Bloodheir

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.

“How is your father?” Orisian asked the Bloodheir. “This must be hard for him.”

Roaric glanced down at the ground.

“He presses on, as do we all,” he said. “He blames himself for Gerain’s death, and will not hear any argument. And now he must smile for Aewult, and pretend we are honoured to receive the High Thane’s son.”

“Honoured or not, we may need the swords he brings with him to drive the Black Road from our lands,” murmured Taim.

“I don’t think so,” said Roaric, with a grimace. “And I don’t believe you truly do either. Your lands — Orisian’s lands — could be reclaimed by Lannis and Kilkry marching together. It hardly matters, though, which of us is right. It won’t be you or me making the decision. Not now that Aewult’s here. My father’s a better man than me: I could find no words of welcome for that ill-born creature.”

“It’s one of the curses of being a Thane,” said Rothe. “Having to wear one mask or another all the time.”

Roaric nodded at Orisian’s shieldman. Rothe’s face was rather colourless, his skin a little slack in appearance. One arm and shoulder were bound up in a sling. There was a suggestion of weariness in his stance.

“You, Rothe Corlyn, look like a man who should be somewhere else,” Roaric observed.

“Resting,” agreed Orisian, “under the care of healers. I can’t even make my own shieldman do as he is told.”

“I’ve seen enough of healers these last few days,” Rothe grumbled. “Good air will serve me just as well.”

“How’s the arm?” Roaric asked.

Rothe glanced at his bandaged limb. “Of little use — for the time being, anyway.”

“And the shoulder?”

“Better than the arm. It’ll take more than one Horin-Gyre crossbow bolt to put me down.”

“Here he comes,” said Taim Narran quietly.

The gates swept open and Aewult’s Palace Shield rode in. They sat tall on massive warhorses, pennant-topped lances held erect. Their breastplates gleamed. Drummers rode with them, unleashing a flurry of beats and then falling silent as the shieldmen flanked the path up from the gate towards the Tower and the waiting crowds. Outside, beyond the encircling wall, there was a mounting tumult of hoofs and voices.

The Haig Bloodheir entered the gardens at a canter, wrestling to control his mount, the biggest horse that Orisian had ever seen. It tossed its head and strained at the reins as Aewult turned it in a tight circle. A dozen of his Shield fell in behind him and followed him up the path. There was a murmuring amongst the assembled dignitaries, whether of unease or admiration Orisian could not say. He saw one or two people at the front of the throng shuffling backwards, as if alarmed by these great horses and the men who rode them.

Aewult nan Haig rode to within a few paces of Lheanor and Ilessa. He towered over the old couple, his horse still unsettled. It was almost as if he expected the Thane of the Kilkry-Haig Blood to take hold of the animal’s bridle so that he might dismount. Lheanor gazed silently up at the Bloodheir, his expression placid and empty.

“See who comes now,” Taim Narran murmured to Orisian.

Looking back to the gate, Orisian witnessed an altogether more subdued entry. Riding a quiet bay horse, this newcomer had none of Aewult’s crude energy or ostentation. He was poised, handsome and wore not armour but a luxuriant woollen cape decorated in red and gold. Instead of warriors he brought with him a band of well-dressed officials and attendants.

“Who is it?” Orisian asked, and guessed the answer in the same moment.

“The Shadowhand,” Roaric said, his voice laden with contempt. “I didn’t know we were to be cursed with his presence as well.”

Mordyn Jerain, Chancellor to Gryvan oc Haig: Orisian knew of him only by rumour, and all those rumours said that he, more than any other, kept the Haig Blood secure in its mastery of all the others. Amongst those who resented Gryvan’s rule, Mordyn Jerain was the man most often blamed for the worst of its excesses.

Seeing the famous Shadowhand for the first time, Orisian was struck by how unobtrusively he came riding up in Aewult’s wake. There was no sign of arrogance; just a quiet man who looked around with a calm smile. His gaze met Orisian’s and held it. Orisian could not imagine that the mighty Chancellor would know who he was by sight, yet there was a slight widening of that smile, a fractional inclination of the head. Orisian looked down at his feet.

