Kanin’s flank where she had hit him protested violently as he lifted himself off the cobblestones. He used sword and shield to lever himself up, and forced himself to straighten, ignoring the cramping pain from his ribs. He wanted to look for Aeglyss, but Shraeve was advancing slowly, that disdainful smile still upon her face.
“Come, then,” Kanin murmured. He would welcome it now, to be freed from the chains of sorrow and failed hopes.
“I killed your sister, Thane,” Shraeve said quietly. “Not Aeglyss. Me. It was necessary.”
“Necessary. Necessary.” Kanin repeated the word in incomprehension. It had no meaning to him, his mind could not grasp its shape. It bore no relation he could conceive of to Wain. To her death. Yet it filled him with renewed fire. It burned away the dull fog of surrender.
He threw himself at the Inkallim, and heard as he did so, as if from very far away, Aeglyss crying out, “Don’t kill him.”
She was all that he had imagined she would be. A dark and dancing flame, always and inevitably just out of reach. He fought as he never had before, knowing that there was nothing to preserve his strength, or will, or passion. It all came to this.
Shraeve’s swords wove fluid webs which he could not penetrate. They notched his shield and struck splinters from its face. Her body described patterns that he did not recognise, and could not follow or predict. His blunt attacks lagged always an instant behind, though he poured every last measure of his skill and effort into them. His boots scraped and slipped across the uneven surface of the street; hers flowed. She laid open his cheek. She dented the chain links on his breast.
Kanin had never been so wholly present within the moments of a battle. He had never been so fast or so acutely conscious of each movement, each fractional instant. He had never been a better warrior than he was there, facing Shraeve in the decrepit streets of the shattered city, beneath broken towers. And it was not enough. From the first ringing touch of their contending blades, he had understood that it would not be enough.
He cut at her hip. Shraeve blocked the blow. As he pulled his sword arm back to gather the distance for another attempt, he found the point of her second sword pursuing it, lancing diagonally between the two of them towards his elbow. He straightened that retreating arm out and twisted his shoulder back to let Shraeve’s lunge take her across him. She turned as she went, showing her back to him. He began to bring his shield sweeping up and around, aiming its rim at the side of her head. A sudden dip and surge and Shraeve was rising, still turning, in the air; moving no longer across him but towards him. Her trailing arm was snapping round. Kanin saw it, read its path, and could do nothing to prevent it.
A dark blur, as of a rock rushing down at him, and the pommel of her sword hit his cheekbone, just in front of his ear. He felt his shield strike Shraeve, but she rolled over it, like an acrobat playing games at a feast. The impact had blinded him. Pain flashed through his skull, as bright and loud as summer lightning. There was a ringing whine in his ears. His legs softened, the knee joints quaking and yawing as he staggered, sinking towards the cobblestones.
Another stunning blow, in the centre of his chest, deadening him. He plunged backwards, blind and deaf. His body was nothing but pain and crushing pressure. He hit a wall or perhaps the ground, the back of his head cracking against stone, and felt consciousness faltering. The beat of his heart slowed and slowed.
“Don’t kill him,” he heard the na’kyrim saying again as he receded.
As soon as the bolt had leaped from her crossbow, Eska was gone. She ducked and scrambled on all fours away from the waist-high stump of wall that had concealed her. Behind her, shouts, pursuit. She did not need to look. Shraeve’s ravens-perhaps even Shraeve herself-would be pouring through this labyrinthine rubble in moments. If she had permitted herself the luxury of such feelings, that might have given Eska a certain pleasure. She would, in many ways, welcome the testing of her skills against their cruder abilities. The Battle might benefit from a lesson in humility.
Now, though, it was escape that dominated her thoughts. She had glimpsed, down the path her quarrel had carved through the air towards the na’kyrim’s chest, the wood-wight’s first reflexive movement. He had reacted with an immediacy she would not have thought possible. This was a lesson for her; one she would remember, should she ever be required to hunt his kind. She could not be certain, for certainty would have demanded hesitation, but she guessed that he might even have been sufficiently fast to save the halfbreed. Her sole concern now was to keep herself alive long enough to find out, and if necessary to rectify her failure.
