’

Tomas chuckled, then hawked and spat into a battered tin pot at his feet. The mess accumulated there suggested it had never been cleaned.

‘Oaths make men slaves, I reckon,’ said Tomas. ‘No place for ‘em here.’

‘You might find a use for that sword, though, if the Black Road comes this way,’ said Orisian.

Tomas shrugged at that and drummed his fingers on the table-top.

‘We can bend with the wind,’ he said. ‘Black Road or your lot makes little odds to us. It’s the oath, and what comes with it, that takes a man’s freedom. What difference who he’s given it to? You’re all the same deep down. Oaths like yours only lead to killing and the like, one way or the other.’

Orisian bit his lip rather than respond.

‘So it’s war, is it?’ Tomas asked. ‘On the Glas? Must be, if you’ve the Black Road up in the hills.’

‘Fighting, yes. It won’t last.’

‘If you say so,’ said Tomas with a crooked smile. He was missing at least a couple of teeth. ‘Bound to run out of people to kill sooner or later, I suppose. I’d not want your troubles in Koldihrve, though.’

‘There’ll be no trouble,’ Orisian said firmly. ‘We’re taking ship with the Tal Dyreens tomorrow and you’ll not see us again.’

‘Not short of coin, if you’ve tempted that one into carrying you around. You taking the na’kyrim with you?’ His voice was thickening all the time, the words rattling in his throat.

‘Yvane? Yes, she’s coming with us.’

‘Good enough,’ Tomas said. ‘I find you, or her, still here after that boat’s gone and I’ll want to know why, mind. I look after this town, and I’ve plenty men’ll help me do it. We don’t want Lannis folk here any time, but doubly not if the Black Road ‘s rooting around.’

‘We’re gone tomorrow. You won’t have to worry about that.’

Tomas nodded. He was shaken by a liquid-sounding cough even as he waved Orisian away. Orisian retreated, as if the sound itself might carry disease into his own chest. As soon as he was outside, breathing the cold night air, he set to forgetting the conversation. It did not matter that Tomas seemed a fraction more threatening—perhaps even dangerous—than he had expected. Soon, soon they would be away from this town, and Orisian was confident he would never return.

They slept in Hammarn’s hut, all crammed together on the floor with furs and cloth spread over them. The boards were rough on the back, but Orisian slept well. Even when Rothe began to snore—a rumbling, rasping sound vigorous enough to rouse half the town—Orisian woke no more than was needed to prod at his shieldman’s shoulder. Rothe shuffled on to his side with an irritated mutter, and the snoring stopped.

Once or twice more, Orisian brushed against the surface of wakefulness. The sighing of tiny waves on the beach infiltrated his sleep, and later the patter of rain on the roof. He heard boat timbers creak, and he heard the breathing of his companions, and pressed in tight in that small hut he was warm. He rested, and though his dreams were troubled they did not disturb him, and in the morning they sank away and he forgot them.

In that half-hearted dawn, Kanin could see the lights of Koldihrve. They flickered in the grey blur of land, sea and cloud, a feeble and fragile cluster beneath the rain that was starting to fall. The Horin-Gyre Thane glanced upwards. An immense host of fat, dark clouds was massing there. A downpour was coming.

He and five of his Shield had outpaced the rest of his company. They waited here, within sight of the town, for the others to catch them up. They should be here, Kanin thought angrily. It would still take a good two hours to reach Koldihrve. The going had been slower than he hoped, across this sodden, empty landscape. Every moment of delay cut at him, plunging him deeper and deeper into a black mood.

His mount could sense his temper, and shook its mane uneasily. There was a boggy stream a few paces away; Kanin nudged the horse over to it and loosened the reins to allow it to drink. He patted its neck. It was not the same animal he had picked from his stables all those months ago. But then, none of them could be the same, after such a journey: through Anlane, to Anduran, across the Car Criagar. Its coat had lost its lustre, the definition of its muscles had faded. He remembered how it had tossed its head and stamped its feet that morning when he rode out from Hakkan’s gate, with Wain at his side. That magnificent arrogance was all but gone now.

‘We’re not what we were, are we?’ he whispered to it.

Igris eased his own mount up alongside the Thane.

‘The others are here, lord,’ the shieldman said.

Kanin glanced around. The remaining forty or so of his warriors were indeed arriving, one by one. They came in an extended line, all looking drained and damp. Their horses were exhausted.

‘No sign of that messenger we sent ahead?’ Kanin asked.

‘Not yet. But he cannot be more than an hour or two ahead of us.’

‘Very well. We’ll pause here, but only long enough to feed and water the horses. We can rest once we’ve got what we came here for.’

Igris nodded curtly.

Kanin dismounted and led his horse gently to a patch of lush grass. They had run out of the oats they had brought as feed the day before, just as they had almost exhausted their own food supplies. Whatever happened in the day now begun, Koldihrve was going to have to provide everything they needed to return over the Car Criagar. And what would they find when they got back to Anduran, Kanin wondered. He spared himself only that one moment to think of Wain. He would see her soon enough.

