Igryn was grimacing once more, his lips straining slowly back to reveal clenched teeth. At the mention of the High Thane, a snarl had begun to form at the corner of his mouth, and was poised there still, half-born.
“In any case,” Torquentine continued, carefully burying his unease beneath a casual tone, “this man of whom I speak, he was, as it turned out, of unusual descent: father a Tal Dyreen, mother from the Free Coast. He’d been living a rat’s life in and around Vaymouth for years, but it did not teach him much love or respect for the Haig Blood in whose house-whose lands-he was a guest. Indeed, he made that lack of affection for his hosts abundantly clear, at tedious length, one night in a tavern down by the dockyards. I listened as long as I could, but in time I felt compelled to challenge his views. I did so with a knife, and he defended them similarly. In due course, the matter was resolved in my favour. It cost me an eye, but it cost him his life, so I have always been mindful that I paid much the lower price that night.”
Torquentine fluttered his bloated fingers in Magrayn’s direction. She pulled a clean, fresh cloth free from her waistband and laid it across his palm. He carefully mopped sweat from his cheeks and brow. So many breathing bodies within this confined space had made it moist and warm.
“Are you still listening, Thane?” he asked.
Igryn was hunching forward once more. He had begun to work his jaw as if chewing some resistant matter. Strands of his hair were hanging down across the bandage that covered his eye sockets.
“Straighten him up, would you?” Torquentine muttered to his men, who were staring distastefully at the Thane. One of them planted a broad hand firmly on Igryn’s shoulder and pushed him, a little more roughly than was necessary, erect. Igryn’s head cracked against the stonework, but he did not seem to notice.
“I hear an idiot dribbling nonsense. Is that you talking?” Igryn ground his chin into the notch between neck and shoulder. “My beard itches.”
“If you’ve brought fleas into my home, I’ll be sorely disappointed,” Torquentine muttered. “But to return to my point. I was a different man in those days, you understand. And not only in my possession of two eyes. I was somewhat… more modestly proportioned, shall we say? More germanely, I was somewhat hotter of temper and fiercer in my adherence to the Blood of my birth and upbringing. But-and this is the important part, Thane, so I hope you are listening-though the fires of my loyal ardour may have been damped down a little by the years, they are far from extinguished.
“I am a part of my Blood. A part many might wish to excise, I suppose, but a part nevertheless. I belong. And I believe, in my deeply buried heart, that the Bloods are a boon to this world. I believe that without them, and without my Blood in particular, we would sink back into the self-mutilation that has so often afflicted us as a people, as a race. As a godless world. You will therefore understand, Thane, that it troubles me greatly to see the Haig Blood convulsed, as it is now, by a multitude of difficulties.”
“You’ll find no sympathy in me,” Igryn sneered. He turned his blind head towards Torquentine. The smile upon his bruised and misused face was ugly. Mad. “I’d like nothing better than to eat your Thane’s warm heart out of the bowl of his broken chest.”
“Unfortunately, I do not doubt the sincerity of your desire in that regard. And therein lies my dilemma, for I find myself at a loss to know what to do with you. Quite aside from my instinctive wish to do no more harm than is strictly necessary to the Blood of my birth, change is something I find distinctly undesirable at the best of times. I would go so far as to say, in fact, that I am thoroughly averse to it, for reasons both temperamental and professional. And there is altogether too much of it in the air at the moment. Wanton, egregious change for no better reason than that everyone seems to have forgotten the limits of appropriate behaviour. Do you know who commissioned me to bring about your removal from the custody of Gryvan’s men, Thane?”
“No,” hissed Igryn through gritted teeth. “And I don’t care.”
“How ungrateful of you. What would you do if I were to return you to your own lands?”
“Make you rich. Raise an army. Avenge myself upon your Blood and render as many of your women sonless, brotherless and husbandless as I could.”
Torquentine emitted a curtailed, stifled laugh. He glanced over to Magrayn. She was as impassive, as quietly observant as ever.
“Surely he would have been dead long ago, were he as guilelessly stupid as he appears?” he said to her.