“He’s marked you already,” Taim whispered. “He guesses who you are, by my presence at your side.”

The notion that the Shadowhand should take an interest in him left Orisian craving nothing but anonymity and the insignificance that the last few weeks had stolen away from him.

Slightly too late, grooms had hurried to soothe Aewult’s horse. The Bloodheir dismounted with a flourish. He hauled off his long leather gauntlets and took Lheanor oc Kilkry-Haig’s hand in his own.

“How long do you suppose we have to stay?” Orisian wondered aloud. “Before we can leave without causing offence, I mean.”

By the time the greetings and hollow pleasantries were done, and the Haig Bloodheir had been ushered into the Tower of Thrones, Orisian had slipped away with Rothe. He left Taim Narran to attend upon Lheanor oc Kilkry-Haig. Taim, Orisian knew, could represent the Lannis Blood amongst the great and the powerful more ably than he could himself. Neither Lheanor nor any of his family would be offended; if others felt differently, Orisian was not in the mood to care. At this moment, the mere thought of making the closer acquaintance of either Aewult or his father’s Chancellor was almost horrifying to him. There were places he would much prefer to be.

One of them was the small house attached to the town garrison’s barracks, just beyond the wall that ringed the Tower of Thrones and its gardens. Orisian approached it with a hurried, almost eager stride, a grumbling Rothe close behind him.

“They’re not going anywhere,” the shieldman muttered. “Do we have to rush so?”

“You confess you’re too weary to keep up with me, then?” Orisian asked over his shoulder.

“No. It’s my arm’s a bit sorry for itself, not my legs.”

There were Lannis guards posted outside the house. They snapped into alert postures as their young Thane drew near. Taim Narran had set them here at Orisian’s request: two of his best men, survivors of the campaign against Igryn oc Dargannan-Haig and the carnage at An Caman fort.

“Any problems?” Orisian asked the guards.

“No, sire,” replied one. “They’ve been quiet as the dead, and no one’s tried to get in.”

Orisian climbed the stairs quickly. He was aware of his own eagerness, and half of him thought it a touch childish, unworthy of a Thane. The other half of him savoured the pleasure of anticipation: it was something he felt little and seldom these days.

Ess’yr and Varryn were in the bedchamber at the top of the stairs. To Orisian’s surprise, his sister Anyara was there as well.

“I heard the serving girls complaining that all the food they brought here was getting turned away,” she explained, her brow bunched into a knot of irritation. She nodded in Varryn’s direction. “He won’t eat. It’s like trying to deal with some sulking child.”

Orisian glanced at the Kyrinin warrior. A sulking child was not the first image that sprang to mind. Varryn was seated cross-legged on the floor, where he and his sister, contemptuous of the soft beds, had slept since their confinement here. Even from that lowly position, Varryn’s fierce presence was impressive. His long back was stiffly erect, his uniformly grey eyes staring at Orisian in that confidently passive way only Kyrinin could manage.

“The food’s not to your liking?” Orisian asked.

“No,” was all Varryn said.

His anger had been constant and consistent from the first moment they had all clambered aboard the Tal Dyreen ship that bore them away from Koldihrve. Its causes were many, Orisian suspected, but it had certainly not been blunted by the rigours of the voyage. Both Varryn and Ess’yr had suffered throughout from violent seasickness. Aboard the rocking deck of Edryn Delyne’s vessel, Orisian had felt something new and unexpected towards them: pity. On land they’d seldom appeared anything other than capable — often intimidatingly so — but it had soon become clear that Kyrinin did not make good seafarers.

Turning to Ess’yr now, the sight of her still filled him with a kind of wonder. The pale delicacy of her features, the astonishing grace in her lean limbs, were there as they had always been; what was lacking, or at least diminished, was the utter ease with her surroundings that she had displayed in the forests of the Car Criagar and the Vale of Tears. Here, enclosed in a rather gloomy panelled bedchamber full of bulky furniture and embroidered bedding, she had the look of someone who knew she was out of place. For all that, she remained beautiful in Orisian’s eyes. The blue, swirling tattoo on her face — far less intricate and detailed than the one that Varryn sported, but nevertheless striking — only served to accentuate the elegance of her lips, the clarity of her eyes.