His horse tore at the grass. The rain was getting heavier; great fat drops pattered down upon them. Kanin shivered. He preferred the clean, dry snow of his homeland to this dank kind of winter.

‘Lord,’ someone shouted. ‘Wights.’

Kanin ducked around behind his horse and followed the pointing arm of the warrior.

There were Kyrinin moving, rushing out from a woodland and on to the flat fields and bogs of the valley. Dozens, then scores. They spilled out in a great wave that flowed over the rushes and through the scrub towards the great River Dihrve. Towards its mouth, and Koldihrve.

‘Is it White Owls, or Fox?’ Kanin demanded.

No one replied. At this distance, they could not tell.

‘Woodwights!’ cried Kanin in frustration. Even now, when he had thought himself rid of them, the petty games that Aeglyss and his savages had set in motion were plaguing him.

‘It must be the White Owls,’ suggested Igris, peering through the sheets of rain now crashing down. ‘They’re making for that Fox camp by the river mouth.’

Kanin swung up into the saddle. Rain pelted his head and back. Everyone was rushing, filling the air with cries and the clatter of weapons. He did not hear it. He turned his horse in the direction of Koldihrve. The future was there, waiting for him, and he could only advance into it. His sword was naked in his hand.

‘The slaughterhouse calls us,’ he shouted. ‘We ride!’

Behind the tent where the Voice of the White Owls dwelled, in a stone-lined pit beneath a roof of oak beams that had been turned hard as rock by time and smoke and heat, the torkyr burned. Through day and night, snow and wind, the clan fire would burn all winter long, tended by the chosen guardians who fed it and watched over it. When spring came, and the Voice had chanted over the flames, and the people began to disperse, each a’an would take away a single burning brand, so that in all the campfires of their summer wanderings through the furthest reaches of Anlane they carried with them a fraction of the clan’s bright soul.

It was to the Voice’s tent that the band of warriors brought Aeglyss the na’kyrim, bound and gagged by thongs of leather. They tied him to a song staff rising from the ground outside the Voice’s tent, and sat cross-legged to wait. They waited for many hours. The sun walked across the sky. Clouds, the scattered raiment of the Walking God, came and went. The na’kyrim moaned and bled from his wrists and from the corners of his mouth where the gag had cut his skin. At length a small child, her hair dyed berry-red and holes pierced in her cheeks, came out from the tent and beckoned one of the warriors to come inside. After an hour he re-emerged and gave a slow nod. The na’kyrim was untied and ungagged and brought into the presence of the Voice.

She was an ageing woman, with skin creased and folded by the years and hair the colour of the moon on water. There were others within—the wise, the a’an chiefs of last summer, the singers and chanters and buriers of the dead and the kakyrin with their necklaces of bone—but it was the Voice alone who spoke with the na’kyrim.

They talked for a long time, the old woman and the halfbreed, and of many things. They talked of the clan’s history and of its struggles against the Huanin in the War of the Tainted and the centuries since. They talked of the evil done by those who ruled in the city in the valley, their axes and fire that cleared the trees from White Owl lands, and their herds of cattle that reached ever further into Anlane; of the na’kyrim’ s life, his flight from the White Owl as a child and eventual return, bearing gifts and promises from the cold men of the north. Through it all, the judgement was being formed, built out of the threads of the past that led to the present. Only at the end did they talk of alliances forged in necessity, and of hopes and expectations betrayed.

The Voice asked him, softly, why the lord whose army had passed through the White Owl’s forest now turned away his friends and forgot them. Why the promises of friendship the na’kyrim had made on that lord’s behalf were now so much dust. The na’kyrim had no answer to that, but spoke instead in the evil way he had. He spoke, as the White Owls now understood that he had so often before, with a tongue that made truth out of lies, that corrupted the mind’s strength and turned judgements inside out.

Had there not been so many of them there in the Voice’s tent, they might have been deceived, but they had prepared themselves for the dangers of this na’kyrim. Some cried out and sang to drown his poisonous words; others belaboured him with sticks.

He begged and pleaded but there had, in the end, to be a reckoning. However long his absence, he had been one of the people once, and he was theirs to do with as they would. The Voice gave her judgement and he was dragged out of her presence.

The na’kyrim struggled and shouted as they bore him away from the vo’an, and spoke in a way that threatened to lay wreaths of mist around the thoughts of the warriors. They beat him with the hafts of spears until he was still and silent. Then they carried him up above the valley. Up and up they climbed, until the trees grew wind-bent and the grass beneath their feet became coarse and rough. They climbed into the afternoon, until they pierced the roof of Anlane and came out upon the moors that formed a borderland between forest and sky. And still they went on amongst the rocky ridges and ravines. In time they began to descend again, and at last, upon a promontory of rock that was closely fringed by trees, they came to the Breaking Stone.