Magrayn frowned. It was an expression that made the exposed, corrupted flesh of her rotted face stir in interesting ways.
“He is sick,” she suggested. “Deranged.”
“Quite possibly,” Torquentine said. “I have not left this chamber for some time, Thane, yet I have a thousand eyes, a thousand ears, spread all through this city, all through the lands of this Blood, and others. I see, and I hear, everything. All of that knowledge flows back to this chamber, and pools here in me. And what do I glean from it? What do I discern of the shape of the world?”
He waited for a response from Igryn, but the Thane was silent, his head turning very slowly, very slightly, from side to side.
“I see the Crafts and the Moon Palace edging towards outright war,” Torquentine continued. “I see your own lands rent by unrest. Not mere banditry but utter lawlessness, and rumours of Dornach ships already scouting your shores with half a mind to land an army by all accounts. I see the Black Road seething across the borders of the Ayth Blood like a swarm of wolves, consuming and destroying. I see murderous mobs rampaging in the streets above us here, battling the Guard. Everywhere I see unreason and savagery and disintegration. It is as if every desire, every ambition now runs unbridled. The fetters of restraint have been cast off by all those upon whom they served a most valuable purpose.”
He sighed. Even as he spoke, he could feel the creeping anxiety that had nested, of late, in his chest. He was a man who craved, who needed, order and control and organisation. Everything, in fact, that the world now seemed determined to slough like some redundant skin.
“And all of it growing worse. Each part of it feeding off the rest, each brutality precipitating another, each stupidity exceeding the one that went before. I have even crept my eyes and my ears into the very house of the man who decided you should be free, Thane. I watch him, I eavesdrop upon him. And I mislike what I see and what I hear. Things have changed in strange and unreadable ways. In that house and everywhere. This puts me in a sorely testing position.”
Igryn laughed. A cackle, like a crow.
“I will eat his heart,” the Thane of the Dargannan Blood murmured.
Torquentine raised his eyebrows and scratched disconsolately at his folded throat.
“As you say, Magrayn: sick. He surrenders himself all too willingly, I think, to the malady that besets the whole world. Ah well. As I was about to explain, I find myself unwilling to comply with my instructions. Returning him to his homeland would only feed a fire that already rages beyond control. I have no wish to play the part of midwife at the birthing of a world given over to unreason and chaos. I just cannot bring myself to do it.”
“Shall I return him to the storeroom?” Magrayn asked.
“Indeed. And make sure there’s nothing there he can hurt himself with. Until I decide what to do with him, it’s rather important he stays alive.”
The two guards unceremoniously hooked their hands under Igryn’s armpits and hoisted him up from the bench. He did not resist, but seemed unable to support his own weight. His legs buckled at the knee and he hung like an ancient, infirm greybeard propped up on a fence.
“Seems like nothing much, doesn’t he?” Torquentine reflected sadly. “Yet because of him, I invite the wrath of the Shadowhand. I all but betroth myself to catastrophe. Constantly surprising, the way things turn out, isn’t it? And I never took much pleasure in surprises.”
II
Yvane was trembling, Orisian realised. They had paused beside a pool into
which the waters of a stream plunged from a low cliff. Moss and ferns festooned the rock face, a miniature, verdant abundance still resplendent in the green that winter had stolen from the rest of the forest. These were no mighty falls. The column of water that churned down into the pool was slight by comparison with that Orisian had seen at Sarn’s Leap, long ago. Still the sound, the cold mist that drifted over his face, was enough to make him think of Inurian. Enough to prickle his heart with needles of guilt and shame. They had left the na’kyrim there alone, and he had died. He had died on his own. What a fearful, awful thing that seemed to Orisian now: that a man so gentle and so deserving of better, had died alone, amongst enemies.
Focusing his attention upon Yvane gave him a handhold with which to resist the tug of those lacerating memories. She sat crosslegged beside K’rina, who was curled into a ball, arms folded about her knees. As Orisian watched, Yvane held out one of her hands before her, the fingers spread. She stared at it. Even from a few paces away, Orisian could see that it shook. Yvane frowned in concentration. She was trying to still her hand, Orisian realised. She failed, and let it fall, palsied, into her lap.