She hauled herself, snake-like, through a hole at the base of a wall. Frost or flood had broken out just enough stones to permit her passage. In the unroofed chamber beyond, the mud was deep. It coated her face and stomach as she slithered into it and sprang upright. There were three corpses here, lying as if asleep against piles of fallen building blocks, wrapped in blankets. They had been alive when she first came this way. Sick, probably dying, but alive. She had seen many such pathetic groupings as she picked her way through Kan Avor’s dismal maze. Half the people of the city seemed to be in the grip of one affliction or another. The febrile suffering of these three in particular, she had chosen to end. It would have been intolerable to her to leave them there alive-even if only barely-across her chosen escape route. She paused only long enough to sling her crossbow across her back, roll one of the bodies aside and retrieve her spear from where she had left it, hidden beneath that dead flesh.
She vaulted through what had once been a window, and splashed into the puddle of filthy water beyond. The ruins stretched out before her, the leaning, slumping carcasses of countless houses. She ran into that thicket of stone, more concerned with speed now than concealment. The Battle would come quickly, as was their wont. They seldom submitted themselves to the restraint of subtlety.
It would have been easier had she not been left alone by the unpredictable tumult of Kan Avor. One of her fellow Inkallim she had heard die, overrun by the raving mob that he led away from her. The other had simply disappeared as if the city had opened and folded itself about him.
Even now, the sounds of war hung over Kan Avor like a fell miasma. The fire Kanin oc Horin-Gyre had lit had taken on a life of its own, and Eska could feel for herself the creeping, persuasive seductions of its sole imperative. Its hunger for death and violence gnawed at the edges of her mind, trying to make her its own. There would be few save the dead left here by nightfall.
Against the background murmur of slaughter, she caught a nearer sound: splashing footfalls behind her, the rattle of scabbards on belts. Too close to be ignored. It was not, then, to be easy. Still, she had one ally left to her. She turned in a narrow passageway floored with great square paving stones. The remnant walls that bounded it were high enough and narrow enough to make it ill-suited to swordplay; a spear, though, would work well. As she stood there, settling into a ready stance, she whistled: a long, keening note.
The first of the ravens appeared at the end of the passage, shouted at the sight of her, and came straight at her. He was a big man, and broad. Behind him, she glimpsed one, two more, but his dark mass blocked her sight of them as he closed on her. She read his intent in his eyes and his pace: he would impale himself upon her spear, and keep it there, in his body, while his companions rushed over him to cut her down. Typical of the Battle. And likely to undo her, Eska judged. She whistled again, still louder.
The Battle Inkallim was almost on her. She dipped into a crouch, bracing herself. The force of his charge onto her spear shook down through its shaft into her hands. She resisted only enough to be certain that mortal damage was done, and to hear the roaring, gasping bursting of the air out from his lungs, and then she dropped the spear, turned and ran.
She could hear them coming after her, stamping over their dying fellow. But she could hear something else now, ahead of her rather than behind, and it was a sound that might yet save her.
The hou
nd came into the narrow gullet of constricting rubble at a pounding gallop, teeth already bared in a spittle-ornamented snarl, its massive shoulders pumping, its back flexing as it strained for every fragment of speed its frame could give. It came with fury, for that was what her call had demanded of it. This was the last of them-the others had died clearing her path in through the outskirts-and it was the best, for she had chosen to preserve it for just such a moment as this.
She hurdled the beast as it bounded towards her, and it flowed beneath her without faltering. It had eyes only for those following in her wake. She landed and spun on her heels, already shrugging the crossbow free from her back. She watched the great dog fling itself up at the throat of the leading Inkallim, even as her hands dragged back the bow’s string, as her fingers went to the quiver of bolts at her belt and plucked one out. Dog and raven went down, thrashing in a confusion of limbs. They battered themselves, both of them, against the stonework, against the ground. The kicking of the Inkallim’s legs, and the thick, desperate cries, told her the hound’s teeth had found a grip.
