Bloodheir

by Brian Ruckley

  Ammen Sharp cupped his hand around the tiny flame of a candle. The two men on watch outside had warned him not to make any light in here, fearful of a fire that could consume the whole building, but it was too dark and unfamiliar a place for him without it. He crept amongst the great towers of boxes and bundles, exploring the unearthly landscape of this treasure house. There were clay jars almost as tall as he was, their stoppers sealed with wax; crates stood one on top of another like cliffs; long rolls of fabric were piled up as if the trees of some soft forest had been harvested; strange powders and dusts covered the floor, releasing bursts of scent when his feet disturbed them.

  For all his nervousness, Ammen found it exciting. Here, it seemed to him, was all the world, all its most distant and marvellous lands, collected together in this great stone ship of a building. Hidden away in here might be pots of carmine Nar Vay dyes, cloths from far-off Adravane, whale oils from the wave-lashed Bone Isles.

  He clambered up over a mound of what he guessed were seal pelts, and onto a stack of crates. He squeezed into a space between two of them. He felt more secure now that he had a corner to call his own, hidden from view, and blew out the candle. He listened to the rats running, the faint knocking of anchored boats outside at the quay, the rattle of a loose shingle somewhere in the roof far above. He rested against one of the crates and imagined what it would be like on the road with his father, and in Skeil Anchor. People would know Ochan the Cook, he was sure. In the roadside inns and the fishing villages they would know Ochan, and they would see Ammen at his side and soon know him too.

  A scraping sound disturbed his reverie. He shifted onto his knees and peered out over the bare expanse of stone floor towards the front of the warehouse. The little door by which the guards outside had let him in earlier was open once more, admitting a shaft of light from their lanterns. A thickset figure with a staff and a huge bag slung over his shoulders was stepping in. It was his father.

  “Ammen,” hissed Ochan. “Ammen Sharp. Where are you, boy?”

  “Here,” Ammen called, rising up and waving even though he was unsure whether his father would be able to see him.

  “Quiet!” Ochan snapped. “Keep your voice down, you idiot.”

  The door closed behind him, and the warehouse’s secretive gloom was restored. Ammen heard his father curse, and there was a thump as he dropped his bag to the ground.

  “I can’t see a thing in here,” Ochan the Cook complained. “Have you got no light, boy?”

  “They told me not to, but yes, I’ve got candles. I’ll light one.” He ducked down again, scrabbling about in search of the candle he had put out earlier. A splinter stabbed into one of his fingers and he gave a soft yelp.

  “Oh, don’t bother,” Ochan muttered down below. “I’ll get a lantern from the watchmen.”

  There was shouting then, and a sudden clatter of running feet.

  Ammen sprang to his feet, but his father snapped, “Stay down, boy,” and he did as he was told.

  He heard the door smash open once more, saw sudden bursts of torchlight rushing across the walls, careening through the roof beams, as men came in out of the night.

  “What do you want here, you little . . .” he heard Ochan rasping.

  “Hold your tongue,” came Urik’s sharp, agitated voice.

  Ammen Sharp could not resist the temptation to poke his head around the edge of his sheltering crate.

  To his horror, he saw his father facing half a dozen men, the squat shape of Urik the Wardcaptain to the fore. They all carried the iron-banded cudgels of the Guard; three of them held torches, the flames stretching out and crackling in the wind from the open door. Wild shadows spun crazily around the warehouse.

  “I’ll hold your tongue for you, if you come any closer,” Ochan said, and Ammen clearly heard the danger, the threat in the words.

  “Be still,” cried Urik, raising his cudgel.

  He sounded almost frantic to Ammen, on the verge of panic. This could not be what the Wardcaptain had wanted. He was surely too afraid of his own corruption being exposed to willingly allow Ochan to be cornered like this. Something must have gone wrong, Ammen thought as a cold, fearful anticipation ran through him.

  “You’ve been followed half the day, Ochan Lyre,” Urik was saying. “Don’t think you can escape now.”

