Winterbirth

Chapter 3 The Black Road

The vast walls of Vaymouth, shining in the last rays of the sun’s light, soared over Taim Narran dar Lannis-Haig and his company. The capital of the Haig Blood had become, in the last hundred years, what might be the greatest city in the world. Its fortifications were on a scale unseen since the Shining City of the Kyrinin was cast down. The southern gate, called the Gold Gate, was open, its great doors of plated iron swung back and chained in place. A handful of guards were clustered to one side, leaning on their spears and watching the approaching band of men impassively. The beggars whose shack-towns seethed around the city’s walls lined the road, reaching out to the Lannis-Haig warriors.

As he drew close, Taim felt his familiar distaste for the city, and the ambition its grandeur embodied. He would gladly have passed it by and gone on through the coastal plains toward Ayth-Haig lands and the way north, but several of his men would not survive without rest. Ten had already died on the journey back from the Dargannan-Haig mountains. He was tired of burning bodies on makeshift roadside pyres.

He rode through the gateway and was immersed in the shadow of the walls, as if engulfed by a gigantic beast. A figure stepped into the roadway ahead. With a sense of cold resignation, Taim recognised the man who blocked his path: Mordyn Jerain, Chancellor to the High Thane. Born and bred in Tal Dyre but long ago adopted as a son of Vaymouth, Jerain had been at Gryvan oc Haig’s side for nearly twenty years. He was a handsome, brown-haired man whose every movement was precise, poised and considered. He wore his power with ease. He wore, too, a dark reputation. In places where there was little affection for the intricate dealings of the Haig court, the Chancellor was called by the name Shadowhand.

‘I was told you were coming,’ said Mordyn as Taim drew his horse to a halt.

‘Of course.’

The Chancellor smiled, and it was a smile both glittering and hollow. ‘I came out to meet you,’ he said obviously. ‘There are matters we must discuss.’

‘I have men with me who need rest and healing. That is my only interest here. I have permission to quarter my company within the walls. We will rest for a little while, and be on our way.’

Mordyn’s eyes narrowed and he put his graceful hand on the bridle of Taim’s horse.

‘I am Chancellor of the Haig Blood, Narran. There are many demands upon my time. I do not come to meet travellers at the gate for idle entertainment.’

Weariness coursed through Taim, and with it a trace of the anger that lay deep-buried. He looked at the Chancellor’s hand, and at the embroidered cuff of his sleeve. A fine tracery of gold thread wound its way through velvet. The coat had most likely been smuggled out of the Adravane Kingship in the far south, into the Dornach Kingship and thence through either the marketplaces of Tal Dyre or the masterless towns of the Free Coast to Vaymouth. The journey placed a dizzying price upon such a garment, and his possession of it spoke as eloquently of Mordyn Jerain’s status as any title could. This was not a man to trifle with, but Taim had left much of his discretion on the bloodstained screes beneath An Caman Fort.

‘And I do not speak with Chancellors for mine,’ he said.

He flicked his horse’s harness out of Mordyn’s grasp and nudged the animal forwards. The Chancellor shook his head like a man faced with a petulant child. He raised a hand, and guards spread themselves across the gateway. Beyond them, inside the city, a small crowd was gathering, drawn by the sight of their infamous Chancellor.

‘You are tired and the road must have been a long and hard one for you and your men,’ said Mordyn. ‘Your impatience is understandable. However, I must insist that you find the time to speak with me. I have news that you will want to hear now rather than later, and I will not give it in the street.’

Taim slumped in the saddle as his horse slowed to a halt. Behind him, some of his men were pressing up, and he could feel the tension in them without looking round. All he wanted to do was find a quiet, warm bed and sleep, dreamlessly. His dreams had been unforgiving of late. He wanted to set the world aside, even if just for one night.

Instead, he turned to the Chancellor. ‘Very well,’ he said.

He dismounted and passed his reins to the closest of his men. He sent the company on without him, while he followed Mordyn and his honour guard on foot to the Palace of Red Stone .

The palace, one of several magnificent residences constructed for the family and high officials of the Haig Blood, was not far away. It abutted the inner face of the city wall, and was raised up on a terrace from which trailing vines and bushes overflowed. Its walls were inset with blocks of red porphyry. Sentries in immaculately polished breastplates and gorgets stood on the broad steps leading up to the entrance. Their helmets bore plumes the colour of corn.

A faint, rich scent in the air distracted Taim as he walked beside the Chancellor through marble halls. The sounds of the city faded behind them, soaked up by the Palace’s massive bulk. Pillars as thick as hundred-year-old trees supported a painted ceiling. They passed a fretwork grill set into the wall and Taim glimpsed female faces behind it, watching him go past. He thought he heard whispers and laughter.

The Chancellor led him to an audience chamber. There was a great desk of dark, almost black, wood there, decorated with gold leaf. Mordyn Jerain ignored it and gestured to a pair of cushioned chairs.

‘Please have a seat,’ the Chancellor said. ‘Can I send for some food or drink?’

A maidservant, hovering between the motionless guards who flanked the doorway, looked hopeful. Taim dismissed the suggestion with a shake of his head and the woman departed.

Taim sank into the chair and was for a moment seduced by its luxurious comfort. He almost had to suppress a sigh of relaxation and relief. The feeling took him a thousand miles, more, away from the memory of the unyielding mountains of Dargannan-Haig. Mordyn’s voice dispelled the sensation.

‘You will forgive my insistence, and my departure from the usual courtesies, I think, when you hear what I have to say. I was told yesterday that Inkallim have overrun Castle Kolglas.’

Taim’s mind went blank. He could not unfix his gaze from the knots and whorls in the wooden arm of his chair. He was, he noticed in a detached way, all of a sudden clutching that arm fiercely. The cloying aroma he had smelled in the halls returned. It had a clovey, spicy texture.

‘Little is certain,’ the Chancellor was continuing, ‘though it does seem clear that the castle was burned, and that the attackers escaped into the forest.’

‘Kennet?’ asked Taim. He longed to believe Mordyn was lying to him. He could imagine no reason for such a deceit, though.

‘I cannot say. I expect more messengers at any time. The first knew only what I have told you.’

‘It is not possible. They could not reach Kolglas. What of Tanwrye, and Anduran?’

For the first time, the faintest hint of doubt seemed to touch the corner of Mordyn’s eyes. It was there for a heartbeat before being extinguished.

‘There was mention of Kyrinin,’ he said. ‘It is... well, it seems absurd, but it may be that woodwights had a hand in the assault. You know how confusion thrives at such times, so I would not place much faith in the report. Still, if the White Owls have aided the Black Road it might explain the inexplicable.’

Taim could find no words. He shook his head.

‘I fear this may be the herald of worse news to come,’ Mordyn said. ‘It seems unlikely that the Gyre Bloods would commit the Inkallim so far beyond their borders, in numbers large enough to take the castle, if it was not part of a grander scheme. The whole valley may be beset. Soon, if not already.’

Taim glared at the Chancellor. Mordyn was unperturbed. ‘I speak the truth, Taim. You must know it. The Inkallim do not make empty gestures.’

‘What...’ Taim fought to master himself, wrestling with a tide of emotion that threatened to blind him. ‘What will you do?’

Mordyn arched his eyebrows. ‘I? Await the High Thane’s return. I sent messengers south as soon as I had the news. You no doubt passed them on your way here.’

‘Wait?’ snapped Taim.

‘And gather our forces as quickly as we can. Even if there was an army provisioned and ready here now, it would still be three weeks or more before it reached Anduran. That means fighting in winter, and if we are to do that it must be with the strength to be certain of swift victory.’

‘Lheanor will not wait,’ said Taim darkly.

‘The Thane of Kilkry-Haig will do as his master commands, I imagine.’

‘He will not wait,’ Taim repeated. ‘He is a true friend to my Blood.’

‘Taim, Taim,’ the Chancellor said, ‘your Blood’s truest friend now is Gryvan oc Haig. He can bring twenty, thirty thousand men to Croesan’s aid. Yes, it will take time, but Gyre will regret its ambition.’

‘I do not care about Gyre,’ muttered Taim. ‘Only Lannis... Lannis-Haig... and my Thane.’

‘Of course,’ said the Chancellor. ‘I understand that, and I counsel you not to let your fears run too far ahead of our knowledge. This may yet prove to be nothing but a raid. And your Blood has, after all, won great victories over the Black Road before. The High Thane’s support, or that of Lheanor, may not even be required.’

‘Perhaps not. It may well have been so, had I and my two thousand men not been summoned south.’

Mordyn Jerain smiled tolerantly.

‘We can all share in that regret. You know it was necessary, though. Igryn’s open defiance of the High Thane could not stand. The True Bloods are nothing if they cannot hold together in the face of rebellion by one of their own. It was fitting that every Blood should play its part in Igryn’s defeat. No, more than fitting: essential. We live in dangerous times. If our enemies saw divisions between us, they would not be slow to act.’

‘The Black Road is our greatest enemy,’ murmured Taim. ‘It always has been. My Blood has not forgotten that. Nor has Kilkry-Haig. The True Bloods might hold together more easily if others shared that view, rather than spending all their time dreaming of the riches that could be theirs if only the Free Coast, or Tal Dyre, or even Dornach, would fall to them.’

A decorous cough drew the two men’s attention to the doorway. The woman standing there was of a beauty that caught Taim’s breath in his throat for an instant. Thick, glossy black hair fell across her shoulders and she wore a silken dress that could not be imagined upon another, so perfectly did it fit and become her. Gold dripped from her ears, her neck and her wrists; a glut of the metal that would have hypnotised a greedier soul than Taim’s. It seemed to him that the rich scent pervading the palace clung, as well, to her, so that as she entered she brought it into the room with her.

He recognised her at once: Tara Jerain, the Chancellor’s wife. He had seen her riding at Mordyn’s side during the ceremonial review of the High Thane’s army before they had marched south. Such a presence once experienced was not forgotten.

‘Ah,’ said Mordyn, springing to his feet. ‘Taim, this is my wife, Tara.’

Taim rose and inclined his head as graciously as he could manage. ‘I am honoured to meet you, my lady.’

‘And I you,’ replied the woman in a voice as luxuriant as her jewellery. ‘I am sorry not to make your acquaintance on a happier day.’

Taim was a touch surprised that the Chancellor’s wife should refer so directly to the source of his distress, then he recalled the rumours that surrounded this woman. There was no shortage of them, and all suggested that she wielded almost as much influence, in her own way, as her husband. She was a worthy wife to the Shadowhand and would, Taim supposed, know all that Mordyn did about events in the north.

‘I asked Tara to join us,’ the Chancellor was saying, ‘in case there was anything she could do to make your men more comfortable here in the city. She can find them anything they need.’

‘Indeed,’ Tara confirmed. ‘Food, drink, the care of healers. Tell me what your men require, and it is theirs, Captain Narran.’

‘Their needs will be well seen to,’ Taim said, unable to keep an edge from his voice. He felt as if he had been waylaid. He was being dismissed; delicately, sympathetically, but quite deliberately.

The Chancellor’s wife gave a subtle nod, her eyes fluttering shut for the briefest of instants as if a breeze had touched them. ‘As you wish,’ she said.

‘You, at least, will rest here for a time,’ suggested Mordyn. ‘I will have a room prepared.’

Taim turned to the Chancellor. He caught himself before he gave full vent to his feelings.

‘Thank you, but my tastes are simple. I will rest with my men, and prepare for the journey on to Kolkyre. And to Anduran.’

‘You will not wait, then, for the High Thane to return?’ asked Tara, her voice all innocent inquiry. ‘Surely he can only be two or three days behind you on the road?’

Taim smiled at her. It was required of him, even though he felt that what mattered now, all that mattered, was waiting for him somewhere in the north.

‘I must go, my lady,’ he said. ‘My place is at my own Thane’s side. And I have a wife of my own, one I wish more than ever to see again.’

Anduran and Glasbridge, the greatest settlements of Taim’s Blood, were as villages compared to the enormity of Vaymouth and the masses of its population. People churned up and down the streets as thickly as fish in a drawn net. Taim had refused the Chancellor’s offer of an escort and a mount. He knew the way to the barracks well enough, and he craved release from the oppressive solicitude of Mordyn Jerain and his household. Now, struggling through the crowds, he was less certain. Although he had been in the capital of the Bloods twice before, its rough exuberance and scale still wrought a disorientating effect.

Strange smells and sounds assaulted his senses: spices and herbs he did not recognise; music made upon instruments unknown in the north; now and again the cadences of languages foreign to him, the odd native argot of Tal Dyre traders or the coarse-sounding olden form of his own tongue that was still spoken in distant parts of the Ayth-Haig Blood. He was jostled this way and that but knew there was no point in complaining.

Taim wondered at the way life continued in all its chaotic vigour. His own world was shaking, its foundations cracked by Mordyn Jerain’s news, yet it was a day like any other in these streets. Far away on the northern border of his homeland, men might be dying; men he knew well from his own time in the garrison at Tanwrye. Here, the traders hawked their wares and the townsfolk went about their business. He felt a kind of loathing for the people all around him.

The barracks themselves lay in the centre of the city. It was a long walk. In time the turreted and balconied spires of the Moon Palace, where Gryvan oc Haig’s family lived and ruled, came into view above distant rooftops. Around one last corner the press of the crowds thinned as the street gave out on to a wide square. The city’s barracks stood austere and massive on its far side. There were performers dotted across the open space, juggling or working sleight-of-hand tricks for appreciative knots of spectators. One was a firewalker whose olive skin and coloured tunic and pantaloons said he was a wanderer from the Bone Isles of Dornach. Amongst his audience a small, lean man darted this way and that, the rags he wore shaking as he bounced from foot to foot.

‘They are not gone,’ he cried to the sky. ‘It is not true. I have seen them, they watch over us still. I met the Gatekeeper on a street in Drandar. The maker! I walked in the Veiled Woods, and saw the Wildling there, feasting on a deer he had killed.’

A madman, Taim thought. The executioner’s axe would have been over his neck for such words once. Monach oc Kilkry had been merciless when the fisherwoman of Kilvale gave birth to the Black Road . Convinced that such heresies could bring only misery and chaos, he did not flinch even when the strife turned into civil war. Now no one even listens. No one cares about such things, not here where Gryvan rules. Once, stability and order had been the whole purpose of the Bloods. They had, after all, arisen as an answer to the tumult of the Storm Years after the Aygll Kingship fell. Now, it seemed to Taim, they served a different purpose: that of supporting the ambitions of the Haig Blood.

Taim passed in through the barrack gates, ignoring the stern gazes of the guards. He found his men in a hall at the furthest corner of the sprawling maze of buildings, yards and armouries. It was then that the burden of his position, and of his news, grew so heavy as to be almost unbearable. He saw exhaustion in the bodies and eyes of his men. They were grimed by the dirt of travel and their clothes were worn. At the far end of the hall the injured and sick lay upon pallets. He could offer none of the rest and comfort they all so deserved, and must raise them up for the long journey to home and, perhaps, a greater battle than the one they had left behind.

It was not so very difficult in the end. Taim took pride in their weary resolution, but for all his tiredness he did not sleep well that night.

Anyara’s cell in Anduran was cold and comfortless. All they gave her to eat was a thin gruel with a few chunks of dispirited grey bread floating in it. It was brought to her by guards, some of them women, who never spoke. They stood and watched her as she ate. She sensed their contempt for her, and sometimes something stronger: hatred almost. It made her angry. She was the Thane’s niece, incarcerated in her own homeland by intruders. It was she who had the right to hatred, not her gaolers. Her anger boiled over just once. She flung her bowl at the feet of a guard and spat curses at him. He regarded the gruel sprayed across his boots, and then struck her with the back of his hand. She yelped and clutched her nose in a vain attempt to stem the blood that sprang from it. He hit her again, on the side of her head, and knocked her down. He picked up the empty bowl and carried it away, slamming the bar across the cell door in his wake. After that, Anyara kept her feelings on a tighter leash.

In the nights she craved sleep as a kind of escape. It came only grudgingly. She lay on the battered mattress they had given her, curled like a worm in the stone gut of some great animal that had swallowed her. The Black Road haunted her exhaustion. To her it was a desolate creed. The whole idea that your life, and the death that would end it, was fixed from the moment of your birth was loathsome to her, yet her own impotence now seemed a bitter echo of it. All the strength she had cultivated over the last five years counted for nothing. Others had decided upon a cruel death for her, and there was not a thing she could do.

She could remember, long ago in a world now as tenuous as a dream to her, sitting upon her father’s knee in the hall of Kolglas, listening to his tales of old battles. As a young man Kennet had fought alongside his father and his brother against the warriors of the Black Road at Tanwrye. In his soft voice, as he whispered stories of that day in her ear, she heard a bitter respect for his enemy. A company of Inkallim had stood aside and watched as a Horin-Gyre army was surrounded and destroyed before the walls of Tanwrye. Some said it was because the ravens wished to curb the Blood’s arrogance, some that the High Thane of Gyre had forbidden the invasion and Horin-Gyre was thus punished for its disobedience. Yet, Kennet murmured, there had been no fear amongst the slaughtered. They had fought on, and died, for hour after hour.

Lairis had scolded Kennet for telling such tales to a little girl in the midst of a meal, but he had reprimanded his beloved wife. ‘She must know the nature of her enemy,’ he said.

Though the knowledge did her little good, Anyara thought, she did know her enemy, and how remorseless and resilient their hatred was.

All she could see through the high, narrow window of her cell was a patch of sky. It offered little cheer, wearing its clouds with sombre gravity. Sometimes she heard rain on the roof and thought that even those drops would be a comforting touch upon her head if she could just walk for a few moments beneath them. The hours were long. Over many years she had fashioned strong defences against her fears and pain, against the Fever, death, her father’s suffering. Now those defences were sorely tested.

Most of the guards had heavy footsteps that she could recognise before they reached the door of her cell. When, after three or four days of imprisonment, she heard a lighter step approaching, her spirit lifted at the mere thought of some change in the crushing routine. Her heart fell once more when the visitor stepped through the doorway. It was Wain, sister to the Horin-Gyre Bloodheir. Her long hair was a little less lustrous than the last time Anyara had seen her, her clothes a little more soiled by smoke and dirt, but her gaze was no less hard; no less contemptuous.

She smirked at the sight of Anyara, who managed to stay an impulse to smooth her own hair and clothes. The time had passed when she could pretend to be anything other than cold and hungry and dishevelled.

‘These walls must never have seen such a distinguished guest,’ said Wain.

‘What do you want?’

‘So sharp. Gaol does not agree with you, perhaps?’ Wain reached out and seized Anyara’s wrist, making a show of examining her palms and fingers.

‘You are a soft little thing, aren’t you?’ she mused. ‘You would not last one winter in the north. Soft women make soft men, it would seem, since your Blood is so easily defeated.’

Anyara wrenched her hand away and glared at Wain.

‘We are not beaten yet. Croesan will have Kanin’s head and yours before he’s done.’

Wain laughed. She ran her fingers over the gold chain at her neck.

‘Your concern for our heads is touching,’ she said, ‘but I do not fear what will come to pass. The Hooded God read the tale of my life in his book on the day of my birth; its ending was fixed at that moment. My feet are on the Black Road and no wish of yours will change its course. Anyway, I think it is your death that is written for this time and place, not mine. I came to tell you that we have sent message arrows into the castle. We told your uncle that we have you, and that he must treat with us or see you skinned beneath his walls.’ She paused as if to observe Anyara’s reaction, but seeing none she carried on. ‘What do you think? How soft have the men of Lannis-Haig become?’

‘Not soft at all,’ said Anyara, hoping that she kept her fear out of her voice. She had known this was how it might go—why else would they have kept her alive except for a game such as this?—but the thought was one she had almost managed to keep at bay so far. There was always hope, she told herself with little conviction. Only the adherents of the Black Road believed that events could follow but a single course.

‘Well, you might be right,’ Wain said. ‘A pity for you. At least you can rest assured that Croesan will be following you into the darkness. Your precious Thane in his castle will not last long. This land will be ours once again.’

‘It was never yours. You must mean that it will be Gyre’s. The Horin family was nothing but thugs in Glasbridge before you fled into the north, I heard. At least the Gyre line springs from true Thanes, even if they lost the right to the title when they…’

Wain took a sudden step forwards and Anyara retreated, expecting a blow to come. Wain flexed her right hand, perhaps imagining what damage the heavy rings that adorned it might do. She seemed to think better of it, and laughed instead. She began to turn one of those rings around her finger thoughtfully.

‘A little spirit left, then,’ she said. ‘It is true that Ragnor oc Gyre will rule here, but it will be my Blood, my brother, that returns his throne to him. But a throne is only the means, not the end. That is what you cannot see. We will rule only to spread the light of the true creed. When that light shines in every heart, then the Gods will return to us.’

‘You’re getting carried away. You can go no further while Anduran stands. And Tanwrye cannot have fallen yet.’ Anyara saw the truth of it in the other’s eyes. She saw danger there as well and did not press the point.

‘Such confidence,’ Wain smiled. ‘Such arrogance, that you think even the strongest walls can stand if it is written that they should crumble. You think all your hope, all the striving in this fallen world makes any difference to the tide of fate? That is the kind of pride the Gods require us to set aside before they will return. The Black Road exists to teach us humility. If our ancestors had possessed more of it, the Gods would never have departed.’

She came forwards again, and Anyara fell back until she was pressed against the wall. Wain pinned her arms against the cold stone. Anyara felt an awful strength in the other woman; not just in the iron-hard grip of her hands but in the icy stillness of her eyes. She wondered what Wain was doing here. It could not just be a desire to frighten her or mock her. Perhaps it was just curiosity to see how this soft girl from Kolglas withstood captivity, or the desire to test the strength of her belief against Anyara’s denial.

‘The Black Road will triumph,’ the Bloodheir’s sister said, ‘because it is truth, and until it rules the Gods will not return and the world will not be renewed. You and all your kind have nothing to set against that, and therefore you will fall.’

Abruptly, she released Anyara and turned her back on her. She left without another word. Anyara massaged her upper arms where Wain had gripped her. There would be bruises there, she knew. That was the least of her worries. No word would come from her uncle to spare her the attentions of the Horin-Gyre executioners. It could not, for her life was nothing weighed against that of the Blood itself.

There was no sickness in the castle yet. For that at least, the besieged could be thankful. But there was little food, either. The blow had fallen with so little warning that there had not been time to bring many supplies in from the great barns of Anduran. If no more than the castle’s normal population needed to be fed, their stores would have lasted for some weeks; twice as many again had poured in as the enemy drew near. In the courtyard, the stables, the great rooms of the keep, people huddled together around whatever few possessions they had managed to salvage. Mothers fed their babies at the breast in the passageways. Rations of food were kept meagre to eke out the stores. Hungry children cried, tempers ran a knife edge.

Only at the very end, when the Horin-Gyre vanguard was over the walls and inside the town, had the castle gates been closed. Then, Croesan had thought there could be no more bitter sound in the world than the desperate voices of those left outside.

Hope had stumbled a little in the Thane’s breast, this last day. If help was to come from Kolglas or Glasbridge it should have arrived by now, and in truth he was not sure how much they could offer anyway. Taim Narran had taken most of their fighting men south with him. The best, and greater, part of the forces left to Lannis-Haig had been on the northern border and must now be trapped in Tanwrye. The real chance of aid was from Kolkyre, and the old Thane Lheanor oc Kilkry-Haig. He would come if he could, Croesan knew. Kilkry and Lannis had been closely bound since the very day Sirian was made into a Thane. It was all a question of time. The Black Road army that held Anduran in its grip did not have the siege engines to breach the castle gate or walls; such machines could never have been transported down through Anlane. If help came before they could be built, and before the castle’s food supplies were exhausted, there would yet be a reckoning with the enemy outside the gate.

The seal of Lannis-Haig was about the Thane’s neck. He lifted it in his hand. It bore the image of Castle Kolglas, the wellspring of his Blood. He wondered if his brother was dead, as the message from Kanin nan Horin-Gyre had claimed. It might be so. The fact that Kennet had not yet come to Anduran could only mean that something had prevented him, and it was hard to imagine how the enemy could have taken Anyara—as they also claimed in that arrow-borne message—except over her father’s body.

