Exile

XV

To Wren’s surprise, Ammenor roared when she told him. A great bellow of frustration that echoed from the stone forms of the Cold Men. He hung his head and stamped his wooden lump of a foot.

‘And you walked back up here from there, did you? In a nice straight line, I suppose?’

Wren did not say anything. There was already a glimmer of guilty doubt in her mind before Ammenor went on.

‘The Huluk Kur can track a deer for days. One of their babes, fresh off the teat, could follow whatever trail you’ve left.’

‘That might be true,’ Wren acknowledged. ‘I thought you needed to know. It’s not safe here any more.’

He flicked her half-apology away with a loose hand. He was frowning, turning things over inside his head.

‘You’re sure it was the whole tribe?’

Wren nodded.

‘They’re mad to try crossing the hills with their entire people at this time of year,’ Ammenor said, as much to himself as to Wren. ‘But perhaps not. If they make it, they’ll come out on the plains by Homneck Bridge. They’ll miss the Hung Gate entirely. That’ll spoke the wheels of the Free and the King’s army.’

He stared at Wren.

‘And by spoke the wheels,’ he said, ‘I mean kill them all, most likely. The Huluk Kur’ll be behind them, between them and the river. Nice open ground for them to play in.’

‘We should go,’ Wren said flatly.

Ammenor frowned.

‘I’ve skinned that squirrel,’ he said. ‘Spitted it already.’

She stared at him in disbelief.

‘They could be here any moment. Now, today, tomorrow.’

‘Or never,’ he muttered. Almost petulant, almost like a stubborn child.

‘Fool,’ she snapped. Her anger, her grief, all her roiling emotions balled themselves up into a knot and made Ammenor their target. ‘What have you got here that you’d sooner die than leave? If they never come this way, you can return in a day or two and go back to pretending this is the life you want. But if they do come and you’re still here – we’re here – then it’s done. Dead and burned.’

He hung his head and stared at the snow.

‘Me, I’m making for the Hung Gate and for the Free,’ Wren went on, deciding it for herself almost in the same instant she spoke it.

‘You know where to go, do you?’ Ammenor asked pointedly.

‘Show me. The Free are the only thing that might stop the Huluk Kur now, as best I understand. And you said yourself they’re undone if they stay where they are.’

‘It’s too late to save the Free,’ Ammenor stated.

‘You can’t be certain of that. I might not be able to live in the Kingdom now, but that doesn’t mean I want to see the Huluk Kur hacking their way across it. It’s still my home, my root. I still have family there. And I’m not afraid to try, even if you are.’

Ammenor glared at her, as fierce as she had ever seen him. She thought perhaps she had gone too far, set the barb a little too deeply into his flesh. But he looked away.

‘It would take days to reach the Hung Gate,’ he said faintly.

‘I don’t care!’ Wren cried, flinging her arms wide. ‘What else is there? I’ve come into this wasteland and found nothing but rock and snow and defeat. And savages covering everything in blood and ashes. What would you have me do, old man? I have nothing left!’

She breathed in deeply and mastered herself.

‘I’m going to reach the Free before the Huluk Kur reach the river,’ she told him. ‘You don’t think a Clever can change anything? You’re wrong. You hear me? Wrong!’

And finally, sluggishly, he nodded.

Wren’s impatience mounted as she waited for Ammenor to ready himself. The man moved as if weighed down by a terrible burden. He laid furs on the ground and brought out from his hut those few things he could carry with him. To and fro he went, emptying out the home he had made for himself. Piece by piece, he assembled as much of his life as he could on the furs. There was not a lot of it.

‘We have to go,’ Wren said. She kept her voice level and calm.

‘You go then, woman,’ he growled. ‘I’m not so old and frail I can’t catch you up.’

She went, but only as far as the edge of the clearing. Where the forest began she stopped and stood there, beneath the first of the trees, to wait for him. Watching him gathering nuts and berries from those bushes he must have planted years ago, she began to feel his weary sorrow as if it were her own.

There had never been anything splendid about his exile, for all the tales the hedge-witches told of him. There was only an embittered man, living a life he had no more than half chosen for himself and hoping to be left alone. Now he was exiled even from that life and hope.

Ammenor folded away his meagre harvest in a square of canvas and tucked it into his belt. He rolled up the furs and bound them with cords. He hooked the bundle under one arm and stood there among the Cold Men, looking around. Saying a silent farewell, Wren supposed.

‘We should go,’ she called softly again from the trees.

Ammenor cocked his head, like a dog catching a sound or scent no human could detect. He glanced sideways and then looked straight at Wren.

‘Get down,’ he hissed. ‘Stay there and don’t move.’

She opened her mouth to question his abrupt commands but already he was turning away from her. He dropped his roll of furs to the ground. Wren saw figures emerging from the trees on the far side of the clearing beyond him. She clamped her lips tight and sank down onto her stomach, burying herself in the undergrowth at the forest’s edge.

They were big men, made bigger by the bulky furs and animal hides that clothed them. Their faces were as pale as any Wren had ever seen, their hair blond, thick and unruly. Claws and teeth hung from their jackets. Feathers were sewn into the seams of their sleeves. Some had small animal skulls – fox, hare, hawk – pinned to their breasts like brooches. They carried spears, bows and cudgels. Some held clubs studded with points and flakes of sea-ivory and dark stone. Some wore tunics that had once belonged to the Clade.

‘Take what you want,’ Ammenor said without any hint of anger or resistance. He waved an almost casual arm towards his shack. ‘There’s food and furs and tools. I’ll not keep you from it.’

