Kanin had been at the forefront of the slaughter, cutting his way up to the base of the leaning watchtower, with his Shield about him and a hundred or more Tarbains howling up behind. It had been unwise, perhaps, with his knee still unreliable and sore, but he had needed that violence and danger. Several of the enemy had taken refuge in the little tower, and barricaded it against him. He burned them out, and those that did not emerge to die on the waiting blades and spears were choked by the smoke or consumed by the flames. The charred tower now had a drunken angle that suggested its life was almost done.
Much of the army had pressed on, and was further along the coast pursuing, or destroying, the scattered warriors of the True Bloods who made repeated, if half-hearted, attempts to block the road. Kanin, spent and tired, had let it rush on without him. He and his weary company remained in Hommen, stripping it of every supply it could offer. The forces under his command were larger now than they had been before the battle. Many commonfolk of his Blood had emerged from the ranks of the greater host, especially after his reckless display during the fighting. He had armed them as best he could; given them captains and at least a semblance of discipline.
Kanin could not fully explain, even to himself, his reluctance to follow the main body of the army in its rush onwards. When asked, he pointed at his knee and said it needed time to heal, which was at least partly true. It would have been more wholly true to admit that there was something he found untrustworthy in the mad fervour that had taken hold of almost everyone. It was not just a result of the domination that the Inkallim had achieved over the multitude; there was a kind of frenzy that seemed to him to have taken root of its own accord, and was now feeding on itself. He could catch hints of it in his own black moods and his hunger — sated, for now at least — for bloodshed.
There was another strand to Kanin’s reluctance that he shied away from examining too closely. Each stride he made down this long road — so long that he knew if he followed it far enough it could carry him to the gates of Vaymouth, and beyond — each stride took him further from Wain, and that felt, at some basic, instinctive level, wrong. Whatever delusion she had slipped into, whatever strange hold she had granted the na’kyrim over her, she remained the most important thing in Kanin’s life. They had begun this war together, and no matter what triumphs might lie ahead down the coast road, he became more certain with every passing day that they could only be hollow and meaningless for him without Wain at his side.
So Kanin lingered, and slept in a fisherman’s house on the quayside, where he could breathe the cold sea air. Snows fell. Hoar frosts cloaked the quay. Ice lay in sheets on the paths. In the north, he realised, up on the furthest coasts, in the inlets and bays, the sea would be frozen now: great flat plains of ice over which snow like dust would spin and twirl in the biting wind. The thought made him long, for the first time since he had left Castle Hakkan, to be marching home. There were others who could fight this war that his father had sired, through him and Wain. He was Thane now. He had a Blood to lead, lands to secure. A widowed mother to greet.
They were thoughts ill-suited to one supposedly faithful, above all things, to the creed. The Black Road was on the brink of its greatest victories in centuries. It was a time when the faithful should be exultant, eager for further glories, determined to test fate’s sympathies to their utmost limits. But Kanin did not feel these things. Not any more. It was failure — cowardice, perhaps — but all he truly wanted was to turn back, gather his sister into his company once more, and march away over the Vale of Stones and back to Castle Hakkan. He hung there, in Hommen, suspended; unable to bring himself to march on, unable to commit himself to retreat.
Bands of warriors and stragglers, and beggars and the wounded, moved back and forth up the road like shoals of fish caught in powerful tides. Much of the movement seemed aimless. There were occasional bursts of violence: small slaughters, petty murders. One day, Temegrin the Eagle came pounding up the coast at the head of a column, thundering through the snowbound village in a cloud of steaming breath. Kanin watched him pass with little interest.
Kanin gathered about himself a makeshift household of cooks and servants, grooms and messengers. He had thirty or more women and old men brought down from Glasbridge — slaves — and set them to work gathering food, filling Hommen’s barns with stores against the deepening winter. He was standing on the wooden quay, watching some of those sullen Lannis labourers casting weighted nets out along the shore when Igris brought a filthy, sickly-looking woman before him.