The great boulder—the height of two men—stood alone, resting where the Walking God had left it. The Breaking Stone was patterned by lichens older than the clan, older than the Kyrinin. Over and amongst their innumerable pale green and grey shades lay darker stains. Black streaks that would never now be washed away, they scarred the great rock, running down like the tracks of mid-night tears from two neat, smooth-sided sockets high upon its face.

The warriors laid the na’kyrim on the ground and stripped his clothes from his body. In that muted evening light his skin looked fragile, ashen. He stirred, but they held him firm. They gagged him with a stone wrapped in a strip of cloth. One of them brought out two sharpened, hardened shafts of willow, each the length of an arm and thicker than a man’s thumb. The na’kyrim writhed. The Kyrinin worked quickly lest he should attempt some trick upon them using his secret skills. They raised his arms and held them tightly as the shafts, twisted and turned to force their way, were driven through his wrists. The na’kyrim screamed around his gag and fell into unconsciousness.

Two warriors climbed atop the Breaking Stone and, using ropes of plaited grass tied around his chest, raised him up its face. They held him there while a third reached down and manipulated the willow stakes until they slotted into the sockets in the stone. They slid in, the stone welcoming them as it had dozens of their like before, and the na’kyrim hung there, crucified upon the Breaking Stone.

Hunching down against the rain, Orisian and the others crossed the long boardwalk across the mouth of the River Dihrve. Weed and barnacles coated the walkway’s supports below the waterline; rot was at work on the parts above. It felt safe enough—the Dihrve was a sluggish, unthreatening thing here at its mouth—but Orisian wondered how much of a life it had left to it.

They had woken to dark skies and miserable rain that gathered strength with every minute. When Orisian said that he was going to find Ess’yr and Varryn, he had half-hoped he could go alone; instead Yvane, Anyara and Rothe all accompanied him. He did not feel he could refuse them.

As they made their way along the shore to the river crossing, he had asked Yvane if an unannounced visit would cause a problem. The na’kyrim dismissed the idea.

‘They’re not so stiff about such things here,’ she said. ‘There’d not be so many na’kyrim around if they were.’

‘Ten, Hammarn said,’ Orisian remembered. ‘We haven’t see any. Are they hiding?’

‘It can’t have escaped your notice that everyone keeps themselves to themselves around here. They’re all on edge now: everybody’s nervous, smells trouble on the wind.’

She was right about the ease of entering the vo’an. No one tried to stop them as they came off the rickety bridge and walked amongst the tents. It was not, in fact, as disconcerting a place to enter as Koldihrve had been the day before. There was none of the boot-sucking mud that greeted a visitor to the human settlement—rush matting was spread in broad pathways—and none of the dark glares or muttered asides. It felt safer than the human town, at least to Orisian. The feeling did not last for long.

There was a crowd gathered in the centre of the vo’an, in a space where the bare earth had been trodden over countless years into the consistency of rock. As they approached the back of the crowd Yvane nudged Orisian with her elbow and pointed discreetly at a pole planted a few paces away. It was bedecked with horns, strings of threaded teeth and animal skulls. The bones looked fresh and unweathered.

‘That’s bad,’ Yvane whispered. ‘A war pole. Means they’re expecting deaths.’

The Kyrinin crowd stirred gently at their arrival. There was a foul smell, Orisian realised, foul enough to make him almost gag. The crowd thinned a little before them; it let them see what stood at its centre.

A wooden frame was there, of the sort used to suspend a carcass while it was butchered. Upon the frame was bound a naked, lifeless Kyrinin. His head hung forwards and his white hair had fallen across his face like a shroud. From shoulder to hip, long thin strips of skin had been peeled back, wound on sticks. The flaying had left livid, gory bands of raw flesh exposed. He had been disembowelled, so that his entrails spilled forth to pile upon the ground beneath him. His groin was a bloody mess. An ordurous stench hung suffocatingly in the air and Orisian felt bile in his mouth as his stomach twisted itself. He heard Anyara’s faint moan of disgust even as he turned away. Three young Fox children were standing close by. They watched him with bland curiosity. One had a bow and quiver—little more than toys—in his tiny, fine hands.

Then Ess’yr was coming around the edge of the crowd. Her brother was a little behind her.

‘You should go,’ said Ess’yr.

‘We’re leaving,’ Orisian told her. ‘On the ship. I wanted to say goodbye.’

‘We will come to you.’

‘It’ll have to be soon. We’ll be gone today.’ He felt a sharp pang of apprehension. He could not leave her behind without talking to her. To him, if not to her, it was a parting that needed to be marked. He saw that Varryn was regarding him with unreadable eyes.

‘Soon,’ Ess’yr said, and he heard a promise in her gentle voice. ‘But not now.’

‘We’d better go,’ Rothe said quietly. ‘I don’t think this is a good place to be now.’

