Bloodheir

by Brian Ruckley

  Thus ended the War of the Tainted. Thus was born the Deep Rove, and men called it the Forest of the Dead and did not walk beneath its ill-rumoured canopy.

  from Tales of the Anain

  by Arvent of Dun Aygll

  II

  K’rina had been weeping intermittently for days. Her na’kyrim eyes, once so beautiful, were now red, veined and bleary. She did not sleep, took no food, hardly spoke. Her friends feared for her, but she did not respond to their efforts to help or comfort her.

  She wandered amongst the pools and reed-beds that surrounded Dyrkyrnon. She squatted down beside stagnant ponds and peered blankly at the grey water. When wet fogs and drizzles drifted across the vast marshes she did not seem to notice, but allowed the moisture to settle on her hair and skin, mingling with her tears. Everywhere she went she was followed by two girls. They stayed a few paces behind her and did not intrude upon her grief-fuelled daze. They simply watched, and kept her from harm, and each night reported to the elders.

  On the fourth evening K’rina did not return to her sleeping hut. Instead, she kept walking: out into the water-maze of the marshes, heading north-west. One of the attendant girls brought word to the village and the elders sent men to bring K’rina back. She did not struggle or protest. When they took hold of her she slumped into their arms and would say nothing.

  In K’rina’s sleeping hut, bathed in candlelight and the scent of soothing herbs, a tall na’kyrim knelt over the stricken woman. He pushed his fingers through her hair again and again, pressing each fingertip to her scalp. He whispered constantly in the tongue of the Heron Kyrinin. Black spiralling tattoos covered his face, even his closed eyelids. Beneath his firm touch K’rina was unresponsive. She did not weep, but her eyes were bleak and exhausted, as if they had not seen sleep for weeks. She stared up into the shadows that lurked against the hut’s roof.

  At length, the tall na’kyrim rocked back on his heels. He regarded K’rina with a puzzled expression, then spread a woollen blanket over her and rose. He left, ducking his head to pass out into the wet night.

  A cold rain was falling. The grass around the domed huts was sodden, the earth bloated with water.

  Paths of rush matting had been laid down. The man took only a few paces down one of these before he found his way blocked by a much shorter figure, cloaked in a too-large rain cape and leaning on a staff.

  “It’s wet,” the tall man said. “Why aren’t you inside, Arquan?”

  “I will be soon enough. None of us would last long here if a little water pained us.”

  The tall man grunted in distant amusement and cast narrowed eyes up towards the sky. There was nothing to see: no stars, no moon, nothing but the darkness from which the remorseless rain fell.

  “I wanted to hear how K’rina was,” Arquan said from beneath the cowl of his cape. “Can you help her, Lacklaugh?”

  The taller man stepped around Arquan and walked on.

  “We shall all be meeting in the morning,” he said as he went. “Why not wait until then?”

  Arquan hurried after him, spilling rainwater from creases in his cape.

  “I’d rather not. I’m sleeping badly, as all of us are: the nights are long and worrisome. I’d sooner talk than search in vain for rest. And you know K’rina has been a good friend to me.”

  “Come, then. I’ll give you some shelter and something warm to drink. I can’t offer anything to make your nights less worrisome, though.”

  Lacklaugh set out low stools for them to sit on and warmed wine beside the fire. Arquan, hunched up on one of the stools, rubbed his hands together and splayed them to soak up some of the fire’s heat. Stumps were all that remained of the two smallest fingers on his left hand.

  “I’ve always preferred frost and ice to these winter rains,” he murmured.

  “We’ll be ice-bound soon enough,” Lacklaugh grunted. He was scraping shavings from a block of hard cheese, delicately picking morsels from the knife’s blade with his lips.

  “Did K’rina have anything to say for herself, then?” Arquan asked. He helped himself to a cup of the dark red wine.

  Lacklaugh mutely shook his head.

  “Were you able to help her?”