The shieldman had a firm grip on the collar of the woman’s worn hide jacket, holding her up so that she had to walk on the balls of her feet. She appeared to be terrified. As Kanin regarded her, her eyes widened and she struggled half-heartedly.
“Tell him,” Igris hissed. “Repeat what you said to me.”
Kanin raised his eyebrows expectantly.
The woman groaned and tried to look away. Igris shook her, like a huge doll. She was limp and defeated.
“Tell him!” the shieldman shouted.
“What is it?” Kanin asked quietly.
“I heard — I heard,” the woman stammered. She was Wyn-Gyre, Kanin thought, by her accent. She hesitated, and he saw that she was weeping. Then it came out in a torrent: “Dead, sire. Dead in Kan Avor. Temegrin the Eagle and… and your sister. Both dead. It’s become a mad place. But they’re dead…”
Kanin had hold of her shoulders then, and she wailed at his crushing hands. He took her from Igris, lifted her bodily from the quay and held her there in front of him. He could see, in inexplicable detail, every stain and smear of grime on her face, every lash aound her eyes, every crease in her trembling lips.
“Wain?” he asked.
“Dead,” cried the woman, flinging the word out as if to rid herself of it.
Kanin could not move. His limbs were stone. He stared into those frantic eyes and did not understand what he saw there, or what he heard.
“Sire…” someone — Igris? — said.
The sound freed Kanin. He turned and took one pace, carrying the woman by her shoulders. She hung slack. A slab of meat in his iron grip. But she was light, lighter than flesh; just skin. He threw her. She tumbled, screaming, out and away, down to crash into the thick, dark water. The sea parted and vomited up a plume of spray and closed, rocking, over her.
“Find out if it’s true,” Kanin said to Igris as he watched the pale form struggling to regain the surface. He could see her mouth opening and closing, her frail hands clawing at the water.
“It may be,” the shieldman murmured. “Others came with her. They told the same tale.”
“Find out,” Kanin repeated, the words dead on the air as they fell from his lips.
Igris turned and went, crunching up the snowy track. The woman’s head broke the surface. She gasped and flailed about. Her face was white now, corpse-pale. Kanin looked along the shore. The fisherfolk were standing still, watching, their nets in their hands. When his gaze touched them, they shook themselves and turned away and cast their nets once more. Down below the quay, the woman was crying for help. He could hear her fingernails on one of the stanchions.
“Aeglyss,” Kanin whispered.
CHAPTER 5
Thane
What, then, is a Thane? Some will tell you that a Thane is a proud or greedy man who makes himself a lord over others the better to satisfy his basest hungers. I tell you, my beloved son, that this is not so. Rather, a Thane is a servant. He serves his people, and all people, by standing between them and the darkness.
There is an impulse in this world, and in we its peoples, towards destruction and decay. Ungoverned, we will always, sooner or later, tear down whatever we have built, unlearn whatever we have learned. If there are to be no Gods to give us order, we must impose order upon ourselves lest we sink for ever into a chaos of cruelty and suffering. Such was the darkness we fell into at the departure of the Gods. The Three Kingships lit our way out of that shadow, but only for a
time. The War of the Tainted, the Storm Years that came after it: the ruin of that thin pretence that we were anything more than the corrupt inhabitants of a failed world.
Now we have made the Bloods, and we have made Thanes, and we do not yet know whether this will be more than another thin pretence. You will be Thane after me, dear son. You will be heir to whatever I build. For good or ill, you must take what I pass on and shape it and hand it on yourself to those who come after. Such is the burden of Thanes: to take what is bequeathed to them by the past and make of it the present; to hold the present in their hands and shape from it a future for their heirs.