The second of the ravens could not pass the flailing combatants. He hacked at them instead, raining ferocious indiscriminate blows down. His blade opened the dog’s haunch, broke its hip, skinned its shoulder, and still it fought and shook its massive head, tearing at flesh. The woman beneath it had stopped struggling. The last of the Inkallim set both hands on the hilt of his sword and raised it before him, point down. He plunged it into the hound’s body, just behind its neck, and the animal gave a gurgling whimper and went limp.
The man looked up then, sword still buried deep in the dog, and his eyes met Eska’s. She was sighting down the line of the quarrel. She saw his recognition of his fate. He tensed to withdraw his blade. She freed the bolt, and it was in his chest, and he fell silently back. His sword stood there, erect. It had gone through the dog and into the dead woman beneath.
IV
The cottage smelled of abandonment. The outside, the winter, had seeped into its fabric, softened it and made it no longer habitation but incipient ruin. There were browned leaves on the floor, blown in through open windows. Dark stains tracked the invasive waters that had found their way in through an unmended roof. It was cold and empty in the way only a place that had long lacked a fire in its hearth, and voices around its table, could be.
Orisian ran his fingers over the carved bowls that were still neatly stacked on a shelf and the bottles draped with cobwebs. The detritus of lives now lost or driven off. There were no bodies, at least. Orisian could remember all too clearly another woodsman’s cottage, on the slopes of the Car Criagar, where a good deal of blood had been spilled. That place had smelled much worse.
Ess’yr lay on a low, hard bed. Orisian saw in her something entirely new: a fragile vulnerability. Pangs of a powerful emotion swept through him, but it was no simple thing. He felt it acutely, but could not fully understand it. Guilt, longing, fear. All those things and perhaps more.
“Can I get you something?” he asked softly, not wanting to rouse K’rina from her torpor on the other side of the room. “Water? Food?”
“Nothing,” Ess’yr whispered.
He sat on the edge of the bed; felt the lightest of contact between the small of his back and her thigh. She appeared to be on the brink of sleep or unconsciousness. Her eyes, as she looked up into his face, would lose their focus now and again, and drift, then return to him and be sharp and clear once more. Even her intricate tattoos, the token of the lives she had taken, seemed to have lost some of their colour and faded a little into the pallor of her skin.
“You would never have been here if you had not found me that night,” Orisian said. “Winterbirth.”
He could see in her eyes that she heard him, and understood him, but she said nothing. If she felt pain, she did not show it. Now, as ever, she drew upon reserves of calm and composure he had seen in no one else, calm that exceeded the capacity of the world to assail it. It was, he suddenly realised, something precious beyond limit to him: that there should be someone near at hand who had within them that imperturbable strength, that resilient self-possession and balance. Someone, he thought, who had found that core of grace and peace and persistence that he had unknowingly been seeking himself since the Heart Fever stole the better part of his life away.
Inurian had had it in some measure. Ess’yr had it in abundance. Orisian looked at her and saw… he saw another world, another life. In those sculpted features and their unutterable grace he saw a world that should have been. One in which there had been no deaths, no Heart Fever even; in which there was still laughter, and companionship, and a lightness of spirit. He was not sure whether he was a part of that world he glimpsed. He did not know whether, in it, he would have found her. He did not even know whether what he saw came from within her, or within him, or from somewhere else entirely. But it was, despite that, utterly beautiful to him. It was filled with light, and that light shone in her alabaster skin, and in her eyes, and in her fine, frail lips.
He reached out carefully, and touched her. As he had imagined doing so often. He laid his fingertips on the curve of her chin, and felt a gossamer strand of her gleaming hair brush the back of his hand. Through his fingers he felt her warmth, and it seemed to him that that was a part of the light too. He leaned towards her, sinking as if towards a dream.
And her hand was on his chest, gentle but firm. The slightest roll of her head took her skin away from his fingers. He felt the pressure of her hand on his breastbone. It was not urgent, not hard, but it was calmly insistent. She slowly pushed him back and lifted his face away from hers.