Reluctantly, Orisian agreed. Ess’yr was already turning away, and he was suddenly afraid that he might not see those beautiful features again. He might have tried to call her back, but did not.

Yvane had been talking quietly with a Fox woman, and now rejoined them, her face troubled.

‘Let’s go,’ she said.

The four of them walked together out of the camp and over the bridge into Koldihrve. The rain was soaking. It churned up the surface of the river.

‘They really are savages,’ Anyara murmured.

‘They are,’ agreed Rothe, and then to Orisian’s faint surprise added softly, ‘but I’ve seen worse things done by humans.’

‘They caught that White Owl not far from here,’ Yvane said as they stepped back on to the human side of the river. ‘From the sound of it, there’s a lot more where he came from. Very close. There’s going to be a good deal of blood spilled.’

‘Today?’ Rothe asked.

‘Probably. They say there’re scores of White Owls. And your friends from Horin-Gyre too.’

‘Wait, wait,’ hissed Orisian, slowing suddenly.

The others looked questioningly at him, and he nodded down the street. Four or five men were standing in the sheeting rain. They were indistinct figures, shapeless cloaks hiding any detail, but nothing about them suggested goodwill. Yvane squinted at them, flicking rainwater from her brow.

‘I thought you said you didn’t upset Tomas yesterday,’ she said.

‘I didn’t,’ Orisian muttered. ‘We parted on the best terms I could manage.’

He was casting about for another path to take. Every instinct told him this was something more than the simple observation Tomas had kept them under since they arrived in Koldihrve. Already, the men were moving, coming towards them. He could see weapons: staffs and cudgels.

‘I’ll deal with them,’ Rothe growled. There was something close to relish in his voice.

‘No,’ Orisian said. ‘No fighting unless we have no choice. We’ll go around them, get out to the ship.’ Inside, the thought was ringing in his head that he should have called Ess’yr back when she turned away from him. But it was too late for that.

‘Down here,’ he said and led them into a side street. ‘Yvane, can you find the way to Hammarn’s house?’

‘I should think so.’ She brushed past him to take the lead.

The alley narrowed, so that they had to trot along in single file. They passed the backs of small houses and shacks. There were no doors, and the few windows were shuttered. Water was spouting from the roofs, drenching them. The ground was slick mud, constantly treacherous, and littered with broken bits of wood, empty barrels and discarded pots.

‘There’s a street up ahead,’ Yvane called. ‘It’s easy from there.’

They burst out on to the road, splashing through puddles. The mud was viscous and clinging. Rothe slipped to one knee and Orisian helped him up.

‘Oh, dear,’ Yvane said.

Tomas stood facing them, no more than a dozen paces away. Ame was with him, and three other men of his Watch. The First Watchman wore a thick woollen cloak and held a longsword.

‘The very folk we sought,’ Tomas rasped.

‘I see you’ve taken that sword down from your wall,’ Orisian said. ‘Why is that?’

Rothe was stepping forwards, but Orisian put a restraining hand on his arm without taking his eyes from Tomas.

‘Because it might be I’ve been played for a fool, that’s why,’ Tomas growled.

‘We don’t take kindly to being taken for fools by those as think they’re our betters,’ Ame added from behind Tomas. He was eyeing Orisian with a kind of malevolent eagerness. Orisian was acutely, almost agonisingly, aware that he was unarmed. The moment felt pregnant with violence, the hissing rain filled with a pressure that was going to demand release. He and Tomas faced each other.

‘Word from the Black Roaders is they’re hunting two runaways. Boy and girl,’ said the First Watchman, his eyes flicking from Orisian to Anyara and back again, ‘perhaps travelling with Fox Kyrinin, perhaps with a warrior. And not just any ordinary folk these: kin of the Thane himself. Word is there’s reward to be had for any who take hold of them, and nothing but strife for those as aids them.’

‘You told me no one would trouble us, if we gave no cause,’ Orisian said. He spat rainwater away from his lips. It felt like the air itself was turning to water, like breathing would be impossible soon.

‘Cause, is it?’ snapped Tomas. ‘Well, I’ve cause enough. I’ve a town to keep safe from harm. We want no part in arguments between Blood lords, but you’ve put us there. And done it without telling me the truth of who you are.’

‘Not intentionally,’ Orisian said as calmly as he could. ‘Let us be on our way, and the trouble will pass you by.’

‘You think so?’ scoffed Tomas. ‘I think maybe not.’

‘Don’t imagine you’re more important than you are, Tomas,’ muttered Yvane. The First Watchman shot her such a look of feral contempt it startled even the na’kyrim. Orisian groaned inwardly, sensing any chance of a peaceful outcome to this slipping away.

‘Don’t test me,’ Tomas snapped at Yvane. ‘You’ll all come to the Tower, and we’ll see then what’s to be done for the best.’

‘No,’ said Orisian heavily. ‘We can’t do that.’

He saw Ame’s lip begin to twitch into a snarl. He saw Tomas’ eyes narrow.

