Exile

XXI

They were all going to die. Wren saw that as clearly as she had ever seen anything. Before the first deaths, before the first cudgel rang on a shield or the first arrow nested in flesh, she knew how this ended.

The Huluk Kur charged in their hundreds and their thousands, shaking the ground and the sky. The rocks echoed. The grass and the reeds trembled.

The Free stood behind the shieldwall. Yulan was shouting something but Wren could not hear it. Hamdan and his archers were emptying their quivers, and the arrows fell among the horde and disappeared. Ten, twenty times as many shafts came in the other direction, rising as if in answer and pattering down. They quilled the grass. Stones came with them, launched from a hundred slings. They made for a sharp, hard hail.

Kerig, close by, was murmuring something. Readying himself. The world around Wren seemed to slow. The Huluk Kur came on. Spears bristled to meet them. It all looked as foolish as a fawn standing at bay to face a hundred-strong pack of wolves. The first of the northern tribesmen crashed in, then more and more endlessly pouring up to the bank of shields and over it. Around it. A great inundation, embracing and engulfing those who would stand against it.

What was happening lost its meaning to Wren’s eyes. She saw it all as some great storm, or a turbulent roiling flood. It was not a host of men struggling and falling and howling; it was chaos, almost formless. But Kerig was there, and him she saw clearly.

He knelt not far from her, his hands sunk deep into the earth. Two men of the Free flanked him, shields raised over him to ward against arrows or slingstones. Kerig’s eyes were closed and he rocked gently back and forth. His arms trembled. The grass around him trembled, and shivered and writhed. Patterns spread out through the turf, radiating out from him. Patterns of growth, patterns of darkening, all reaching towards the battle and the Huluk Kur. Wren saw the tips of coiling briars rising from the earth. Kerig had called the Vernal entelech onto the battlefield.

Then a stone, loosed from some distant sling, found a gap between the guarding shields. It flicked down from the sky and clipped the side of Kerig’s head. He slumped limply onto his side. In an instant, the Vernal was gone. The grass stilled and the emerging briars withered.

Wren turned about, stunned. Her eyes fell upon Yulan, who stood on the edge of the raging battle. He was staring back at Kerig’s fallen form, then he looked towards Wren. Just for a moment, he stared at her, his gaze unyielding and potent. Then he spun to catch a slashing knife on his blade and turn it away and kill the man who wielded it. And he plunged into the maelstrom.

Wren’s mind raced. It scrabbled for the possible in the face of the terrible. Ammenor had been an Autumnal like her. Yet he had brought the Hibernal into the world, there among the Cold Men. He had wielded it against the Huluk Kur and might have saved himself with it had he pushed harder, been more ruthless. Had he sacrificed more of himself.

No sword or arrow could stand against this tide, or turn it back. But a Clever still might, Wren knew. Ena Marr was gone. Kerig was gone. She remained.

‘The wrens are in the willows,’ she murmured, half singing. ‘Weaving nests of grass.’

She reached for the memory of those words on her mother’s lips. The calm, the peace they had brought her many years ago when she lay as a child unable to sleep for fear of the Clade.

‘The wrens are in their nests.’

She could remember her mother’s face. She could remember the stillness that had overtaken her own young body as the soft song filled her ears, gently crowding out all fears and frets.

The Hibernal came. It shook her. Nothing familiar and easy about this as there was to the channelling of the Autumnal. This was jagged and ragged, rasping through her like blades. It convulsed her and made her cry out.

But oh, it was potent. It was urgent and irresistible. A dam was broken and floodwaters poured out from the world beneath the world: the entelech in full torrent. It might not be the season for it, but she was in the north amid mountains. The Cold Men were there like a beacon beyond the horizon. They called the entelech of which they were a part to it. The Hibernal was hungry and vast and rushing out into a place it longed to claim.

What Wren did with it she barely knew. The violence of its passage through her was too much for her senses to bear. They scattered, storm-blown leaves. As they went, they saw ice crackling into being across all the wide expanse of the bog. It seized legs and spun crystals around them and into them. It tore men down and buried them beneath its glassy sheets. It spat flocks of glaucous daggers into the air which lashed and spun and cut.

She let the Hibernal pour through her, and knew she might never be able to stop it. With every heartbeat, it was carrying more of her with it as it swept from the formless to the real. Her mind and her will struggled with it as it rushed into the world, barely able to grasp it, barely able to twist it into the shapes she wanted. She could hear men shouting and wailing all around, but their voices were growing distant, sunk beneath the white howling of the entelech within her.

And still it was not enough. Still she dimly saw, dimly felt the great host of Huluk Kur rolling on. Climbing over the dead and dying. Crunching through ice. Still killing. She needed more. She had to give more.

Yet she had nothing left to give. In the last few days she had called upon the entelechs too often, too strongly. Her last reserves of body and mind were gone. Aches already occupied every corner of her bones. Her thoughts moved like oozing mud. All that remained to her were the last threads of her very life, so that was what she gave. It seemed to her in those final slow moments that she had no better use for it. It felt natural, as if she was being who she was meant to be.

Death was a part of the Hibernal, so she gave it that shape. She let death enter into her and possess her, and sent it on and out to walk among the Huluk Kur. She walked with it, a part of it. She became the entelech and went with it out onto the field. There she saw and felt men dying. She found the chieftains of the Huluk Kur, in horned skullcaps and fur robes, and brushed black fingers over their cheeks and breathed black winter-death into their mouths.

She felt the terror and the dread of what she was doing and what she had become. Darkness, blindness, these too were of this entelech. They descended. She made them descend. She set them loose across the hills.

And then she was alone. Drifting in black isolation. Aware that her body was shaking and twisting as the Hibernal consumed it, but feeling no pain. Barely feeling anything. She was disappearing. In moments, only the entelech would be left. A Permanence, the last fragments of her mind whispered. I will go, and perhaps something terrible that can never be undone will come into the world in my place.

That, she did not want. That was a burden too much. The frail vestiges of who she was were all that remained, and she spent them in closing the channel she had become. She refused the entelech and dammed it once more. That was what broke her in the end. She sent the ice and the darkness and the blindness away, returned them to whence they had come. But not the death. Not all of it. That was beyond her. Some part of it remained, hers and hers alone. It folded itself about her heart and carried her down into shadow. She did not fight it. She had no strength left for that. And she had changed the world at least before she left it.