  “Escape? Escape?” Ochan’s voice was rising, his anger with it. “And do they know about you, these thugs you’ve brought with you? Do they know—”

  Urik howled and rushed forwards. Ochan was fast, though. He snapped the tip of his quarterstaff down and landed it square on Urik’s forehead, sending the stocky little man staggering. Had it only been the two of them there in the warehouse, there would have been no doubt about the victor. But Urik was not alone. The other Guardsmen closed in on Ochan at once, cudgels flailing.

  A cry lodged frozen in Ammen’s throat as he watched the blows rain down. He wanted to leap out of his hiding place and fly to his father’s aid, but his legs were locked as if his knees had rusted in place.

  Ochan had gone down on his hands and knees. Urik stamped up to him, blood running in rivulets down his face.

  “You bled me!” the Wardcaptain screeched. “You bled me!”

  He hit Ochan once, hard, on the back of his head with his heavy iron-clad club. Ammen saw his father fall to the ground and knew in that instant, from the leaden slackness of his limbs, the wet limpness with which his head smacked onto the stone, that Ochan the Cook was dead.

  The other Guardsmen restrained Urik, who was still shouting furiously. Ammen shrank back, trembling, into his little dark corner. He closed his eyes, held his hands to his face, pressing down on his mouth and the moans that were rising towards it. Lights were dancing inside his eyelids.

  “Drag the body out,” he heard someone say far, far away. “We’ll get a wagon to take it.”

  And then, soon, they were gone and the door had closed behind them. And Ammen Sharp was alone with the dark, and his horror.

  VII

  “Aewult will not be happy when Taim marches,” Lheanor oc Kilkry-Haig was saying softly. The Thane seldom spoke loudly these days. He sat in a capacious high-backed chair. He did not fill it as Orisian guessed he might once have done. Lheanor was hunched forwards a little, hands laid across one another in his lap, shoulders pinched in.

  “No,” Orisian acknowledged. “He might not. I don’t want to cause trouble for you, but I may leave some behind me.”

  Lheanor’s right hand stirred, the fingers fluttering as if to dismiss such a minor concern.

  “A little more trouble will make no difference when there’s so much of it already in the air. We’ve been told no Kilkry spears will be needed in the coming battles either, you know. Aewult wants our men scattered, sent home, even the ones Roaric brought back from the south. My son’s . . . unhappy.

  “And to bind the wound with salted bandages, I am requested – requested, mark you – to help in defraying the costs of this war, and that against Igryn. It’s not the Chancellor himself who asks, of course.

  One of his scribblers, his counters, comes quietly and does the asking for him.” Lheanor shook his head.

  “They’ll not come knocking on the door of your treasury yet, Orisian. Not until you’re back in Anduran.

  But knock they will, and stretch their greedy hands out.”

  “You’ll give them what they want?” Orisian asked.

  “Oh, yes. I bent the knee to the Haig Blood, as has every Thane of my line since Cannoch. And what’s the value of an oath if we set it aside when the fulfilment of it becomes onerous, painful? The only other choice would, sooner or later, be war with Haig, and with Ayth and Taral. That way lies chaos: the very thing the Bloods were made to end. Anyway, it’s not a war we could win.”

  The Kilkry Thane leaned sideways in his throne, looking past Orisian to the ranks of his shieldmen arrayed along the far wall. Rothe was there too, standing tall and alert despite his still-bandaged arm.


  “Let us walk in the gardens,” Lheanor said as he rose, heavily, from his chair. “I find it does not help my mood to sit still for too long.”

  They went out into the chill air. Their guards followed behind, out of earshot but close. Orisian thought Lheanor would be cold, but the old man gave no sign of discomfort, as if the state of the world around him could no longer impinge on his thoughts. They set out along one of the garden’s broad paths, curving away around the side of the hillock that supported the Tower.

  “You’re going to Highfast, then?” Lheanor said.

  “Yes. I’ve seen – and heard – enough to make me think . . . I’m not sure. Perhaps armies are not the only kind of strength we need in this. But I’ll stay there only briefly. I mean to meet Taim Narran at Kolglas. I’m told there’s a good path from Highfast across the Peaks to Hent and then down to the coast.”