There was a clattering, urgent sound then, from somewhere out in the storm on the town’s landward edge. It sounded like pots being hammered together, or a shield being beaten. It sounded like an alarm.

‘Tomas! Tomas!’ A faint and distant voice, almost lost in the downpour. ‘They’re here! Riders! White Owl!’

Orisian saw the shock that flashed across the First Watchman’s face. For an instant he felt sorry for the man. He felt sorry for all of them, as choice and chance collapsed into this one pattern that might kill them all. There were other noises, caught up in the roar of the rainstorm: drums, cries from across the river.

‘That’s the Fox,’ said Yvane. ‘It’s starting.’

Orisian stared at the na’kyrim for a moment.

‘Then it is time for us to go,’ he said.

He flicked a glance at Rothe, striving to ask a question with his eyes. He thought he saw the answer he was looking for. Orisian moved first, his shieldman a moment behind him. Tomas and all his men were staring at Yvane, their aggression momentarily overlaid by confusion and alarm. They were slow.

Orisian hit Tomas around the waist, inside the First Watchman’s sword arc before he even realised what was happening. They smacked down together into the mud. Orisian heard the sound of Rothe reaching Ame in almost the same instant, but it barely registered. His whole world had narrowed into a maelstrom of mud and water and the flailing limbs he wrestled with. A detached part of his mind said he was surely going to die here, yet his body had a furious, frenzied hunger for life and he punched and clawed at Tomas like a wild animal.

The First Watchman threatened to lever himself up again, but his hand shot from beneath him. Orisian threw his weight across Tomas’ sword arm, pinning it, and raked at his throat with hooked fingers. There was a terrible blow to Orisian’s flank, a club landing squarely on his old knife wound. The pain was blinding, but even as he was bludgeoned sideways his fingers clenched reflexively on the First Watchman’s throat and he heard a strangulated cry.

Then Orisian rolled free. He got on to one knee, fighting against pain, the mud and the weight of rain. The butt of a staff swept by his face so close he felt it pass. Anyara flung herself at his assailant, shouting furiously. The man slithered sideways, twisting too late to fend her off. Orisian scrambled back to Tomas. The First Watchman was writhing in the mud, pawing vaguely at his throat. Orisian seized his sword and, forgetting everything Rothe had ever taught him, hacked wildly at the man with the staff. The blade found the knee joint and he went down, taking Anyara with him. Orisian staggered to his feet, the sword dragging in the mud, water pouring from him. He gasped for breath, struggled to find Rothe. Ame’s dead eye, streaked with dirt, met him. The Second Watchman lay on his side, his neck broken and his battered helm lying in the road collecting rainwater.

Rothe was roaring, howling like some beast in a blood-rage. The two Watchmen he faced were backing away from him, glancing nervously at one another.

‘Lannis! Lannis!’ Rothe bellowed at them, and at the rain-swept sky, and they ran.

Orisian raised the sword with two hands. The last of Tomas’ men had thrown Anyara off him; she sprawled helplessly in the road as he hauled himself upright, leaning heavily on his staff.

‘Go,’ Orisian shouted and thrust the sword forwards. Rothe was coming too, reeling as if he was drunk but still roaring. The Watchman hesitated for a moment, saw that he was alone and hobbled away.

Rothe helped Anyara up. He used his right hand only; his left arm hung limply at his side.

‘You’re hurt?’ Orisian called.

‘It’ll come back,’ Rothe grunted. ‘Don’t think it’s broken. Lucky that Inkallim’s hound didn’t have longer teeth, or I’d be no use at all.’ He nodded at the sword Orisian carried and held out his good hand. Without hesitation, Orisian presented the sword to him hilt-first. Even with only one arm, Rothe could put it to better use. The shieldman smiled harshly as he took hold of the weapon.

‘Feels better to have my hand on a sword again,’ he said. He grimaced as he peered at the blade. ‘Even if it’s not been cared for as it should.’

The alarm was being rung again, more furiously even than before. It sounded closer too, but in all the tumult of the rain it was hard to be sure. It was, in any case, abruptly cut off. Tomas still lay on the road, struggling to breathe. His teeth were bared. His eyes seemed to be roving about blindly. Orisian, calmer now, felt a moment of horror at what he had done to the man. He saw Rothe eyeing the First Watchman purposefully.

‘Leave him,’ he murmured.

‘We should go,’ Yvane said. ‘Now.’

The rain pounded on the roofs around them, churned the roadway. Other sounds were rising up to compete with the storm. There were cries: panicked voices blurred with the sound of rain. Perhaps even the sound of battle. It was impossible to say where the noise was coming from, but it was not far.

Rothe made them go down the centre of the street, fearful that doors or alleyways might hold a surprise. Every muscle in Orisian’s body sang with the desire to run, but his wound was acutely painful and Rothe acutely wary. They went cautiously to a corner, and turned into a road that angled towards the sea.