Croesan let the seal fall back against his chest and looked around. The audience chamber had never been more finely decorated. Golden ribbons were strung from the throne up to fans of polished boar spears that glinted on the walls. Wreaths of greenery were hung with the banners of Anduran, Kolglas, Glasbridge, Targlas and Tanwrye, the five towns of the Blood. A red carpet, trimmed with gold, ran the length of the chamber.

It had been in this room that the seal was first placed around Croesan’s neck. His father had been dead no more than a few hours, laid low by a fever only months after coming unscathed out of the Battle of Stone Vale. Now three more generations of the Lannis line stood in the magnificent chamber. Croesan looked upon Naradin and Eilan, the latter cradling their baby son in her arms. Husband and wife were dressed in plain white robes that brushed the floor. The baby was wrapped in a cream-coloured sheet. Behind them was gathered a solemn group of officials and castle officers. It was a smaller gathering than the occasion warranted. In more normal times, every family of substance throughout the Thane’s lands would have been represented here to witness what was about to happen.

To one side, close by the Thane, a silver bowl filled with water rested on an oaken stand. Athol Kintyne, the Master Oathman of the Lannis-Haig Blood, waited before it. His grey hair and beard, his stooped shoulders and his skin like well-worn hide bestowed an aura of aged wisdom upon him. His duties, shared with the dozen Oathmen who served him, lay at the heart of the Blood’s life and history. One of those duties was the Naming of infants. That Naming most often took place at the end of the first three months of life. For reasons nobody felt the need to question, the Thane’s grandson was to receive his name before he was even one month old.

‘We should begin,’ murmured Croesan.

Naradin and Eilan came forwards. They stopped by the silver bowl and bowed their heads to the Master Oathman.

‘Who is the child?’ asked Athol.

It was Eilan who gave the reply. ‘He is the son of Eilan, daughter of Clachan and Dimayne, and he is the son of Naradin, son of Croesan and Liann.’

Athol nodded. ‘Wash him,’ he said.

Naradin and Eilan together removed the sheet from the baby and lowered him into the water in the bowl. They handled him carefully. He made no complaint while Naradin held him and Eilan lifted water in her cupped hands and spilled it over his head. Naradin lifted him out again, and Athol proffered a new, immaculate sheet of purest white satin in which he was wrapped.

‘Who is the child?’ asked the Oathman again.

There was the slightest of hesitations before Eilan replied, in a clear and strong voice. ‘He is Croesan nan Lannis-Haig.’

Naradin glanced across to his father. There was a sad smile on the older man’s face. He had not known of this. He blinked. His eyes had taken on a watery sheen.

Athol stepped forwards and tied a fragile strand of cloth about the infant’s wrist.

‘Croesan nan Lannis-Haig, son of Naradin and Eilan, be welcome amongst us. Bear your name with honour.’

There was a ripple of soft approval and congratulation from the onlookers as the Master Oathman straightened and smiled at the mother and father. ‘A well-chosen name,’ he said.

‘We think so,’ smiled Eilan.

‘There is one other thing,’ said Naradin. He turned to his father. ‘Thane, it is my wish to stand in place of my son and to take the bloodoath on his behalf.’

Croesan raised his eyebrows. ‘It is unusual . . .’ He looked to Athol.

‘But possible, of course,’ the Oathman confirmed. ‘It is permitted for one to stand in another’s place in some circumstances.’ He paused for a moment, a trace of uncertainty crossing his face. ‘If... if there is the likelihood of death before they are of an age to do it for themselves.’

Eilan was stroking the baby’s face. She bent over him as if he was all that there was in the world. ‘Our son has a name,’ she said, without looking up, ‘but that is not enough for the grandson of a Thane in such times as these. It would not be fitting should he die with a name, but without a master.’

Croesan sighed. His mouth trembled, and for a moment it seemed that he might not be able to speak.

‘Very well,’ he said thickly. ‘There is no need, since no harm will come to the child, but it is a choice for the parents. Athol, you will accept the Bloodoath from my grandson. Naradin shall stand on his behalf.’

‘Place the child on the floor, Bloodheir, and kneel at his side,’ Athol said.

Naradin did as he was told. The white sheet shone against the dark red carpet. The Thane pressed his lips tight together and turned away, fighting in that moment to calm powerful emotions. The baby was making small, inarticulate sounds. His minuscule hands pawed the air as if he strove to grasp some drifting motes that only he could see.

Athol stepped forwards, interposing himself between the Thane and Naradin. He spoke in a deep, impersonal voice.

‘In the name of Sirian and Powll, Anvar and Gahan and Tavan, the Thanes who have been; of Croesan oc Lannis-Haig, the Thane who is now; and of the Thanes yet to come, I command you all to hear the Bloodoath taken. I am Thane and Blood, past and future, and this life will be bound to mine. I command you all to mark it.’

He reached out an open hand to Naradin. ‘Have you the blade?’ he asked. Wordlessly, Naradin withdrew from a sheath at his belt a short, flat-bladed knife with a handle carved of antler. He laid it hilt first in the Oathman’s palm. Athol held the knife up and examined it.

‘The blade is fresh-forged? Unbloodied? Unmarked?’ he asked, and Naradin avowed it was.

‘By what right do you speak for the oathtaker?’ Athol asked.

‘He is my son’, replied Naradin.

‘It is fitting.’ Athol went down on one knee beside the baby. He held the knife poised by little Croesan’s chubby arm.

‘You will give of your blood to seal this oath?’ Athol asked.

‘I will,’ said Naradin on behalf of his child.

‘By this oath your life is bound to mine,’ the Oathman intoned. ‘The word of the Thane of Lannis-Haig is your law and rule, as the word of father is to a child. Your life is the life of the Blood Lannis-Haig.’

He laid a tiny cut into the skin of the baby’s arm. A bead of blood formed. An expression of offended puzzlement appeared on little Croesan’s face. He made a coughing noise that threatened to develop into sobs. Athol caught a fraction of the blood upon the very tip of the oathknife. With his thumb he began to rub the liquid into the blade.

‘You pledge your life to the Lannis-Haig Blood?’ asked Athol, and Naradin agreed softly.

‘You bend your knee to the Thane, who is the Lannis-Haig Blood?’

‘Yes,’ Naradin said.

‘None may come between you and this oath,’ said Athol sternly. ‘By this oath you set aside all other allegiances. The Blood shall sustain you and bear you up. You shall sustain the Blood. Speak your oath.’

Naradin took a deep breath and said, ‘I speak in the name of Croesan nan Lannis-Haig, son of Naradin and Eilan. By my blood I pledge my life to Lannis-Haig. The word of the Thane is my law and rule; it is the root and staff of my life. The enemy of the Blood is my enemy. My enemy is the enemy of the Blood. Unto death.’

Athol leaned forwards and laid the stained knife on the baby’s naked chest.

‘Unto death,’ he said, and turned away.

Naradin lifted his son in his arms. The baby was crying now. Eilan came and bound his wounded arm. There were tears on her cheeks as she kissed his soft forehead. Croesan the Thane took his grandson. He cupped the baby’s head in his great hand and gazed down into a face contorted by mounting unhappiness.

‘Hush, hush,’ whispered the Thane. ‘The Blood shall sustain you, little Croesan. The Blood shall sustain you.’

He put all his belief into the words. He meant them with all his heart, yet knew they were only a part of the bargain. The Blood would not sustain his brother’s daughter, imprisoned somewhere in this very city that Sirian had built. Croesan himself had held the crumpled message from his besiegers over the flame of a lamp and watched Anyara’s life burn away in his hand. He had no choice, just as there had been no choice but to bar the gates of the castle against his own townsfolk when the enemy drew too near. Yes, the Blood sustained its people. Sometimes too it made demands of them that would break the hardest heart, and Croesan’s heart had never been of the very hardest stuff.

Anyara found marks scratched on the wall of her cell. As far as she could tell, running her fingertips over them, they were nothing more than a counting of days: a dozen short, shallow lines gouged out of the stone by some previous inhabitant of the gaol.

Her own days passed with grinding slowness, every minute extending itself as if to savour her impotence. Even so, she found herself wishing it would slow still further, so that the moment when hope died would be delayed. Every morning she woke half-expecting that they would come and take her to be killed.

She leapt up and grabbed at the bars of the tiny window to test their strength, and found they were immovable. She tried to strike up conversation with one of the guards, choosing a man who seemed a fraction less implacable than the others. He did not respond to her approaches and gave no sign of even noticing when she smiled her finest smile and fingered the hem of her ragged skirt for him. For half a day she feigned illness in the hope that they might move her to a less secure place. She writhed upon her mattress, clasping her stomach and copying the sounds she had heard serving women in Kolglas make when they were giving birth. When a guard came in and asked her what was wrong she pretended she could not reply. The woman seized her hair and turned her face upwards, holding her like that for a few seconds before snorting and leaving. After a few hours had passed and no one else came she abandoned the pretence.

So much time passed that she almost started to believe they were not going to kill her after all. She resisted that thought. The hope she needed to find was a strong one, not one based on an illusion that the world was going to change its nature and become kind and merciful. She had to look after herself. It was what she had always done.

A family—mother, father and two young boys—was being executed in Anduran’s main square. Kanin nan Horin-Gyre was there to witness it. They had tried to hide food from one of the Bloodheir’s foraging parties. A poorly relaid section of boarding in the floor of their house betrayed a few bags of flour and dried meats, and condemned them all to death. None disputed the order that the children must die as well as their parents. The reasoning was common currency amongst the northern Bloods: if a life must to be taken, take those of any who might avenge it at the same time. Still, Kanin had commanded that the family should have quick deaths, their throats cut with sharp knives as they knelt blindfolded upon the cobbles of the square. Cruelty would not have added to the message their deaths were meant to send.

It was not the sullen resistance of these common folk that had brought a black mood down upon the Horin-Gyre Bloodheir. He expected little else; had expected more of it than he had found, in fact. Rather, it was the mere fact that he was standing here in the miserable drizzle watching them die while his true foes were ensconced behind unyielding walls. He had dared to imagine, as he struggled through the seemingly unending wilderness of Anlane with his army, that fate would be kind to them. He had hoped that the head of the Lannis Thane might be on a spike over the castle gatehouse by now. Instead he faced the prospect of a wearing siege, with time as great an enemy as the warriors on Castle Anduran’s walls. He strove for the humble acceptance of fate’s course his faith demanded, but it was hard.

This war had been a desperate enterprise from the start, conceived in the hope that fate would favour the bold. The border stronghold of Tanwrye was too stern an obstacle to be easily overcome, as the Horin-Gyre Blood had learned to its cost in the past, but when the halfbreed Aeglyss had appeared at the Horin-Gyre fortress of Hakkan, promising that he could deliver the aid of the White Owl Kyrinin, Kanin’s father Angain had glimpsed opportunity. Although Kanin felt nothing but contempt for the progeny of such obscene interbreeding—and Aeglyss had struck him from the start as a particularly distasteful and self-serving example of his kind—even he had been exhilarated by the possibility the na’kyrim offered up: an entire Horin-Gyre army smuggled through Anlane deep into enemy lands, reducing Tanwrye to an irrelevance. Before Kanin was born, when Angain himself was Bloodheir, the finest of the Horin-Gyre Blood had been slaughtered at Tanwrye by the army of Lannis-Haig. Angain’s younger brother had died there while Angain lay in his sickbed, prostrated by a wound taken in a bear hunt. Aeglyss offered the Thane not just vengeance but a kind of healing when he promised that he could open a path to the heart of Lannis-Haig.

Out in the centre of the square one of Kanin’s shieldmen was reading aloud the sentence. There was not much of an audience. Aside from the Bloodheir and some of his Shield, the only onlookers were a few groups of warriors huddled in their cloaks and a dozen or so residents of the city who had been dragged out to watch. They were poor folk, clad in ragged clothes and keeping their eyes down. They gave every sign of indifference to what was happening in front of them. Kanin knew, though, that they would spread word of Horin-Gyre justice through the small population left in Anduran.

The other Bloods of the Black Road had mocked Angain’s proposal at first, not least because the very idea of alliance with a Kyrinin clan was repellent to them. Even when grudging assent was granted, no more than a thousand Gyre swords had been lent, and those only in support of the feint against Tanwrye. More would come, the High Thane pledged, if fortune showed the way; it was obvious what he thought the likelihood of that was. And a hundred or so warriors of the Battle Inkall had come forward, of course, with Shraeve at their head. The thought still twisted a barb in Kanin’s guts. The Inkallim had betrayed his family all those years ago at Tanwrye, watching from a knoll while the Horin-Gyre warriors were overwhelmed, and he did not trust them now. Shraeve, though, had been the one who suggested that not just the Thane but all the ruling line of Lannis-Haig should die, and volunteered some of her warriors for an assault on Kolglas. Aeglyss had again delivered White Owl aid for that attack. However much Kanin despised the na’kyrim, his value was beyond dispute. Without the food and guides provided by the woodwights, he might have lost half his warriors on the march through Anlane; the other half would probably have been killed in skirmishing if the White Owls had been actively hostile.

Fate had played a cruel trick in the last days before the army was to march. Life began to loosen its grip upon Angain oc Horin-Gyre. His strength slipped away and all his desire was not enough to let him take the field. So when the time had come, Kanin and his sister Wain had knelt at the side of their father’s bed, the scent of his sickness filling their nostrils, and promised to put an end to Lannis-Haig for him.

The executioners were tying back their victims’ hair. One of the boys—the younger one to judge by his size—was struggling against fear. His lips were shaking, convulsed by the half-strangled sobs that filled his throat. Kanin saw but did not note it. His thoughts had strayed far from what his eyes observed.

They had come so close to success. The attack across the Vale of Stones had trapped most of Lannis-Haig’s strength to the north; the castle at Kolglas was fired and the Thane’s brother killed; the town of Anduran itself had fallen pitifully easily. Yet it had not been quite enough. The castle held, and the Thane within waited for his allies to come to him. If Tanwrye had been assaulted a few hours earlier, or Kanin himself been a single day later in emerging from Anlane, there might have been hardly a warrior left in Anduran to man the castle. Croesan might have been caught exposed upon the road between his capital and Tanwrye. That had been the intention; the hope. On such fine margins did fate work its will.

Out on the square, blades cut through flesh. Four bodies toppled forward. Legs kicked; heads jerked in time to a slowing beat. Blood poured over the ground, running in intricate patterns along the countless channels between the cobblestones. Kanin wheeled his horse about and nudged it towards the merchant’s house he and Wain had made their own.

Wain. His other half; his stronger half, he sometimes thought. He knew very well that the majority of warriors they commanded feared her far more than they did him. The fervour of Wain’s belief in the Black Road, and in the Blood, was a beacon for all of them. Those things burned in Kanin’s breast too, but in Wain they were informed by a passion so ferocious its light could blind.

Angain had often tried to make his son marry. None of the brides Kanin had been offered—the fawning daughters of great landowners, even the mesmerisingly beautiful niece of Orinn oc Wyn-Gyre—had been a match for his sister. Kanin could not imagine himself marrying until he found a woman who could be measured against Wain and withstand the comparison.

He found her upstairs in what had once been quite a grand bedroom. The merchant whose family had lived here must have been a gifted trader, for the house was as finely fitted out as any Kanin had seen in his homeland save the homes of Thanes and their kin. Wooden panels carved with hunting scenes covered the walls. Ornate iron stands held flickering candles. There were wolf and bear skins laid out on the floor. They had been found in the loft, with dozens of others forgotten or abandoned by the fleeing family.

Wain was seated before a long, narrow table. She had set a burnished shield up on it and was grimacing at her distorted reflection as she ran an antler comb through her hair.

‘Done?’ she asked, without looking round.

‘It is done. I would rather have had them working on the walls.’

‘Four more pairs of hands will not make the city any more fit to meet an assault,’ said Wain. ‘Four cut throats may yield a good deal more food.’

‘Indeed.’ Wearily, Kanin unbuckled his leather tunic and cast it to the floor. The light shirt he wore beneath was soaked through.

‘I’ll have someone light a fire,’ his sister said.

He crossed the room and took the comb from her hands. ‘In a while. Let me do that. You’ll pull your hair out before you straighten it.’

He stood in silence for a few minutes, unteasing her hair with methodical persistence. Concentrating upon the task distracted him from his troubled thoughts. Her locks were beautiful, even dirty and knotted as they were. He could smell smoke and grime and sweat on her.

‘You’ve been labouring?’ he asked.

‘With the machine-makers. There’s enough timber and rope here to make a hundred war engines. It’s the hands skilled in the making that we lack; we lost some of our best back in the forest. Still, another few days and we’ll be throwing the ruins of their precious city down their throats.’

‘Another few days. And a week after that to break down the walls or the gate. Or two weeks? Or six? Have we got that long, Wain?’

She shrugged. Looking down at her hands resting in her lap, Kanin could see that she was toying with her rings. It made him smile. The habit had been with her as long as he could remember, and he could summon with perfect clarity the sight of her, an ungovernable, independent child sitting in her night robes and doing the same thing: turning, always turning, the ring on her finger. It happened when her mind was working, as if her thoughts moved with such force that they had to have some external echo. She had long since stopped noticing when she did it, and if ever Kanin pointed it out—which he sometimes did, with a studied air of innocence—she would glare at him with such annoyance that he laughed. That too reminded him of when she was young, of her severe expression whenever she had observed something that offended her child’s sense of what was right.

‘The guards told me you went to see our prisoners the other day,’ he said to diffuse the temptation of teasing her.

‘I did.’

‘And?’

‘The girl has more strength than I expected. Not as feeble as most of them seem. She is afraid, though, like all of them. They live in fear.’

‘What about the halfbreed?’

Wain’s reflection showed her lack of interest. ‘I don’t think he’s said a word since he was locked up. The guards stay out of his way. We should kill him and have done with it.’

Patience had never been a part of Wain’s armoury. When they had been children she had always been the one to court a scolding by loosing her dogs too soon on a hunt or venturing out on the ice too early in the season, before the adults judged it thick enough. Kanin knew it was hard for her, this inactivity. That was why she had gone to bait the Lannis-Haig girl. It was why she drove the workers making the siege engines so hard.

‘You never know when even a rat is going to have its use,’ Kanin said. ‘Look at Aeglyss. He’s served a purpose. Still, we’ll see. After they’ve stewed a little longer in the castle we can let them watch while we finish the girl. Maybe we should kill the halfbreed at the same time.’

Wain’s hands had become still. As a rule, it meant she had reached some conclusion. Kanin met her reflected eyes. She was excited.

‘It’s coming soon,’ Wain said. ‘I can feel it in my bones. The Road is going to turn, one way or the other. What do you think? Light or darkness for us?’

‘One or the other, Wain,’ he said. ‘One or the other. Aid will come to us from the north, or to Croesan from the south. This is a horse we can only stay astride. We cannot lead it where we will.’

‘Yes, yes,’ and he heard that fierce certainty in her voice that he knew so well, ‘but still I say something is coming. One way or the other.’

A huge man, all muscular bulk, appeared in the doorway: Igris, chief of Kanin’s shieldmen. He waited in silence, staring rigidly ahead. Kanin set aside the comb.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘The halfbreed asked for an audience. We told him you would not see him.’ The man’s voice was deep and strong.

‘Very well,’ said Kanin. Wain rose and began buckling on her sword belt.

‘He’s insistent, though,’ Igris said. ‘He still waits outside. He asks that he be allowed to speak with the other halfbreed, the one from Kolglas. The guards turned him away when he tried to get in to the gaol.’

Kanin sighed in irritation. ‘So he has you running around as his messenger, does he?’

For the first time, the shieldman glanced at his master. His face was impassive, but there might have been the faintest flicker of doubt in his eyes.

‘Perhaps he charmed you with that voice of his?’ Kanin suggested. ‘Perhaps you listened a little too closely when he suggested you should pass on his request?’

‘No, my lord. I do not think so.’

‘Well you wouldn’t, would you? What do you think, Wain? Perhaps we should rid ourselves of Aeglyss.’

His sister was testing her blade’s edge with her thumb.

‘He’s obsessed with Kennet’s tame halfbreed. Let them talk to each other. What harm can it do? It might keep Aeglyss quiet for a while, at least.’

There was room in the Shared for Inurian to find peace. By stilling the chatter of his senses and freeing his mind of all contact with the world about him, he could sink back through deep strata of silence and darkness. He could bring about dissolution. It was a feeling none save another na’kyrim could hope to understand, and even amongst them precious few could attain it as he did. Time lost its meaning there, in the abyssal places, and the mind could find solace. It was a respite he needed during his incarceration in Anduran.

On the fifth night of his imprisonment he lay down upon the floor. He let his awareness of the cold and of the stone beneath him fall away. He shut out the harsh voices in the yard outside and the whispering rivulets of rainwater trickling down the walls of his prison. His breathing shallowed, taking on a steady trance-rhythm. His thoughts slipped away behind him, like eddies in the wake of a ship. His mind was smoke, attenuating. He was thousands, thousands of thousands. He was Huanin, Kyrinin, even joyful Saolin. He ran within Kyrinin hunters, felt the lovestruck awe of every Huanin mother, the abandoned exultation of the Saolin’s shapeshifting.

Even the Whreinin had left their traces in the eternity of the Shared. Although the wolfenkind were long gone, they had once walked the world and the Shared would never forget it. He could sense the wolfenkind’s savage cruelty, that had finally driven the Tainted Races to hound them to extinction, but there was no judgement in the sensing of it. The Shared was all things, and there was no good or evil in it, no right and wrong. There was only existence, or the memory of existence.

The Anain alone lay beyond him. They were there, like the rest—theirs was an immeasurable, illimitable presence—but their nature was of a different kind, and not something any na’kyrim could comprehend or taste.

Inurian faded, dispersing into the seamless unity that underlay thought and life. He had surrendered himself thus to the Shared many times in his life, but on this occasion the experience was marred. Something tugged at his awareness, refusing to allow its cleansing dissolution. It was as if the last flimsy threads of his mind caught upon some snag and were held. For a moment he strove to dissipate those final elements of his self. The focus grew stronger. The sensation of his thoughts recoalescing was almost physical. It grieved him to be thus denied release. As he ascended towards consciousness, he felt that which had prevented his escape drawing closer: a turbulent shadow casting itself over him and wrapping the sharp stench of corruption around him. Like a drop falling upon the still surface of a pool, something had marred the perfection of the Shared.

He opened his eyes to find Aeglyss standing before him.

‘I am not sure what you were doing, but I would like to learn the way of it,’ Aeglyss said quietly. A faint smile was playing across his pale, thin lips.

Inurian rose and flexed his right knee to ease its protests. The long walk through Anlane, and the damp and cold of his miserable cell, had reminded the joint of a twisting fall long ago on the rough slopes of the Car Anagais. He returned his visitor’s gaze unresponsively, burying his surprise and the sudden presentiment of horror that accompanied it. It was clear that Aeglyss was the cause of the turbulence in the Shared; what that implied about the man’s potential potency put a sliver of fear into Inurian’s heart.

‘Can we not even talk to one another?’ Aeglyss persisted. ‘I wish only to learn from you. I need your help—your guidance—to harness the strength I know I possess.’

He took a short step closer to Inurian. ‘Our interests run in the same channel. These people would kill you without a second thought: I have been arguing on your behalf ever since we arrived here.’

‘That’s a lie,’ Inurian said evenly.

‘Ah, so you’re interested enough to go scrabbling about inside my head. What do you see there? I could keep you out—I did at Kolglas—but there’s no need to. You must know I mean you no harm.’

‘I don’t need the Shared to tell me that you are no friend of mine,’ replied Inurian. It was true only in part. He was not prepared to give even a hint of how unsettling the things he sensed in Aeglyss were. The younger man carried such a roiling knot of anger and resentment in him that Inurian could almost taste it.

‘Use me, then, if you refuse my friendship,’ snapped Aeglyss. ‘I hoped for more from another na’kyrim, but I should have known better. I’ve had no better from na’kyrim than from anyone else. Why should you be any different?’