  “Good? I don’t know. Passable, yes, if you don’t wait too long, and if you’ve no wagons to haul. The Karkyre Peaks can be nasty in the winter.” Lheanor flicked a glance at the sky. “Not quite yet, though, I suppose.”

  “What did you make of the word Bannain brought from Highfast? About Aeglyss, the Shared?” Orisian felt like a charlatan, pretending to discuss weighty matters with the Thane of a True Blood. He wondered if he would ever feel as though he belonged at the side of such a man.

  Lheanor shrugged. “I worry about grain harvests, about tithes, about the Shadowhand’s games. The worries of na’kyrim . . . well, some problems are best left to others. How can the likes of you and I oppose things that cannot be met with a blade, or an emissary, or cold coin? Don’t mistake me, though: Cerys and her people at Highfast, they’re a precious thing. Giving that place to the na’kyrim was not the least of Kulkain’s wise deeds, not by a long way.”

  “Have you said anything about it – Bannain’s message – to Aewult?”

  “Ha! You really think the great warriors of Haig would care what a few na’kyrim think? Aewult would not listen to any counsel drawn from such a well. It would only feed his contempt for us, to learn that we gave it any credence ourselves. We have a few slender threads of tolerance left for the children of two races, your Blood and mine. But Haig? No. Even if they believed it . . . oh, there are old hatreds that could easily be stirred back into life. If people start to think there are na’kyrim mixed up in this war, how safe do you suppose any of them, anywhere, would be?”

  “They took a risk, in sending Bannain to you,” Orisian murmured.

  “I like to think they trust me, as they have trusted my ancestors. Unfortunately, I fear they do not really understand how much power has leaked away from the Tower of Thrones.”

  Crows that had been strutting across the neat lawns in serried ranks flew off, cawing in irritation, as the two Thanes approached.

  “They believe it’s their garden more than mine,” Lheanor said as he watched them go. “You’re taking your Kyrinin with you, are you?”

  “I am. They expect to be killing White Owls soon, and that . . . pleases them.” He remembered well the smile that had burst from Ess’yr’s flawless face at the news: a rare prize.

  “I can’t say I’ll be sorry to see the back of them. I know they helped you, and that makes them friends of my Blood as much as yours, but word gets out, no matter how much care it’s guarded with. There’d be a mob at the door demanding their deaths before too much longer.”

  “I know. I’ve brought more problems with me than I would have wished.”

  “Not you. Horin-Gyre. Haig. They’re the ones who’ve crafted our troubles. And a foolish father, too ready to grant his son’s desire for battle.”

  There was such a weight of sadness in Lheanor’s voice that Orisian could almost feel its tug himself. He looked at the Thane of the Kilkry Blood and saw not a mighty leader but an old man, bowed by loss, beset by guilt.

  “I wake up every day,” Orisian said, “and . . . every morning I have to learn to believe it all over again: that they really are gone. A dozen times a day – no, more – I think of something I want to say to one of them, or ask. My father, my uncle, Inurian. My mother, even, and Fariel.”

  “There are a great many things I wish I could say to my son.”

  “You still have a son. Perhaps you should say them to him.”

  The Kilkry-Haig Thane glanced at him, and Orisian wondered if he should tread more carefully. But he did know something of this; in the matter of dead sons, of grieving fathers, he could claim some knowledge.

  “I don’t know you well, sire,” he went on, “so you must tell me if I speak out of turn. My father lost a son, and I lost him because of that. Grief took him away from me before the Inkallim did.”

  “I walked here sometimes with Croesan, you know,” Lheanor murmured. “And your father and mother once, perhaps more than once, years ago. We talked about . . . what?” A frown crumpled the old man’s face, and then passed. “I’m not sure. Nothings, probably. For ones such as us, Thane, there are too few people in whose company we can be . . . idle. You come to treasure those you do have, and therefore are wounded by their passing.”

  Lheanor paused, looking down at the path on which they walked. One of the flat stones had lifted a little, disturbing the smooth surface.

  “Look,” Lheanor muttered. “The frost’s got under that.”

  He made an irritated noise at the back of his throat and waved one of his shieldmen over. He pointed the stone out to the warrior.