  “Not much.” Lacklaugh unlaced his calf-length boots and pulled them from his feet. One had a long Kyrinin hunting knife scabbarded along its side – a legacy, like the tattoos that swirled across his face, of his youth, when each summer he had run with a Heron spear a’an . “She might sleep a little tonight, but what ails her is beyond my reach. I cannot even ease my own dreams, or still the itch of disquiet at the back of my own thoughts. How could I hope to heal her, when what she feels is so much more sharp-edged?”

  “Yes,” sighed Arquan. “And we know why it’s she who suffers so much more than the rest of us, don’t we?”

  Lacklaugh shot him a grim glance. “Perhaps.”

  “Of course we do. She was the only one who loved – liked, even – that poisonous little wretch. She never forgave us for casting him out. It’s been years, but I doubt there’s been a day gone by when she’s not thought of him, not grieved over his absence.”

  “No,” Lacklaugh grunted. “She has carried a secret hope, all this time, that she would one day see Aeglyss again.” He sighed, staring at the boot he still held in his hand. “She will go to him.”

  “What?”

  “The intent, the desire, is clear in her mind. What is left of her mind, at least. She is on the brink of madness, I think. Ensnared. The . . . currents . . . in the Shared are far too strong for her.”

  “But why go to him?” cried Arquan in a mix of alarm, anger, confusion. “What’s been flowing in the Shared these last few days is . . . is corruption. Poison. Nothing you would want to draw nearer to.”

  Lacklaugh shrugged and tossed the boots to the foot of his sleeping mat. He swallowed down a great mouthful of the warmed wine. “We feel unease, we feel unbalanced by the taint leaking into our minds.

  But you said it yourself: she loved Aeglyss. She cared for him as a mother might. What she feels now is not the same as we do. She does not sense the wrongness or the danger of it all, only the pain, the suffering. His pain and suffering. She thinks of him as her child, and what mother could help but go to her child at the sound of his torment?”

  “Well, we can’t let her go,” said Arquan.

  Again, Lacklaugh shrugged. “Short of binding her hands and feet, keeping her under guard day and night, I doubt we can prevent it.”

  “Then we bind her. We guard her.”

  “Dyrkyrnon is not a gaol; we are not gaolers.”

  “Why not, if it’s the only way to keep one of our own safe? She must emerge from this waking dream some time, and then she’ll thank us. If Aeglyss is indeed at the root of this, there’s nothing but harm can come of it.”

  “Oh, you will get no argument from me there. I said when we sent him away that he would bring nothing but misery wherever he went.”

  “I went deep – as deep as I dare – last night,” growled Arquan. “You can’t tell quite what’s wrong, but everything feels out of kilter. And his presence is there, a shadow thrown across the Shared. Fouling it.

  All the old anger and contempt. The Shared reeks of it. But there’s power, too, like the echoes of a great shout.”

  Lacklaugh sighed. “He was always strong, but to make himself felt all through the Shared like this . . . it defies understanding.”

  “Agreed. Something happened, clearly. We all felt the moment when something . . . broke. Whatever happened, he’s not the Aeglyss we knew. Even then, when we cast him out, we were more than a little afraid of him, and of what he might do. Now . . .” Arquan shook his head as if shying away from the thought. “So what will you be saying to the rest of the elders tomorrow?” he asked.

  “That I expect K’rina to keep trying to leave us, and that I see little sense in seeking to prevent her. If she stays here, she will only sink further and further into despair. She may harm herself,
or someone else, in the end.”

  Arquan stared into his cup of wine.

  “Trouble’s even more likely to find her if she wanders off in search of Aeglyss,” he said disconsolately.

  Lacklaugh rose. He took a fishing spear from the wall and peered at its viciously barbed point.

  “I need to replace the bindings on this,” he muttered, and began searching around for some cord.

  “This place hardens hearts,” Arquan said, though without the accusation or reproach that the words implied.

  “It does,” agreed Lacklaugh as he sat back down and laid the spear across his knees. “Dyrkyrnon has never been a hotbed of soft hearts. But then, soft hearts are not what we have needed. If K’rina chooses to leave – however misguided the reasons for that choice – she puts herself beyond our protection. Our world is bounded by the pools, the mists. If we reach out beyond those limits, we invite the world to reach in. That is not what any of us would want.”

