Gryvan closed his eyes against the pounding ache that was building in his skull. His hands, still clasped behind his back, tightened, the fingers bars of steel locked around one another.
“They will retire from all the lands they have occupied,” Mordyn continued. “They will withdraw across the Stone Vale, and make over to you all the territory they have seized. To you personally, sire, not to Kilkry or Lannis. They pledge a permanent peace, on condition that you rule those lands directly and unmake the Bloods that formerly held them. Ragnor knows that without Kilkry and Lannis to stir up these ancient, dry troubles, there can be peace between our peoples. In pursuit of the same quarry, he pledges in his turn to wipe away the Horin Blood.”
“Peace…” rasped Gryvan.
“The better to deal with those enemies that lie more nearly at hand. The Crafts. Dornach. The time is ripe. Everything you have long dreamed of lies before you now, sire. It is all possible, now that they have revealed themselves. We have only to reach out and grasp the future, to make it real.”
“I need…” Gryvan’s tongue stumbled over his own words. There was some part of him that feared the fell anger, the grasping hunger, roiling in his breast. Yet the larger part rejoiced in the scent of crisis, the anticipation of long-held ambitions upon the brink of realisation. Kilkry, Dargannan, Lannis, all swept away. The Crafts humbled. Dornach bloodied, perhaps even subjugated. And King, perhaps? Perhaps even that?
“I need more certainty,” the stubbornly cautious fraction of him said as he turned back to face his Chancellor. “I need to know.”
“We have a day or two,” Mordyn said with a flat smile. He seemed entirely unsurprised by Gryvan’s hesitancy. “No more, I would suggest. And no time at all, perhaps, for one or two matters.”
“Such as?” Gryvan asked. He wanted this to end now. His mind seethed, his temples throbbed. Why was it so difficult to think clearly? He wanted only to retire to his chambers.
“I hear rumours of a plot-fostered by the Goldsmiths, perhaps-to seize Igryn and return him to his lands, in the hope of stirring up yet more enfeebling trouble for us. Allow me to have him removed to In’Vay. Once he is there, out of sight and mind, he can be quietly killed. None will mourn his passing. None who are true friends to the Haig Blood, at least.”
“Very well. My wife no longer finds him amusing, in any case.”
“And recall the Bloodheir from Kilvale, sire. Send word at once. Have him bring a few thousand of his men back here. The greater threat now is from Dornach, perhaps Dargannan; perhaps still closer to home, if the Crafts and those they have suborned think us weak. The people of the city grow more restive with every passing day. We may need Aewult’s swords to cure them of that ill.
“The forces of the Black Road lack both the vigour and the inclination to test him again, and I can set them on the path back to their own lands with a single message. Better yet, if we but halt all movement of ships in and out of Kolkyre, they might yet wipe away the last vestiges of the Kilkry Blood on our behalf, even as they retire. Roaric will quickly fail, if we close the sea to him.”
“I need to know,” the High Thane repeated.
“I believe we can clear away whatever doubts you harbour, sire,” Mordyn said, nodding sympathetically. “There is one here in Vaymouth who surely knows the truth of it, and might be compelled to share it. The Dornachman. Alem T’anarch.”
“The Ambassador?” Gryvan murmured, faintly incredulous.
“You must have the truth. You said as much yourself. Such truths cannot be won easily, or without daring. T’anarch… he has no supporters here, sire, no mobs to rise up in his name. And his masters have never concealed their contempt for us, their envy of our strength.”
“Would you have open war with the Kingship?”
“If this comes to nothing, whatever wounds we open may be healed. But there is war already, I think, open or otherwise. A great many will be rendered carrion by the end of it: those who shy away from the demands of the moment or yield the initiative to their opponents.”
Carrion, thought Gryvan, his weariness briefly pierced by lances of bitter anger. Yes, if there are those who think to test my resolve, that is their destiny. I shall not meekly surrender all that I hold, all that I have won. Let those who imagine otherwise learn the harsh lessons of their error. The weak, the foolhardy, the traitorous, become carrion. Such is the world.
VII
The scout came back into the copse on a lame horse. There was a bloody welt across its hamstring.
