“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 imag
ine 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.
“And I was the betrayed, not the betrayer,” muttered Aeglyss. “But you, Voice? What do you say? What conclusions have you reached in all your pondering, your delay?”
“I have not decided,” the Voice said carefully. “There has not been enough talk. Not yet. You live, for now, and I…” she stumbled over her words, twitched her head in a kind of sudden uncertainty that no Voice should every display “… there is no decision yet. Until there is a decision, you cannot die. That must be enough.”
Aeglyss laughed. The healing woman started away from him, alarmed at the raucous human sound. He held her there at his side; leaned on her.
“Not enough. No. Never enough. Never…”
He swayed. His eyelids fluttered, his chin sank down towards his chest. The healing woman, freed of some intangible restraint that revealed itself only by its absence, darted away from him, making for the protection of the Voice. Aeglyss staggered a few steps to one side. The Voice watched impassively. The na’kyrim steadied himself. His eyes opened, clear and sharp once more. He lowered himself gingerly down onto the sleeping pallet, and smiled ruefully at the two women.
“It will take time, for me to learn. To control this. I need one thing from you, though. Now, not later, not after any decisions. I will give the White Owls a gift of great strength in time, Voice, but first, you must do this one thing for me: send spear a’ans south. There is a woman, a Heron-born na’kyrim, who will come to me from out of the south. We — I — must have her.”
The Voice was shaking her head. She tried to deny him. His brow furrowed. His mouth tightened. He held out his hands, palms up, towards her.
“You must do this one small thing for me, Voice,” he whispered. Quite soft. Quite calm, but his voice was daggers in her ears, a cold compulsion in her heart. She nodded once and went, shivering, from the lodge, the healing woman close behind, casting fearful, awed glances back over her shoulder.
And in the lodge, Aeglyss the na’kyrim sank back on the pallet of juniper and hazel boughs. He held his arms flat at his sides, a little away from his body. His lips trembled now, in pain or fear or horror. The blood came freely from his wounds, saturating the cloth wrappings about his wrists, falling in viscous drips down amongst the twigs and fronds beneath him.
II
The road ran up from the south towards Kolkyre through flat farmlands. Inland, low hills filled the eastern horizon; to the west there was nothing but foaming waves rumbling on weed-strewn beaches and, far out beyond those breakers, the distant hump-backed mass of Il Anaron.
The High Thane’s army snaked its way up the coast beneath wintry clouds. Aewult, the Haig Bloodheir, rode at the head of the column. The last of his ten thousand warriors were the better part of a day behind him, still straggling out of Donnish even as the Bloodheir came in sight of Kolkyre. His host had become a rough, ill-disciplined thing during the long march from Vaymouth. There had been trouble in Donnish the night before: drunken warriors thieving from the townsfolk, then fighting with the hawkers and pedlars the army sucked to itself as a rotting corpse drew flies. There had been desertions, too. Many of the men in this army had only just returned from war against the rebellious Dargannan-Haig Blood. They had expected rest and revels, not another punishing march and the promise of battle against the Black Road.
The Bloodheir remained ignorant of most of the problems afflicting his army. Those who commanded his companies judged it wiser to manage the difficulties as best they could, rather than to risk the Bloodheir’s ire by reporting them or — still worse — suggesting that he slow the remorseless pace of his advance. They all knew why Aewult drove onward so quickly, with so little regard for the cohesion of his forces. He hated the harsh realities of the campaign: the cold and the wet; the potholed roads; the hours in the saddle; the impoverished, dirty villages through which they passed. The Bloodheir wanted to win his victory and get back to his palace in Vaymouth as a matter of the utmost urgency.
So when the vanguard of the army of the True Bloods swept down the long, gentle slope that led to Kolkyre’s southernmost gate, the Bloodheir himself was in its midst. His heralds blew horns and his bannermen snapped flags back and forth. The giants of his famous Palace Shield, haughty in their shimmering armour, let their horses run on and came hammering down the cobbled road like harbingers of glory.