  “No.”

  “I still have friends amongst the Heron, though. I know young warriors who grow bored now that there is peace with the Hawk. No doubt they long for some kind of adventure. They might follow her – some of the way, at least. Guard her. Unless you want to volunteer as her guardian?”

  “I’m an old man, and a coward.” Arquan raised his left hand, showing the stubs of his two missing fingers. “I had my fill of the wide world long ago. It kept part of me so that I should not forget just how much it disliked me.”

  Lacklaugh did not look up. He was frowning in concentration as he wound the cord around the haft of his spear, binding the barbed bone point in place.

  “I don’t suppose there’s any of us here who would leap at the chance to walk by her side,” Arquan said.

  “Not at the best of times, and certainly not if Aeglyss is waiting at the end of whatever road she wants to follow. Perhaps your Heron friends are the best we can do.”

  “Perhaps they are,” said Lacklaugh, grimacing as he pulled the cord tight. “You should not condemn yourself, or the rest of us, too harshly, though. If Aeglyss is indeed the cause of this . . . this sickening of the Shared, none of us here could offer K’rina much in the way of protection. None of us has that kind of strength, for all that we have the most potent na’kyrim outside Adravane amongst our number.”

  “We do,” agreed Arquan glumly, then corrected himself at once. “We did. It appears the one we cast out can now lay claim to that dubious honour.”

  CHAPTER 1

  Kilkry-Haig

  Put ten Kilkry men in a Kolkyre tavern, ply them with drink for a time, and you will hear ten different views on how it came to pass that their Blood meekly surrendered its authority to the Haig line. And there will be a seam of truth running through each one of those views, for no single blow broke the strength and will of the Kilkry Blood. Rather, it was an accumulation of wounds and ill fortune that undid their rule.

  Some fifty years before, Kilkry had led the other Bloods to victory against Gyre and the Black Road cult. Their immense losses in battle, and through defection to the Black Road, had still not been entirely made good. And even as Kilkry laboured beneath those lingering wounds, Haig was rising to new heights of strength and prosperity. It had taken a century and a half, but the lands around Vaymouth – ruined during the Storm Years – were at last restored to the bountiful fertility that had seen them called The Verdant Shores in the days when they fed half the Aygll Kingship.

  The Thanes of the Haig Blood had grown rich, their armies numerous, their influence over the Taral and Ayth Bloods pervasive, on the back of those lands.

  When the time came, the men of Kilkry, and of Lannis, would willingly have taken up arms, but Cannoch oc Kilkry could not bring himself to return the Bloods to the horrors of civil strife. He bent his knee, and with nothing more than that Haig became highest of all the True Bloods.

  Hundreds – most likely thousands – would have died had Cannoch not humbled himself so, but you will find few people in the backstreets of Kolkyre prepared to thank him for it. The memory of better times suffuses this Blood, undimmed by the passage of time. Each generation is heir to the resentment and bitterness of the one before. These are people whose pride runs deep; they bred High Thanes once, and they are not likely to forget it.

  from Hallantyr’s Sojourn

  I

  The na’kyrim lay curled on a pallet of interlaced hazel and juniper boughs inside the Voice’s lodge. His knees were pressed up into his chest. His face rested in the sheltering cup of his hands. There was a pale, thin crust of vomit on the pallet by his head, and on his lips. There had been almost nothing in his stomach to come up, for he had hardly eaten since being brought down from the Breaking Stone. There were terrible wounds beneath the bindings on his wrists. The bandages were stained brown and earth-red by his blood.

  He was alone in the hut save for a single Kyrinin woman: an aged, time-worn, herb-wise healer. Outside, on the threshold of the lodge, two warriors were squatting down on their haunches. Their purpose was not the imprisonment of the na’kyrim but his protection. Ever since Aeglyss had been taken down from the Breaking Stone and brought back here, there had been ill-tempered argument and dissent. This, the heart and home of the White Owl clan, the ancient vo’an around which its life turned, had been shaken.