It took an effort of will for Inurian not to wince at the sharp, sudden pain that flared in Aeglyss as he spoke. That was what underlay all the more ferocious emotions that burned in Aeglyss. Beneath the bitterness was pain: a deep-rooted hurt, profound and lonely.

‘Help me because I can help you,’ Aeglyss insisted. ‘I cannot force you—I know I’ve not the strength for that, not yet—but if you help me to understand what I am capable of, you will benefit as much as I will. I know I can do things with the Shared no one has been able to do in years. I know it!’

Inurian regarded the other man. He could almost pity him. Almost, bur not quite.

‘No,’ he shook his head. ‘I cannot help you.’

For an instant, a terrible fury burned in Aeglyss’ grey eyes. Unable to help himself, Inurian glanced away. When he forced himself to meet the other’s gaze again, that fury had gone.

‘We can talk about it another time, perhaps,’ said Aeglyss.

He left, closing and barring the door behind him.

In the first hour or two of daylight, the Children of the Hundred came out on to Anduran’s market square. Kanin was there, organising a party of Horin-Gyre warriors who were about to head south down the valley. Anduran itself might have fallen quickly, but there was troubling, sporadic resistance throughout the country-side. The survivors of a minor battle near Targlas, halfway between Anduran and Tanwrye, had just straggled in: they had been victorious, and probably broken the will of that town’s populace, but it had cost thirty lives that Kanin could ill afford.

Already in a foul mood, he watched the Inkallim taking up their sparring positions. Every morning they did this, performing their elaborate and precise ritualistic combats beneath the steely gaze of Shraeve, their leader.

She stood attentive and motionless as the first clash of blades rang out. She was a tall woman, lean and powerful. Her long hair, dyed black like that of all Inkallim, was tied back. Two swords were sheathed crossways upon her back. Never yet had Kanin seen her draw them. She would be lethal, he knew: lethality was the sole purpose of the Battle Inkall. Although only around eighty remained of the hundred or more who had joined the long march through Anlane—a dozen or so Hunt Inkallim had come too, but their business was not on the battlefield—eighty of the Battle were worth at least two hundred ordinary warriors, probably more. They followed Shraeve’s command, though. Kanin could no more tell them when and where to employ their skills than he could order the passage of the clouds across the sky. He was not inclined to make the attempt, in any case; he would as soon trust one of the long-dead wolfenkind as the ravens’ loyalty to his cause.

Wain put a hand on his shoulder, disturbing his dark musings.

‘Come away,’ she said. ‘The time of our testing is here.’

He looked at her questioningly.

‘Our scouts have found an army gathering, between Glasbridge and Kolglas. It’s coming up the south side of the valley’

‘So soon?’ said Kanin. ‘I’d hoped . . . well, no matter. How many?’

‘Three or four thousand, they say. With Kilkry-Haig riders in the van.’

That was a bitter blow. Lannis alone, Kanin would have hoped to defeat; an army strengthened by the prideful horsemen of Kilkry was a sterner test. What was coming now would be utterly different from the skirmishing that had been going on up and down the valley for the past few days. He had, at best, equal numbers to stand against the enemy, and hundreds of those would have to remain in position around the castle to keep Croesan from sallying forth. Worse, almost a third of his strength was Tarbain tribesmen who would be grass beneath the scythe of Kilkry cavalry. Shraeve and her Inkallim might be enough to make a difference, but he would not ask for her aid.

‘That will be enough to test us, indeed,’ he murmured.

‘We should send for Aeglyss,’ Wain said. She shook her head slightly at the doubt on Kanin’s face. ‘He has not given up hope of winning our favour. We can use that. He may be able to persuade the White Owls to give battle once more. It probably won’t work, but we lose nothing in the attempt. If he succeeds, we can dispense with him and with his woodwights just as we did before; if he fails, he fails.’

Kanin grimaced. ‘Are we so desperate? We were going to do this together, for our father. For the Blood. I don’t want it . . . fouled. In any case, what can a na’kyrim and a few woodwights do against an army?’

She shrugged. ‘I do not know. Is there harm in trying, though? I like him no better than you do, but if fate dictates that Aeglyss is a weapon we are to use against our enemies, that is what he will be. It is not for us to choose.’

‘I suppose they are good archers if nothing else, the wood-wights.’ Kanin glanced back towards the Inkallim. Their swords were flashing in the low morning sun. Shraeve was watching him, he saw. She ignored her warriors and stared directly at the Bloodheir.

He turned away. ‘Very well. Let’s talk to Aeglyss. If he can turn the White Owls to our cause again, he’s got even more talents than I thought. But as you say, we lose nothing in the attempt.’

There was no singing or cheering in the ranks of the army that Kanin and Wain led out from Anduran. A grim silence hung over the tight-packed companies of warriors. There was a certain resolution in the quiet of the Horin-Gyre men and women; that of the Tarbain levies who swelled their numbers had more the feel of nervousness about it. Open, massed battle against a strong foe was not the way the tribesmen would choose to make war. They were still raiders and ambushers in their hearts.

Although Kanin and his sister had debated the wisest course almost to the last hour, the outcome had never seriously been in doubt. They both knew they could not retire northwards. If they did, Croesan and Lheanor oc Kilkry-Haig would just gather their forces and come after them. Standing and fighting, victory was still possible if fate allowed it. And if this one victory could be won, Castle Anduran might well fall before their enemies could mount another relief attempt. Wain resolutely confirmed Kanin’s instinct: give battle. Test fate, and do it on open ground, too far from the city for Croesan to take a hand. The story of the Road’s course was told long ago. It could not be escaped; only faced.

The Inkallim were taking the field, at least, with Shraeve at their head. Kanin had not asked them to come. In this as in all things the Inkallim did as they pleased. They had dyed their hair before marching, though: it was as glisteningly black as fresh pitch. That might mean they would fight.

Beneath heavy skies and a soft rain, they passed by Grive. The little town was still. No smoke rose from the chimneys, its streets were empty and the windows of the houses shut fast. Most of the inhabitants had fled. The remainder hid themselves away. The land here was flat, crossed by narrow ditches, dotted with tiny copses of willow and alder. Abandoned cattle lowed disconsolately as the army went by. Kanin dispatched a handful of warriors to round them up and return them to Anduran. A swirl of crows, kites and buzzards was circling above an unseen carcass. You will be gorging yourselves soon, thought Kanin.

They were not far beyond Grive when Kanin’s outriders returned. They reported that the enemy was a few hours away, moving along the southern edge of the Glas Water. Kanin found a place where any attack upon his lines must come across the wet, heavy ground of a wide grass field, and drew up his forces. Ditches to the north and south would hamper any attempt to turn his position; bloody and bruising as it would be, a face-to-face confrontation, stripped of any subtlety or manoeuvre, seemed to offer his best chance of victory. His two hundred or so mounted men he kept in the rear, with his Shield. The Inkallim arrayed themselves upon his right, behind the main line. They squatted down on the grass. Kanin ignored them. He would not demean himself by asking Shraeve her intentions.

With so few riders, the Bloodheir could not hope to attack. Too many of the horses that had left Hakkan with him had died, or fed the hungry, in Anlane. All he could do was wait, and hope that spears, courage and the muddy ground would suffice against the charge that he knew must come. If Aeglyss could somehow produce some White Owls willing to fight it might help, but Kanin had all but resigned himself to the halfbreed’s failure. Aeglyss had been gone for more than a day and time had run out. It was no great surprise: whatever subtle tricks of persuasion and deceit the na’kyrim could work with his half-human voice Kanin had never really believed he was equal to the task of convincing the wood-wights to once again serve the purposes of the Black Road . His willingness to make the effort had been embarrassingly effusive, though. The halfbreed’s urgent desire to ingratiate himself was pathetic.

Out in the distance to his right, he could see a dark mass looming over the flat expanse of the Glas Water. It could only be Kan Avor, the drowned city that had once been the Gyre Blood’s home and now called like an imprisoned lover across all the miles to every northerner’s heart. It would be fitting to test the fates here, within sight of those broken-backed towers. And so close to Grive: that had been the home of Tegric, whose hundred men held the Stone Vale against all the Kilkry Bloods for the day the people of the Black Road needed to escape into the north. It was the Inkallim who called themselves the Children of the Hundred, but any warrior might draw inspiration from Tegric’s example. Here, today, Kanin would make his own stand.

Far from Anduran, beyond the vertiginous peaks and heaving glaciers of the Tan Dihrin, light snow was falling on the slopes around Castle Hakkan. In the night not long gone, for the first time in a week, the scouring northern wind had ceased to blow across Horin-Gyre lands and the morning’s snow was settling on frost-coated ground.

That frost crackled beneath his feet as Ragnor oc Gyre, High Thane of all the Bloods of the Black Road, strode towards the entrance to the catacombs. His cape of sable fur skimmed across the ground, stirring the thin layer of snow like dust raised into pirouettes by a broom. Behind him marched Angain oc Horin-Gyre’s household. The late Thane’s Shield came in the midst of the procession, bearing his shrouded body on their shoulders. There was no sound save the trudge of feet and the tolling of the bells that rang from the castle below and all the rocky crags around. The low, flat clouds trapped the sound of the bells in the valley, building echo upon echo until the air shook with it.

The High Thane led the way up to the mouth of the tunnel. It gaped like the bolthole of some huge mountain beast. Torches were burning inside, lighting the passage to the chamber where Angain would join those who had travelled this way before. Ragnor did not enter. He stood to one side of the entrance as the corpse-bearers came forwards and went in. Angain’s widow, Vana, dressed in the ermine only widows wore, followed them. She went past the High-Thane without looking at him. Her dead husband’s oldest hunting dog—the grey hound that had kept vigil at the foot of his bed throughout his last days—walked at her side. Its tread was sluggish and weary.

The only other to enter the catacomb, walking behind Vana, was a figure hidden from view by a capacious grey cloak. A great hood covered his face. This was Theor, the First of the Lore Inkall. There was nothing to distinguish his robe from that of the lowliest Inkallim in the earliest years of service; nothing to say that he held a power in these lands as great, in its way, as that of the High Thane.

The rest of the dead man’s household waited a short distance from where Ragnor stood. The flecks of snow began to crowd in the air. Nobody spoke. The bells rang and rang, distant celebratory peals now. Ragnor waited.

Angain’s Shield, having discharged their final duty, emerged first. A short time later Vana and Theor followed. As they walked up the passage they doused the torches that lined its walls, so that as they moved back towards the light, darkness reclaimed its territory and took possession of the dead Thane. Ragnor inclined his head as Vana drew near to him. He offered her his hand and she fleetingly took hold of it. The dog at her side looked up at Ragnor with torpid eyes.

‘He waits in peace, my lady,’ the High Thane said. ‘A fortunate man, to leave this bitter world behind.’

He was looking at the back of her hand. Many years ago, before she was betrothed, he had tried to bed this woman himself. She had been a magnificent, haughty girl, and she had refused him. That had taken courage, since his temper in those days was extravagant. He looked now at the back of her hand, and wondered at how small and old it was, lying there in his grip.

‘Fortunate indeed,’ she said. ‘I will see him again. I look forward to that.’ Her voice was not so frail as her hand. That girl Ragnor remembered was still within. She went to join the others, who crowded around her.

The First of the Lore Inkall stood at Ragnor’s side. They watched as the crowd shared out sweetmeats and small beakers of grain spirit. A soft murmur of conversation began to rise, a touch of laughter here and there. They would be telling Vana tales of her husband’s first life now, and looking forward to his second. Death was not an occasion for too much mourning in the lands of the Black Road . One by one, the bells around the valley fell silent.

Theor slipped back the hood of his cloak to reveal startlingly silver-grey hair. His lips, nestled within a short beard, were stained black by years of seerstem use. His skin had forgotten its youth and sagged from his cheekbones. Only his eyes retained some semblance of vigour, for they were bright and would have sat well in a face thirty years younger.

The creaking sound of a heavy-laden wagon drew his attention down to the track running along the valley floor. Two horses, whipped on by a group of Tarbains, were straining to haul a flat-bedded cart over the uneven surface. It bore a cage in which a massive bear swayed, giving out a long, low rumble of suppressed fury.

‘Destined for Castle Hakkan, no doubt,’ sighed Theor with a slight shake of his head.

‘You disapprove,’ said Ragnor, eyeing the creature in the cage.

‘This baiting of bears upon a lord’s death is a relic of Tarbain beliefs from before we came, when the bear was the symbol of their chieftains. Should the Lore Inkall approve of its adoption by a Blood of the Road?’

The wagon rocked, one of its wheels thumping down into a rut. The bear bellowed and its Tarbain captors yelled back and rattled the bars of the cage with their spears.

‘It means nothing now,’ said Ragnor. ‘Sport for drunkards toasting their master’s passing. And good sport, too. Have you seen the dogs they breed in these parts, First? Vicious. They’d give even those monsters your Hunt uses pause for thought. Still, that bear looks as though it will take more than a few of them with it.’

The Inkallim’s dark lip curled with distaste. ‘Whatever its merits, it is a corrupt tradition. Angain has gone to await rebirth in a brighter world, not to some mountain guarded by the ghosts of bears. We have enough trouble bringing the Tarbains out of the darkness of their ignorance without our own Thanes endorsing their rites.’

Ragnor snorted. ‘We are all Tarbains now, Theor.’

Theor glowered at the High Thane. ‘There is no Tarbain blood in my lineage. Nor yours.’

‘If you say so, Lorekeeper. Makes ours the only two pure lines in the north, though. What does it matter? Fane and Wyn, even my own Blood, count many Tarbains amongst their oathbound followers. I’ve plenty in my Shield who’re part Tarbain. And you know as well as I do that man we just laid to rest, may he moulder and never wake’—he saw, but ignored, Theor’s twinge of distaste at the phrase—‘had more than a trace of the wilderness in him. His grand-mother’s appetites were not very particular, they say. Anyway, if we’d not had the savages’ blood to renew our own we’d be breeding nothing but freaks and idiots by now. Looking at some of the offspring my liegemen have produced I wonder if we’ve had enough of it.’

Theor gathered himself for a riposte, but changed his mind and looked back towards the bear.

‘Perhaps you are right,’ he said. ‘There are few of the Tarbain left who do not bend the knee to you now, in any case. Most are Saved.’

‘Indeed.’ Ragnor produced a flask from deep within his heavy cape and unstoppered it. He took a long drink of its contents and wiped his lips with satisfaction. He offered the flask to Theor, who declined.

‘Your loss,’ muttered the High Thane. ‘A powerful protection against the chill, this stuff. Will you walk with me a way? No matter how keen they are for the revels, the rest will not dare return to the castle until we move, and I’d hate them to get themselves frostbitten.’

They walked side by side, the lord of the Gyre Bloods and the lord of the Inkallim, and the rest fell in behind them like a well-drilled company of soldiers. The High Thane’s Shield ensured that a respectful distance was maintained, to give the great ones their privacy. Down at the foot of the slope the bear in its cage followed a parallel course, matching their pace towards the castle where its bloody end awaited.

‘You were within the catacomb with Vana for some time,’ the High Thane mused.

‘We spoke a little,’ Theor said. ‘She sought my views on whether her husband had been true enough to the Road to earn his rebirth in the new world.’

‘Can’t say I’m sorry to see the back of Angain,’ Ragnor said. ‘His was a miserable spirit.’

‘He was true, in his heart, to the Black Road .’

‘That he was. Here’s to him,’ and the High Thane took another great swallow of fortifying liquid. Snow was matting down his hair, melting and running on to his forehead. ‘Bad time to die, with his children off on this mad adventure in the south.’

‘They do as their fates require,’ said Theor. ‘But, yes, it might have been easier for all of us if he had lived a while longer, or if Kanin at least had remained in Hakkan.’

‘Yet you’ve got your little war maiden down there with them,’ chuckled Ragnor. ‘What a woman that one is! I’d give a lot for a few like her in my Shield.’

‘Shraeve is . . . her own woman,’ murmured Theor, ‘and not easily dissuaded from a course once she is set upon it. She believed Kolglas could be taken. When someone wishes so fervently to test their fate it is their right. Anyway, I do not interfere in the doings of the Battle Inkall. That is Nyve’s domain.’

‘Well, he’s trained himself a fierce raven in Shraeve. Still, she might have met her match in Wain. I pity poor Croesan. With Shraeve and Wain for enemies, and Gryvan oc Haig for an ally, he’s about as lucky as a man beset by wolves and finding nothing but a donkey to ride away on.’ He emptied the drinking flask and tossed it away to shatter amongst the rocks. He blew his cheeks out and turned up his collar. ‘It’ll be cold tonight. This cloud won’t last once the stars come round.’

They walked in silence for a short distance. The cart carrying the bear had become stuck again, and Ragnor glanced down the slope as its Tarbain escort strove to lever the jammed wheel free. They were shouting curses in their harsh language. The cart rocked forwards and back again. The haunches of the horses were turning bloody beneath the switches of their handlers. Ragnor gave a snort of disgust.

‘Never known how to manage horses, those people.’

‘There were none here until we came. Tell me, what do you think will happen if Wain and Kanin do not return from south of the Vale?’

‘Ah, you want to trade tales of spies? Well, I’m willing. Mine say those Gaven buzzards are eyeing up Horin lands already. Supposedly, Lakkan has ten years’ production from his silver mines put aside to offer me for them if Angain’s children die. What has the Hunt Inkall been whispering in your ear?’

The Lorekeeper shrugged. ‘Similar. But Orinn oc Wyn-Gyre covets them too, and would not willingly see them pass to Gaven-Gyre. Angain would have served you better by having a larger family, or keeping the heir he did have safe, at least.’

‘It’s his children who’ve failed me there,’ smiled Ragnor. ‘Kanin’s eyes are focused too close to home, and Wain herself is about as welcoming to suitors as that brute in the cage down there. It’s a poor example they set, when we spend so much time telling the common folk they have a duty to breed. Horin has always been a Blood to make more problems than it solves. I’d not shed many tears over its demise, even if it sets Gaven and Wyn at each other’s throats.’

‘No more than Gryvan oc Haig would shed for the Lannis Blood, I imagine,’ said Theor pointedly. ‘Do you think so?’

‘Your father always embraced the Inkallim with his confidence. There were no secrets between him and my predecessor, yet I find myself uncertain of your intent in allowing this war to begin.’

‘There were ravens there when Angain and I discussed it. Nyve himself on one occasion, I seem to recall. He made a number of helpful observations on Tanwrye’s defences.’

The First of the Lore Inkall looked grave. ‘And I am sure Angain was aware of your full intent, of course. Nevertheless, there were occasions when your father had plans afoot that did not find their way into the ears of the lesser Thanes. At such times, it was to the Inkallim that he turned. He did so when the Horin-Gyre Blood required chastisement in the past, you will recall.’

‘I do recall,’ the High Thane said lightly. ‘They were a still more unruly brood in those days. But come, if you suspect me of keeping secrets from you, say so. The Lore Inkall has always enjoyed the liberty of plain-speaking.’

‘I make no accusation. I am sure that whatever plots or devices you may have in progress are intended to further the cause of the Black Road . To strengthen the creed, rather than weaken it. Or give succour to its enemies.’

Ragnor stopped. After a couple of strides, Theor turned and looked back at the High Thane. Behind them, Ragnor’s Shield halted and the entire funeral procession shuffled to a standstill, puzzled at the sudden delay. No voices were raised in query or protest, though. The crowd simply stood in the gently falling snow and waited. When Ragnor spoke his voice was low, ensuring none save Theor could hear, but it was icily precise.

‘Not an accusation, but a threat perhaps? I would kill any man who suggested that any action of mine weakened the creed. Save one of the Lore Inkallim, given the privileged position your people enjoy in such matters.’

The First of the Lore smiled.

‘Such privileges do not extend beyond matters of the creed, of course,’ continued Ragnor.

‘Of course. But do not misunderstand me, High Thane. I make neither accusation nor threat. My only desire is to see an absence of secrets between Gyre and the Inkallim. We are the roots and boughs of the Black Road, the Gyre Blood and the Inkallim. In years past the creed has been saved, or renewed, time and again by the two of us acting in concert. Anything that undermines that unity gives me cause for concern.’

‘Yes. Well, you are custodian of the creed, and...’

The High Thane’s words were interrupted by a sudden chaos of cries and creaking wood. He and Theor both turned to see one of the carthorses rearing in panic. Its companion started forwards, twisting the cart round. The stuck wheel came free and bounced against a rock as it scraped sideways. The bear was roused by the tumult and half-rose on to its hind legs. The tribesmen yelled furiously. Ragnor saw what was going to happen a moment before they did, and muttered, ‘What fools.’

The bed of the cart tilted, shifting the cage, and the bear reeled sideways. With a slow inevitability, accompanied by a thunderous, splintering crash, cart and cage toppled over. The Tarbains shouted louder still. Both of the carthorses began to buck and struggle. Roaring, the huge bear tore its way out of the wreckage and raised itself up to its full height. The men scattered. One was a fraction slow, and the beast ran him down in a few strides. A single sweep of its paw knocked him flat and its jaws engulfed his head. The bear shook its prey from side to side, and the sharp snapping of the Tarbain’s neck was clearly audible to all in the funeral party. As the surviving tribesmen fled down the track, the bear stood over the body for a moment or two then swung around and glared at the throng a hundred yards or so up the slope.

‘I suppose we had better do something,’ said Ragnor. He gave a flick of his head and his Shield separated themselves from the other mourners. Crossbows were released from their bindings. The bear shook itself and came a few paces towards them. It reared up once more and roared.

‘Magnificent,’ the High Thane murmured. Some of his warriors knelt, the rest stood in a rank behind them. They were slotting bolts into place. The bear dropped on to all fours and bounded closer over the rocks. It rose again, bellowing defiance. Angain’s hound was barking furiously, as if imagining that his dead master was at his side still.

A dozen crossbows sang and their shafts flowered together in the bear’s chest. It swayed, fell forwards on to its forepaws, took a few unsteady steps and then slumped down. Its great flank heaved and they could hear its rasping breaths. One of the shieldmen drew his sword and strode down to administer the final blow.

‘A magnificent animal, don’t you think?’ Ragnor said to the Lore Inkallim. ‘As fearless in the face of death as any true believer could hope to be.’

‘Fearless or ignorant,’ Theor said absently. His eyes never left the bear as the warrior sank his sword into its neck. A slight frown settled over his features.

‘It’s as well you don’t hold with the old Tarbain symbols,’ said Ragnor. ‘On a day such as today, that might look an ill omen to those inclined to see it that way: presaging the death of a great lord, or changing times or some such nonsense.’ He turned and marched on towards Castle Hakkan, laughing to himself.

The master of the Lore Inkall did not follow at once. He watched as the shieldman drew his blade across the thick fur of the corpse to clean away the blood. When he did follow in the footsteps of the High Thane, he bore a thoughtful expression. He drew his grey hood up once more to shelter his face from the elements. The snow was getting heavier all the time.

A black line emerged out of the drizzling mist. More than three thousand, Kanin estimated as the companies fell into position facing his own. Some of them looked to be common folk: farmers, fishermen and villagers gathered from the southern Lannis-Haig lands. Many, though, were fighting men. The two lines were not far apart, and despite the leaden air he could hear shouts running to and fro along the enemy ranks, and the stamping of horses and the clatter of their harnesses. He saw a few banners hanging limply. He could identify only a few of them. At the centre amidst a mass of horsemen stood one that bore the insignia of Kilkry-Haig. Kanin sniffed and shook raindrops from his hair. He glanced across to Wain. She sat astride her horse close by, the half-dozen warriors of her Shield in attendance.

‘It seems we have the chance to make a name for ourselves,’ Kanin said. ‘That’s the Kilkry Bloodheir, isn’t it?’

His sister grinned. ‘It would be sweet-tasting to win this one.’

‘As fate falls,’ murmured Kanin. ‘We can hope.’

The waiting was a torment. The rain eased off, leaving wet clothes plastered to bodies. Kanin could feel his muscles growing stiff in the saddle. The Tarbain men before him were becoming restive, shifting about, muttering and shouting at one another in their barbarous tongue. Kanin rode down the line, quelling them with a fierce glare. The Horin-Gyre warriors amongst the tribesmen were still, quiet. He saw some of them murmuring under their breath as they stared fixedly ahead. He found his lips moving of their own accord, the whispered words coming without thought: ‘My feet are on the Road. I go without fear. I know not pride.’ Again and again, over and over. The Hooded God would hear and approve, if the words were spoken with true belief. And if that belief was still in the heart when the moment of death came, he would gather the fallen in to him to rest until the renewal of the world.