“Have you refused the food as well?” Orisian asked her.

“Not all. But it is too wet, too lifeless. Too human.” She said it without rancour, a mere statement of fact.

“Tell us what you would prefer and it will be provided,” Orisian said.

“When do we leave?” Varryn demanded.

Orisian looked back to the warrior, determined to keep all sign of the weariness he felt out of his voice. This had been, from the instant his foot touched Kolkyre’s quayside, the only thing Varryn would willingly talk about.

“You know you can leave whenever you want, and you know why it’s difficult,” he said. “We’ve offered you a boat and crew. Lheanor has, anyway.”

An almost undetectable flick of Varryn’s head and wrinkling of his nose betrayed his opinion of another seaborne venture.

“We will walk,” the Kyrinin said in a tone that allowed no argument.

Orisian shrugged. “As you wish, but you know, too, what the chances of you reaching your lands are if you go alone. Lheanor can’t even guarantee your safety on the street outside this house. If you thought you could do it, you’d have gone already.”

Varryn sank into silence, glaring at the floorboards, and Orisian could see then what Anyara meant; perhaps more a truculent child than a sulking one, though. It pained him to see the steadfast warrior so disturbed. It made him feel guilty. He owed a great debt to these two Kyrinin, and so far had been unable to repay it as he should. Even so, since he had no easy answer to the constant complaints, they became tiring.

“If you won’t go by boat, there’s not much I can do yet,” he said to Ess’yr. “You’ve refused Lheanor’s offer of an escort to Kolglas. And even if you reached there, you’d still have to get through the Black Road army.”

“We are Kyrinin,” Ess’yr said quietly. “Huanin we do not know are not trusted.”

“I know,” Orisian sighed.

“We trust you. When will you go north?”

“Soon,” said Orisian, and hoped it was true. “There is a great army here now. The Black Road will be defeated, and your way home will be opened. I will take you to Glasbridge myself. Soon.”

“It must be soon. The enemy is on Fox land. Our spears are needed.”

“We didn’t want to come here any more than you did,” Anyara muttered, ignoring Orisian’s warning glare. “We’d be back in Kolglas now if that Tal Dyreen hadn’t taken fright and shipped us down here instead.”

Edryn Delyne, the captain who had given them passage away from Koldihrve, was long gone now, running across the west winds back towards the comforts of Tal Dyre. Their parting had not been on the best of terms. In the first day or two of the voyage he had exuded charm and solicitude. Everything changed once they encountered a boatload of fearful fishermen, who told Delyne that the Black Road had reached the sea and burned Glasbridge. He turned the ship towards Kolkyre and was deaf to all argument against his chosen course. Nothing, clearly, mattered to him save the safety of his precious ship and cargo. After that, Anyara had plagued him with accusations and invective, until Orisian had begun to worry for their safety.

“It doesn’t matter how we ended up here,” Orisian said firmly. “We’re here now, and that’s the end of it. It won’t be for much longer. Ess’yr, tell me if you want anything. I’ll get it for you if I can.”

She regarded him for a few moments, and he felt a familiar surge of pleasure and nervousness at being the object of that intense gaze.

“Water,” she said at length. “Clean and fresh. They bring us wine. What good is wine?”

“Somebody’ll have to find the cleanest of clean wells, if we’re to get them the kind of water they’re used to,” Orisian mused as he made his way downstairs with Anyara and Rothe.

“Maybe so,” said Rothe. “I’ll sort out some proper food for them, though. I know what it is they’re wanting: roast meat, nuts, dried fish, that kind of thing. I’ll get the kitchen folk thinking straight about it.”

Orisian smiled. His shieldman, once as suspicious and hostile towards Kyrinin as anyone else, had undergone a surprising transformation. He had fought alongside Varryn, and for a warrior that perhaps made all the difference.

“What about Yvane?” Anyara asked. “Is she any happier than they are?”

They stepped out onto the street, into the sharp, blustering breeze.

“Not that I’ve noticed,” Orisian admitted. “She still hasn’t come out of her room in the Tower, as far as I know. Now there’s someone who really is sulking, I think.”