“Crossbow,” the rider said by way of explanation as he swung out of the saddle.
In the gathering darkness it was difficult to see much, but the man’s voice sounded strained to Orisian.
“And you?” he asked. “Are you hurt?”
“Nothing serious, sire. The woman with the crossbow: my knee met her helmet when I rode her down.”
“Were you followed?” Taim demanded. He was holding the horse’s reins, stroking its neck while another warrior examined its wound.
“No.” The scout shook his head emphatically. “It was just the two of them stumbled across me. Both dead. They were careless, wandering around looking for a deer or hare for the pot, I think, not someone to fight.”
“And Ive Bridge?” Orisian asked.
“Not more than three score spears to hold it, sire, as far as I could see. And only half of those look to be trained warriors.”
“No Inkallim?” asked Taim.
“None that I could see. Couldn’t go too close, but no, I don’t think so.”
“Good enough,” Taim grunted. “We’ve likely got them overmatched, then.”
“We should wait until the night’s got a firm hold,” said Orisian quietly. “Let them get bleary with sleep. K’rina and Eshenna and Yvane can stay hidden here, with a dozen men.”
He half-expected Taim to demur, to try to persuade him to remain behind with the na’kyrim, but the warrior said nothing. Orisian glanced up through the leafless branches towards the bruised sky. The cloud was thin; the moon, risen long ago, a diffuse disc.
“There should be enough light to see by. And if there isn’t, we’ll have Kyrinin with us. They won’t.”
They had not made camp in the little patch of woodland. No tents were set up, no fires were lit, despite the searing cold. They merely sheltered there, from the desultory snow and from the revelatory daylight. Men and horses were crowded into the heart of the copse, all made listless and irritable by the enervating tension. Some sat on the damp ground, dicing or muttering softly to one another, or chewing on cured meats and oatcakes. Most stood by their horses, keeping them quiet.
Sentries were scattered through the fringes of the thicket, watching the snow-dusted fields and rough slopes all around. Low hills rolled their way westwards, sinking into the huge coastal plain. There were scattered farms and villages, fading in the distance into a flat haze of grey. Snow showers had come and gone all day, by turns revealing and obscuring grim signs of unrest and ruin. For a time a dark smear of smoke marked the site of some burning barn or farmhouse; later a dozen twisting, frail columns rose elsewhere, betraying the campfires of some roving band of reavers; once a great company of riders could be seen, sweeping across the very lowest slopes.
All within that concealing stand of trees felt the calm and quiet that currently embraced them to be a treacherously fragile, even deceptive, thing. A lie, told by a world that had turned into a savage and cruel mockery of itself, and could betray at any moment those who forgot how much had changed.
Orisian squatted down beside Ess’yr, holding his water pouch out to her. She blinked the offer away.
“We’ll be moving soon,” he said quietly. “Once it’s as dark as it’s going to get.”
The Kyrinin rolled her head, stretching her long neck.
“When you choose,” she said.
“I’m grateful for your aid in this,” Orisian murmured. Grateful for many things, in truth, few of which he could easily put i
nto words.
“This opens the way north, yes?” Ess’yr said. “We move closer now, to the place we belong. To the war we must fight.”
She meant the White Owls, he knew. She and her brother believed they were travelling towards their own personal renewal of the brutal contest between Fox and White Owl; towards the discharge of a lethal duty that had been upon them ever since the fighting at Koldihrve. Vengeance, Yvane would no doubt dismissively call it, as Orisian himself might once have called it. He thought-he felt-a little differently now, though those feelings were imprecise, as hard to grasp and examine as vapours.
“Where did it come from?” he asked. “The hatred between Fox and White Owl, I mean.”
“From the beginning,” Ess’yr said softly, without inflection. “From the shape of things. From the pattern the Walking God made. He spoke with many animals, not one, as he walked. Without difference, there is no pattern at all.”
It was an answer that gave him nothing, but he had not really expected otherwise. To his surprise, though, Ess’yr had a little more to offer.