  Children were kept out of sight while their parents met around the fires, arguing, accusing. Some wanted to kill the na’kyrim , to cut his throat and leave him for the eaters of the dead in the forest, as befitted an outsider, a betrayer. Others caught the scent of significance, of purpose. He had survived the Breaking Stone, and when he had been taken down from it and carried back to the vo’an , something else had come with him: something untouchable, invisible, unnamed. But it could be felt.

  The na’kyrim woke. He blinked. The healer came and stood over him.

  “You have not slept long,” she said.

  “I cannot rest. Whenever I close my eyes, my head is filled with a stench of malice and doubt. I’m surrounded by it here.”

  The healer’s expression offered no denial. Aeglyss tried to raise himself up on his elbows, but failed. He slumped back with a hiss.

  “You are weak,” the healing woman murmured. “You need food, and water. And I cannot stop the weeping of your wounds. Your blood runs like a river. It is poisoned.”

  “You can’t heal what ails me,” Aeglyss said. “Can’t even understand it. Your own blood is too pure for that. My wounds will look after themselves. Whatever it is that’s in me, it’s not poison. Not poison.”

  He grimaced and twisted his head as if afflicted by some blinding light.

  “No, no,” he gasped. His thin hands went to the sides of his head. New blood bloomed at his wrists, blushing through his bandages. The healing woman took a step backwards, away from him and towards the doorway that led out into the bright, safe world beyond. She could smell death here, in the air and the hides and the earth of the lodge. It should, perhaps, be burned when the na’kyrim was gone.

  “Wait,” Aeglyss snapped, reaching out to her, clawing the air. His eyes were pressed shut. “Do not leave me.”

  With a great effort he shifted to the edge of the pallet. He opened watery eyes, swung his feet out to rest on the ground.

  “A passing moment only. It is so . . . so much, you see. You could not imagine. The Shared runs in me like . . . it boils.”

  “You are bleeding,” the woman observed.

  Aeglyss glanced at the bloodstained bindings and gave a faint shrug.

  “Leave it. It’s not . . . you must do something for me. Go to the Voice. Tell her I would talk with her.”

  The Voice of the White Owls was an old woman, silver-haired, stooped, slow. She wore the pale, speckled feathers of the owl around her neck. She leaned on a staff of oak. She whispered as she came, murmuring phrases that had been passed down over centuries as tools to focus and clear the mind. The healing woman followed in her footsteps.

  They found the na�
��kyrim on his knees in the centre of the lodge, beside the ashen remains of the fire. He was flexing the fingers of his right hand, opening and closing them again and again. Both Voice and healer hesitated in the lodge’s entrance, like deer catching danger on the wind.

  “Do you mean to live or die?” the Voice asked.

  Aeglyss looked up. At first his expression was blank, as if he did not recognise her, or did not speak the people’s tongue. Then the clouds cleared from his eyes and he grimaced.

  “Live. Help me up.”

  The Voice nodded to the healing woman, but she hesitated, reluctant.

  “Help me up,” rasped Aeglyss, and such was the weight of that command that even the Voice took a step forwards before she caught herself. The healing woman was faster, and more pliable. She went to the na’kyrim ’s side, and he hauled himself up onto his feet, anchoring himself with handfuls of her clothes.

  “Even after I have survived the Breaking Stone, there are those who would deny me my place here,”

  said Aeglyss bitterly. “Do not imagine I am deaf, or blind, to it.”

  “Some are afraid,” said the Voice. “Others are uncertain. Bad dreams assail us in the night since you returned. We are afflicted by ill tempers, mistrust. The people fear that your presence discolours their thoughts. They say you have clouded my judgement; that you have done so before, and do so now. That you betrayed us to your Huanin friends. They say we should take the life that has been spared by the Breaking Stone. Others say it is not for us to take a life that the Stone refuses.”

  “Bad dreams? Nothing that stalks this camp is anything more than a faint echo of what burns inside my head. What you feel is a breeze, a moth’s flutter. I suffer the full storm, waking or sleeping.”

  Still he clung to the healer’s shoulder, unable to support his own weight. He was more than a head taller than the old woman, but wasted and lean, like a sapling spindling its way up towards distant light. She was steady beneath the burden.