Finally, after an hour or more, there was movement. Horsemen began to stream across behind the opposing army, gathering on its left flank. They milled about there as minute by minute their numbers swelled: a hundred, two hundred, and more. At the same time, a line of archers were coming forwards, strung out across the field. They advanced to within a long bowshot before kneeling. Kanin felt his pulse speeding, the sense of impending release building within him. Now the answer would come. Whatever happened, it was better than the waiting.

A hissing flight of arrows arced up and over. They pattered down, many falling short, others rattling against uplifted shields or smacking home in thigh or chest. It was a sound unlike any other, the thudding of an arrow into yielding flesh. Kanin’s horse skittered sideways as the first cries rose up and it caught the scent of battle. He patted its neck. There was a second volley of arrows, and a third.

‘More crossbows to face the horsemen,’ he called to Wain, and she nodded and cantered off. A few shouted commands sent crossbowmen scurrying from left to right to take up positions opposite the Kilkry horsemen. There was barely time, for a great clamour and blowing of horns rose up amongst the riders, and they wheeled their mounts about and began to advance across the field. Another shower of arrows came in. A stray one passed well over the line and felled a Tarbain warrior standing close by Kanin. He looked up at Kanin with a fixed expression of shock on his face as he died.

The riders came slowly at first, holding their horses on tight reins. Their speed picked up until, in a thundering burst of hoofs and flying clods of earth, they broke into a gallop. And here was another sound that had but one meaning: the visceral, swelling rumble, felt through ground and air, of the charge. It touched upon some leashed part of Kanin, shivering through his breast-bone, and he felt it raising him up, bearing him in wild anticipation towards the clash that must follow. A volley of bolts flashed out to meet the charge. Horses crashed down, ploughing into the soft ground, flinging their riders beneath the stamping feet of those who came behind. The crossbowmen stepped back, hurrying to reload, and spears sprouted along the front rank. When it came, the impact was like the wordless roar of a thousand voices.

The spear wall was not dense enough to deter all the horses, and the charge swept up and crashed against the footsoldiers. In moments, the right flank of the line was in chaos. Horses lunged through the mud and over bodies as their riders slashed around them. Tarbain tribesmen were already beginning to stream away in terror, flying back past Kanin’s position. Knots of Horin-Gyre warriors formed, the cavalry swirling about them. Swordsmen and spearmen hacked and stabbed at the horses, while crossbowmen struggled to pick off the riders. The screams of animals and men flowed together into a single, high cacophony.

Kanin glanced along the rest of his line. Everywhere the Tarbains were wavering, groups of them edging back from their positions, jostling and arguing with the Horin-Gyre troops alongside them. They had been taught to fear cavalry charges by the Gyre Bloods themselves and, unlike the mail-shirted warriors of the Black Road, had only small wicker shields for protection against the arrows that were still cascading down. Kanin swore.

Wain came cantering up. Her face was spattered with dirt, but there was a kind of exultation in her eyes.

‘They’ll turn our flank soon,’ she shouted above the din.

‘Get down the line,’ the Bloodheir cried, gesturing to his left. ‘Keep the savages in their places. I’ll hold the right.’

Kanin turned his horse about. Behind him, his Shield—a score of his Blood’s finest warriors—were waiting in motionless, silent ranks. Igris, their captain and the most stony-faced of them all, was gently stroking his horse’s mane. His eyes were fixed upon Kanin. Beyond the Shield, Kanin’s few precious cavalry were watching him expectantly. They wanted blood and, in the way it often was with warriors of the Road caught up in the fierce anticipation of battle, it mattered little to them whether it was their enemy’s or their own. Fate called for a host of deaths today; those who fell would be answering a call that had been sounded at their birth.

‘With me,’ was all Kanin cried, and then he was off, galloping at their head towards the raging battle on the right flank. A wild freedom filled him as he pounded into the melee. Here, he was just one amongst the many, and this would be a good way for his first life to end. The Horin-Gyre riders plunged in amongst those of Kilkry-Haig, the weight of their charge carrying them on and on. Horse lurched against horse, blade clashed with blade. Crossbow bolts hissed through the air. There was, for long minutes, only blood, and tumult, and death. Then Kanin found there was no enemy before him. The Kilkry horsemen were streaming back towards their own lines. The footsoldiers spilled out from their little clusters, falling upon the wounded and unhorsed. Kanin brought his mount to a protesting, rearing halt. He looked around. The ground was black with bodies. Here and there a crippled horse struggled to rise from the mud. There were despairing cries for help from amongst the corpses. Kanin almost laughed out loud.

He made his way back to where Wain was waiting, his jubilant company of horsemen following behind. Many of them had fallen. The survivors did not care.

‘What now?’ asked Wain.

‘A moment,’ said Kanin. His heart was hammering and his face was flushed. He mastered himself, setting aside the red lust of combat. He looked across to the enemy, and that helped to calm him. There were still too many. The disciplined Kilkry riders were regrouping, and the archers continued their methodical, relentless work. Companies of spearmen were forming up to advance across the centre.

‘So close,’ he murmured.

Wain looked at him questioningly.

‘We can only stand and fight,’ he said.

‘These Tarbains are no more use for this kind of work than goats,’ muttered Wain.

There was a renewed chorus of cries and horns. Across the field, rank after rank of warriors began to move forwards. Somewhere, a drum was beating.

‘Let us see what is to become of us, then,’ Wain cried and spun her horse away.

The army of Lannis and Kilkry came on across the grass. The going was difficult in the centre of the field and their lines began to break up as men stumbled, the wet earth sucking at their feet. The cavalry came charging up again, tearing the ground to pieces. Kanin led his own riders to meet them. Arrows and bolts whipped between the closing lines. The banner of Glasbridge town fell and was snatched up in a second.

A burgeoning bellow filled the air as the armies sprang together, closing the last few yards in a sudden rush. In that first savage fury of contact it seemed for a moment as if the Horin-Gyre line would break at once, but it held. Just.

Kanin lashed out at any figure that came within reach. He wanted to find Gerain, the Kilkry-Haig Bloodheir whose banner he had seen, but in the chaos of the struggle he had no chance to seek him out. An arrow skimmed off his mail-clad shoulder. He ducked beneath a sweeping sword and hacked at the exposed thigh of its wielder. His blade cut through leather and there was a spray of blood that soaked his glove. His horse stumbled and carried him a few lurching steps sideways before it recovered its footing.

Kanin steadied himself and glanced around. His warriors were outnumbered and though they were taking a heavy toll of the enemy it was only a matter of time before they gave way. Yet even as the thought occurred to him, a great shudder passed through the mass of combatants as if a wave had broken over them. He turned and saw the Inkallim cutting through the fray, a black-clad tempest. Shraeve was in the heart of it, her swords dancing like light. She barged aside a Tarbain, crouched and sprang to bear a Kilkry warrior down from his saddle. The man was dying—his stomach opened—before he hit the ground, and Shraeve was spinning away to slash the legs from beneath a second horse.

None of those on the field, save a handful who had been at Kolglas on the night of Winterbirth, had ever met the Children of the Hundred in combat. They knew of them only by terrible rumour. Now they saw them: leaping, spinning, dancing a bloody path through the battle with all the ease of birds playing on stormy currents of air. In the first few minutes of carnage as the ravens swept out of imagination into reality, and man after man fell beneath their blades, the will of the Kilkry and Lannis warriors who faced them shook, hesitated and broke. First one, then a dozen, then a hundred turned and poured back the way they had come. They trampled their comrades in their urgent desire to escape. Some of the Horin-Gyre riders, wild at the sudden turn in their fortunes, spilled after their foes. Tarbains too rushed forwards, eager for slaughter now that they saw their enemies’ heels.

The Inkallim halted as soon as their opponents were broken. Their fury was cold, controlled. Kanin shouted, gathering to him all of his warriors that would listen. He knew as well as Shraeve and her ravens that the battle was not won. The flank might be saved but most of the line was a surging maelstrom. Enemy archers, not caring what home their arrows found, were still raining shafts down upon the fight. The centre of the Horin-Gyre position was buckling. It was not just Tarbains who were falling back.

All that was left of Kanin’s Shield had come to him, and he rallied another forty or fifty warriors. He looked at them, raised his sword in the air and without a word kicked at his horse’s flanks and made for the place where the fighting was fiercest. The Inkallim ran alongside him. The world fell into the space between two breaths. Blood and mud were one; the formless howl of battle filled the air, drawing every other sound into itself. Bodies came up against one another and were cut, broken, pierced. The fallen were ground into the earth by the feet of the living.

Kanin found himself for a moment in a patch of clear ground with no opponent to face him. A severed hand lay in a deep hoof-print. There was a broken, abandoned spear. His chest heaved and burned. He knew there was blood on his face because he could taste it. He had no idea whose it was. His horse was shaking. Then Wain was before him, shouting. He frowned. He could see her lips moving, but heard only the cries of the dying and the clash of swords coming out from her mouth.

‘See!’ he heard at last. ‘From the forest.’

She was pointing with her sword, and he followed its line. He saw a sight that was at first beyond his understanding. Beyond the battle, out across the flat farmlands to the south where there was still grass and sky and quiet, more warriors were coming. It was a company without banners, or horses, and it came in an unordered mass: two or three hundred figures walking in silence.

‘What...?’ said Kanin in confusion.

‘Kyrinin,’ cried Wain. ‘White Owls.’

She was right, he saw. Even in the dull light of this day, and across the distance that separated them, he could see that this was no human army. It was a sight to astonish any onlooker. The few Kyrinin great clans left in the far east and south were said to still have the will to give battle on open ground, but Kanin would hardly have believed it of the White Owl. That they would do so on behalf of the Black Road—knowingly or not—filled him with a fierce kind of rapture.

The men of Kilkry and Lannis looked with different eyes. They saw a new enemy, hundreds strong, descending upon their flank and rear. A flash of uncertainty sparked through their ranks. Some tried to break free from the melee to face the threat. The archers who had kept themselves back from the main battle suddenly sensed their exposure and vulnerability and began to waver. The Horin-Gyre warriors knew nothing save that the men before them hesitated. They drew in a breath of renewed hope and pushed forwards.

The White Owls, still far from the heat of battle, halted. Hundreds of bows were silently drawn. A flock of arrows took to the air, vaulting a huge distance. The second cascade of shafts was loosed before the first had fallen. They lanced down amongst the Lannis rearguard and bowmen.

Shraeve and her Inkallim carved their way through the ranks of the enemy.

‘On! On!’ cried Kanin. Igris charged at his side.

It became a rout in minutes. Floundering in ever-deepening mud, scores fell: warriors from Kolglas, Glasbridge and Kilkry lands; townsfolk and villagers fighting for their Blood. Their bodies piled up in drifts like heaps of dung waiting to be ploughed into the earth. The survivors streamed in panic-stricken disarray southwards, pursued by the few mounted Horin-Gyre warriors. Gerain nan Kilkry-Haig died, unrecognised, crushed by his great horse as it fell, hamstrung and gutted by deftly wielded knives.

Groups of Tarbains were capering about the field, looting the fallen and killing the wounded. Kanin watched as his own casualties were carried in from around the field. There were many Tarbain tribesmen amongst those borne past him. They groaned and writhed, fought against their pain. His Blood, like all those of the Black Road, had carved its northern territories out only after a long struggle with these wild tribesfolk. They were, as far as Kanin was concerned, little better than woodwights. Most were now Saved, their eyes opened to the truth of the Black Road, yet he could see, in the way their wounds and suffering afflicted them, how shallowly the creed was rooted in them. His own people, the warriors of Horin-Gyre, were silent as they were carried in. They bore their fates well and it pleased Kanin to see it. There was a strength to be found in acceptance; in knowing the nature of the world. Those whose wounds were too severe would meet the Healer’s Blade—the fine knife designed to slip between ribs into the heart that every Black Road healer carried—with dignity, and go gladly towards a new life in the renewed world.

Wain came to fetch him away from them. Several men were with her, bulging sacks slung across their shoulders. They had been collecting heads to be thrown into Castle Anduran.

The Kyrinin had not moved since the end of the battle. Now a small group had separated from the main band of White Owls. They came across the grass, picking their way between and around bodies: a dozen warriors, their faces blurred by sweeping, spiralling tattoos, walking in a loose band with a tall, unarmed figure at its centre. It took Kanin a few moments to recognise who it was. Wain was a moment ahead of him.

‘Aeglyss,’ she murmured.

As the party of Kyrinin drew closer, they passed between knots of warriors who fixed them with hostile glares. The White Owls did not seem to notice. Kanin could see an amused expression playing upon Aeglyss’ face. It broke into a narrow smile as the na’kyrim came up to him.

‘You don’t seem pleased to see me,’ said Aeglyss before Kanin could speak. ‘I hoped for a warmer welcome.’

‘I am surprised, that is all.’

Aeglyss gave a sharp, short laugh at that. ‘I do not doubt it. But pleasantly surprised, I hope?’

Kanin frowned. It was as if the halfbreed’s fawning, obsequious manner of only a day ago had never been. Now, the man reeked of arrogance and self-satisfaction, perhaps even thinking himself some kind of hero. He was as unpredictable and inconsistent as a child.

‘You should thank me,’ said Aeglyss, indicating the battlefield with a sweep of his arm. ‘If we had not arrived when we did, things might have gone differently.’

Kanin followed the gesture with his eyes, taking in the bodies of men and women and horses; the gouged, broken earth, stripped of any hint of green; the Tarbains crossing and recrossing the scene in their search for bounty. It looked ugly to him, now that Aeglyss had come. ‘I suppose so,’ he muttered.

‘Graciously done,’ said Aeglyss, his voice weighed down by sarcasm. Kanin made to reply, but the na’kyrim was already holding up a conciliatory hand.

‘Let us not argue,’ Aeglyss said. ‘We are reunited in victory. It would be a shame to sour the moment.’

‘Indeed,’ said Kanin.

‘I will not trouble you further now,’ Aeglyss pressed on, ‘but perhaps we shall have more time to talk once we have returned to Anduran.’

There was a silvery, soothing undertone to the na’kyrim’ s voice with his final words. Kanin felt light-headed, and closed his eyes momentarily. When he opened them again, Aeglyss was already turning and heading back with his Kyrinin escort.

‘Wait,’ shouted Kanin.

‘We will follow you to the city, Bloodheir,’ called Aeglyss without looking back. ‘I will come to you there.’

The Bloodheir stared after the na’kyrim and his inhuman companions.

‘He seems to think he will now be a favourite of yours,’ Wain said at his side. She sounded almost amused.

Kanin shook his head. ‘The man is mad,’ he muttered.

The Craftmasters were bringing gifts to the Thane of Thanes. In the Great Hall of the Moon Palace in Vaymouth, a succession of bearers deposited treasures before Gryvan’s throne. It had been the way of things ever since Haig replaced Kilkry as chief amongst the Bloods: a High Thane returning victorious from battle received the tribute of the Crafts, in gratitude for his restoration of peace and prosperity.

The day before, the ordinary folk of Vaymouth had thronged the streets to hail the triumphal progress of Gryvan oc Haig all the way from the Gold Gate to his Palace. The journey had taken two hours, such had been the jubilant press, so urgent the collective need to greet the returning army with their train of yoked prisoners. Now Vaymouth’s greater powers made obeisance in their turn.

In the presence of the full assembled court, the Weaponers gave to Gryvan pikes and maces set with gold, the Armourers a helm of solid silver. The Vintners laid before him jars of the best Taral-Haig wines and the Furriers the pelt of a great white bear. One after another, each of the sixteen Crafts paid homage, and Gryvan oc Haig acknowledged each gift with a gracious nod and smile.

Standing a little behind the throne, Mordyn Jerain watched impassively. The Shadowhand had received gifts of his own from some of the Craftmasters—those who took the keenest interest in the fate of the now Thaneless Dargannan-Haig Blood—these last few days. Dargannan was a young Blood, without tradition and history to fall back on at a time of crisis, and Igryn had no son; fighting had broken out amongst his relations as soon as he was taken. With each gift had come a murmured suggestion of how stability might best be restored, which of Igryn’s diffuse family might best be suited to replacing him as ruler of Dargannan lands. For all the courtesy and humility the Craftmasters affected, their pride grew year by year. The time might soon come, Mordyn felt, when it would be necessary to remind them that it was still the High Thane who wielded the greater power.

Seated upon the steps that led up to the Throne Dais was a living demonstration of that power. Igryn, the fallen Dargannan Thane, was an eyeless mockery of his former self. His hair and beard had been trimmed and combed, new clothes provided and his empty eye sockets hidden behind a black silken band to make him fit to appear amidst the splendours of the court. Still, he was left to sit upon the cold marble steps like a child or an idiot.

Mordyn did not imagine that the message of humbled power Igryn embodied would discomfit the Craftmasters. They would assume that their ways were too subtle, their ambitions too narrowly defined, to merit such a violent response. Gryvan had meant the blinding for another audience: Igryn’s successor, and the troublesome—though now beset by troubles of their own—Thanes of Lannis and Kilkry. The High Thane’s instincts had always run towards blunt gestures. Mordyn would have prevented this one if he had been there in the wilds of Dargannan-Haig. The sudden revival of the Mercy of Kings drew too clear a link between Gryvan and those long-dead monarchs of Dun Aygll. It would have been better to kill Igryn outright.

As the Chancellor watched, a servant in the raiment of the Goldsmiths approached Gryvan oc Haig and, kneeling, unfolded a velvet-wrapped bundle upon the floor. He revealed a necklace woven from hair-thin threads of spun gold. The servant lifted it to display its beauty to the assembled throng before respectfully setting it back upon its velvet bed.

Mordyn suppressed a smile and glanced up.Tara was there, in the crowd lining the hall. The Chancellor savoured the familiar feeling of surprise that he should be loved by a woman of such astounding beauty and gifts. So many years of marriage, and still he hardly believed that he deserved such fortune. It was the discreet droplets of gold hanging from her ears that he was looking for now, though. Lammain, Master of the Goldsmiths, had delivered them personally into Tara’s hands only two nights gone, expressing the hope that they might be a fitting ornament for such a lady on this day. Later, in one of the more private rooms of Mordyn’s Palace of Red Stone, as they lingered over cups of aromatic wine, the Craftmaster had wondered aloud if Gann nan Dargannan-Haig, a cousin of Igryn’s, might not be fitted for the Thaneship. Mordyn knew Gann to be a crude blowhard, and knew as well that the Goldsmiths had been secretly enriching the young man for several years. They probably all but owned him by now. The hills of Dargannan-Haig were thickly veined with gold in places, and the idea of a compliant Thane no doubt appealed to the Goldsmiths.

Mordyn had taken care to send the Craftmaster away content that the earrings had bought a worthy audience. Gann would never be Thane—and perhaps Lammain already knew that—but he might have to be found some elevated position that would allow the Goldsmiths to benefit from their investment. At least until the Chancellor could determine exactly how deep their claws were sunk into the Dargannan-Haig Blood.

Gryvan and his wife Abeh were magnificent, seated side by side upon the dais. His crimson cloak outshone anything else in the vast hall and made itself the object of every gaze. Abeh, as ever, had neither the sense nor the inclination to hide the delight all this ceremony and opulence kindled in her. Mordyn was always assailed by the image of a sow rolling ecstatically in mud when he saw the High Thane’s wife in such a setting.

Aertan oc Taral-Haig was close to the dais, surrounded by an attentive crowd of his followers. The Thane of Taral spent almost as much time in Vaymouth as he did in his own city of Drandar . He had passed most of the summer ensconced in a wing of the Moon Palace, awaiting Gryvan’s return from the campaign. Not for Aertan the discomforts of a hot summer in the dry heart of Taral-Haig, where the petty lordlings who infested his lands could trouble him with their interminable disputes, when the luxuries of Vaymouth beckoned. There’s one we needn’t worry about at least, thought Mordyn. Aertan’s loyalty would never need to be questioned so long as it brought him comfort and wealth. Behind him, skulking at the rear of the crowd as if he longed to be somewhere else, was Roaric nan Kilkry-Haig. Even at this distance Mordyn, experienced as he was at reading a man’s emotions, could detect the hatred that lurked in the young man’s eyes. It was an impotent hatred, so long as Lheanor his father remained bound by his pledge of allegiance to Gryvan, and Mordyn gave it little thought.

A more problematic figure stood close to the Taral Thane: Alem T’anarch, the ambassador of the Dornach Kingship. With his pale hair tied back from his face, and an ostentatious diamond clasp at the collar of his black cape, the ambassador was an exotic, faintly unsettling presence. Since his return, Gryvan had refused to even meet with T’anarch, despite insistent requests; uncowed, the ambassador had submitted a demand for reparations to be paid to the families of the two hundred or more Dornach hire-swords Gryvan had captured and executed during the campaign. It was an outrageous claim, and the whole dispute smelled to Mordyn like the kind of game-playing that could easily get out of hand. War with the Kingship was inevitable, if the Haig dominion was to continue spreading into the rich lands of the south, but the time was not yet right for that struggle to begin.

The gift from the Goldsmiths was the last. Horns were blown, their notes bounding back and forth in the stone-clad hall like silver in the air. The audience began to flow towards the doors, a slow river of glorious indulgence and self-satisfaction.

When Mordyn went to speak with him in the evening, Gryvan was in a fine mood. Mordyn could smell sweet wine upon his breath. The High Thane had been drinking with his sons while they trained hunting eagles in one of the long, high terrace gardens on the palace’s flank. Mordyn had little time for either the Bloodheir Aewult or his younger brother Stravan. Neither matched their father’s singleminded hunger for power, and that, as far as the Chancellor was concerned, made them poor inheritors of Gryvan’s mantle. Or of his own service. But the Thane of Thanes loved them well, so Mordyn kept his thoughts to himself. There was time yet; one or other of them might some day become what was needed to keep the slow avalanche of Haig supremacy moving.

The brothers had departed to seek livelier entertainments elsewhere by the time Mordyn came walking softly across the grass to join Gryvan. The High Thane was at the edge of the terrace, staring out over his city. A group of huntsmen stood at a respectful distance, the great brown eagles massive upon their arms. Gryvan’s shieldman Kale was with them. Both he and the birds watched the newcomer as he took up position at Gryvan’s side. Mordyn had been in the service of this man for so long that he could read all but the subtlest of his moods without a word being exchanged, and Gryvan had few moods that would merit the description subtle. Now, the Chancellor could sense that his lord was in an exalted state.

Beneath them, thousands of houses were crammed together, making warrens of narrow streets from which there rose the murmuring of countless lives being lived. Here and there, scattered between the Moon Palace and the distant horizon of the city wall, greater buildings rose above the rooftops like islands in a dark, tumultuous sea. In the distance Mordyn could see his own Palace of Red Stone, its porphyry glowing dimly in the last of the sun, and he thought of Tara waiting somewhere in its deep embrace for him to return to her. There were other grand houses too: the Palace of the Bloodheir, where Aewult hosted revels of a kind Mordyn preferred not to attend; the marble-faced White Palace, where Abeh took her household whenever the High Thane was long out of the city; the Crafthouse of the Gemsmiths, to which a tower taller than anything in Vaymouth save the Moon Palace itself had only this last summer been added. That edifice caught Mordyn’s attention for a moment longer than the rest. It was an uncomfortable reminder of his earlier musings on the rise of the Crafts. He did not allow the thought to distract him. He had other concerns to share with his Thane this evening.

‘It is a sight, is it not, Mordyn?’ Gryvan breathed.

‘It is,’ the Chancellor said softly.

‘When I was a child there were fields wide enough to race horses across within Vaymouth’s walls. Orchards enough to give every child an apple a day through the season. All gone now; all become houses and workshops and markets.’

There was no nostalgia in Gryvan’s tone. It was with something close to wonder that he spoke.

‘We have sucked the world to us, you and I,’ he said. ‘Built a place that draws life to it. Was Dun Aygll ever quite such a sight, do you think?’