Some may love you, but others will curse you and defame you and be jealous of you. Pay no heed to those who berate you. Pity them, rather, for the failure of their memories, their wilful ignorance of the fallibilities, the vast imperfections, at the root of our kind. Take comfort that you fulfil a noble duty. There must be laws, and Thanes, and order. They are our only armour against our own malignant instincts.
from To My Son and His Sons Thereafter by Kulkain oc Kilkry
I
Orisian left a trail of dead men behind him on the journey out of the Veiled Woods. One of those corpses weighed more heavily upon him than all the others combined, but each added its small burden. The White Owls harried them, like wolves at the heels of a dying stag, coming close enough to snap and wound, but never committing to a final, fatal struggle. Men died with arrows in their back, or with their throats cut while they stood watch in darkness.
Torcaill did his best to keep the battered company moving, resting only briefly, never straying out of one another’s sight. Orisian’s respect for the man grew. He was tireless, resolute. But for all his efforts, everyone knew that it was upon Ess’yr and Varryn that their best hopes of survival rested. The two Kyrinin ranged through the Veiled Woods without pause, ahead and behind, day and night. They moved soundlessly through the misty forest, quartering the ground in search of scents and sign. No one — Orisian least of all — tried to give them any commands. They were fighting their own war, generations old, against their clan’s enemy, and they knew its methods and necessities better than anyone. This was, in a way, what they had been seeking ever since Koldihrve, and now that it had come they went about their work with silent, bloody intensity.
The horses, that Torcaill had so wanted to keep, were long gone, abandoned to the wilderness. They could only have slowed, rather than aided, their flight through the tangled forest. The Veiled Woods seemed almost to be folded in upon themselves, trees and brambles and rocks and moss all bent inwards and intertwined in vast confusion. And all dripping wet, suffused with cloud, green and loamy. Not a place for humankind. Perhaps not even a place for Kyrinin, for whenever Orisian caught a glimpse of Ess’yr and Varryn their manner suggested a caution and unease that he did not think even their struggles with the White Owls could fully explain.
The oppressive otherness of the place ate away at his own spirit. Constantly, out of the corner of his eye, he thought he caught some fleeting movement. Whenever he followed such a hint with his gaze, he found nothing; just the mute vegetation, the still, convoluted trees. But there was something here, something more than human or Kyrinin, of that he became certain. The grass on which they walked was that of autumn, not winter. The leaves on the bushy undergrowth were still a patchwork of reds and browns and mottled greens. The tiny streams that gurgled their rocky way across the forest floor seemed to be giving a voice to a saturating presence that hung, untouchable, in the air and the soil. Sometimes, Orisian was almost certain the treetops stirred when there was no breeze to move them, and at night there would be sudden creakings and crackings as if the oaks and willows were twisting themselves into new shapes. He thought constantly, and fearfully, of the Anain.
Much of the time, they had to carry K’rina. The thin na’kyrim was often too feeble to walk, though whether it was feebleness of mind or body none could be certain. The raw scratches that had covered her when Orisian first saw her quickly faded into a dull net of scars, flat across her skin. Her distress came and went, with tears and with kneaded hands and trembling brow. Her eyes darted this way and that, or lay dead and sightless in their sockets; her lips shivered and worked in silent flurries, or locked themselves into taut closure. But never did she utter a word. Never did she give any sign of knowing where, or who, she was.
Neither Eshenna nor Yvane could tell Orisian what had happened — or was still happening — to K’rina.
“Will she recover?” Orisian asked Eshenna when they paused, sitting for a time on boulders cloaked in lichens. “Can you not even tell me that?”
“There’s nothing there,” Eshenna said. “She’s gone. Empty.”
Yvane shook her head slowly. “Not empty, I think. A dead space in the Shared, but it’s concealment, not emptiness. There’s something there.”
“So that’s what all this has been for?” Orisian asked. “You cannot even tell me what prize it is we’ve won with all these deaths.” He spoke carefully, wary of his battered mouth. It hurt less now, though there was sometimes still a dull throbbing in his jaw. The stitched wound in his cheek itched, and stung when he stretched it. His tongue was tender, and constantly stumbling over the unexpected gaps amongst his teeth.
Yvane scowled at him. “Her name’s K’rina, if you remember. And whatever has happened to her, I doubt she chose it. Look at her. Do you suppose she’s happy with the way things have turned out?”