The Huluk Kur advanced, spread out. The nearest of them regarded the Clever’s shabby home with unreadable eyes. He seemed entirely uninterested in the strange stone figures arrayed around the clearing. It was almost as if he could not see the Cold Men. They held no meaning for him.

He spoke in a jagged, barking tongue Wren did not remotely understand. Nor did Ammenor evidently, for he shrugged.

Another of the northerners strode to the Clever’s side and kicked at his baggage roll on the ground, testing its weight and worth.

‘Take what you want,’ Ammenor repeated.

The Huluk Kur warrior struck him without even looking at him. A single fast backward sweep of his arm caught the old man on the side of his face and knocked him to the ground. Some of the others laughed. Some began moving towards the hut. One began pulling berries from a nearby bush and crushing them into his mouth.

Lame Ammenor tried to get to his feet. His wooden stump slipped on the slushy ground, sending him back onto one knee. The man who had hit him gave a harsh laugh and said something clearly contemptuous to his fellows. The warrior hefted the ivory-flaked club in his hand and stepped closer to Ammenor. He raised the club over his head. The Clever looked up.

Wren felt a tremble in her heart and her arms and her throat. It was a shiver of fear and alarm, and the bow wave of the Autumnal entelech rising up in her. It came unbidden, volunteering itself for violence. But another was faster than her.

‘Very well,’ Ammenor muttered, still gazing up at the Huluk Kur who meant to kill him, and lifted his hand.

In his palm he held soil and snow, mixed and muddled. The warrior frowned. Ammenor blew across his hand.

Wren felt the blast even from where she hid. A cold gust buffeted her face. It was not directed at her though. A storm of ice- and grit-laden wind engulfed the Huluk Kur. In the moment between two heartbeats, the clearing was transformed into a whirling chaos. Debris and frost and dirt churned the air into a maelstrom.

The branches of the trees beneath which Wren hid shook themselves, shedding veils of snow. The storm caught it and spun it into the clearing in great white spirals. Wren’s eyes stung. She closed them and pressed her face into the crook of her arm to shield it.

This did not feel like the Autumnal to her. It was surely Hibernal. It was the entelech that spoke in the language of cold and darkness and slumber and death. Not Ammenor’s natural affinity, but it might be that the presence of the Cold Men changed the balance of things here. Anything was possible when a Permanence was involved.

The roaring of turbulent air and clatter of falling twigs and wind-driven debris was deafening. In amongst it, Wren thought she could perhaps hear the Huluk Kur crying out. They were fierce and hard men, but an entelech wielded by a determined Clever could be fiercer and harder still. Wren could not imagine anyone standing in this tempest, let alone moving through it.

She lifted her head, eyes narrowed against the biting gale. There was nothing to see. Just the obscuring, churning storm. Which began to subside even as she stared, blinking, into it. The wind dropped. Dirt and snow began to settle.

Ammenor was limping towards her from out of a mist of ice crystals. Behind him, beside him, Wren saw terrible things. Not one of the Huluk Kur who had entered the clearing still stood. Some were dead, some merely maimed. That ice mist hid much, and Wren was glad of it. What she could make out was more than enough. Gelid shards which had burst outward, springing from bone like winter knives, splitting faces open. Raw red flesh where the storm of grit had scoured away skin. Eyes white, frozen in their sockets.

She could hear nothing but the gentle settling of snow and ice, and the moaning and the weeping of those who still lived. And a voice, she thought dimly. She blinked again and looked at Ammenor. He was unsteady, pale. The skin beneath his eyes had loosened and slipped. There was blood trickling from his nose. He was talking to her, she realised.

‘Run, girl,’ he was saying. ‘Don’t wait for me. Run…’

And his voice bubbled away in a tangled froth as an arrowhead appeared, protruding from the front of his throat. Wren had not heard the impact. Ammenor’s eyes just opened a little wider as those bushy brows lifted and he made a strained coughing sound. He stopped and lifted one hand towards his neck and began to turn as he did so. His fingertips brushed the bloody point jutting out just above his collarbone.

As he turned, another arrow hit him in the shoulder. He went down onto one knee. Wren could not move. She lay there in the brush, transfixed.

Indistinct figures were moving among the last remnants of the icy tempest. It was as if the Cold Men had come to life, suddenly closing towards Ammenor. But as the air cleared, Wren saw that these were no statues. More Huluk Kur clubmen. They did not all come into the clearing, she wanted to cry out to Ammenor. They were not all close enough. You were not savage enough.

Then Wren felt the weight that had been holding her down lifting. Her limbs remembered themselves. She began to rise, not to run as Ammenor had told her but to go forward. To cloak herself in the entelech and spread her wings and carry death with her into that clearing.

Her movement betrayed her. Before she was even fully on her feet, the nearest of the Huluk Kur was staring at her. He was still staring at her as he calmly and slowly pushed the point of his spear down into the notch between Ammenor’s neck and shoulder. Deeper than Wren would have thought possible. Ammenor gave out a long, fluttering gasp. The Clever fell forwards. The spear came out covered in gore.

The moment in which Wren’s eyes remained locked with those of Ammenor’s killer stretched. Her mind filled its unbounded space. She could not save Ammenor. She did not know precisely where all her enemies were, or how many. Already, in the indistinct corners of her vision, she could see more shapes moving, coming closer. If she died too, there would be none to carry warning of the Huluk Kur’s intent, nor to work vengeance upon them.

She spun about and ran into the forest. Twigs and brambles lashed at her clothes and face. She bounded over fallen branches and roots half hidden by snow and slush. Behind her, she heard the warriors shouting in their hard-edged language. Their cries followed her like the voices of blackbirds.