‘No,’ said Mordyn, carefully colouring his voice with reflection and thoughtfulness, ‘not such as this.’

‘They fell because they grew still, the Aygll Kings. They made nothing new for too long. They forgot to cow their warlords with ever greater glories.’

Hardly an accurate assessment of the Aygll dynasty’s collapse, Mordyn thought. They fell because their strength was spent on the battlefields of the War of the Tainted; because the mines in Far Dyne were exhausted, and because the last King of their line who was worthy of the name was turned into a puppet on a string by the na’kyrim Orlane. Still, the High Thane could be allowed his drink-fuelled fantasies. Even when drunk he usually heeded counsel wiser than that offered by wine.

‘The great must never be still if they are to prosper,’ Gryvan was saying. ‘They must always be moving onwards. The south calls to me. Ah, it’s a tempting call. Next year, or the year after, before I am too old for the testing, we must measure ourselves against the Dornach Kingship. If we could humble that nest of thieves and whoresoldiers, what a legacy to leave my son, eh?’

Mordyn could not help but think the High Thane underestimated the toll the passing years were taking upon him. The man was not recovering as quickly from the recent campaign as he once would have done. His face still had a pinched look to it, and there was a tiredness in the skin beneath his eyes that had not been there before he rode out to make war on Igryn oc Dargannan-Haig. A campaign against Dornach would be an altogether more demanding endeavour.

‘Indeed,’ the Shadowhand said, ‘though Dargannan must first be secured for such an undertaking to succeed.’

Gryvan tore his gaze away from the great vista before them. He regarded his Chancellor with a wry smile.

‘Ever the practical man,’ he said.

‘I share the vision,’ Mordyn said and thought, You had not the half of it before you opened your ears to me. ‘But still, the glories of two years hence are founded upon what we do tomorrow, and next week and next month.’

Gryvan clapped him on the shoulder and laughed. ‘I know, I know. You remind me often enough that I shall not forget it. And we shall pick Igryn’s successor soon, though I am tempted to leave his bloodthirsty brood to tear at one another for a while longer. No great harm can come of it, so long as the thousand men I left there remain.’

Mordyn nodded, and judged that the moment was right to share the small concern that had been nagging at him over the last couple of days.

‘Appealing though the southern prospect is, I fear we must give some thought to events in the north, my lord.’

The High Thane was not so drunk that he did not raise an eyebrow at that, and fix Mordyn with a steely gaze.

‘I thought we were on safe ground there, Mordyn. We agreed before I went south that anything that happened in the Glas valley would matter little in the long run.’

‘Of course,’ said Mordyn with an ease he was no longer sure he truly felt. ‘Gyre has as much wish to see the Horin Blood spending its strength as we have to see Lannis being drained of its. Ragnor oc Gyre will not come to Horin-Gyre’s aid.’

The Chancellor still believed it to be true. He, and therefore the High Thane, had always known there might be an attempt upon the Glas valley once they had summoned Croesan’s best warriors away, but Mordyn was certain Ragnor oc Gyre lacked the will to put his full strength behind it. He had a few precious eyes and ears buried amongst the Bloods of the Black Road and knew something of how things stood there. More importantly, he had the words of the Gyre Thane himself. It would likely trigger instant revolt in the lands ruled by both men if it were known that Gryvan and Ragnor had exchanged messages in the last few years, especially if the content were revealed. No promises had been given, no explicit guarantees, but the outline of an understanding had been sketched: Gryvan would not threaten the strongholds of the Black Road so long as Ragnor extended the same courtesy to the True Bloods. If some of the lesser Bloods—Lannis and Horin the obvious, unstated examples—came to blows, neither High Thane would permit the situation to escalate into full-scale war and neither would permit their peoples to claim any new lands. Unrestrained conflict was in nobody’s best interests. So long as that held true, no great damage could be done by the latest disturbances, save to Lannis pride.

Only in the last few days had a sliver of doubt intruded upon Mordyn’s confidence. There had been no word at all from Behomun Tole in Anduran, and the last message from Lagair, the Steward in Kolkyre, reported rumours that the Lannis-Haig capital itself was besieged. The Chancellor was not accustomed to being surprised; that news had startled him. How a Horin-Gyre army could be encamped around Anduran so quickly, given the strength of the defences upon Lannis-Haig’s northern borders, was a mystery. The most worrying possibility—that the Bloods of the Black Road were, after all, united in the assault and had simply overrun Tanwrye with an immense army—was one the Chancellor would not admit to Gryvan, but which demanded some precautionary measures. If it was indeed the case, Ragnor oc Gyre had lost his reason. He must know that sooner or later the Haig Bloods would destroy even the greatest army the Black Road could keep in the field south of the Stone Vale.

‘So, if you do not fear Ragnor has played us for fools, what is your concern?’ the High Thane asked him.

‘I can only admit that it seems the Horin-Gyre forces have moved more swiftly than I—than any of us—thought likely,’ Mordyn said with as much humility as he could muster. ‘It is no great worry. We still have time enough to deal with them. No, it is Kilkry-Haig that occupies my thoughts.’ There was truth enough in this line of argument, Mordyn believed, to convince Gryvan.

‘There must be some doubt about how long even the leash of your command will keep Lheanor from the field. We do not want him gaining some glorious victory on his own. Anyway, should he be drawn in before our strength is mustered, this could become a more protracted affair than it need be. The outcome would be the same, of course, but there would be more... waste.’

‘Waste,’ repeated the High Thane. ‘And you do hate waste, don’t you, Mordyn? Well, you would not raise the matter if you had no answer to it, so let me hear it.’

‘We remind Lheanor that he is to await the arrival of the armies of the other Bloods before taking the field, my lord. And perhaps hurry along a few men to reassure him that we are making haste. A few hundred should suffice.’

Gryvan nodded. ‘Easily enough done,’ he said.

‘And perhaps,’ Mordyn went on, ‘lend a little more urgency to our assembly of the main force? If Anduran is indeed already besieged, there is little to be gained from further delay. The sight of the Black Road hammering at his own door will have given Croesan pause for thought. If he has not realised by now that his best interests lie in maintaining your good favour, he never will.’

Gryvan turned and looked out once more over Vaymouth. Night was coming on quickly and the city was falling away into shadow. All across the sprawling capital of the Haig Blood pin-pricks of light were sparking as the citizens lit torches, candles and lanterns. The High Thane yawned and rubbed his face.

‘Do it, then,’ he said. ‘We can use some of the men I brought back from Dargannan-Haig; they’ve not dispersed yet. The great must keep moving onwards, but we might hope for a little more time to rest between our triumphs.’

Gryvan laughed at his own words, and Mordyn, satisfied with his evening’s work, joined in.

The Chancellor rode back towards his palace flanked by grandly attired guards and preceded by a pair of torchbearers who cleared a path through the thronged streets. Parts of Vaymouth seemed more convincingly alive during the hours of darkness than in the day. There had been a fashion for night markets this last summer, and even though the lazy warmth had gone from the evenings, a few still operated.

The seething crowds parted, in the main without protest, at the approach of the Chancellor’s party. Even those who did not recognise him could tell from his escort and dress that he was a man of importance. It was a giddy height for the son of a timber trader to rise to, but then Mordyn Jerain had never been quite like other merchants’ sons. As a young boy in Tal Dyre, when Vaymouth was just the name of one more foreign city, he had not been popular with his peers. He imagined he must have been an arrogant child: cleverer than most, more instinctively aware of his own potential even at that tender age. He could not really remember. His childhood often seemed to have been lived by some other person, linked to the man he was now by only the most tenuous of threads. He learned the arts of manipulation as a defence, and they came naturally to him. By the time he left the island at the age of fourteen, he had more allies than enemies amongst the other children, and those who spoke against him would quickly be on the receiving end of a beating.

He liked to think that as soon as he saw Vaymouth he knew he would never return to Tal Dyre. The merchant isle was still a match for Vaymouth, in wealth at least, in those days, but the capital of the Haig Bloods was so vast and crudely vibrant that it was intoxicating to the ambitious young Mordyn. While his father laboured to build a business, Mordyn had set about educating himself in the ways of the city. It probably broke his father’s heart when Mordyn abandoned his Tal Dyreen roots and took service at the Haig court as a lowly official. Probably, but the Chancellor could not be sure, for he had never seen any of his family again. They had left the city and returned to Tal Dyre many years ago. His Tal Dyreen contacts knew better than to trouble him with any news of them.

The Palace of Red Stone was filled with the scent of honeyed cloves. They had been set on lattices above the braziers. It was an indulgence of his beloved wife that the Chancellor could not refuse. A slight breeze toyed with the silken drapes that hung across the bedchamber’s windows. Mordyn could hear the metal-shod tread of one of his guards on the terrace outside. The sound was so familiar he barely registered it, and it did not distract him from his task. With precisely weighted fingers, he worked balm oil into Tara’s naked shoulders. The sensation of her slick, pliable skin beneath his touch worked an almost hypnotic effect upon him. He inhaled deeply, savouring the rich mixture of smells: the cloves, the oil, her. There was nothing in his world to match the perfect, complex texture of such a moment.

He laid a soft kiss upon the back of her neck, felt the oil on his lips. She made an appreciative sound. He touched his tongue to her skin.

‘I saw you looking at me in the Great Hall this morning,’ she whispered.

‘How could I not?’ he asked.

He drizzled more oil over her skin and began to massage her neck. Her head eased forwards a little, and she lifted her hair out of his way.

‘You must be tired,’ she said.

‘Not yet.’

‘Did Gryvan give you what you wanted?’

‘Oh, yes. It was not so much to ask. Mere sense.’

‘So there will be war in the north soon? The ladies of the court twitter like a flock of birds. There has not been so much excitement for a long time. War against the Black Road would be so much more... traditional than the crushing of a rebellious Thane. There is nothing quite like the toing and froing of armies and reports of distant victories to spice up their lives.’

‘Distant victories are the best kind,’ said Mordyn softly. He pressed his ear against her back, listening for her heart. ‘One or two more of them and we shall have the best-loved Thane the Haig Blood has ever seen.’ He could hear it. He imagined that his own heart beat in time with hers.

‘Yes,’ she said as she turned to take him in her arms. ‘Keep the blood and the strife safely distant and we need only concern ourselves with better things.’

In Anduran, a great catapult was being hauled across the square by a team of mules. The machine looked like an angular creature from another land, intruding upon the order of the town.

‘They’re moving the second engine up,’ Kanin said. Wain peered over his shoulder. They were standing at a high window in their commandeered house.

‘Let us hope its workmanship is better than the first,’ she said. The throwing arm of the first to be put to use had split when it was tensioned. The man who missed the flaw in the wood lost half the skin from his back for the oversight.

‘How long before more are ready?’ Kanin asked.

‘We should have three or four of them by the morning.’ He knew her well enough to detect the undercurrent of detachment.

‘Not enough, you think?’ he pressed.

‘Who knows? We were granted some time by the victory at Grive, but not much of it. Perhaps they will come out of their own accord once we start throwing heads inside. They might be hungry, or sick, already. Our chances would be better if it was high summer.’

‘Perhaps,’ agreed Kanin. Now that the elation of their victory was receding, he knew as well as Wain did that their position was as dangerously fragile as ever. There would be more armies marching up the valley before long. They had sent word commanding part of the army besieging Tanwrye to come south. It may or may not be possible: the Lannis garrison there would sally at the slightest sign of weakness. Other messengers had gone further, making for Kan Dredar. They would plead with Ragnor oc Gyre to unleash his own mighty army, now that Horin-Gyre’s daring had brought such a rich harvest within reach. Whether or not the High Thane would respond, Kanin had no idea.

A commotion outside turned him back to the window. Below, a band of Tarbains were driving a bullock along. The animal was recalcitrant, pulling against its halter and lowing in protest. The excited tribesmen jabbed at it with spears and shouted at one another. Points of blood speckled the bullock’s haunches.

‘Where have they got that from?’ snapped Kanin. ‘Igris!’

His shieldman came in at once and joined him at the window.

‘Find out where they’ve brought that animal from,’ commanded the Bloodheir. ‘If it’s within an hour’s walk have them whipped. They know that all goods near the city are to be handed over and recorded, don’t they?’

‘They do, but Tarbains are like children. They can’t hold a thought in their heads.’

‘Why should I care?’ snapped Kanin. ‘I don’t need you to tell me that they are children. I need you to enforce my orders.’

The anger in Kanin’s voice straightened his shieldman’s back and put an expression of rigid obedience on to his face. Kanin almost said something to dilute the harshness of his words. He chose not to.

Igris went out. Kanin could hear him shouting as he descended the stairs. It was in the nature of anger to be handed on and grow, and it would travel out to the tribesmen on the square.

‘The Tarbains will be ungovernable soon,’ Wain said. ‘Scores of them have scattered through the valley already. Almost all of the wild ones have gone; even some of the Saved.’

‘Let them go. We knew it would happen, and they’ll give Lannis and Kilkry a little more to worry about. The city and the nearest farms must feed the army, though. If Gyre had given us all the swords we asked for, we wouldn’t have to rely on these barbarians.’

Below, Igris emerged with a couple of other men and strode towards the Tarbains. He began to berate them loudly and they shouted back, gesticulating with their spears. The bullock, relieved of its captors’ harsh attentions, stood quite still and hung its head as if searching for grass among the inhospitable cobblestones.

‘I’m going to the castle,’ Wain said.

Kanin nodded. He did not turn as she left the room. Instead he watched as Igris knocked down one of the tribesmen with a back-handed blow. The bullock wandered off. A brawl developed.

Figures were moving on the battlements of Castle Anduran. From the safe vantage point of one of the houses fronting the castle, Wain could just make them out, although the light was too poor for her to see them clearly. Others were better placed: a few crossbow bolts lanced up from amongst the crude earthworks and wicker shields on the open ground beneath the castle walls. The shapes on the wall disappeared. She was sure none of them had been struck. She had been watching for an hour, awaiting the arrival of the siege engine.

The Bloodheir’s sister muttered a soft curse. As she strode back towards the centre of Anduran, she was oblivious of the groups of weary, dishevelled warriors she brushed past. The slow attrition of the siege filled her with frustration. She knew she must accept whatever fate decreed, and would do so; but the faith permitted—advocated, even—hope. The most unlikely victories could sometimes be won, for nothing mattered but what tales the Last God had told, and fate seldom took account of what seemed likely in the minds of mortals. The arrival of Aeglyss and his White Owls had proved that, if nothing else.

A liquescent cough from some invalid registered upon her thoughts. Signs of disease had begun to appear in the ranks of the Horin-Gyre army. Wounds festered in the wet and the dirt. Hot and cold fevers stalked the streets. The weakest had been culled before they even reached the city; dozens had died on the journey through Anlane. Now a fresh winnowing was under way.

The atmosphere amongst the besiegers was not helped by the presence of a huge Kyrinin warband encamped beyond the semi-derelict city walls. Despite their part in the battle, no one trusted the woodwights, or really understood what had brought them out from their forest lair in such numbers. To her irritation, Wain found Aeglyss in her head once more. Her brother refused to meet with the na’kyrim, and had insisted that the White Owls remain out of bowshot of the city.

Wain shared her brother’s contempt for all na’kyrim. Their very existence was a symptom of that wilful disregard for the world’s natural order which had led to the Gods’ despair. Nevertheless, she could not free herself of the sense that Aeglyss meant something. He had proved his value more than once now. Kanin might refuse to accept it, but fate could use the strangest tools in weaving its pattern.

She found the catapult becalmed on the street outside the gaol like a sea monster thrown helpless on a hard shore. One of its axles had broken. Workmen were trying to mend it, and at her approach they bent furiously to the task, each trying to outdo the other in the urgency of his efforts. For a few minutes she watched the repairs. The leader of the group kept glancing at her. Every back was tensed, expecting the lash of her tongue at any moment. It did not come. She no longer truly believed that siege engines were the key to this lock. She left the men to their labours and walked on.

She went to the outer wall of the city. Climbing up on to the rubble of the ramshackle defences, she stared out over the fields beyond. The tents and fires of the Kyrinin were there, the camp as silent as ever. She stood and watched for some time. She had no idea what it was she was looking for. There was nothing she had not seen before.

She looked down at the stones beneath her feet. They had been great building blocks once, scales of the town’s armour. Now they were eroded and chipped, jumbled in a heap and already embarked upon the centuries-long journey to dust. Time and fate paid no heed to the intent of mere mortals.

‘Wain.’

The soft voice at her shoulder startled her and she almost lost her footing on the loose stonework. His hand was there in an instant, upon her elbow, keeping her steady. She snatched her arm away.

‘Do not touch me, halfbreed,’ she hissed.

‘As you wish,’ Aeglyss said, unconcerned. He glanced out towards the White Owl encampment. ‘You were watching the camp. What do you see?’

‘Savages.’ His closeness made her skin crawl.

‘They would say the same of you. A mistake, to always see only what it is easiest to see.’

The urge to turn away from him, from his grey eyes and his corpse-pale skin, was powerful. Yet his voice held her.

‘Why is it you and your brother turn me away?’ His hand was back upon her arm, and this time she did not withdraw. ‘I only want to help you achieve what you desire.’

‘What is it that you think I desire?’ she asked tightly.

‘The same things as your father, and your brother: vengeance for past defeats, the triumph of the Black Road, honour for your Blood. The end of this world. The Kall. But it burns more fiercely in you than in them, Wain. I can feel it in you as if you carried the sun itself in your breast.’

Carefully, she took a step away from him, easing her arm from his grip. She had never feared anyone in her life, yet this na’kyrim brought that emotion close. For all that she could break his neck or snap his wrist in a moment, some part of her believed she was the weaker. And his unflinching gaze and his calm, entrancing voice told her that he really might be able to give her what she wanted. He is more than he appears, she reminded herself. He can twist your thoughts, cloud your mind, with that voice.

‘You move away from me,’ he said. ‘Are you afraid?’

‘Not of you,’ she said. ‘But I mistrust your voice. What is it that you want?’

‘Speak with Kanin. Persuade him to look with favour upon me again. Persuade him to allow me to help you, in whatever way I can.’

She hesitated. Hesitation was no more in her nature than was fear.

‘I did what I promised before,’ Aeglyss whispered. ‘I bent the White Owls to your will. Your father trusted me to aid you. Learn that trust from him, Wain. Teach it to your brother.’

A terrible tension was building in Wain, knotting the muscles of her stomach and shoulders, setting her pulse thudding in her head. She could not bear it.

‘Very well,’ she said, without knowing quite why she said it. ‘I will speak to my brother. Come to us tomorrow morning. We will be holding a council in the hall on the square.’ She made to climb down from the wall.

‘Wait,’ he said, and she found herself turning back to him. ‘Why do you despise me so, Wain?’ His voice was different now. She thought she heard need. She refused to trust that thought.

‘You are what you are,’ she told him, ‘and I am as I am. I do not despise you, but you are not of the Road. And you are not of my kind.’

‘My father was, though. He had the same blood in him that you do. That should mean something. But it’s not enough, is it? Not for you. I do not understand what I have done to earn your—and your brother’s—contempt. I did nothing but what you wished. I sought only favour in your eyes.’

‘Fools look for reasons,’ Wain said softly. ‘What has been and what will be are one. They are the Road, and happen because they must.’

‘Will you see me differently if I give you what you want?’ He smiled and it was a smile that shook her. ‘Am I really so terrible in your eyes? You seem so fair in mine. You are not like the others. All I want is for you to trust me, to let me be a part of this with you.’

Her breath was light, fluttering in her throat. He reached out towards her. She felt as if she stood upon some towering precipice and the world was rushing away beneath her. Then she saw his fingernails, and they were clouded. She remembered who, and what, he was. She spun away and vaulted down over the great stone blocks to the street below.

‘Please...’ she perhaps heard him say, almost inaudibly.

She forced herself not to run as she strode into the city, and did not look back although she could feel his eyes upon her back like twin embers.

Inurian did not even hear the other entering this time. He felt his presence, and that was enough to wake him. It was like a breath upon the back of his head; a stone dropped into the Shared. Inurian rolled over. Aeglyss was sitting with his back against the wall, his knees drawn up to his chest and enfolded by his arms. His face was in shadow. There was a silence such as comes in the very heart of the night, when all the world and all its inhabitants are still. Inurian said nothing. He watched his visitor and waited.

Aeglyss spoke. ‘I never knew my father’s name. They killed him before I was born, as soon as they realised I was there in my mother’s womb. She would never tell me what they did to him, but they are cruel, the White Owl. For a Huanin, and a captive at that, who had dared to take one of their own as a lover... Well. They might easily have taken her life, too. Stilled me before I had drawn my first breath.’

Inurian dared not stir. He could almost see the emotion that was coiling and uncoiling itself within the other’s frame, like a snake in a fire.

‘When I was... six? Eight? One of the other children—a girl—ah, what was her name? I can’t remember. She was hounding me, tormenting me. Kyrinin are no more gentle with the likes of you and me than Huanin are. That day it was too much. I told her to take out the skinning knife she had on her belt. I told her... she put it through her hand. It was the first time I really understood anything about the Shared, understood why they were afraid of me.

‘They shut me away. They must have wanted to kill me then, I suppose, but my mother came. She cut through the side of the tent and carried me off. We went into the forest, just me and her together. Do you know what that means, for one of the people to leave the vo’an, to go alone out into the winter?’

He gave a sudden, harsh laugh, his bowed head jerking up and cracking against the stone wall. ‘Of course you know what it means. You know exactly what I’m talking about, don’t you? Anyway, it was a bad winter, not a time to be alone in deep Anlane. She kept me alive, though, somehow. She was a strong woman. Ah, and beautiful. As beautiful as any Kyrinin you’ve ever seen.

‘I remember walking through snowdrifts as high as my waist, and some so high she had to carry me on her back. I remember hiding, for days at a time. We left White Owl lands, crossed into Snake and then beyond, and always we were hiding. Can you imagine? I still feel the cold, sometimes, even when there’s a fire burning. I can’t get warm. It was a long time, always moving, always starving, always alone.’

His hands shifted. Inurian saw them twitching.

‘There was a storm eventually, worse than anything before,’ said Aeglyss. ‘One morning, she just stayed asleep. She would not wake no matter how I shook her. I lay down beside her, and folded her arms around me. I knew ... I could feel... that if I could find the way to use it, the Shared could keep her alive. It was like seeing a light just out reach, and every time I reached for it, it went away. I could tell that there was warmth in the Shared, but I had no idea how to draw it out. No one had taught me. So she died, and I waited for the end to come.

‘They came instead. She had come far enough, you see. She had... lasted long enough. They found me beside her and took me into the marshes.’

Again, Aeglyss broke off. He looked up at Inurian for the first time. There was not enough moonlight for Inurian to make out his features clearly. Still, there was a pallid, haunted look about the man’s face that chilled him.

‘That is where I first heard your name, you know,’ said Aeglyss. ‘Those fools sitting around in their tents and huts; said you understood more about the Shared than most, even though it was not strong in you. I thought nothing of it, then. And yet all those years later, I found myself in Hakkan talking about Kolglas, and I remembered you. Ha! Almost enough to make you believe in the Black Road, do you think?

‘Here we are. You and I, the knowledge and the power. The two halves of something that could be quite new. That is how it ought to be. You must be my guide through the deep places of the Shared. It’s there in me: this... vastness, that I don’t know how to reach, how to use. Do you understand?’

Inurian could sense the other man’s need, his longing. Something in Aeglyss was breaking, or perhaps had broken long ago.

‘I cannot help you,’ said Inurian. ‘I told you that before.’

‘Cannot?’ cried Aeglyss, surging to his feet. His voice lashed out. Inurian felt his skin crawling with the tread of a thousand imagined insects. He might die now, he thought. Now, in this cell with no one to see, he might easily die.

Aeglyss leaned against the wall. One hand hung at his side. The other was pressed to the stone, splayed like a huge, rigid spider. When he spoke again, his voice was quite level. ‘You can see what is inside men.’

‘I can sometimes . . . know what is unspoken,’ said Inurian carefully.

‘What do you see in me?’ asked Aeglyss.