“It is not thought amongst my people,” she murmured, “that strife, and pain, and hate came to us only with the leaving of the Gods. These things have always been in the world, in its differences. They are part of what was made. When the Gods left, it was balance that was lost; not suffering that was found.”
Orisian nodded, though Ess’yr was not looking at him, and though her words gave rise to an inchoate sorrow in him.
“But there was no balance, even before the Gods departed, was there?” he said. “We killed the wolfenkind. Every one of them.”
“Still, it was balance the Gods sought,” Ess’yr said. She sat there cross-legged, straight-backed, with her hands upon her knees and now she did fix him with a steady gaze. “They chose to make us many, not one. They chose to put unlikeness into the world, where before there had been none. It must be, I think, that they believed such difference could bring balance. If it brings strife also, it must be that they thought that a fair price.”
Her eyes held him. The richness of her voice held him. He felt himself drawing nearer to her, to her life and her people. It took him, for a moment, out of the chill, fearful present; took him somewhere safer, better.
“My dreams have lost their balance,” he said, as much to himself as to Ess’yr. “When I manage to sleep at all. It’s cruel to find sleep so hard when the nights are at their longest.”
“They become shorter.”
“The nights? Do they?” He fell silent for a moment. Grief came up in him, rising in his throat, through his cheeks, touching his eyes. “Winter grows old, then. I missed its turning.”
Ess’yr said nothing. The last fading light that reached into the heart of the copse caught the tattoos that crossed her cheekbone, set the slightest glint in her soft grey eyes.
“We used to celebrate on the longest night,” Orisian said thickly. “In Kolglas. It’s the night when winter’s strongest, but also when it begins to lose its grip. There was feasting and dancing. And my mother sang.”
The immediacy of the memories was frightening, their intricate weight-grief and comfort too inextricably entwined to tell one from the other-so great that he felt himself buckling. But her voice was there, in his mind, coming to him across an impassable chasm of loss. He heard it, and at once it was gone, melting away into the sounds of the cold dusk, the accumulating darkness. The losing of it robbed him of whatever comfort it had offered; left him only with the grief. The bitter anger.
“Time to go,” he said through trembling lips.
Ive Bridge huddled in stony silence on the south bank of the river. Orisian remembered passing it as he made his first journey to Highfast, and he had thought it an unappealing place then. Now, it appeared ominous in its bleak isolation: squat houses crowded in on what little flat ground the terrain offered, and the bridge itself, hooking over the river like a bent finger. All of it was indistinct and menacing in the darkness, with only the faintest of moonlight to pick out its inanimate forms. A few lamps or torches burned in windows, but most of the village was all greys and blacks and imagined danger. He could just catch the soft scent of woodsmoke on the breeze. That smell too spoke to him with a threatening cadence these days.
Orisian could hear the River Ive down there in the crevasse it had made for itself on the far side of the houses, grinding and foaming in its mountain bed under the bridge. Somewhere beyond that noise, out in the utterly impenetrable darkness, lay the road that led on and up into the Karkyre Peaks, to Highfast. If he thought of that too clearly or carefully, doubt came crowding in upon him. He did not know how much trust to put in his own thoughts and instincts now, and chose instead-as much as he could-to hold his attention upon the present, the immediate.
Figures were moving down the rugged slope towards Ive Bridge: Ess’yr and Varryn, and a dozen warriors led by Torcaill. They did not follow the main trail that snaked its way into the village, but descended instead over steep, boulder-strewn ground, creeping from moonshadow to moonshadow. It would not be long before they reached the first outlying cottage.
Orisian rolled away and scuttled like a beetle-bent almost double, with his shield strapped across his back-to join Taim and the others. They waited in a cutting through which the trail passed before it began its descent into Ive Bridge. A fell sight: dark forms with a dusting of moonlight upon them, gouts of steaming breath rising from the horses, bared blades. Orisian hauled himself up astride his mount.
“They’re almost there,” he said quietly to Taim Narran.
The warrior nodded, and eased his way to the front of the column.
“Go carefully,” Taim said as he rode on. “Keep your reins tight until you’re told otherwise.”