‘I hear horses,’ Yvane said.

Orisian tried, but he could not disentangle the blur of sounds assailing his ears. Perhaps there were hoofs buried in the cacophony.

‘Can’t tell,’ shouted Rothe. He was at the rear, constantly turning this way and that, constantly seeking threat. Then, ‘Here’s trouble,’ he cried.

They all looked, and saw two Koldihrvers staggering out into a junction. The rain put an illusion of distance on the scene, muffled any sound. The men paused, as if unsure of where to go. One of them stared at Orisian and the others. Then three great horses came plunging through the rain and mud, their riders swinging swords. They rode over the Koldihrvers, slamming them down. The horses slithered around. Their hoofs carved troughs into the sodden ground. The riders leaned down and hacked at the fallen men. No cries, no screams, reached Orisian. He saw the riders straighten, though, and master their mounts and come on. The horses stretched their legs and surged through plumes of spray.

‘Black Road!’ Anyara was shouting.

Rothe had both hands upon the hilt of the old sword now. The riders were bearing down on him; beyond, deeper into the grey rain, Orisian could see more horses appearing.

‘Get into a house,’ Rothe urged through gritted teeth.

Orisian spun, and found two more warriors galloping towards them from the other end of the road. A wild-haired woman was in the lead, leaning forwards over her horse’s neck, sword held out to the side as if she meant to take a head in the first charge.

‘They’re behind us,’ he cried out.

Even as the words left his mouth, a lean, pale-haired figure sprang out from between two houses, lunging to punch a spear into the side of the first horse’s neck as it passed. The animal twisted in mid-stride. It crashed down in an eruption of mud and water, flinging its rider loose. The spear splintered and cart-wheeled away. Orisian started forwards but Ess’yr was ahead of him, whipping out a knife from her belt. She threw herself on to the woman, stabbing precisely for the throat. The fallen horse was thrashing around, unable to rise. The second rider slid to a halt beyond it. Varryn came swiftly and silently from the same alleyway as Ess’yr, and drove his spear up into the man’s back. He hooked the Black Roader out of the saddle and cast him down, impaled.

Orisian wheeled about. The three other horsemen were moments from Rothe. The shieldman stood with his feet well spaced, the sword held out before him.

‘Come,’ Ess’yr was shouting at Orisian. She had his arm in a powerful grip and dragged him towards the alley she had emerged from.

‘I have to get a sword,’ Orisian said, casting about for one dropped by the two fallen warriors.

Then Anyara was pushing him from the other side, crying right into his ear, ‘Move, move!’

Yvane barged into them all and knocked them down.A Black Road horseman surged past, the scything sweep of his blade cutting only the sodden air where Anyara had been standing. They scrambled for the safety of the alley. The road behind them was suddenly full of horses, bursting through the veils of rain.

‘Rothe!’ Orisian yelled. He could not see his shieldman in the chaos. Varryn ran forwards, darting between two rearing horses.

‘I will bring him,’ the Kyrinin snapped over his shoulder as he went.

Orisian thought he heard Rothe shouting, ‘Make for the ship, Orisian.’

Anyara was pulling him down the narrow path. Yvane and Ess’yr were already ahead.

‘I’m not leaving anyone,’ Orisian shouted at his sister.

‘They’ll find us,’ she replied without looking round. ‘You don’t want to die here, do you?’

They heard wailing from one of the houses they rushed past. They were moving away from the sea, away from the safety of Delyne’s ship, but the alley offered no side turns. It channelled them along its length and spat them out into another street.

There was a woman screaming as she ran down the road. She was hauling a girl after her, dragging her through the mud. The child was crying.Battle spilled into the road beyond them: half a dozen of Koldihrve’s Watchmen locked in a doomed struggle with three Horin-Gyre riders. One of the horses reared and twisted away in panic. Its rider was thrown. The other two slashed about them with their swords. Orisian glimpsed a spray of blood; it looked black at this distance, through the rain.

Ess’yr led them away from the fight, pressing close to the houses fronting the street as if they could give some shelter from the horrors consuming Koldihrve.

‘Wait,’ gasped Yvane. She gestured at a shabby house next to them. ‘There’s a path on the other side of these, I think. We can cut back to the sea.’

She pushed rather weakly at the door. It opened partway and then stuck. Orisian kicked at it and it smacked open. They tumbled inside. There was only one room: a bed with threadbare blankets, a table, chair and ash-filled fireplace. The occupants had fled, or were fighting or dying somewhere. The rain shook the thin roof. Water ran from their hair, their clothes.

‘We can’t leave Rothe,’ Orisian said.

‘He knows where we’re going,’ Yvane said. ‘He’ll come to us.’ She was struggling with the latch on a closed window at the far side of the room. Orisian went to help her.

The shutters came open. Yvane leaned out. Ess’yr was watching the door.

‘You left your own people to come to us,’ Orisian said to the Kyrinin.