Inurian closed his eyes for a moment. He lay quite still beneath Aeglyss’ intense gaze. He felt the hard, cold floor of the cell against his side. He focused upon it, shutting out the blackness that strove to force its way into his mind.

Aeglyss laughed bitterly. ‘You are afraid. Everyone is afraid of me. They always have been. The White Owls wanted to kill me; Dyrkyrnon cast me out. Even these Black Road bitches, after I have brought them to the edge of greatness. Whatever I do for them, they will not let me be one of them. I know that.’

Knowing was not the same as believing in the heart, Inurian reflected. Whatever Aeglyss might say, the hope—the need—for acceptance was so powerful in him it leaked out, giving the lie to his words even as he spoke them. He still craved the approval of the Horin-Gyre leaders. His desire to belong somewhere, anywhere, was painfully obvious to Inurian.

‘The fear is too much for them,’ Aeglyss continued. ‘All afraid, but now they do not even know what they fear. I will not be put aside any more. I will not! You, you of all people, will not turn away from me.’ He shivered and clasped his arms across his chest. He was swaying. ‘Who has been the greatest of our kind? Dorthyn who hunted the Whreinin out of the south? Minon the Torturer? Orlane Kingbinder?’

‘All were powerful in their ways,’ Inurian murmured. ‘Their power added little happiness to the world, but in any case you overestimate your strength if you mean to compare it to theirs.’

‘You could teach me their ways,’ said Aeglyss, then, no longer addressing Inurian, ‘To bind a King...’ He shook himself. ‘I think ... I think I cannot continue like this. I think I will lose my mind. Or die, perhaps. Will you help me, Inurian?’

When Inurian did not reply, Aeglyss turned as if to go. Inurian lifted himself up on one arm.

‘I would help you if I could, Aeglyss,’ he said.

Aeglyss stopped. He stood there, his head bowed, his hands digging into his shoulders.

‘Not just for your sake,’ continued Inurian, ‘but because of what you might do. It is too late, though. Your heart, your intent—they’re too... damaged. I have known little love in my life, Aeglyss. All our kind learn what it is to be feared, to be turned away. I am sorry for what you have suffered, but the pain need not lead to whatever place it is you have found yourself in. It need not have brought you to this.’

‘Help me, then,’ said Aeglyss urgently. ‘Do not refuse me. Please, you are the only one who could understand. I will give you whatever you want.’

‘Is that truly all you have seen in the Shared? Power? A way to bend others to your will?’

‘You talk of power as if it is an evil thing. I see a strength that is given to me, but not to others. Only a fool would turn aside from such a boon. What else would you have me see?’

‘That all is one. If you use the Shared to harm others, you harm yourself.’

‘All is one. All is one! No. I don’t think so. All is hate, fear, pain. If others seek to harm me—as they will, as they have always done—would you have me lie still and unprotesting beneath their blows?’

‘Then I am sorry. I cannot teach you to see what I see; I cannot heal your wounds. You would not use anything I taught you well.’

Inurian stretched himself out on the floor and shut his eyes. He could feel Aeglyss standing there for a little while, feel the weight of his presence.

‘I will wait for you to change your mind, Inurian,’ Aeglyss breathed. ‘But not for long. Not long.’

Then he left.

Inurian did not sleep for a long time. He lay awake, staring at the wall of his cell. For some reason, out of all that had been said, it was the names Aeglyss had spoken that haunted him the most: Dorthyn, Minon, and Orlane Kingbinder, most fearful of them all. Great powers they had been in their time; true shapers, who moulded the course of the world.

The na’kyrim now were but an echo of what they were when the world was younger, and it had always seemed to Inurian a good thing that it was so. The might of the great na’kyrim of old bred fear and loathing in those, Huanin and Kyrinin alike, who could never hope to understand it. Worse, it had corrupted the na’kyrim themselves, made them drunk with their potency. Many had become the eyes of bloody storms. Such was the company Aeglyss sought to count himself in, and Inurian could almost smell the truth of it. This marred young na’kyrim, burning with anger and pain, would cast a long shadow if he ever came by the power he craved. Inurian felt the awful horrors of history crowding in, clamouring to be unleashed once more upon the world.

He knew what it was to be shunned by all, shut out from both of the worlds from which he sprang. All the peoples of the world were outcasts—all craving other certainties to replace those that had departed with the Gods—but none were so bereft as the na’kyrim, with no places, no kind, no children to belong to. Yet in Kennet nan Lannis-Haig Inurian had found a man who could look upon a na’kyrim and see an equal behind the grey eyes that returned his gaze. He had found a whole family he could love in place of the one he would never have: Kennet and Lairis, whose devotion to one another had warmed all the cold halls of Kolglas; Fariel, wonderful Fariel, who had carried his gifts with a grace that belied his youth; Anyara, who could not hide from Inurian’s inner eye the things she concealed so well from others. And Orisian. The boy who grew up in his brother’s shadow, only to have his heart broken when it was taken away and he was exposed to the harsh, ferocious light. He had loved every one of them, but Orisian most of all.

And he had failed them, in the end. Lairis and Fariel had been carried off to The Grave, Kennet cut down, going too gladly to his death. Perhaps Orisian still lived—he would surely have known if that one had died—but if he did he was beyond any help Inurian could give for the time being. There was only Anyara now.

Somehow, if he was allowed the life to do it, he must find a way to shield her.

Outside the window of his cell there was the sound of flapping wings. He rose and looked up. He could not reach the window and saw nothing but the night sky. There was the soft, rasping call of a crow. Inurian smiled sadly and lay down again.

His rest was fitful. The slabs on which he lay were unyielding and the thin blanket could not keep out the cold. What finally roused him was less immediate, less tangible: a calling in his dreams, as if some distant voice was summoning him. He pressed his hands into his eyes as he lay there in the semi-darkness. The feeble first light of dawn coming in through the high window illuminated the cell. There was no sound save the skittering of a rat’s claws somewhere out of sight, and the tapping of half-hearted rain on the roof. He rolled on to one side and sat up. Looking around, his eyes still bleary with sleep, he saw nothing at first. Then the faintest distortion of the air on the far side of the cell caught his attention.

He watched as a shape formed itself out of nothing. It was too tenuous, and the cell too gloomy, for any detail to be visible, but he could tell that it was a female figure that now wavered before him. The rain outside was worsening, its drumming on the roof growing louder.

‘I had thought you might be dead,’ said Inurian.

‘I doubt you thought of me at all,’ came the almost vanishingly soft reply, as if from the walls themselves. Inurian grunted and rubbed at his shoulders.

‘And I had not troubled myself to think of you in some time,’ continued the female voice, ‘until I stumbled across you now.’

‘Well, I’m not sorry to see you, Yvane.’

There was the thinnest thread of laughter in the cell for a moment, and then a pause. ‘That’s kinder than I would have expected.’

Inurian waved a hand irritably, though he knew his visitor could not see him. Not in the way that eyes saw, at least.

‘This is not the time to renew old disagreements,’ he said. ‘You have come looking here because you felt something in the Shared.’

‘I know you can’t be the source, unless you’ve changed a good deal since I saw you last.’ The question had more than a hint of confrontation in its tone.

‘Yvane, Yvane, please. I will not argue with you.’

There was silence, and then the flat reply: ‘Very well.’

‘There is another here. He is what you have felt. His name is Aeglyss. He is young, very raw, but the Shared runs strong in him. Perhaps more strongly than it has in anyone for years.’

‘Does it indeed,’ said Yvane. The scepticism in her voice was clear.

‘Yes,’ insisted Inurian. ‘We were arguing. His anger disturbs the Shared. He’s filled with hate, with resentment. It’s crowded everything else out of him. You know my gifts, and I tell you truly what he is.’

‘What’s he doing in Kolglas?’

‘I’m not in Kolglas,’ said Inurian wearily. ‘I’m in Anduran. The Black Road has me.’

‘The Black Road ? Is Anduran taken?’

‘It is close.’

‘Hmph. It never ends, does it? Your precious Huanin live for the chance to wade around in one another’s blood. How do you come to be in the middle of it? What about that miserable old chiefling who kept you under his roof?’

‘Ah, Yvane,’ sighed Inurian. ‘Please.’

He bowed his head, shorn of all strength. His visitor’s image shimmered as if touched by a breeze, though the air was still.

‘Are you a prisoner, then?’ she asked.

‘Yes. Yvane, if I do not come out of this alive, Highfast should know of Aeglyss. Perhaps even Dyrkyrnon: I think he may have lived there for a time. He said they cast him out. If he continues down the path he’s following, it might take Highfast or Dyrkyrnon to rein him in.’

There was no reply for a time, then: ‘They long for these bloodlettings. Gyre, Haig, Lannis, all of them. From the crib they dream of vengeance for some crime or other committed in the distant past. Father kills father, and so child must kill child. It never ends. Leave them to their cruel games. Nobody will thank na’kyrim for interfering.’

‘Aeglyss has already interfered,’ said Inurian, gazing at the floor. ‘The Gyre Bloods might think he is their puppet, but I doubt they understand what they’re dealing with.’

When Yvane did not reply, Inurian looked up, thinking for a moment that she had left him. The outline of her form was still there, a fragment of cloud glowing palely from within.

‘I would... regret it if you died,’ she said quietly.

‘As would I.’

‘Perhaps I should see for myself,’ she said. The pale figure began in that moment to fade.

‘No,’ hissed Inurian, reaching out an arm. ‘You’ll only alarm him. He’s dangerous. Yvane!’

But she was gone, and he was alone again.

He sat without moving for a long time. Then he unpicked the lace from one of his boots, and drew it out. Closing his eyes, he began to knot it. One small, tight knot after another along its length, pausing over each to savour its shape beneath his fingertips. Outside, dawn was breaking.

The Horin-Gyre Blood held its council of war in the feasting hall that Croesan oc Lannis-Haig had prepared for Winterbirth. The high-roofed chamber was in disarray. Tables and chairs had been overturned and all its decorations torn down. A single huge table stood in the centre, a dozen or more people gathered around it.

Kanin nan Horin-Gyre was seated in the great carved chair that was to have been Croesan’s. His sword lay on the table in front of him. Wain was to his left, his shieldman Igris to his right. Shraeve was there, wearing a cuirass of hardened black leather like the carapace of a martial beetle, and all the captains of the Bloodheir’s army. A single Tarbain chieftain, old and haggard in a jacket trimmed with moth-eaten bearskin, occupied one end of the table. He looked as if he might fall asleep at any moment. Aeglyss the na’kyrim sat a little apart from the others, his chair pulled back: he was here only by the indulgence of the Bloodheir’s sister and Kanin would not grant him a seat at the table.

‘We must make the attempt,’ Wain was saying. Her eyes had a fierce intensity and certitude. ‘We will not be granted enough time to sit here and wait for the castle to be delivered to us. We must reach out and take it.’

Nobody seemed to be inclined to challenge her judgement, though Kanin knew not everyone here agreed with it. He had his own doubts.

‘Is there any fresh word from the scouts this morning?’ he asked.

One of the warriors shook his head. ‘There are bands of farmers and villagers roaming around beyond Grive and the Dyke, but no sign of any army yet. They will spend a while longer licking the wounds we gave them at Grive.’

‘Only until another few thousand Kilkry horsemen turn up,’ muttered Wain. ‘Then what? We can’t fight them with Tarbains and woodwights.’

She cast an angry glance at the Tarbain chieftain at the end of the table. He grinned back at her and said nothing. There were many gaps amidst his teeth.

‘We don’t know yet how long it will be before help comes to us from the north,’ Kanin said. ‘Tanwrye has not fallen, and will not do so for days—perhaps weeks—yet. It can’t be taken by storm, unless Ragnor oc Gyre changes his mind and sends his whole army to do the deed. The besiegers may be able to spare us a few hundred spears but it will be no more than that, for the time being at least.’

He turned to a small, slender man who sat beside Shraeve.

‘Cannek, what do you know of the castle’s strength?’

The man looked up. He wore nondescript clothing of hide and soft leather; his face was plain, without distinguishing features. Someone passing him in the street might do so without noticing him, but for the long, sheathed knives that were strapped to each forearm. He was the leader of the dozen Hunt Inkallim who had accompanied the army. The Hunt had its own methods for gathering information, and though Kanin had no wish to know what they were, he was happy to derive whatever benefit he could.

‘Well, we cannot be certain, of course,’ Cannek said with a faint, disarming smile. ‘We have questioned many of the city’s inhabitants, but really they are poor material for us to work with. The common folk, you know, rarely pay enough attention to important matters such as food supplies and garrison strengths.’

Kanin nodded with as much patience as he could muster. The Hunt was the least of the three Inkalls that together made up the Children of the Hundred—both Lore and Battle came before it in numbers and seniority—but it had gathered perhaps the darkest tales of all around it. Whatever Cannek might imply, he would not be relying solely on rumours extracted from prisoners. The Hunt had dozens, perhaps hundreds, of ordinary people in their pay throughout the Bloods of the Black Road and, if rumour was to believed, even amongst the so-called True Bloods. If anyone at this gathering would know what lay behind the obstinate walls of Castle Anduran, it would be Cannek.

The Inkallim flicked a stray hair from the back of his hand.

‘They are short of food, though,’ he said. ‘Of that we can be fairly sure. As to numbers, it’s a matter for guesswork in the main. Few warriors, we think. But how many men were taken in through the gate in those last hours before it closed? Can’t say.’

Kanin frowned, but quickly forced his face to relax. It would not be wise to show displeasure. Falling out with the Hunt Inkall could only create difficulties. Still, he suspected Cannek could be more forthcoming if he wished.

‘Perhaps you should execute that Lannis girl under the walls, as you threatened,’ mused Cannek.

‘That’ll achieve nothing,’ Kanin said. ‘She’s more useful alive, for the time being. Since he was not taken at Kolglas’—he glanced at Shraeve, who ignored him—‘we may yet find ourselves dealing with her brother before long. She might have value as a bargaining piece then.’

The slight sound of a chair leg scraping on stone from some little way behind him drew Kanin’s attention. Aeglyss was leaning forward in his chair, as if straining to close the gap between himself and the rest of them. He should have refused Wain’s suggestion that the halfbreed attend, but she had been so calmly persuasive he had given in. She persisted in her belief that he might prove to be of some further use, and Kanin had no stronger argument than his dislike of the man to set against that belief.

‘It matters little whether there are fifty or five hundred swords to defend the castle walls,’ Wain said. ‘We have been in the hands of fate since the day we marched out from Hakkan. Why turn aside now? Whether we succeed or fail we will have lived out the tales told by the Hooded God willingly and with courage.’

She is always so certain, Kanin thought. Always the first to test fate. If all of us could surrender ourselves so willingly to the Road our armies would be an unstoppable flood sweeping away Kilkry, Haig, even the Kingships in the south. If all of us had been as steadfast as Wain, perhaps the Kall would have come years ago.

‘There is someone here.’

The words were so unexpected, so disconnected, that at first no one was certain where they had come from. Then, one by one, everyone turned their eyes to Aeglyss. The na’kyrim was sitting erect in his chair, his eyes narrowing thoughtfully. He cocked his head to one side as if trying to catch the faintest of whispers. He looked up to the roof beams, around to the furthest corners of the hall.

‘An uninvited guest,’ he murmured.

‘What are you talking about?’ demanded Kanin.

‘Hush,’ said Aeglyss.

The Bloodheir’s eyes widened and he surged to his feet.

‘Do not presume...’ he started, but fell silent as the na’kyrim suddenly grimaced and staggered upright himself. A ripple of disquiet ran through the hall. Aeglyss took a couple of steps towards the doorway, his right hand clasped to his temple.

‘Looking for me...’ he said to himself. It was clear he was barely aware of the presence of Kanin and the others. He halted and suddenly looked at the dais at the end of the hall. He laughed, though it sounded strained. ‘How clever, whoever you are. Like smoke ... a woman, if I see you right.’

Following the line of the na’kyrim ‘s gaze, Kanin saw nothing. The dais was empty, occupied by nothing but dust and the fallen decorations of Winterbirth. Igris had risen from his seat and stepped forwards. The shieldman looked questioningly at the Bloodheir.

‘That is an admirable skill,’ said Aeglyss as he took a step closer to the dais. ‘I would dearly love to know the trick of it, my lady, if we meet some time. But not now, I think. No, whoever you are, I’ll not have you looking over my shoulder.’

His hands twitched at his side as if they wanted to reach for whatever he thought he saw on the dais. His shoulders went taut and his jaw locked in concentration and effort.

‘Begone,’ he spat through gritted teeth. ‘Begone.’

‘He has lost his mind,’ Igris whispered in Kanin’s ear. ‘Let me kill him.’

Kanin hesitated, minded to grant his shieldman’s request but held by a kind of morbid fascination. Before he could speak, Aeglyss gave a sudden cry and slumped to the ground. He lay motionless. There was blood on his face: he had bitten through his lower lip.

Many miles away, amidst ancient ruins high in the snowbound peaks of the Car Criagar, there was the piercing sound of a woman crying out in pain. It lasted for just a second or two and then died, falling away beneath the wind that surged around the mountains.

In the hall in Anduran, Kanin stared at the unconscious form on the floor.

‘Extraordinary,’ murmured Cannek.

Kanin blinked.

‘Take him away,’ he said to the nearest of his captains. ‘Give him back to his woodwight friends, or leave him in some hovel. I don’t care.’

As Aeglyss was dragged out Kanin resumed his seat.

‘As my sister was saying . . .’ he began.

‘I believe the castle can be taken,’ Shraeve said quietly.

Kanin looked at her in surprise. She had not spoken since they first entered the hall. He had not expected her to take any great interest in proceedings.

‘It may cost you most of what strength you have left, but then if you fail you will have no need of strength,’ the Inkallim said. ‘And if you succeed . . . well, who knows what may happen after?’

‘We are of one mind,’ said Wain. Kanin glanced at her and saw how chill was the look she fixed upon Shraeve. The two women did not like one another, Kanin knew. Too much alike to rest easily in each other’s company, perhaps. But they were alike in determination, in implacability. If both of them were going to argue for the storming of the castle, Kanin already knew the outcome of this council.

To travel through the forest in the company of Kyrinin was a revelation to Orisian. He had been on hunts often enough—riding in his uncle’s parties or going more softly with a hawk on his arm—and when he was younger he had played with Fariel and Anyara in the fringes of the great forests around Kolglas, and gone with his father to visit Drinan or Stryne deep in the woodlands, but none of that changed the fact that his heart lay with the open vistas of the coast and the Glas valley.

So it was for most of the people of the Lannis Blood. Even though some grazed their cattle deep into Anlane when the season was right, and woodsmen bred their mighty horses to haul timber to the workshops of Anduran, the forest was not where they belonged. It was a wild place to be cleared, or a source of food, wood and forage that could be harvested only with a wary eye.

Now, following in the wake of Ess’yr and Varryn, Orisian realised what it might be like to see the forest in a different way. It was not just that the Kyrinin went confidently and quickly over land that had no trails; it was, as much as anything, all the things he never even glimpsed. The first time Ess’yr paused for half a stride and lifted her head, just as a deer might, before moving on, he was puzzled. After it had happened twice more, he realised that she was hearing, or smelling, or feeling things that were beyond his reach.

Once he understood that, the forest changed its character for him. Birds that passed croaking overhead seemed to be calling a name he could not catch. Trees looked as though they were human figures frozen in the midst of some contorted movement. On the second day out from the vo’an, as the four of them came around the edge of an impenetrable thicket of brambles and saplings, the two Kyrinin froze, snapping into a stillness so deep it was startling. Orisian and Rothe halted as well. Ess’yr and Varryn sank down to their haunches and gestured for the humans to do the same.

They waited thus for what seemed an age. Orisian’s muscles tightened in his legs and the wound in his side throbbed. He longed to ask what was happening, and knew that any frustration he felt would be multiplied several times in Rothe. It would infuriate his shieldman to be held thus at the whim of the Kyrinin.

At last, somewhere up ahead, there was rustling and the sharp crack of a fallen branch giving way beneath a heavy tread. A great creature was moving through the forest, climbing up the slope heedless of any undergrowth that might bar its way. The sounds lingered for a few minutes and then faded as the animal passed beyond earshot. Even then, the Kyrinin kept them immobile and silent for a long time. Eventually Varryn rose and without a backward glance set off once more as if nothing had happened.

‘Bear. The wind is kind,’ Ess’yr said.

After that Orisian imagined the creature somewhere above them, a dark, ill-formed presence, watching them from afar.

When they rested they sat a little way apart, Huanin and Kyrinin keeping their distance. Rothe sniffed suspiciously at the food Ess’yr offered. There were little strips of flaking dried meat so desiccated and aged that it was almost black, and a handful of big seeds that Orisian did not recognise. When he split one between his teeth it had a nutty, sharp taste. Rothe gnawed with a wary grimace at the frayed end of the meat. He wrinkled his nose, but teased a strand of the fibrous material loose and chewed on it.

‘I would give a lot for a rack of roast boar,’ muttered Rothe as he probed with a fingernail to loosen scraps of food from the crevices between his teeth.

‘Perhaps when we reach Anduran,’ Orisian said.

‘That would be good,’ Rothe agreed. ‘And a bench to sit on instead of wet grass, and a bed to go to at the end of the day.’

‘I didn’t know you liked your comforts so much,’ said Orisian with a smile.

‘It’s nothing but sense, to wish to be elsewhere than under the stars when winter’s come. I’ve had my full share of rocks for pillows and trees for a roof. The years chip away at a man’s patience for such things. Still, I shouldn’t be hankering after comforts, meagre or otherwise. It’s not feasting and sleeping we’re headed for.’

‘No,’ murmured Orisian. One way or another, it could only be war they were travelling towards; something he felt unready for, something he was not sure he would be able to meet in the way he should. Yet a part of him felt that only war could make sense of the horrors of Winterbirth. Orisian was feeling something he never had before: a desire for blood to wash away blood. The thought felt like a tapeworm lodged in the gut of his mind. He could almost see Inurian shaking his gentle head in disapproval.

Rothe sensed his distracted gloom, and patted him upon the shoulder. It was a soft touch, from those calloused, blunt hands.

‘We’ll come safe through this, Orisian. You’ll see. The Blood is strong. And I’ll not leave your side, whatever comes.’

‘I’ll be safer than anyone in the valley, then.’

‘Of course. I’ve killed an Inkallim. Not even Taim Narran could claim that.’

Having Rothe with him was a source of strength to Orisian. In one way alone did the precious shieldman’s presence make for a less easy journey, and that was in the tension between him and Varryn. Rothe’s frustration—fury, almost—at having to follow where the Kyrinin led was never far from the surface. It showed in the rigidity of his jaw and the way he would sometimes tug distractedly at his beard while he stared ahead.

It was clear that Varryn was not inclined to make the experience any easier. He made no concessions to the humans’ lesser agility or surefootedness in the routes he took, and offered no explanations for anything he did. Even to Orisian, whose instinct, however hesitant, was to trust these two Kyrinin, there appeared to be a cold arrogance in Varryn. And his tattoos, the kin’thyn that swirled over his face like the dance of blue fireflies, did nothing to soften the impression. Though he felt a pang of disloyalty at the thought, Orisian suspected that even Rothe might not be a match for the Kyrinin, on this ground at least. Perhaps that was part of what lay between the two men; perhaps such warriors instinctively weighed each other’s worth, played out some confrontation in their minds to see who would emerge the victor. Varryn’s arrogance might be that of the one who had triumphed, in both his own imagination and Rothe’s.

Several times, when he lost his footing upon some slick patch of moss or broke a twig with his tread, Orisian heard a muttered ‘Ulyin,’ from Varryn. Once, Rothe caught the word as well.

‘What do you think ulyin means, anyway?’ he asked Orisian darkly.

‘I don’t know,’ Orisian lied. ‘Probably “be careful”.’

As they worked their way along the flank of the mountains it was sometimes hard to believe that they were still within the lands claimed by Croesan’s uncle. Once or twice they did come across a path that was too crude and obvious to be the work of Kyrinin. Varryn would not let them follow such routes. Sometimes, too, there were clearings where they saw signs of grazing by cattle, or could make out the scars left by some woodsman’s or hunter’s camp. None of these marks his people had left upon the forest struck Orisian as anything other than transient. He saw nothing that would not be healed.