“Is it bad?” he asked quietly.
“I can smell wolfenkind,” she replied. Her voice was somehow different. It had an attenuated fragility to it that was new. “The memory of them. I can hear them running through a forest far older than this one. It sounds like death.”
“It’s not long now,” Orisian said. “Another few days, that’s all. Then we can — ”
“What?” said Yvane sharply, glaring at him. “You really think it will be that easy? What is it you think is going to happen?”
Orisian stared blankly at her. She was changing, he thought. Bit by bit, she was becoming someone he did not know. Perhaps they all were.
“It won’t be easy for her,” Yvane muttered, looking down at K’rina. The other na’kyrim appeared entirely at peace, hugging herself into a safe, quiet ball.
Splashing behind him distracted Orisian. He twisted around. The warriors were along the edge of the pool into which the falls tumbled. Some were drinking its clear waters, others soaking tired and blistered feet. One had waded out, barefoot, into the middle of the pool. He stood there, unsteady on hidden rocks, arms outstretched as the spray from the waterfall threw shifting, tenuous veils across him. He was, Orisian saw to his alarm, weeping. He made no sound yet his face was contorted with grief, his cheeks bunched in anguish.
“Eagan, get out of there,” Taim Narran was saying.
The warrior gave no sign of having heard the command. He drew his arms slowly in, closed his hands over his face. He was shaken by silent sobs.
“You’ll not be fit for walking if you don’t come out of there,” Taim said, more sternly now. He was not angry yet, but there was urgency there.
Orisian rose to his feet. Eagan was entirely unresponsive to his Captain’s voice. Orisian could feel fear settling itself over him like a cape, and he did not know why. A flicker of movement drew his eyes up to the top of the waterfall. Varryn was there, tall against the pale sky. He and Ess’yr had been-as they always were now-scouting ahead, roving like hunting dogs through the forest. Now he stared down with the piercing, attentive eyes of a hawk. Even as Orisian watched, the Kyrinin set down his spear and unslung his bow from his back.
“Wait…” Orisian said, but he said it softly, and the words were drowned out as Eagan took a few lurching, splashing steps back towards the edge of the pool.
The warrior’s hands fell away from his face. With one, he began to tug helplessly at the thongs that bound the neck of his jerkin; with the other he reached out to Taim. No more tears fell, but still his expression was one of despairing horror.
“I can’t…” he gasped out.
He sounded very young to Orisian. He sounded like a distraught, helpless child.
“Get out of there,” Taim said.
He held out a hand. Eagan locked his grasp about Taim’s wrist and hauled violently, dragging him instantly face forward into the water. Taim vanished below the surface with a booming, hollow splash. Eagan surged up onto the bank and staggered back the way they had come. His sodden leggings spilled clouds of droplets. His naked feet, bleached by the cold of the stream, slithered on the wet grass.
“Wait,” Orisian shouted, moving to intercept Eagan.
Two of the other warriors took hold of their companion, grabbing handfuls of his collar and sleeves. He howled and threw one off. He struck the other on the cheekbone with the heel of his hand, and the man stumbled back.
“I can’t,” Eagan cried. “We can’t!”
Orisian stepped in front of him and stretched out his arms to block Eagan’s path.
“It’s all right,” Orisian said, the stupidity, the inadequacy of the words ringing in his ears.
His eyes met Eagan’s, and he knew in that instant that the man was lost. That something in him had given way. He saw something else there, in those wide and desperate eyes, and it set his hand moving towards the hilt of his sword before his mind recognised it. Beyond Eagan, Taim was rising, water pouring from him.
“No,” said Orisian as his sword began to slide from its scabbard.