Her hair was clinging to the side of her face. Rainwater ran in fine rivulets over her skin. She blinked, and there were droplets upon her eyelashes: silvery beads of rain.

‘I must see you safe,’ she said.

‘We have to go,’ Anyara insisted.

‘All right,’ Yvane said. ‘I don’t see any trouble out on this side. Hammarn’s is close. Follow me.’

She clambered out of the window on to a wooden walkway that ran along the backs of the houses. Anyara went after her, and then Ess’yr. Orisian put his hands on the window frame to pull himself out. He swung a leg up and over, and then stopped. A pale glint by the fireplace took his eye: the blade of a thin knife hanging from a hook. He pulled himself back inside. He went across and took the knife in his hand. It was a plain tool, but it was sharp.

‘Orisian.’

He turned, and thought his heart would stop. A lean, powerful man stood in the doorway. He was half-stooped, for the frame was too low for him. He held a sword; blood and water were dripping together from its blade.

‘That is your name, isn’t it?’ the man said quietly. ‘Mine is Kanin oc Horin-Gyre.’

The crashing of the rain receded; Orisian’s vision tightened upon the man standing before him.

Kanin took a single, long step into the room. He straightened up, lifted the point of his sword until it was level with Orisian’s chest. Orisian edged towards the window. Kanin surged forwards. Orisian hurled himself at the window, launching himself up and out into the rainstorm. He cleared the walkway and sprawled in the road. Mud filled his mouth and nose. He rolled, spitting, in time to see Kanin oc Horin-Gyre putting a foot on the window sill, pulling himself up into the aperture. Ess’yr was standing to one side, and as the Thane emerged she swung her bow like a club and smashed it into his face. There was a spray of blood and Kanin fell backwards into the house with a cry of shock and pain. The impact broke the bow’s back, and Ess’yr cast it away as she sprang down into the roadway.

‘No sitting around,’ muttered Yvane as she pulled Orisian to his feet.

They flew down the street and around an acute corner. They cut between houses and came out within sight of the sea. Orisian recognised where they were. Hammarn’s hut was there, the door open, Hammarn himself peering out with wide and frightened eyes.

‘Is it you? Is it you?’ he shouted as they rushed up.

‘Yes,’ Yvane said. ‘Time to come with us, friend.’

The old na’kyrim looked startled.

‘Can’t you hear?’ Yvane asked him. ‘This town’s no place to be.’

Hammarn cocked his head. Cries and screams were still rising up through the rain.

‘Perhaps so,’ Hammarn grunted. ‘Maybe so. Better gather myself.’ He ducked back inside.

‘Hammarn . . .’ Yvane started to say.

‘Let him get what he wants,’ Orisian said. ‘We’ll wait for Rothe as long as we can. And for Varryn.’

Yvane looked back the way they had come.

‘That would not be wise,’ she said.

Orisian faced her without a moment’s uncertainty. ‘Wise or not, I will give them the chance.’

He darted around the side of the house, hunching his shoulders fruitlessly against the downpour. The sea was a great shiver of ripples and impacts beneath the rain’s assault. Edryn Delyne’s ship had its sails set. Figures were moving about on the deck. Orisian waved and shouted, but there was no sign that anyone saw him. He glanced along the storm-swept, muddy shore. There was a long, low rowboat tied up at the nearest of the crude jetties. He returned to the others. They were gathered just inside the doorway. Hammarn was rummaging deep in a pile of driftwood, muttering softly to himself.

‘There’s a boat we can take,’ Orisian reported, ‘but we don’t have much time. Delyne’s making ready to sail.’

He looked at Ess’yr. An unfocused glaze had settled over her eyes. A blurring sheen of rainwater overlay her tattoos, making them seem damaged, impotent.

‘What of the vo’an?’ he asked her.

She gave the slightest shake of her head. ‘The enemy have come. Many of them.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Orisian felt a hand upon his arm. Anyara was at his side. Her face was mournful. He tried to smile for her.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘No more time. We can’t wait.’

Hammarn had collected nothing but woodtwines. He bound a scrap of cloth around the little bundle of carvings and clutched them to his chest like a baby.

‘Got it,’ he said to no one.

Orisian led the way out and made for the shore. He had gone only a few paces when he saw Rothe and Varryn burst out from a side street and come running towards them. The Kyrinin was limping a fraction. Rothe’s left arm hung with an ominous looseness. It had taken no mere numbing blow this time: there was blood sluicing away in the rain.

Orisian felt a tremendous surge of relief rush through him.

‘Is it bad?’ he asked as the shieldman came up to him.

‘Not as bad as it could have been,’ Rothe said with a lopsided smile. ‘Lucky there’s plenty of places too narrow for horses in this dismal town.’

When they reached the shore, water running out from the town was cutting channels for itself down the beach. Shells and stones were appearing, eroded out of the mud by the hard rain. They slipped and slithered to the jetty and ran out along its uneven length. The boarding felt treacherous.

