"Listen to me," Tara whispered. "I know what this is. Gryvan's angry, looking for answers. He's only here because Mordyn refused to go to him in the Moon Palace earlier. Listen to me."
Tara's agitation was unsettling, especially in one normally so entirely in command of the impression she gave.
"Please. Do not lose me my husband, Anyara. That is all I ask of you. Let it be a sickness. A sickness of the mind. Not treachery. Not binding. If you should convince Gryvan of such things, he will have my husband killed. If it's a sickness... there might be exile. Imprisonment, perhaps. Not death."
Anyara did not know what to say. She felt indebted to this woman, and understood something of just how much she treasured her husband. And yet... there was more at stake than that here.
Kale pulled the doors open. The lean shieldman stared out at them with chilly indifference, as if he knew none of them.
"You wait out here," he said levelly to Coinach.
"No," Coinach said promptly.
Kale smiled then, and it was a strikingly lifeless and troubling sight.
"It is not a request or a suggestion. It is the command of your High Thane."
Anyara smiled reassuringly at Coinach, though she felt more in need of reassurance herself than of providing it. He turned reluctantly away and stood with his back against the wall, staring straight ahead. Kale ushered Tara and Anyara inside, and closed the doors behind them.
The room was high-ceilinged, the walls painted with bright murals. No windows. One other set of doors, opposite those by which they had just entered. A single bare table set with six chairs, at two of which Gryvan oc Haig and his son were seated.
"You must let me provide some refreshment," Mordyn Jerain was saying casually. "Wine, at least."
"Nothing," Gryvan snapped.
Mordyn Jerain turned, a transparent pretence at having only just noticed Anyara and Tara's arrival.
"Ah, here we are." He smiled. "Now perhaps we can resolve this confusion."
He wore all his old charm, and it fitted him as snugly as a custom-made glove. Anyara looked at him, and it was like looking at an entirely different person from the one who had given her the bruise still discolouring her face. Here was someone all fluid grace and natural warmth.
"Sit, sit," he said to Anyara, gesturing towards chairs. "The High Thane wants to talk with us."
Watching him warily, Anyara settled into a seat opposite Gryvan. Tara Jerain, she noticed, was staring at her husband, rapt. Her face did not seem to be able to decide between unease and relief, as if she did not trust what her eyes and ears told her.
"You too," Mordyn said gently to her, and Tara sat at Anyara's side.
Gryvan, evidently inured to the effects of the man's charm by long exposure, was glowering at the Shadowhand as he walked slowly around the table. Aewult looked merely bored, though he did favour Anyara with a particularly savage glare before he resumed his studied detachment.
"I want answers," Gryvan rasped, his hands bunched into fists on the surface of the table.
"As do we all." Mordyn nodded. "And we shall have them, I am sure."
He paused suddenly in his circuit of the room, and frowned.
"Do you hear something?" he asked of no one in particular. And in the question's wake came the unmistakable sound of raised voices and hurried feet somewhere within the Palace of Red Stone. Then what struck Anyara immediately as the sound of fighting. Her first thought was concern for Coinach, but the disturbance seemed to be coming from the front of the palace, beyond the door through which Gryvan and Aewult had presumably entered, not that at which Coinach stood guard. Tara was rising from her chair, alarmed.
"Wait, wait," muttered Mordyn, extending a hand. "It's probably nothing, but let's wait a moment. Let's not rush into anything."
"I'll see what's happening," said Aewult, rising, but Gryvan pushed his son back down into his seat.
"Kale," the High Thane said. "Find out what it is."
The brief tumult was already fading, but Gryvan's shieldman obediently turned and went out through the doors behind the High Thane's chair. Mordyn moved round that way, craning his neck as if to peer out as the doors swung shut behind Kale. The Chancellor took hold of the doors to hurry them on their way, and pushed them firmly closed. There was a dull clack as some latch fell into place. Anyara frowned at the sound, which seemed out of place. Inappropriate.