He thought of the face of the Anain that watched over In’hynyr’s vo’an. Ess’yr had said that the Anain were here, even if they did not show themselves. Orisian found himself glancing at flickering shadows, and at the movement of branches stirred by the wind. He started at the clattering eruption of pigeons out of the trees. The sharp barking of foxes in the dusk took on a shivery quality in his ear.

His unease was reinforced by the small rituals Ess’yr and Varryn followed. They never made a fire until darkness had fallen, and then only a small one that they ringed with a makeshift low screen of branches to muffle the light. When the time came, as her brother was decanting the embers of the previous night’s fire from the birch bark container he carried and sustained them in, Ess’yr would find a flat stone. She set it at the new fire’s side and placed a few scraps of food on it. In an almost inaudible voice, she murmured a few words. After she was done, Varryn would bow his head over the food and whisper the same incantation. In the morning they left the food behind them as they made their way onwards.

Orisian hesitated to ask Ess’yr what the act signified. His curiosity must have been poorly concealed, for on the third evening Ess’yr sat beside him at the fire.

‘The food is for restless dead. Those who walk. No anhyne to guard us here. If one of the restless comes in the night, they will take the food. Leave us.’

‘The restless dead,’ echoed Orisian, feeling the stirring of the darkness beyond the reach of the fire’s frail light. The unburied dead.

‘You fear the dead,’ he murmured.

‘Not fear. Pity. Only those who do not rest.’

Orisian was not sure how to behave with Ess’yr. He felt she was less at ease with him now than when they had been in the vo’an. It might be because of Varryn’s presence, or the fact that she was no longer his healer but his guard, guide and escort. Still, she did not mock him as Varryn did. She would talk to him and tell him things, if not with as much freedom as she had on occasion back in the camp. More often than her brother, she would wait for him and Rothe to catch up when they fell behind.

They came to a stream that bubbled along between moss-covered rocks. There was a pool where the water paused, gathering itself before rushing on down towards the valley that summoned it. While Varryn and Rothe sat in silence, Ess’yr took Orisian to the water’s edge and made him kneel down beside her. He did so gingerly, trying to protect his side. The wound had been hurting more for the last day or so.

She pulled up the sleeve of her hide jacket, exposing the pale, sculpted length of her forearm. He watched as she flexed her long fingers. She slipped her hand into the water with seamless delicacy, leaving barely a hint of its passing upon the surface. As she reached beneath the lip of the bank, she looked not at the water or at her arm but at Orisian. He could not look away from those utterly grey eyes.

Her face betrayed nothing: no expectation, no concentration. Its surface was no more ruffled than that of the pool. Her hand emerged, and cupped in it was a small, glistening fish. It was a mountain trout, its flanks speckled with red dots. Orisian laughed, and for a moment there was a smile on Ess’yr’s lips as if the sun had touched her.

‘You,’ she said.

He obeyed, sinking his hand into the water. He moved his hand along the bank, feeling the earth, brushing his fingertips over pebbles. He touched something alive and cold and smooth. Closing his hand with all the care he could muster, he raised the fish. As soon as he brought it within a breath of the air it gave a single, contemptuous twist and flicked out of his grasp and away.

His disappointment showed. Ess’yr smiled again.

They caught no more fish, and shared the meagre flesh of the one between the four of them. It was enough to make it the best meal they had eaten since leaving the vo’an.

Rothe pursed his lips as he peered at the wound in Orisian’s flank. Orisian was lying on the ground, his jacket hitched up.

‘How does it look?’ he asked.

Rothe gave a non-committal shrug. ‘It matters more how it feels.’

‘Not bad. It itches sometimes. Is it healed?’

‘Will be soon, if you treat it gentle. Still red.’ He sniffed at the paste-smeared bandage he had removed from over the wound. ‘Wish I knew what it was they’ve used on it, though.’

‘Whatever it is, it’s worked. I’ll settle for that.’

Rothe grunted and straightened.

Orisian pulled his jacket down and carefully righted himself, still wary of jarring the muscles in his side. ‘I’m sure they knew what they were doing,’ he said. ‘They are Kyrinin cures, all those medicines Inurian has. He never did anyone any harm with them, did he?’

‘No, but he didn’t cure all the ones he tried, either,’ said Rothe.

‘Well, anyway, this has worked.’

Rothe frowned at the poultice in his hand. Orisian glanced over to where Ess’yr sat further up the slope with her back to them. She had said it would be all right to take the dressing off, but shown no further interest. Varryn had disappeared some little while ago: scouting ahead, or hunting. As usual, he had not seen fit to explain what he was doing.

Rothe leaned close, fixing Orisian with a serious gaze.

‘We should go,’ the shieldman whispered. ‘Leave them. We are not their prisoners now, whatever they may think.’

Orisian shook his head, but Rothe was insistent. ‘This is taking too long. Anduran cannot be far. If we go straight downhill we would surely be in the valley in an hour or two. Orisian, these wights are no friends of ours. We don’t need them.’

Orisian shot a nervous look towards Ess’yr, afraid that she would hear what Rothe was saying. She had not moved.

‘They were told to take us, Rothe. I would get there faster if I could, but their vo’an’tyr told them to escort us, to see us out of their lands. They won’t let us go off on our own.’

‘We don’t need their permission,’ hissed Rothe urgently. ‘And this isn’t their land. It’s ours; yours. Now is the time to do it. You’re almost healed. Her brother isn’t here. She can’t deal with both of us alone.’

Again, Orisian shot a worried glance towards Ess’yr. Her head and shoulders remained as motionless and relaxed as ever. Yet he saw that her right hand rested upon her spear where it lay beside her, and he could not remember if it had been there before. He had a sudden taste of fear and a glimpse of something awful waiting a few paces into the future.

‘No, Rothe,’ he insisted as quietly as he could. ‘No. Stop now. We stay with them.’

The words felt unfamiliar and ungainly on his tongue as he uttered them. He knew why: he had never, in any sense that mattered, commanded Rothe before. He had never had to. His shieldman blinked, and for just a moment Orisian saw in his eyes the instinct to keep arguing. It was snuffed out. The tension vanished from the warrior’s face.

‘As you say,’ Rothe said, and Orisian could not hear in his voice a single trace of frustration or disagreement.

Shortly afterwards, Varryn returned and sat silently beside his sister. A squall of rain swept over them. It came down the valley from the north, drenching the forest and rattling the trees for half an hour. In the sodden aftermath, the Kyrinin shook their heads like animals to shed rainwater. Ess’yr leaned forwards so that her long hair hung in a curtain and ran tight fingers through it. Orisian watched her squeeze out droplets of water with a few long sweeps of her hand.

The child’s body was twisted where it had fallen, one arm bent and pinned beneath the torso. Rothe laid his hand on the dead boy’s shoulder and rolled him over. The limbs moved sluggishly. Death’s grip had been on him for just a little while, stiffening his joints but not yet locking them. Orisian glimpsed a ruined face—split skin flecked with fragments of tooth or bone, a lot of blood—before Rothe, kneeling down, blocked his view.

The corpse was shod with crude hide slippers. The leggings were of undyed wool. It was the clothing of a poor household: shepherds, perhaps, or woodsmen. The boy lay in a slight hollow. Trees leaned over him. The grass was lushly green and wet from recent rain.

The two Kyrinin were standing back, resting on their spears. They watched as Rothe closed the child’s eyes. He had to clean his hand on the grass afterwards. He turned the body over again to hide the face.

‘Not long dead,’ said the shieldman. He stood up. He looked tired, Orisian thought.

They could be no more than a day’s walk from Anduran, in a fold of the hills that hid the Glas valley from sight. For the last couple of hours they had been walking through parts of the forest that had been well grazed in the summer. Most of the trees were young and spindly; only stumps remained of those that had offered good timber.

‘This was in the wound,’ Rothe said, holding out his hand. In his palm lay a thin piece of horn, worked to a sharp point.

‘What is it?’ asked Orisian.

‘The Tarbains from the north set them into their clubs. That’s who killed him: Tarbains.’ He cast a glance towards Ess’yr and Varryn. ‘Savages. They’re barely human.’

‘Tarbains,’ said Orisian quietly. ‘Then it’s bad, isn’t it?’

Rothe nodded. He flicked the sliver of horn away. It disappeared into the grass as if it had never been.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘If Tarbains are roaming free this far south, it’s very bad. They could only have got here with a Black Road army. I’d not have believed it if it was any eyes but my own doing the seeing.’

‘We should take care of the body,’ Orisian said.

‘The ones who did this cannot be far away. It’s not safe to stay.’

Orisian looked at the dead boy. Once it had departed, life left no trace. The body had a shapeless quality. It was difficult to imagine it had ever been inhabited. As far as he could tell, all his family had come to this: certainly Fariel and Lairis, perhaps Kennet and Anyara. All of them. He wanted to look away, but could not lift his eyes from a patch on the back of the boy’s jacket where some old tear had been carefully repaired.

‘How old is he, do you think?’

‘I couldn’t be sure,’ Rothe murmured.

‘How old, though, do you think?’ Orisian repeated, and heard the strange insistence in his voice as if it was someone else speaking.

‘Perhaps twelve. Thirteen.’

‘We should find the ones who did this,’ Orisian said.

‘I don’t think...’ began Rothe.

Orisian pointed to the lip of the hollow. The grass there was trodden flat. ‘Even I can see the tracks,’ he said.

‘It would be better to pass around, and make for Anduran,’ said Rothe.

‘No. This boy wouldn’t be out here on his own. His family, his home, can’t be far away. His parents might be searching for him.’

‘More likely they’re dead and the Tarbains are feasting on their hearts, waiting for us.’

Orisian glared at his shieldman. Rothe looked back. His face was quite calm, quite firm.

‘Then we will kill them,’ Orisian said. ‘I am going to follow this boy’s trail, whether it’s wise or not. These are our people. Should we pass by?’

Rothe stroked his beard.

‘I will do it, Rothe. I am nephew to the Thane,’ said Orisian quietly. Never before had he truly thought that his uncle’s position made a difference to who he was, in his heart; perhaps it did, after all.

The shieldman held Orisian’s gaze for a moment or two, then knelt and began to examine the ground. Orisian glanced over towards Ess’yr. She and her brother had not stirred. They showed no great interest in what was happening.

‘We are going to find this boy’s family,’ he said to them. Ess’yr gave a slight nod. He had no idea what it meant, beyond the fact that she understood his words.

‘There were three or four of them,’ Rothe said. ‘They ran him down and killed him with clubs and spears. It’s easy to say, Orisian, but you understand that if they see us we have to kill them? All of them, if we can. If one escapes, he might come back with more.’

‘Of course.’ Orisian heard the coldness in his own voice.

Rothe stood up and faced Ess’yr and Varryn. When he spoke it was still to Orisian, though.

‘You’ve only a knife. The few who did this might not be the only ones around. We may need help.’

Orisian looked to the Kyrinin. Both of them were watching him, not Rothe.

‘Ess’yr, if there is a fight we may need your help. Please?’

It was Varryn who said, ‘We have no quarrel here.’

‘Perhaps not. I will understand if you do not come with us. But if the Tarbains have come this far, they can go further. They will kill Kyrinin as willingly as Huanin.’

‘We will come,’ Ess’yr said. ‘We must take you to the forest edge. We are not there yet.’

As they set out along the trail left by the boy and his pursuers, Rothe muttered to Orisian, ‘I am your shieldman, and you will allow me to keep you safe. Stay back if there is trouble. If you have to fight, show no fear. Whatever happens, do not run. Tarbains are dangerous but they’re cowards, too. They’re like wolves: quick to turn tail if they decide you have sharper teeth than they do. If you face one, let him see your teeth. And let’s hope your friends know how to use those bows.’

The boy had not come far. He had crossed a little stream, run beneath the spreading branches of a huge oak that had been spared the axe for some reason, crossed a glade that must be full of flowers in the spring. Not far.

They lay in the damp grass atop a rise, looking down between scattered trees towards the cabin a few score paces away. It was the kind of dwelling hundreds of Lannis folk lived in: square, made of timber and stone, with a little woodshed close by. There were snares hanging on the wall, sheltered beneath the eaves. A pile of unsplit logs lay in front of the woodshed, as if at any moment a man might come out from the cabin with his axe. He might be a charcoal-burner or a fur trapper, or even a honey-maker with hives somewhere out of sight.

The door of the cottage hung open, leaning at a broken angle, and the voices that Orisian could hear were not those of a woods-man and his family. They were crude, abrasive, and shouting in a language he had never heard before. Orisian was tense. It had been so clear, standing over that body in the hollow, that this was the right thing to do; a brief moment of clarity, when things for once had seemed simple. Now, faced with the consequence of his will, he was not so certain. Rothe had been right, of course. It would be wiser to pass by. Yet he was the Thane’s nephew, and those who lived here were people of his Blood. Orisian had taken the oath. The enemy of the Blood was his enemy. If it was to mean anything, surely it was this?

Then a figure came out of the cabin. It was a man, but one unlike any Orisian had seen before. He was tall, rangy like a lean dog. His heir was filthy and tangled in knots and mats. Dozens of splinters of bone were sewn into the fur jerkin he wore, a speckling of morbid ornament. His arms were naked but for two leather armlets, one at the wrist, one just below his shoulder. The great weapon he rested across his shoulder was vicious-looking: a long cudgel with a thick head from which five or six spikes protruded.

The man loitered in front of the doorway. He spat and scratched at his face. He looked around, and though his eyes drifted over the place where Orisian and the others lay he did not see them. He was relaxed, careless.

The Tarbain went inside again. There was a renewed chorus of loud voices, raised in what sounded like argument. Rothe eased himself back from the crest of the rise. The four of them squatted in a tight group once they were hidden from the cabin.

‘Can’t say how many are in there,’ Rothe whispered. ‘It doesn’t sound to be more than four or five, though.’

‘There’s no sign of the boy’s family,’ said Orisian. ‘They might be inside, do you think?’

Rothe shrugged. ‘If they are, they’re dead, or worse. Tarbains don’t take prisoners, Orisian. They’ll probably stay here a while, eat and drink as much as they can and then carry off everything else.’

‘And maybe do the same to the next family they come across?’

‘Maybe. Now that we’re here, I’d be glad to see them dead. We need them outside, though. If we go rushing in, it’s as likely to be us that’s buzzard food as it is them.’

Varryn whispered to his sister. She nodded, and he was gone, running in a low crouch up the line of the ridge. Ess’yr took an arrow from her quiver and ran its fletching between her lips, smoothing the feathers. It was a delicate, almost sensual, movement. Rothe looked alarmed.

‘What’s happening?’ he demanded in a hiss.

‘They must be under the sky, yes? To kill them?’ Ess’yr said. She began to crawl up towards the spot from where they had been watching the cabin.

Rothe unsheathed his sword and raised his eyebrows at Orisian before following her.

The voices had quietened. The clearing around the cabin was quite still. A slight wind brushed the highest twigs in the trees. It touched the broken door and creaked it on its one surviving hinge. Orisian realised he was holding his breath.

‘What’s happening?’ asked Rothe again. He was getting close to anger.

Ess’yr pointed. Varryn was there, crouched against the nearest wall of the cottage. Ess’yr rose to one knee and put the arrow to her bowstring. Rothe gave a low growl of irritation, but half-rose himself and hefted his sword. The Inkallim’s knife was still in Orisian’s belt. He fingered its hilt. As he set himself on his knees his side gave a twinge of protest and he winced.

Varryn stood and walked forwards. He carried his spear loosely. His bow was still across his back. He went out twenty paces into the space in front of the cabin.

‘This is not how I’d do it,’ muttered Rothe.

Varryn shot a quick glance up towards them. Ess’yr drew back the bowstring and held it. Varryn took a few steps sideways, and put himself in the line of sight from the open doorway. He rested the butt of his spear on the ground and stood there.

‘Don’t forget, stay back,’ Rothe whispered in Orisian’s ear.

There was a chorus of shouts from inside the cabin. Varryn sprinted towards Orisian and the others. The Tarbains spilled out behind him, howling and almost falling over one another in their haste. They saw only a single Kyrinin flying away, and they came after him. There were six of them. Orisian saw teeth bared, cudgels and spears flailing.

The arrow was gone and homed before Orisian even realised Ess’yr had released it. It took the rearmost Tarbain square in the chest. He tumbled over his own feet. Rothe sprang up and ran forwards, crying out like a madman, ‘Lannis! Lannis!’

Another arrow thrummed across the air and found a shoulder. It spun a second man around, but he did not fall. Orisian stood and pulled his knife free. Two of the Tarbains were slowing, realising that they faced more than a single foe. Two more came on, though, too frenzied to care what was happening. Varryn turned to meet them, halfway up the slope. The first Tarbain to reach him was the one they had seen outside the cabin before. He swung his spiked cudgel. The Kyrinin slipped beneath it and put his spear into the man’s belly. It took him off the ground, punching through furs and flesh and stabbing out through his lower back. Varryn let body and weapon fall and met the next Tarbain with a kick to the knee. The two men rolled together, each grappling for an advantage.

The one Ess’yr had shot in the shoulder was fleeing. She put another arrow in his back. Rothe was on top of the last two. He bore one backwards with the weight of his charge. The other froze, poised upon the boundary between courage and flight. Then as Ess’yr sighted on him her bowstring snapped. The arrow tumbled to the ground. The Tarbain looked up. He stared straight at her for a fraction of a second, and made his choice. He came bounding up towards her and Orisian, his spear levelled. Ess’yr dropped her bow and stooped to pick up her own spear. The Tarbain came on. Orisian took a step back. The tribesman had no eyes for him; he might have been invisible.

Ess’yr met the Tarbain with a lunge that made him lurch to one side and come to a slithering halt. Fast as a falcon’s strike, the butt of her spear came round and cracked into the small of his back. He grunted, but he was strong and the blow barely rocked him. He feinted towards Ess’yr and she backed up. The Tarbain was making a strange noise, half growl, half groan. There were strands of leather and hide twisted into his hair; they shook as he rolled his head this way and that. Orisian rushed at him.

He came from behind and to one side, almost out of sight. The Tarbain’s reaction was late. His spear swept round in a flat plane. Orisian ducked it and hit the man around the waist, staggering him. He would not fall and somehow Orisian could not get his knife turned the right way to stab him. Then there was a solid thud and a piercing shriek as Ess’yr’s spear sank a foot deep into the tribesman’s thigh. Blood flooded out, more than Orisian had ever seen except when a sheep’s throat was cut. The Tarbain tried to turn and tripped. Orisian landed on top of him, and drove his knife into the man’s chest with every shred of strength he had. The impact made his hand slip off the hilt. There was blood everywhere, all over his fingers, over the knife and on his clothing. The blade stayed where he had put it, though. There was a roar, or perhaps a scream, in Orisian’s head, crowding out any thought, bearing him away from himself on a cresting wave of fury and grief. He gripped the knife and pulled it from the man’s flesh, stabbed it in again, and then again.

The Tarbain did not move. He was still making strange noises, but they were soft and fading now. The grass all around was a dark, liquid red. Ess’yr was running, sprinting towards the cabin. Orisian did not want to be left alone with the dying man, and went after her.

Rothe had killed his man. Varryn had managed to pin the last and was straddling his chest. As they came near, he whipped an arrow out of his quiver and plunged it into the tribesman’s neck. The first man Ess’yr had put an arrow into was crawling on his hands and knees back towards the cabin. He was speaking very quickly in his unintelligible language. For all that the words were senseless, the current of terror that flowed through them was clear. Rothe walked up to him and raised his sword above the back of his neck. Orisian looked away.

They found the boy’s father, mother and two sisters in the cabin. They were all dead.

Afterwards, Orisian sat on the grass a little way from the cottage. He had his back to it, and was gazing out into the forest. When he looked in that direction, everything appeared normal, as if nothing had happened. The trees were as they had always been. The lichen on their trunks had not changed.

The knife was in his hands. Rothe had retrieved it for him and washed it in a bucket of water they found inside the door of the cabin. Orisian had cleaned himself as best he could. He doubted whether the stains would ever come out of his jacket, though.

His shieldman came and sat beside him.

‘You all right?’

‘It’s not the same as practice, is it?’ Orisian said.

‘No. You did well, though. Showed no fear, stayed alive; can’t ask for much more.’

Ess’yr was a short distance away, testing the spare string she had fitted to her bow. Orisian gestured towards her.

‘She killed him, really. There was so much blood coming out from where she stabbed him he would have bled to death in no time.’ Even as he said it he wondered. Whether it was true or not, it did nothing to shift the hollowness in his stomach.

‘Probably. Still, you made sure he wasn’t getting up again. That’s important, Orisian. Leave it only half done and one day you’ll be the one doing the dying.’

‘I thought it might feel better,’ said Orisian.

‘Better?’

‘I thought it might even the scales a bit. For Winterbirth. For my father.’

‘But it didn’t.’

‘No.’

‘It’s a start. Only a start. These men we killed, they were enemies of our Blood.’

Orisian was no longer certain that any amount of killing would balance the scales of Winterbirth. What had just happened felt as though it had nothing to do with Kolglas. And if it happened a thousand times it would not give Orisian the chance he wanted to tell his father that he had loved him, despite everything. Ess’yr loosed an arrow into the trunk of a birch tree. It smacked into the wood and shivered there.

‘She does know how to use a bow, though, doesn’t she?’ Orisian said.

‘She does. There’s no doubting that.’

They left the Tarbains for the scavengers. They fetched the boy and put him with the rest of his family into a shallow grave in front of their home. It was a poor kind of end, against the Blood’s traditions, but there was no question of making a pyre. There was no knowing who might see the smoke. They ate well, too, and gathered as much food as they could easily carry to take with them. It made Orisian uncomfortable.

‘It’s food for rats if we leave it,’ Rothe said. ‘We’ve done the best we can for them. They’d not begrudge us it.’

They walked in silence through the afternoon. As the first greying of evening had begun they came to the edge of the woods and the Glas valley was before them: a few rolling, sinking slopes shorn of trees, and then the flat lands of the valley floor. It was a huge plain laid out like a blanket of green patchwork. Farmhouses were scattered across it, and a few cattle could be seen here and there, but it was a lifeless view. There were no people in sight, and no smoke rose from any of the buildings. Orisian had a fleeting sense of apprehension. Now, the forest felt safe and concealing compared to that open, exposed ground.

Anduran was out in the centre of the valley, couched in a lazy curve of the Glas some way to the east of where they stood. The river still had a faint shine to it even though the sun had almost fallen from the sky. The castle stood tight up against the riverside. The town it guarded lay to its south, a dark discoloration upon the valley. Orisian did not experience the surge of relief he had expected.

Rothe was standing beside him.

‘What do you think?’ Orisian asked.

Rothe frowned in concentration as his narrowed eyes swept over the landscape.

‘A camp,’ Ess’yr said. ‘There.’

Rothe and Orisian looked. Orisian thought he could see what she was talking about: an indistinct, pale shape sprawled around a darker point at its centre, not far from Anduran. It might have been a camp of tents radiating out from a big farmhouse. Certainly, whatever it was, it had not been there when he and Rothe had ridden out from Anduran all those days ago.

‘Now what is that?’ Rothe was murmuring.

‘The enemy,’ Ess’yr said.

‘White Owl,’ said her brother, and for once there was clear emotion in his voice. He spoke the words as if they tasted vile.

Rothe almost laughed. ‘White Owls? There’d have to be hundreds for such a camp, and out in the middle of the valley, right next to Anduran? You’re mad.’

‘No,’ was all Ess’yr said.

‘It’s impossible,’ insisted Rothe. ‘Inkallim at Kolglas and Tarbains here are strange enough, but White Owls at Anduran?’

Orisian was frowning. ‘It was impossible for Inkallim to reach Kolglas, but they did it. The White Owls helped them do it. In’hynyr said as much, back in the vo’an.’

Varryn had squatted down. He was no longer paying any attention to the discussion. He stared rigidly out at the camp on the valley floor. Orisian turned to Ess’yr.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

Rothe gave an exasperated snort. Orisian ignored him.