As it sometimes did once Winterbirth was past, Kolkyre’s air in the next dawn had the tang of the sea on it. A salty mist settled over the roofs and alleyways; all the timbers and the stones of the town were damp with it. The sailors and fishermen called it the moir cest, this breath of the sea that drifted in off Anaron’s Bay, its name in the ancient language from which that of the Aygll Kingship, and later the Bloods, had grown. Its arrival in Kolkyre was held to be an ill omen for any undertaking. The longer the leaden fog persisted, the more downcast and querulous would the superstitious seamen who filled the dockside taverns become.

Such concerns did not deter Old Cailla as she made her careful way down towards the quayside, a long yoke across her shoulders. She knew without doubt that a body’s fortune, whether good or ill, depended upon things other than the weather. She had lived more than three score years in Kolkyre, and seen the moir cest come and go hundreds of times. For the last thirty of those years, she had made this same journey every week, in rain and shine and storm alike: out from the servant’s quarters in the grounds of the Tower of Thrones, around the edge of the garrison’s barracks, then down the long straight slope of Sea Street towards the harbour. She had walked this way so often that she could have done it blind, let alone in a heavy mist.

At the foot of Sea Street she turned left and made her way along the row of inns, warehouses and workshops that lined the waterfront. The mist made everyone who was out and about keep their heads down and their voices low. There were oars rattling in a boat, invisible out on the water somewhere, and a few half-hearted shouts rang out. A handful of stallholders were setting out their wares on the quayside, but they did so in a subdued manner, as if they did not wish to disturb the melancholic fogs.

“It’s a bad moir cest, eh, Cailla?” Merric called to her as she entered his shop.

The old woman swung her yoke off her shoulders and rested it against the doorpost. “I’ve seen worse and better.”

“Well, so’ve I. I’ve seen more better than worse is all I’m saying.”

“Fair enough. Perhaps you’re right.”

“Perhaps I am,” Merric said, sounding pleased to have wrung this concession from her. “Look here, you’ll have your pick of a good haul this morning.”

He gestured at a row of pots set along a table. Every one of them was filled with shellfish, bathed in sea water. Cailla peered into each of the pots in turn.

“You’ve many guests up at the Tower now, eh?” Merric said. “They’ll not have tasted the like of our Kolkyre shells down where they’re from.”

“That I wouldn’t know,” Old Cailla said. “All fresh, Merric?”

“I’d not try to pass anything but the freshest on you, you know that. You were buying from my father when I was still at my mother’s breast. You’d sniff out a stale shell faster than I could myself, wouldn’t you?”

Cailla grimaced at him: an indeterminate, gap-toothed expression that might have signified anything from disgust to amusement.

When she emerged a short while later, Cailla bore two lidded pots strung from her yoke. They swung heavily in time with her stride. A few steps from Merric’s door, having felt the balance and sway of the pots, she paused. She knelt, lowering her burden to the ground, and made a few swift adjustments to the knots. Satisfied, she made to rise, one hand pushing against the cobbled surface of the path.

No one paid any great attention to Cailla on her weekly journey from the Tower to Merric’s shop and back again. Had someone watched the old kitchen maid, they might have noted that every time, week after week and year upon year, she paused thus to adjust the balance of her yoke. Every time, she knelt in exactly the same place on the roadway, and rose with exactly the same touch of one hand to the cobblestones. They might note it, but would still have thought it nothing but the habit of a woman old enough that to change anything in her routine would be beyond her.

This time, there was a difference. No observer, however keen-eyed, could have caught it. Nevertheless, it was a difference profound enough to set Cailla’s heart pounding in her chest as she made her slow way back up Sea Street. For the first time in several years, her finger had caught the edge of something nestled in the seam between two of the cobbles. A subtle flick had freed it and folded it up into the palm of her hand: a thin piece of wood into which was cut a single short line of script. Cailla had not looked at it. She did not need to. A brief examination with practised fingertips told her what the message was, and it bestowed upon her a great task in a worthy cause; the final shedding of the lie she had worn for a life all these years.

It was all the old woman could do not to laugh exultantly as she trudged on towards the mist-wrapped Tower of Thrones with her two heavy pots of shellfish.