Mordyn turned, each of his hands reaching into the opposite sleeve. He withdrew them as he stepped forward, smiling. Anyara saw the gleam of metal, and had a vivid, ghastly memory of a feast night in the Tower of Thrones, and a serving woman leaning close to Lheanor oc Kilkry-Haig. She opened her mouth to cry out.
"How simple," Mordyn said with satisfaction.
Tara was rising once more from her chair, shock plain on her face. Gryvan twisted round in his chair to see what was happening.
The Chancellor drove one of the long-bladed narrow knives into the back of Aewult's neck, at the base of his skull. The other went in under Gryvan's chin as he turned onto it. As soon as the blades were planted, the Shadowhand was running, darting around the table. He reached the second set of doors before either Tara or Anyara had got free of their hampering chairs.
"Coinach!" Anyara shouted.
The same dull clack of wood on wood as Mordyn sealed the doors.
"What have you done?" Tara Jerain gasped, hands rising to her mouth as she looked from her husband to the dead Thane and his son, their blood flooding out over the table.
"Paid some clubmen off the street to stage some distracting little trouble," Mordyn muttered.
He ran at Anyara, surprisingly fast, and seized her by her shoulders. He threw her violently against the wall and she fell.
"Didn't really think that would work," she heard the Chancellor saying through the faint ringing in her ears.
She could hear the doors shaking too. Coinach shouting: "Anyara!"
"Thought I would be dead by now, but it would have been a price worth paying."
Anyara got unsteadily to her feet. Mordyn had his wife by the throat, was holding her down on the surface of the table. Her mouth was agape.
"I suspected the game was done as soon as I heard you had been to see Gryvan. Knew it beyond doubt when I got his message demanding I go there myself. A pity. I could have done so much more. But this will do. This is enough."
Tara had her hands about Mordyn's wrists, straining ineffectually to pry them apart.
The door shook once more beneath Coinach's assaults. Anyara looked from the latch holding the door shut to the knife protruding from the back of Aewult's head. And chose the knife. She leaned across the table and wrenched it free with a sickening crunch. Mordyn looked round at her.
She rushed at him. None of the meagre training she had received from Coinach was needed. Mordyn raised no defence. He merely looked into her eyes as she ran at him, and kept his hands on Tara's throat. Anyara stabbed him in the side, under his arm. She did remember something Coinach had told her then, and punched the knife in and out once, twice more, reaching for the heart. To be certain.
Mordyn fell heavily. Tara did not stir at first, but then lifted herself up groggily, one hand pawing at her neck. Anyara opened the door to admit Coinach. The shieldman came in with sword in hand, his eyes widening in astonishment as he took in the gory scene.
"What happened?" he murmured.
"We have to get out of here," Anyara said, considerably more calmly than she felt. "Help me with Tara."
She tried to put supporting hands under Tara's elbows, but the Chancellor's wife pushed her away. She was staring down at her dead husband.
"Tara," Anyara said quietly. "We should go."
The doors opposite rattled as someone tried to open them.
"We really should go," Coinach said emphatically.
The doors crashed open under Kale's foot, and the High Thane's shieldman strode in, sword readied. His eyes moved with precision and speed, and settled on Coinach. Kale l
eaped forward, brushing the corner of the table. His sword came sweeping down. Coinach raised his own, and caught the descending blade and held it there. He brought his knee firmly up into Kale's groin, lifting him momentarily off his feet and staggering him.
Coinach went after him, making two or three rapid slashing cuts. A single slightly misjudged parry and Coinach's blade had skidded off the top of Kale's blocking thrust and into his side. Anyara heard a rib break from the other side of the room.
Kale buckled, and Coinach hit him again, and again as he went down. Once Kale was on the ground, Coinach finished him with a straight thrust to his throat.
He frowned as he sheathed his sword.
"I had heard he was better than that." He sounded vaguely disappointed.