Orisian oc Lannis-Haig stared up at the soaring spire of Kolkyre’s Tower of Thrones, oblivious of the crowds gathered around him. A blustery wind was driving sheets of grey cloud eastwards off the sea. Seagulls were spinning about the Tower’s summit, playing raucous games with the gale. They cut wild arcs and curves across the sky, screeching at one another as if in celebration. When Kilkry had been first among the Bloods, the Tower of Thrones was the axis around which the world turned. Now its austere grandeur remained but the worldly power of its inhabitants was more circumscribed.
Orisian forced his gaze back to the scene before him. He did not want to be here but in this, as in so much else, he seemed to have far fewer choices than once he did. The Tower stood atop a low, broad mound. A thick wall ran around the base of the mound, studded with gatehouses and small watchtowers. Between wall and Tower, on the slopes, a succession of Kilkry Thanes had created gardens. With Winterbirth gone, there was little by way of colour or greenery to show for all those years of effort, although the signs of meticulous husbandry were apparent. As Orisian looked around he saw not one rotting apple upon the lawns, not one fallen leaf marring the perfection of the flagstone paths.
The crowd now assembled on the grass was as well prepared as the gardens. Every tunic, every dress had been cleaned, every child firmly tutored in how to behave, every blade and shield polished to radiance. Lheanor oc Kilkry-Haig’s entire household stood ready to greet the Haig Bloodheir and his mighty host.
Orisian, though he had insisted upon keeping to the outer fringes of this great welcoming party, still felt absurdly conspicuous. He was wearing borrowed clothes — the few fine vestments he once possessed had burned along with the rest of his life in Castle Kolglas — and they fitted imperfectly. He was flanked by Rothe, his shieldman, and by Taim Narran: two warriors who, Orisian imagined, made him look frail and only half-grown by comparison. None of which would have mattered, were it not for the fact that he felt curious eyes constantly upon him. He was, after all, the youngest Thane any of the Bloods had seen in many years.
“Lheanor looks a weary man,” murmured Taim Narran.
Orisian watched the Kilkry-Haig Thane for a few moments. The old man did indeed have the air of one burdened by years. He had a slight stoop, and all the majesty of his flowing, fur-trimmed robe only accentuated the pallor of his complexion. His long grey hair was limp. He and his wife Ilessa who stood beside him were quiet, still. All around them their attendants and officials held murmured conversations, adjusted their fine clothes, cast expectant glances in the direction of the Haig Bloodheir’s approach. Lheanor and Ilessa did none of those things. They gazed off into the distance. They made no effort to hide the fact that their minds were elsewhere.
Orisian had seen this several times in the past few days. Every so often Lheanor or Ilessa — more often the Thane than his wife — would lose track of the world around them and drift away on some melancholic current of thought. The loss of their son Gerain had sorely wounded them. For Lheanor in particular, Orisian suspected, his son’s death in battle against the Black Road had cut one of the moorings that bound him to the world. Orisian could understand that. He had seen more than enough loss of his own since Winterbirth to know what it could do to the heart, to the spirit.
An exuberant drumbeat rose up from somewhere in the streets. It ebbed and flowed, snatched to and fro on the sea wind. A ripple of anticipation spread through the crowd gathered by the Tower of Thrones.
“Aewult’s Palace Shield,” muttered Taim. “They have the drums specially made.”
“Rumour has it they spend more time practising with their drums than with their swords,” someone said behind Orisian.
He turned to find Roaric nan Kilkry-Haig standing there: Lheanor’s one surviving son, now destined to succeed him as Thane. Orisian had met him once or twice when he was a child, though Roaric had never paid him much heed then. Now, the Kilkry-Haig Bloodheir was a brooding, intense presence. Wherever his eyes fell, they seemed to find fault and to gleam with accusatory anger.
“The Palace Shield certainly haven’t fought any battles in my lifetime,” Taim Narran said.
“They wouldn’t want to mar the shine on their breastplates,” said Roaric. He and Taim had an easy manner in one another’s company. Orisian assumed that it sprang from their recent shared service in the war against Igryn oc Dargannan-Haig, and their shared anger and resentment at what they had seen — and suffered — there. A bitter kind of mutual sympathy seemed to lie at the root of it.
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