  “Find one of the gardeners and get them to relay that.”

  The man trotted off to carry out the command. Lheanor led Orisian on around the Tower of Thrones.

  They walked in a great, slow circle while overhead the clouds flowed in from the west.

  “A man never speaks out of turn when he offers well-meant advice,” Lheanor said. “My loss – my loss I find to be unbearable. Yet it is less than yours, and you remain unbowed by it. Unbroken. Thus it seems you are made of better stuff than me.”

  “No, that’s not—” Orisian began, but Lheanor stilled him with an upraised hand.

  “I envy you your youth. It’s an armour against many things, youth. You refuse to play games with Aewult and the Shadowhand. I allow them to set fences about me, my Blood, my army. You do not. Whether what you intend is wise or not, I do not know; but I do know that I envy you the will to make the attempt.”

  The old Thane bent to snap a dead twig from a bush by the path. He pointed with it down towards a sweep of grass by the wall.

  “I think I want to plant trees down there. Something that flowers in the spring, with white blossom, perhaps. My wife likes white blossom. That’s one thing that does not change, isn’t it? Whoever dies –

  even if we die ourselves – there is always another year to come. Every winter ends eventually.”

  He laid a hand on Orisian’s shoulder.

  “You do as you see fit, Thane. If you do not wish to follow at Haig’s heels like some lady’s tame dog, so be it. You will hear no complaint from the Kilkry Blood so long as I live, and none when Roaric is Thane after me, I think.”

  “There’s one other thing I would ask of you,” Orisian said.

  “Ask it. If it’s within my power, I’ll grant it.”

  “Watch over Anyara for me. She’s angry that I want her to stay behind, but I won’t take her with me. I want her to be safe. I’d feel more sure of that knowing you – your family – are watching over her.”

  Lheanor smiled then, though the smile carried more regret than pleasure. “That is something I would willingly do even if you did not ask it of me. We will guard her as jealously as we would a daughter of our own. But do this for me in exchange, Orisian: do not give up your own life too easily. You go into danger, of one sort or another, and there are already too few good people left. Come and see, in years to come, whether the trees I plant have bloomed.”

  Jaen Narran was upset. She hid it, but the multitude of subtle signs did not escape Taim. Her lips were pressed tight together; she dol
ed out the oatmeal gruel from the pot over the fire a little too fast, spilling wet lumps of it; she moved quickly from table to hearth and back again, taking small, sharp steps.

  She would never shame him, and herself, by asking him to stay here with her. He would never embarrass them both by seeking to justify his return to the battlefield, so soon after he had come back from what they had both hoped would be his last such absence. She knew as well as he did that this was a battle that had to be fought, a call it would be unthinkable to refuse. And she knew that it would break his heart a little to leave her.

  Taim stirred some salt into the grey sludge in his bowl. The quarters they had been given here in Kolkyre’s barracks were good: spacious and warm and dry. They were better than those that the warriors who followed Taim enjoyed, crushed into halls meant for half their number. For the sake of his family, he accepted that he could not share his men’s discomfort, but he could, and did, share their diet.

  Jaen sat down on the other side of the rough table.

  “I’ll mend what I can tonight, then,” she said. “There’s still a lot of holes and tears I’ve not had time to make right yet. The rocks down south must be sharper than they are here.”

  “There’re seamstresses here who can help.”

  Gobbets of gruel dripped from her spoon as Jaen held it poised halfway to her mouth. “I’ll do it. I’ve been doing it for better than thirty years. I’ll not stop now.”

  “No, I wouldn’t want you to.”

  They ate in silence for a little while. The fire crackled. The wind was rising outside, blustering around the squat stone mass of the barracks.

  “Where’re the young ones?” Taim asked at length.

  “Gone to the harbour. Achlinn’s trying to find work on a fishing boat. Maira went with him, looking for word of friends.”

  Taim nodded. He was proud of his daughter, and of her husband too. Their flight with Jaen from Glasbridge had been so rushed that they had been able to bring almost nothing away with them. Most likely, they had no home to return to. In the face of all this, they showed nothing but determination.