VIII
Ess'yr scaled a mighty tree and crouched there, far above, in the crook of a branch. Sunlight had cracked the clouds and it spilled in pale abundance down through the boughs, patterning the forest floor with a web of shadows and ponds of light. It warmed the tan hues of Ess'yr's hide jacket. Breathed life and lustre into her hair. Gazing up at her, Orisian squinted into the unfamiliar glare. He had to raise a hand to put a protective shadow over his eyes. How long since he had done that? He could even feel, when a beam of that light fell upon his cheek and his jaw, just a murmur of warmth in it. A whisper, presaging a new season. That heat stirred memories of other years in his skin. The only place it could not penetrate was the thick scar where a White Owl spear had opened his face. That remained cold and dead.
"Can you see anything?" he said. He did not call it out, for though she was high, she would hear him well enough.
"The valley." Her voice came drifting down from the canopy, as natural as falling leaves. "I see your valley."
The land sloped away on either side of them, to north and south. Southwards, sunwards, there was only Anlane, rolling to distant horizons. Northwards--Orisian turned that way now, though he could see nothing through the tangle of tree trunks and branches--northwards lay his homeland.
"How far?" he asked the treetops.
"Tomorrow," Ess'yr replied. "Late tomorrow, we could be under an open sky."
Murmurs passed amongst the warriors gathered at the base of the towering oak. Orisian could not read their tone. It might be anticipation, unease, even unrest. K'rina was seated with her back against the massive bole. Yvane was trying to ease water into her, trickling it out from a skin onto unresponsive lips. Neither was paying attention, of course. They had become almost a world unto themselves, just the two of them, bound together--and separated from the others--by their alloyed blood. It pained Orisian, but he understood it too. At some level, he understood it all too clearly.
He let his gaze ascend once more, tracing the line of the tree trunk up through the great spray of limbs, seeing her there. The dappled shade made her almost seem a part of the tree, or of the forest itself. Had he not known she was there, he would never have detected her. Then she moved, extending a long arm and shifting her weight smoothly so that her leg could come reaching down. She turned and bent her head to look for that next foothold, and for a moment her eyes met Orisian's, and they looked at one another, she above and he below, through the fretwork of branches.
Then she was moving down, as easily as if she descended a stairway. As he watched her, Orisian had a sudden vision of a young girl--Anyara--in another tree, in another time, doing just this, but coming loose and falling, tumbling down, rattling from bough to bough all the way down. He could hear the sickening sound of it, and could feel the shock and lurching fear that had filled his child's breast. Now, in Anlane, he lifted his hand to his mouth to still the very cry he had let slip all those years ago.
But it was Ess'yr, not his sister, who was coming down towards him, and he blinked his way clear of the vivid memory. He anchored himself with the sight of this graceful form moving with utter confidence back to earth. She jumped the last of it, landing lightly on the balls of her feet in front of Orisian. Her knees folded and she sank down onto her haunches, recovered her spear from where she had left it by the tree, and straightened. She wiped her free hand across her upper chest, leaving tiny fragments of loose bark on the hide.
"Late tomorrow," she said quietly, and he nodded.
The sound of movement some little way ahead, down the dipping northern slope, drew every gaze and had men reaching for their swords, but it was only Taim Narran and the two warriors he had taken with him, struggling free of thick and brittle undergrowth.
"No sign of trouble," Taim said as he came up towards them. "Varryn says some White Owl have passed along a trail down at the bottom in the last day or two, but they were moving quickly. And there was some smokesign from a long way to the east. Too far off to be much of a worry yet."
"We've been lucky," said Orisian.
From the corner of his eye, he saw the grimace of disgust that flashed across one of the warriors" face. He understood it at once. Eagan had died; had been killed by Orisian himself. No luck attended upon such a journey. How could such a thing have left him so unmarked that he should utter such foolish words? He was ashamed, but bewildered too. For a moment, he was unsure whether he had in truth killed Eagan. It had the quality of delusion, of nightmare, that memory.
"Not so lucky," said Yvane, still squatting down beside K'rina.
Orisian looked sharply at her, wondering if--as she had sometimes before--she knew the pattern of his thoughts without his needing to say a word. But she was on another track.