Orisian sighed, and tugged at the grass. He was angry; at himself, the White Owls, Eshenna, the world. Even through that obscuring anger, though, he knew that however desperate was his desire to assign blame, K’rina deserved none of it.
“No,” he muttered. “How did she come to this state, though?”
“The Anain,” Yvane said. Eshenna winced at even the word, and the older woman shot her an irritated glance. “We’re amongst them here. I can feel them, hear their movement. And K’rina is a part of it, somehow.”
“And Aeglyss?”
“He has receded, a little. Sunk back into whatever hole his skull has become, since…” Yvane faltered. She did that more often now, running aground on her own feelings, or fears.
“Since Highfast,” Orisian finished for her, and she nodded.
It had come late one morning, perhaps the first after Rothe’s death, though Orisian could not be sure, for the passage of time had become an indistinct thing to him for a while. Eshenna had been suddenly on her knees, fists balled and pressing down into the mossy grass. She wailed, and the sound was so piercing and anguished that it turned every head, arrested every stride. Yvane had gone to help her, but she too was shaken by something, sent staggering. Orisian held her up, trying at the same time to reach out a hand to touch Eshenna’s back.
“What is it?” he had asked them.
“They’re dying,” cried Eshenna. “Disappearing.”
“Who?” He looked from Eshenna to Yvane, frightened by the extremity of whatever had taken hold of them.
“Highfast,” Yvane stammered. Her arm was shaking in his grasp. “Cerys is gone. Oh, he’s too bright, too dark… he’s burning them away. He’s a beast, a great beast gone mad.”
“Save us,” Eshenna had said then, and Orisian heard a terrible, hopeless pleading in her voice.
“There’s nothing but death,” Yvane said, more controlled but still unsteady and bleak-faced. “ Na’kyrim are dying, in Highfast. Aeglyss is there. For a moment… for a moment, there was no difference. He was the Shared, and it was him.”
Ever since that morning, Eshenna had been withdrawn. Haunted. She had been, when Orisian first met her in Highfast, urgent and eager; hungry, almost, to leave it behind and step out into the world. What had happened since then, Orisian thought, had been too much for her. Just a few days. That was all it took. That part of him still capable of sympathy regretted the savagery of the lessons the world had seen fit to teach her. But such sympathy as he could summon up was tinged by a cold rec
ognition that such was the nature of the times in which they lived. If Eshenna was paying a price for her curiosity, it was less than others had paid for the recent twists and turns in the path of the world. He disliked the ease with which such thoughts occurred to him now, but he could not deny them.
They exerted little control over the route they followed. They went where ground and thicket and pursuit permitted, and that meant south and west, towards the towering Karkyre Peaks that they could sometimes glimpse through gaps in the branch-woven roof of the forest. However much Orisian wanted to retrace their steps to Highfast, Ess’yr told him with casual certainty that to attempt it would mean death on White Owl arrows or spear points.
“We’ll be out of here soon,” Yvane said to Orisian, as they sat sharing some of the last hard oaten biscuits.
Orisian looked around, aware that his sight and his thoughts alike were blurred and clumsy. They had been on the move since long before dawn, blundering their way through wooded gullies and rocky thickets. It was miserable, and punishing, but preferable to the alternative of waiting, motionless in the darkness, for Kyrinin to creep out of the moonshadows with murderous intent.
“Out of where?” he asked. “The Veiled Woods, you mean?”
Yvane nodded, trying to break a piece off a biscuit with her teeth, failing, and staring doubtfully at it. “The ground’s been rising under us since daybreak. Haven’t you noticed that the mountains are near?”
Orisian peered up through the latticework of branches over their heads. His eyes had, this morning, been fixed on the ground beneath his feet. He saw now that Yvane was right. The Karkyre Peaks were close. He could see the texture of their sunlit eastern slopes, and of the clouds around their summits. The snow, white strands laid down in the crannies and crevices of the high rock faces.
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