Eagan’s own blade was slipping free as he staggered towards his Thane, as heavy and inevitable as a falling tree. There was a thud, and a spasm of distraction twitched across Eagan’s face. The feathers of an arrow trembled above his shoulder. The shaft had come in steeply, from the top of the waterfall, to lance down into his back. It was not enough to stop him, though it gave Orisian time to get his sword free and raise it to block Eagan’s ragged swing.
Orisian staggered back.
“Eagan!” another of the men shouted as he came up behind. Confusion and anger and shock writhed together in that single word.
Eagan spun around, and his sword spun with him. It took his comrade high on the side of the face, and the man fell leadenly back, his eyes wide in surprise as the blade streaked his blood across the air. Another arrow darted down and found its target, but Eagan did not fall.
He turned back towards Orisian, raising his sword above his head as if to bring it bludgeoning down. He gave out a strained keening, a grief-stricken, doomed wail. Orisian drove the point of his sword up into his stomach, under his ribs. Eagan was struck abruptly dumb. He dropped his own weapon and slumped sideways.
Orisian stared down at him, listening to his shallow, faltering breaths. Eagan’s eyes were open. They stared at the grass into which his head was pressed. The spaces between his breaths grew longer and longer.
Taim came striding up from the pool, hair pasted across his forehead, water still falling from his chin and the cuffs of his jerkin.
“Stand back, sire,” he said to Orisian.
Taim kicked Eagan’s sword away and knelt to look into the man’s face.
“He’s finished,” Orisian said bleakly.
Taim only nodded as he rose to his feet once more. Eagan was not breathing any more. Nor was the man he had struck with his sword. The others were all standing motionless, with the waterfall splattering away behind them, staring either at the dead men or at Orisian. In every eye that was upon him Orisian detected-or thought he detected-accusation. He looked up to the head of the falls. Varryn was still there, silhouetted, unstringing his bow. Orisian nodded once towards the Kyrinin warrior. Varryn simply turned away and disappeared from sight.
“Not long now,” Orisian whispered to no one but himself. “Please.”
The dead White Owls were strewn all along the eastern flank of a long, low, forested ridge. The trees were sparse along the crest of the ridge, and many of the corpses lay exposed to the sky. They were not alone. Ravens spiralled overhead, croaking in protest at this interruption to their feasting. As Orisian trod carefully between the bodies, a buzzard swept heavily up from a nearby tree and glided away over the canopy. The thin snow that persisted on this higher ground was patterned with innumerable tracks: the prints of the men and women and children who had die
d here intermingled with those of their killers, overlaid by the marks of the eaters of the dead. Several of the corpses had been opened or gnawed. Fox and crow and bear had been busy.
Orisian did not know what to think. He had never seen so many Kyrinin dead. Although these were notionally his enemies, and their clan had taken Rothe’s life and made war upon Ess’yr’s people, he could not help but lament the transformation of so much grace and power into sanguine ugliness. Without life to animate them, the bodies looked ungainly. Pathetic almost, with their disordered, frozen clothes, their scattered bundles of belongings. He could make no connection between these sad shells and the Kyrinin he had seen, and known, and fought in the weeks since Winterbirth.
Yvane and K’rina lingered further up the slope. The bulbous bare rocks almost hid them from sight. Taim and his men were moving amongst the bodies, each following a solitary, silent path from corpse to corpse. Looking for what? Orisian wondered. There was no life here, not even its faintest residue. Taking the measure of death, perhaps. Feeling its texture, learning afresh its look.
Ess’yr and Varryn were coming up towards him, emerging from the deeper shadows down there in the thick forest, where the dead and the tree trunks and the dark ground merged into uniform gloom. Varryn’s expression filled Orisian with an imprecise, all-encompassing regret. The Kyrinin was not smiling, but his eyes gleamed with restrained excitement.
“It is good,” Varryn said as they drew near.
“No,” Orisian said. “No, it’s not.”
Ess’yr held out the bloodied stub of an arrow. It had been broken off halfway along the shaft.
“White Owl,” she said. Orisian was glad not to hear her brother’s eagerness reflected in her. But nor did he hear any trace of sorrow, any hint of distress at this slaughter.
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