The horses were wary at first, distrusting the dark road. It made them careful and quiet, at least, but still Orisian felt the tension of possible discovery. The slightest rattle of harness or slip of hoof on a loose pebble sounded loud, punctuating the background rumble of the river. No new lights were lit in Ive Bridge, though. No alarm went up. He could see no sign of movement down there. Even Ess’yr and the others had disappeared from sight, as if they had been swallowed by the rock or the shadows.
They covered perhaps half the way down to the village before a sudden strangulated cry broke the night’s skin. Even as its last anguished echo trailed away, Taim Narran was kicking his horse on. The long blade of his sword flashed once, a shaft of captured moonlight, as he flourished it, and then he was pounding off down the road. Orisian and the others followed. After that, it was a chaos of thudding hoofs, a jolting, jarring charge in which Orisian saw almost nothing but his horse’s neck pumping up and down before him.
They burst into the heart of Ive Bridge before anticipation or fear had any chance to take root in him. The darkness made everything sudden and bewildering. Figures-men and horses-jostled all about him. Shouts and the clatter of hoofs and ringing of blades echoed from every stone surface, shivering back and forth on the cold still air until they lost all form and became a single raucous accompaniment to the slaughter. And slaughter it was, rather than battle.
Orisian glimpsed Torcaill’s little band of warriors spilling from the door and windows of one of the cottages, rushing on without pause, breaking into another house to slay those asleep-or coming blearily awake-within. Spearmen came stumbling out from a long, low building into the roadway, half-dressed, bare-headed, fumbling with weapons and shields as if still all but blinded by sleep. Someone rode straight into them, not even bothering to swing with his sword, using the weight and strength of his horse to batter them aside. Others, already dismounted, darted in behind and set to work with blades.
There was a fast and fierce efficiency to the bloody work of Taim’s men. The killing went on all around Orisian, and he felt himself strangely divorced from it, like an uncomprehending spectator at some mad and cruel revels. Indistinct forms lurched this way and that all around him. His horse turned itself about in a
tight circle, tossing its head in agitation. He let it carry him, and carry his gaze in a sweeping arc.
He saw Varryn and Ess’yr, improbably perched atop the slate roof of a hut. Their Kyrinin faces seemed bright in the moonlight, almost shining, the blue swirls of their tattoos almost luminous. The arrows that left their bows were so fast that they vanished into the darkness as if snapping out of existence in the very moment they were loosed. And as his horse swung Orisian about, cloud must have taken the moon, for the darkness deepened. He saw a knot of figures running for the bridge: Torcaill, he hoped, going as intended to block any escape. He saw an unmounted horse staggering, something trailing from beneath it, and only after a moment did he realise that it had been disembowelled. He saw two men rolling across the cobblestones, punching or stabbing one another in a frenzy.
Then the moon was unveiled once more, and in its sudden, muted light he saw the point of a spear lancing up towards his face. He instinctively knocked it aside with his sword, turning it across his horse’s shoulders, then jerked his arm back to cut his assailant across the side of the head. It was a woman, he realised as she fell silently and limply away. Another figure veered towards him, another spear coming in at hip height, but then there was a wet thud and the spear was falling aside, the Black Roader pawing at an arrow in his neck. Orisian knocked him down with a single blow. He looked up. Ess’yr was there on the roof, already reaching to her quiver for another arrow. She turned away as soon as their eyes met.
Orisian kicked his horse towards the largest of the buildings. It must, he thought, be a tavern of some sort. His warriors were rushing in as he drew up before it. He heard screams and feet pounding on wooden stairs. There was a crash of splintering wood and a figure tumbled from one of the upper, shuttered windows, blurring down and hitting the ground a few paces from Orisian. He heard the crack of leg bones break in the impact. The man howled, but began to crawl at once, seeking shadows. Orisian dismounted and walked over to him. The man rolled onto his back. His face was contorted by pain, but he had strength and sense enough to curse Orisian in a northern accent so thick the words were almost unintelligible. There was venom in the voice, hatred and bile. Orisian hefted his sword, began to raise it. The man did not shrink away. He bared his teeth through his short dark beard and spat out vitriolic contempt.
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