"There shouldn't really be any White Owls at all wandering around these parts at this time of year. They should all be cosied away in their winter camps, telling themselves tales and tending their fires. Don't start thinking we've luck in our company. They might be busy hunting each other now, but a spear a'an will be just as happy to make our acquaintance if they stumble across us, I'm sure."
Orisian nodded. Beats of pain were taking hold in his temples. He could feel himself drifting again, something in him trying to separate itself, to sink away and turn to other thoughts, other dreams. The forest around him, even the ground beneath his feet, was beginning to seem unreal and thin. If he reached out, he thought, he might pierce it; put a rent into the world and see what lay beyond it.
He shook himself and began to walk downhill. He was frightened to look into the faces of the men he needed to follow him, fearful of what he might see there.
"Let's cover what ground we can today and tonight," he said. "Then tomorrow we'll see. We'll see where we are, and what to do."
"All right," Taim was saying briskly behind him. "You heard. There's nothing to be gained by lingering here."
For a time, as the day dwindled into dusk, Ess'yr walked alongside him.
"I had forgotten... until just now, I had forgotten the first man I killed," he said softly to her. "Do you remember? You were there."
She did not reply, but he could tell from the way she held her head, the way she curbed her stride to match his own, that she would listen, if he talked. It was not easy to do so, for his thoughts grew less clear and less easily herded with every passing hour. But she would listen, and there was no one else he would be so willing to speak to.
"The Tarbain I--we--killed," he said, "at the cottage in the Car Criagar. He was the first, and I had almost forgotten what that felt like. How it made me feel. Now, I have killed another man--Eagan, his name was Eagan--and there was almost no burden to it. He was one of my own men, one of my own Blood, and his death had too little weight to it."
"It was necessary," Ess'yr said quietly. "Varryn saw. He told me."
"Perhaps. I don't know. There's a lot I'm not sure about. It was not something I ever wanted... I never wanted to be able to kill men and have it be so... light."
The ground was falling away slowly but steadily beneath their feet. Anlane was gradually diminishing itself around them, yielding pace by pace to the pull of the great valley that lay to the north. It was as if the very shape of the earth conspired to draw th
em down towards whatever waited by the Glas, in Kan Avor.
"I think of the life I lived once," Orisian murmured, watching the green grass and the broken, withered leaves, "before my mother and my brother died, and it's as if I'm on a ship, and that life is an island, falling away behind me. I can't reach it. I can see the sunlight on it; I can hear waves breaking on its shore; I can remember, almost, how good it felt to be there. But I can't reach it. It's further away every day."
"Where does your ship go?"
"What?"
"This ship you are on. Where does it go?"
"I don't know."
"All journeys have the same ending."
"Do they?"
"You call it the Sleeping Dark. We call it Darlankyn."
"I suppose so. I hope not yet, though. Not yet."
She was quiet for a time, and Orisian fell into the rhythm of his own steps. He could hear--acutely, it seemed to him--the fall of his feet, the rustling of the fallen leaves beneath them, the soft sighing of grass under his heel and against his shin. Yet he heard nothing of Ess'yr. She moved through this place in silence, as if she had no substance. He wondered for a moment, without alarm or distress, whether she might not be an entirely imagined presence, summoned up by his wandering mind. Perhaps the real Ess'yr was somewhere up ahead, hunting and tracking her way through the forest with her breath; perhaps he walked now with the Ess'yr he longed for, not the one who was.
But she spoke again, and she spoke of things his mind could surely not have woven for itself.
"There is some kind of return in every journey, in every life. When the God Who Laughed made my people--all my people, all Kyrinin--he walked across the world and came, at the end, back to the place where he began. There are mountains, in the lands of the Boar clan now: they are Eltenn Omrhynan. First and Last, perhaps you would say. They are the knot in the circle of his journey, the beginning and the end. An important place to us. But what he did on the journey was more important. In the shape made he upon the land, he spoke a truth. Endings and beginnings are smaller things than the movement between them, and the manner of it."
Godless World 3 - Fall of Thanes Page 37