“No,” she said, soft as the movement of a feather, and the light receded. What he had seen, that place, that possibility he had caught a distant sight of, faded. He felt alone and reduced. But he nodded, just once.
Ess’yr let her arm fall back to her side. She closed her eyes. Orisian rose from the bed and walked away. He could remember the light, just. He could remember how it had made him feel. But not what it contained. Not precisely what it was that might have been.
Outside the cottage he found a colourless world, desolate. The stumps of felled trees. The cold prickle of drizzle on the air. A muffled, sluggish silence.
Yvane was sitting on a stump not far away. She was picking dried berries from a clay pot she must have found somewhere inside, placing them one by one into her mouth. She watched Orisian as he emerged and stood blinking up at the featureless clouds. He turned away from her. There was a path beaten into the grass. He followed it to the side of a tiny stream running in a narrow cut between concealing clumps of grass and rushes. He knelt down and scooped searingly cold water over his face. It ran from his chin and bubbled on his lips as he breathed through it.
He sat there and looked back towards the cabin. It looked lifeless, even now. It looked as though it belonged to the brooding forest that waited just a little way up the slope. Yvane was walking towards him, still eating those berries as she came. He ignored her, and stared at the timber walls, the slanting roof, the collapsed woodshed, as if the cottage and its contents were a mystery he might unravel by examination; as if it held a secret truth. But his mind was empty. For the first time in days-weeks-there was a hollow silence in him. Nothing.
“She will probably live, if the wound stays clean,” Yvane said, looking down at him. “If she’s tended.”
He nodded but said nothing. The na’kyrim offered him the little pot and the last of the wizened fruits it contained. He waved it away.
“If Varryn finds the medicines he’s out looking for now,” Yvane added. “It’s not the best of seasons for it — ”
“She will live,” Orisian interrupted her.
Yvane sniffed. “Probably.” She lifted the pot and tipped its contents into her mouth.
“She will,” Orisian said.
Yvane bent and raised a handful of water to her lips.
“I hope you’re right,” she said, after she had swallowed it down.
Movement at the door of the cottage drew Orisian’s attention. K’rina came hesitantly out into the damp, stumbling, her arms folded across her chest. She made her way northwards over the dark grass. Yvane saw Orisian was looking that way, and turned to follow his gaze. She sighed.
“I’ll…” the na’kyrim began, but Orisian shook his head.
“No need. See?”
Taim and one of the warriors were coming, returning from their foray out into the fogs and rains of the valley. They trudged steadily and slowly up towards the cabin, adjusting their path without a break in stride to intercept K’rina’s weaving course. Orisian and Yvane watched the two burly men close on the oblivious na’kyrim and gather her up, turn her about and ease her back towards the bed she had risen from. They were gentle, as if they shepherded a sick child, or a simple one.
“Before we left Highfast, I spoke with Eshenna about K’rina,” Yvane said.
Orisian stood up. The movement dizzied him.
“She was a kind and gentle woman, from the sound if it,” Yvane went on. “Too kind and gentle, perhaps. She cared for Aeglyss, back there in Dyrkyrnon, when no one else would.”
“Don’t, Yvane.”
“No, you should hear this. Why not? She made good fish traps, apparently. And knew the best places to put them. She caught a lot of fish. She used to sing to the children. Old Huanin songs. Her parents were — ”
“Yvane…”
“Why don’t you want to know?”
Orisian could have left her, walked away from her and taken refuge in the cottage. But something in him would not permit that. Something chose to face her. They were both quite calm. For once, there was not the slightest trace of argument between them.
“Because it’s not knowledge I can do anything with,” he said to her.
“Her parents… Ah, I can’t remember their names. Eshenna told me, but it’s so hard to keep things clear now.” Yvane rubbed her cheek wearily. “But it doesn’t matter. The point is that she had parents, they gave her life. She was a child once, and grew, and lived and thought and hoped and wanted. All of that wasn’t for this. Not be made into… this. To be used.”
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