Two ropes held the boat. Yvane went to one, Orisian the other. The swollen knot felt huge and solid beneath his numb fingers. He could not get any purchase. He pulled the knife out from where he had tucked it into his belt and began to saw at the sodden fibres. He shot a glance at the ship. Men had gathered at its rail and were gesturing towards them.

‘Let me cut it,’ Rothe said, raising his sword. ‘Blade’s not the sharpest, but it’ll do.’

Orisian backed away. Rothe’s first blow went partway through the rope.

‘We go now,’ Varryn said quietly.

Orisian turned to him. The Kyrinin warrior was impassive, looking not at Orisian but Ess’yr. She did not reply at once. Orisian sought for the words he needed. This once, this one time, he wanted to say the right thing to her.

‘Kanin!’ Anyara cried. ‘It’s Kanin.’

There were riders pounding along the shore, ten or twelve of them. Orisian wiped rain from his eyes. Kanin was to the fore, driving his horse on with wild energy. Orisian heard the chop of another sword blow from behind him.

‘It’s free,’ Rothe said. ‘I’ll cut the other.’

Yvane gave up her unequal struggle with the second rope. She stood at Orisian’s side. The Black Road warriors were close. Fountains of mud and sand erupted at their horses’ feet. Orisian could hear the wet thumps of the hoofs.

‘Quickly, Rothe,’ he said.

He watched Kanin coming. He could see the fury in the man’s face now, and the great bloody wound Ess’yr had put there with her bow. Orisian was strangely aware of the leaden weight of his soaking clothes. He squeezed the hilt of the knife. Rothe’s sword smacked against the rope. The shieldman cursed. Kanin hauled at his reins. His horse came to a ragged halt at the base of the jetty.

The other riders gathered around him. They looked as if they had ridden out of the rain-riven sky itself, a wild expression of the storm. Kanin held out his sword, pointing it at Orisian.

‘Hold,’ he cried. ‘Hold there.’

Warriors were dismounting. Orisian could see crossbows being readied.

‘Rothe?’ asked Orisian without looking round.

‘Done!’

A crossbow bolt snapped out, flashing darkly through the rain and past them, out over the sea. An answering arrow sprang from Varryn’s bow. It darted past Kanin, thudded into the warrior behind him.

‘Get into the boat,’ said Orisian. ‘Everyone.’

‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ Hammarn was muttering over and over again.

He and Yvane, then Anyara scrambled into the boat. A flurry of bolts hissed down the length of the jetty. Orisian flung himself at the rowboat. Rothe, there beside him, gasped as one quarrel found his shoulder. The boat rocked as the shieldman slumped into it. Orisian struggled to his feet. Yvane was fumbling with an oar; she was staring, as if in surprise, at the crossbow bolt transfixing her upper arm. Varryn, still standing with Ess’yr on the end of the jetty, loosed another arrow.

‘Come on,’ Orisian shouted at the Kyrinin. ‘Get in.’

‘Pull, pull,’ Anyara was screaming at Hammarn as the two of them hauled at oars. The boat jerked away from the jetty. Orisian reached for Ess’yr.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ he shouted. ‘You can’t stay here.’ Kanin was rushing down the jetty, his warriors coming behind him like a dark flock of crows stooping out of the rain-lashed sky. Orisian heard Kanin’s inarticulate scream of fury. Varryn and Ess’yr looked silently at one another for an instant and then leapt from the jetty. They landed together in the rowboat’s stern, so lightly and precisely that it hardly bucked.

Orisian scrambled over Rothe’s prostrate form. The warrior was moaning softly. Orisian saw the blood soaking through his shieldman’s shirt, but would not allow the sight to touch him. Not yet. There were four oars. Hammarn and Anyara were pulling at two, Yvane struggling with a third.

‘No,’ Kanin was shouting as the boat took another unsteady lunge away from the shore.

More bolts: dark flickers darting out to the boat, slicing through the rain.

‘Get down,’ shouted Orisian, and hunched over his oar. A couple of the quarrels thudded into the hull, the stern; another flew over their heads. He felt his oar shiver and saw a bolt stuck in it, next to his hand. Then nothing. The warriors on the jetty were hurrying to reload. Kanin stood at the furthest point, arms and sword upraised as if to threaten the thick, grey sky itself.

Waves, dragged up by the storm, were slapping at the rowboat’s prow. Water sluiced over the sides and around their feet. Spray misted around their heads.

Gasping, spitting salt water from his mouth, Orisian hauled at the oar with all the strength he had left. As they drew clear of Koldihrve he could see, through the teeming rain, the vague shape of Kanin standing impotent and dark over the water, staring out. The Horin-Gyre Thane watched them all the way.

They rode the tide out to the Tal Dyreen ship. The sailors, laughing and shouting excitedly, threw ladders over the side. As they tied ropes about Rothe so that he could be hauled aboard, the huge shieldman fainted away.