‘How many?’ he asked Ess’yr.

‘Many.’

‘Well, I won’t turn back now. We’ll just have to go carefully, and see what we find.’

‘Wait for dark,’ Ess’yr said. ‘We go too. We must know what the enemy does. Where you are blind, we can see.’

The catapult’s arm snapped forwards and an arc of fire vaulted the wall of Castle Anduran. The barrel of oil and pitch roared as it blazed through the air. The thump of its impact somewhere within the fortress was heard by the besiegers. It brought a ragged cheer from the warriors who hid amongst the crude siegeworks facing the castle. They shouted encouragement to the men straining to crank back the throwing arm. There were three catapults in all, and they had been at their work for some time. The smoky stink of their missiles had settled over the whole area. For a time, the castle’s defenders had attempted to pick off the men working the machine with arrows, but the range was too long for accuracy and there were shieldbearers standing guard. Now the burning barrels, the rocks, the severed heads went unanswered as the day sank into dusk.

In the streets and houses that faced the castle across the killing ground, there was a subdued bustle of activity. Small bands of warriors, their feet muffled with cloth, moved along alleyways, gathered in abandoned houses and taverns. Their captains silenced any murmur of conversation with murderous gazes. They carried no torches, and in the deepening dark there were trips and falls and strangled curses. Beakers of bracing grain spirit were passed around, one swallow only for each. Some of the warriors slept, some did not. Some murmured in the shadows: ‘My feet are on the Road. My feet are on the Road.’ And on and on into the night the catapults kept up their thumping rhythm and threw ribbons of fiery gold into the black sky.

In the last few hours before dawn, the temperature fell. The day’s first light brought with it a bitter chill. Clouds piled up around the summits of the Car Criagar to the north. The men atop the battlements shivered and peered out over the town as it emerged from the darkness. The catapults had fallen still, and there was no sign of movement around them. Here and there in Anduran the odd light glimmered. Somewhere a fire-weakened timber gave with a resounding crack.

It was a calm scene, until the eye looked closer. Amongst the barricades and low earthworks that had been thrown up beneath the walls, crowds of Tarbain tribesmen were packed more thickly than ever before. They thronged the ground, pressing themselves down and jostling for any scrap of protection. A few arrows flashed down from the walls, until hurried commands were shouted to save them. Figures were moving amongst the houses that fronted on to the castle; not many, but they moved with haste and purpose. The sentries looked more closely, and they saw spears and polearms. They saw more figures, pressed in beneath overhanging eaves. The Black Road had gathered its full strength.

Word ran through the castle like wildfire. ‘They’re attempting the walls,’ some cried; ‘They’ll force the gate,’ others. Most of the shouts were nothing more than: ‘To arms, to arms!’

Warriors and farmers, shieldmen and townsfolk took up whatever weapon they had to hand and went to the walls. They were hungry and cold. They were tired, for the bombardment had denied many sleep. But they went to the walls and they promised one another the Black Road would be bloodied today.

Croesan and Naradin, Thane and Bloodheir, stood together atop the gatehouse. They risked no more than the briefest of glances out over the grim scene.

‘They grow impatient,’ murmured Naradin. ‘That’s a pity.’

Croesan grunted. He wore polished mail; a gleaming silver shield hung on his arm.

‘They’ll not find us easy,’ said the Thane.

Naradin looked around and back, over the courtyard of the castle. Most of the wooden outbuildings by the keep—stables, blacksmith’s forge, hay store—were ruins, burned out during the night’s incendiary bombardment. A new fire was being kindled even now: a pyre, on to which the bodies of men and horses had been piled, along with the heads thrown into the castle by the catapults. The keep itself was intact, though it bore the scars of several impacts. A fire had started on one of the upper floors in the night, but it had been quickly extinguished. Naradin cast his gaze along the walls that flanked the gatehouse. More than half of those now gathered to defend them were not warriors at all. They were townsfolk trapped here and left with no choice but to take up arms: apprehensive, exhausted.

‘If we had only another couple of hundred trained spearmen they’d find us impregnable,’ the Bloodheir reflected.

‘Well, we don’t have those men,’ said Croesan firmly. ‘So we trust to the courage of those we do have. If we fail, there’ll be others to avenge us: Lheanor, Kennet if he lives. Taim Narran. First, though, let us try to ensure that their vengeance is not required. Our Blood has life in it yet.’

Naradin nodded.

‘Go to the keep,’ Croesan said. ‘Wait there with your Shield, and anyone else you can find in there. Keep Eilan and your child safe. Leave the courtyard and the walls to me. We will meet again once all is done.’

Naradin embraced his father. They stood thus for a few moments, clinging to something, then parted and went their separate ways.

The arms of the catapults were cranked slowly back. Baskets of rocks and rubble were manhandled into place. Kanin nan Horin-Gyre stood at the mouth of an alleyway, within sight of Castle Anduran’s gate but shielded from arrows by the overhanging roof. A man standing by the nearest of the catapults, twenty paces ahead, watched the Bloodheir intently. Kanin nodded, and in a great crash the three machines sprang once more into life.

Kanin turned to the thin, gap-toothed figure at his side.

‘Go, then,’ he said to the Tarbain chieftain.

The man’s eyes were hostile, his lip curled as if preparing an angry response. But he bent his grey head and took a single long stride out into the open. He sucked in a rasping great breath, spread his arms and howled with all the strength his ageing lungs could muster. It was a wordless, formless cry.

Hundreds of Tarbain warriors huddled amongst the siegeworks rose up as one, howling in their turn, baying in the sudden release of tension. A seething mass, bearing huge ladders that rocked like twigs on a fast-flowing stream, they poured forwards to the castle walls. Many fell, trampled or brushed aside by their comrades. Arrows and rocks showered down from the battlements. Boulders flung by the catapults rebounded from the walls and fell amongst the tribesmen. Still, the ladders reached the castle and were flung up against it.

As the Tarbains scrambled upwards, ants on a great boulder, another band of thirty or more men—the strongest of Kanin’s own warriors—barged through the throng and up to the gate. They pushed a massive wheeled ram, fashioned from a single straight oak and capped in iron. Before they could bring it to bear on the great timbers of the gate, a cascade of stones and arrows had felled a dozen of them. Others ran up from behind to take their place.

Atop the walls, blows were traded, blood shed. Tarbains fell screaming from the ladders back into the press of their kin below. Some spilled out on to the battlements. Against them, women, old men and boys fought alongside the castle’s warriors, hacking and swinging with staffs and clubs, axes and kitchen knives. They killed and were killed.

Croesan the Thane came surging along the wall, his Shield all about him. They pushed to the fore and swung their long-bladed swords. The Tarbains had no protection save their tunics of marten and lynx fur. The dead piled up. The wounded groaned and writhed, and were trodden underfoot. Croesan came to the head of a ladder and shouted out in fury as he slashed at the man ascending it. His shieldmen levered the ladder away from the wall with poles and it toppled. Below, the battering ram was crashing against the gate.

The Thane wiped flecks of blood from his eyelashes. He looked to left and right. There was still fighting, but the castle’s defenders had the upper hand. Nowhere had the Tarbains gained a secure foothold. A great boulder smashed against the battlements nearby, and spun on and over down into the courtyard. Croesan glared out at his besiegers, and saw that there was to be no respite. A host of Horin-Gyre warriors was now drawing up in open sight, spears to the fore, swords and axes behind. A desultory volley of arrows came down from the sections of castle walls that were not yet beset. The crack of splintering timber said the castle gate was yielding. The army of the Black Road were swarming around the foot of the walls; more ladders were being thrown up. A flurry of crossbow bolts hissed overhead as Croesan turned away. One of his shieldmen fell at the Thane’s side, his helm stove in by a bolt.

When the main gate broke open, Horin-Gyre warriors poured into the breach, pushing back the fractured timbers and spilling through into the passageway beyond. Their way was blocked by the inner gate and there, in the gloom beneath the great mass of the gatehouse, dozens died as missiles darted out from holes and alcoves. The ram rolled in, grinding the dead and wounded beneath its wheels.

The strength of the Tarbains on the walls was spent. They died, or fell back. They had served their purpose, though. The mail-shirted warriors of the Black Road who now swarmed up the walls to take their place found fewer, tired defenders. Croesan was drawing up his Shield, and as many other fighting men as he could muster, in the courtyard, facing the inner gate. When he lifted his eyes to the walls he could already see how this day would end. The Black Road would pay a heavy price for Castle Anduran, but it would be theirs. There were too many of them. However much courage and determination burned in Lannis hearts, it was not enough to outweigh the enemy’s numbers. The inner gate shook, shedding splinters and dust as the ram smashed against it once more.

‘Lannis!’ cried the Thane. He held his sword and shield above his head.

‘Lannis!’ he shouted, and the men all around him took up the cry.

Then the inner gate surrendered. Croesan charged forwards to meet the Black Road .

In the shadow of the gatehouse, around the abandoned ram, back into the passageway, the battle crushed itself into chaos. Spears crashed against shields, were parried, broke, drove through into flesh. It came to the push of body against body. Knives came out and stabbed and slashed furiously amongst the press of legs and bodies. The attackers were driven forwards by those coming up behind them, and the fighting began to fragment as the Lannis-Haig defenders were overwhelmed. Entangled groups of combatants spilled back into the courtyard.

Naradin the Bloodheir burst from the keep with a score of men. They cut a swathe through the ranks of the enemy and fought their way to the Thane’s side. A spearpoint gouged a bloody track across Croesan’s cheek. He slashed it away and hacked down the woman who directed it. Naradin, unbalanced, took a savage axe blow upon his shield, and his arm broke behind it, but he cut through his assailant’s wrist, and sent hand and axe tumbling. The Horin-Gyre attack faltered, and was pressed back. The cobblestones were slick with gore; the dead formed banks like windblown leaves. Fighters lost their footing and were pinned down and killed. The Lannis-Haig warriors pushed on.

‘To me! To me!’ Croesan was crying, at the heart of the fighting. He buried his sword deep in the side of a foe. The blade caught between ribs, and when the man slumped to the ground the Thane for a moment could not free it. He cursed, and hauled at it, and in that moment a sword came down on his shoulder, snapping bone and driving jagged edges of metal into his flesh. Croesan fell to his knees, and took his hand from his sword to steady himself. His shieldmen brushed past him, guarding him as best they could. Naradin tried to lift him with his one good arm. A bolt darted down from the battlements and struck the Thane’s son in the throat. He clasped his hand to his neck. He staggered backwards and collapsed. Others helped Croesan to his feet. He could not free his sword, and snatched another from the hands of one of his helpers as he let his shield fall from his crippled arm. He looked for his son, but could not see him.

Fresh attackers kept coming. Inkallim were amongst them, and Wain and Kanin and his Shield. The courtyard was once more filled with tumultuous conflict. A ring of shieldmen gathered around Croesan. The sea of invaders washed around it. One by one his guard was cut away, and Croesan the Thane of Lannis-Haig was surrounded by a dozen footsoldiers of the Horin-Gyre Blood. They cut him down with many blows.

The army of the Black Road swept through Castle Anduran like a horde of wild dogs. In stairwells and passageways silent, desperate battles were fought. In the kitchens and the halls, men, women and children were put to the sword. The door to the main keep was smashed open. Up through the keep the conquerors fought, hunting out those hiding in its corners. In the end it was Wain nan Horin-Gyre who led the way as a group of warriors broke down a small door at the head of the keep’s spiralling stairway. They found a chamber with bare stone walls and floors. Sitting in a simple wooden chair beside a bed was Eilan nan Lannis-Haig, cradling her son Croesan in her arms and staring at those who had burst in upon them. As they paused, she laid the baby down on the bed. She did it gently, unhurriedly.

‘You are the Bloodheir’s wife?’ Wain demanded.

Eilan said nothing. Wain raised her already bloodstained sword and advanced across the room. Eilan lifted a short sword from where it rested by the chair and stood to meet her.

Afterwards, Wain nan Horin-Gyre cleaned her blade on the white bedsheets.

The Bloodheir stood in the centre of Castle Anduran’s courtyard. He was afraid that his hands might be shaking, so strong were his emotions. The fighting had been done for almost an hour, but his sword remained unsheathed and his shield was on his arm. Sweat still ran down his back. He had to blink to clear his eyes of tears, blood or whatever it was that blurred them. There was a small glass vial tucked into his belt. It held dust: the dust of Castle Anduran, gathered and sealed away to be sent north as a gift to his father.

Wain joined him.

Kanin held out one hand, palm downwards, to her. ‘Look. It’s still, isn’t it? I can’t tell. Does it feel the same to you?’

Wain smiled at him. He almost wanted to sink against her, to take the weight from his legs and lean on her strong shoulders. All the tension, the fierce hope, of the last few weeks had washed out of him like a great ebbing tide. It had taken his strength with it, leaving a kind of elated exhaustion. Corpses littered the ground. They choked the castle’s gate. Smoke still rose from charred wood. The castle’s defenders had been weaker than they expected but the cost to Kanin’s army had still been great. At least a third of all his strength lay dead around him. It had a sort of glory about it.

‘It is more than we could have hoped for,’ Wain said. ‘Fate has some great purpose in mind, to grant us such victories.’

Kanin nodded. His thoughts were less on the Black Road than on his father today. Angain had dreamed of this day for years. Kanin and Wain had made his dreams real. For now, whatever happened next did not matter.

‘We can feast in the halls of our enemies tonight,’ said Wain.

‘Yes. And send messengers north. Our father will rejoice. Ragnor oc Gyre will see just what is possible. He must send us aid now; he cannot refuse the chance to hold what we have taken for him.’

‘Perhaps. We should send the heads of Croesan and his son to Tanwrye. Let the garrison there see that their Thane is cast down. It will rot a little of their hope. And we killed Gryvan’s Steward in the keep; he was hiding with his family in the kitchens. His head would make a fine gift as well.’

‘I will have Igris see to it.’ Kanin at last sheathed his sword. He set his shield down, resting it against his legs. He flexed the fingers of his sword hand. ‘Have the girl from Kolglas—Anyara—brought up here tonight, for the feast. It will do her good to see the ruin of her Blood.’

He looked up at the keep. ‘We should take ourselves some rooms up there,’ he said; then, almost as an afterthought: ‘Let’s bring Kennet’s na’kyrim here tonight as well. Aeglyss seems infatuated with him. That’s reason enough to put an end to him, I think.’

The long cacophony of the castle’s fall reached Anyara in her gloomy cell. She did not know its exact meaning but the sound put an edge to her fear. She slumped down and sat with her back pressed hard against the wall of the prison. She covered her ears. The sound of slaughter was blocked out, and worse imaginings filled the void it left. She sighed and lowered her hands. There were cries upon the breeze now, the voices of the hurt and dying. It lasted for a long time but eventually the noise faded and gave way to a quiet that was in its way more grim. A battle was over, she knew.

Those who came for Anyara hours later were not ordinary warriors. They bore themselves with a haughty arrogance, and their heavy leather tunics were sewn with delicate chain that looked more suited to ceremony than battle. Round shields were strapped across their backs. Some honour guard of the Horin-Gyre Bloodheir’s, perhaps, or his Shield, dressed for show.

They bundled her from the cell, along the passage and out into the gaolyard. It was near dark. She had only a moment to savour the longed-for sensation of open sky above her before they were pushing her onward. The yard was filled with people rushing this way and that. Amongst them, Anyara thought she glimpsed captives; frightened faces amidst the crowds of Black Road warriors. The cells were filling up. She saw Inurian then, being driven towards her. He grimaced.

‘Not the best hosts I have ever known,’ he said.

Men pushed between them, and Anyara had no chance to reply before they were being hurried out from the gaol and into the streets of Anduran. They turned at once towards the castle. Anyara’s heart quailed at the sound of celebration that assailed her ears. The last thin sliver of hope she had clung to was melting away. A group of warriors, whooping excitedly, rushed past. One trailed a long skein of material—a fine curtain torn from its place—behind him. An ornamental chain, the emblem of some castle official, hung about the neck of another. The guards escorting Anyara and Inurian moved them aside to let the celebrants go by.

Another burst of shouting came from up ahead and Anyara saw men pulling a wailing serving girl down the street. She looked away. One of her escort pushed her and they resumed their march up the Street of Crafts. The once elegant houses that lined it were now dilapidated and bedraggled like a row of poor mourners. Anyara felt fearful apprehension building in her. Soon they would be out on to the open ground before the castle, and she had no wish to see what awaited them there.

More warriors spilled down the street, clutching torches and capering about in a mad fashion. They were different to those she had seen before: Tarbains who looked like they belonged in some cave or hut of sticks. Some of them were naked to waist, their torsos streaked with ash and dirt. The tribesmen cried out to the Horin-Gyre warriors as they passed by, but got no response. They were drunk, giddy on the intoxicating combination of liquor, loot and evaded death.

Inadvertently, Anyara met the bleary gaze of one of the Tarbains. She lowered her eyes, but too late. She felt a claw-like grip on her arm as she was dragged to one side. The Horin-Gyre warriors turned on the Tarbains. One of them struck at the man who had taken hold of Anyara with the flat of her sword. Anger sparked between the two groups. They jostled one another as the tribesmen passed from raucous excitement to outrage. A warrior stepped in front of Anyara to shield her from further assault. There were men rolling on the ground, wrestling. Others rushed to pull them apart. Anyara was almost knocked over. Some of the Tarbains had clubs or knives out now; there was a piercing yell as one of them struck home.

The Horin-Gyre warriors shed all restraint, and a savage melee began.

Anyara spun about, looking for Inurian. The na’kyrim stood a few paces away beside a female warrior whose attention was fixed upon her comrades’ struggle. Even as Anyara turned to look, Inurian was sliding a belt knife out of its sheath at the woman’s waist. Anyara’s attention alerted the warrior and she swung around, grabbing at Inurian. The na’kyrim was faster. He stabbed into her throat and she fell, dragging the knife from his hand as she went.

Anyara leapt over the fallen woman. Inurian pulled her through the doorway of a fire-gutted house.

‘Run,’ was all he said as they crashed over blackened timbers in the hallway and stumbled past a ruined flight of stairs. Behind them, there were urgent shouts. Inurian thumped aside a door that hung loose and then they were spilling out into a black, tight alleyway. Inurian had hold of her wrist and she could only follow as he turned right and rushed a few strides along the cobbled alley before diving through another doorway. The voices behind them felt imminent. An open window led them out into another passage. A foul stench said there was an abandoned slaughterhouse somewhere near. Small shadows scattered as rats took flight.

Inurian closed his hand over Anyara’s mouth and pulled her down, pressing her into the blackness that had pooled at the angle of walls and ground. She stirred uncomfortably, but he whispered in her ear, ‘Still.’

She could hear his deep, even breathing. The sound of pursuit grew louder. Feet hammered into the alley; muttered curses and urgent exchanges. Some of the hunters ran off. Other, softer treads came closer, and there was the startling crash of doors being thrown open as they peered inside the buildings that lined the passage.

She pressed her eyes tight shut, as if it would in some way mar the sight of those who searched for them. Inurian was as still as a corpse beside her. Someone standing nearby shouted out. Then they were moving away, their voices receding, their footsteps fading into the night. Inurian exhaled and Anyara opened her eyes. Inurian rose to a crouch, glancing up and down the alleyway.

‘Quickly,’ he whispered, ‘they’ll think we are ahead of them for a little while yet. We must get out of the town if we can. I don’t know if there are any Hunt Inkallim here, but if there are we’ll not be able to hide from them or their dogs. We need to get over the walls.’

They scurried along the back streets of Anduran, darting from doorway to doorway and shadow to shadow, seeking always the deepest dark. Where burned-out ruins had replaced buildings they scrambled over and through the rubble, finding shelter in its nooks and crannies. Twice the groups of warriors criss-crossing the city almost had them, and each time they huddled down as small as they could, holding their breath while their pursuers went past.

The minutes stretched as they worked their way closer to the western edge of Anduran. Once there was, from some little distance away, the sound of barking dogs and they glanced at one another. It could mean nothing, but it put the same thought in both of their minds: the Hunt was to be feared at least as much as the Battle Inkall. Assassins and torturers, hunters and trackers, the Inkallim who served in it were said to be an elite amongst the elite. Once marked by the Hunt Inkall, a life had no more value than a Whreinin’s promise.

‘We must get across the river,’ said Inurian. ‘If we can reach the forest, there are Kyrinin tracks I know. We might be able to lose ourselves for a time.’

Anyara nodded dumbly. She knew Anduran well, but in the darkness, with the enemy upon them and so much of the town disfigured by fire and battle, she had little idea where they were. Inurian seemed confident of his route, though. She followed without hesitation, trusting in his instincts.

They came to a place where the city wall was crumbling and half-fallen. For a few, tense seconds, they crouched in a doorway, straining their ears and eyes for any sign of watchers. There was only the faint sound of voices far behind them. They clambered up a pile of rubble, grabbing at stems of ivy that had colonised the city’s fortifications, and then they were up and through the breach and tumbling into the ditch outside the wall. Anyara could have laughed as she rolled, filled with the heady sense of escape. Inurian was on his feet again in an instant, scanning the night.

‘Stay close,’ he said to her, and he was off before she could reply, racing up and out of the ditch and into the fields beyond.

The moonlight was stronger here, with no buildings to cast their shadows. It made the bushes and trees, barns and distant farmhouses into sinister shapes somehow filled with threat. They waded along a water-filled field drain. When at last they clambered out, Anyara’s legs felt numbed to the bone. Her ragged skirt clung to her skin. She was about to ask if they could rest for a moment when Inurian crouched and gestured at her to follow suit.

‘See?’ he asked, pointing out across the flat fields. At first Anyara did not understand what he meant, but then she picked out the yellow pinpricks of firelight in the darkness.

‘Kyrinin fires, I’d say,’ murmured Inurian. ‘A White Owl war party, and a huge one.’ He turned to Anyara and whispered with steely intensity. ‘The world is turned upside down for them to be out here in such numbers. Aeglyss has a great deal to answer for. He could be as great a threat as the Black Road, Anyara: the more so because he’s unstable, unpredictable. Remember that.’

‘I will,’ she whispered, taken aback.

‘One more thing,’ Inurian said. He was pressing something into her hand. ‘It’s a foolish thing, but I would be grateful. Take this.’

She closed her fingers about the knotted lace.

‘If something happens to me,’ the na’kyrim was saying, ‘and you have the chance, afterwards, bury this somewhere where the earth is wet, and plant a willow stake over it. Will you do that?’

Anyara nodded. She might have asked him what it meant, but that did not seem like the right question.

‘What do we do now?’ she asked him.

‘Make for the river. I think ... ah, I wish I could be sure. I can’t be certain. There might be someone, beyond the river, who can help us. I think I can feel her . . . perhaps.’ There was a wistfulness, almost an ache, in the na’kyrim’s voice. ‘I’m not sure. But we must go quickly, anyway. If they put White Owls on our tracks we’ll need a big start to have any hope of shaking them off.’

‘We had best keep moving, then,’ said Anyara with a resolution she did not feel. Inurian squeezed her shoulder.

‘We had,’ he said. ‘Stay close and quiet.’

The Inurian who led her through the farmland was one Anyara did not know. It was, perhaps, the Kyrinin part of him that had been hidden through all his years at Castle Kolglas. His steps were careful but swift, his movements silent. He found concealing ditches and hedgelines, even low undulations in the apparently flat ground, where Anyara saw nothing. When he paused, becoming so still that he faded into the greys and blacks of the night, she could have believed that she was alone. She fought to calm her thumping heart and the voice in her head that urged wild, abandoned flight. All she could do was focus on Inurian and follow his lead.

There was a sharp barking from somewhere out in the darkness. Anyara knew it was only a fox, but the sound had a chilling edge on this night. Muddy ground clawed at her feet as they skirted a little stand of trees, and she stumbled, her hands sinking deep into the wet earth. As she struggled upright a few pigeons erupted from the branches above. Inurian took her arm in his hand.

‘We must run for the river,’ he hissed, and his urgency clutched at her throat.

‘Why?’ she gasped. ‘Because of the birds?’ but already he had spun about and was dashing on into the darkness. She flew after him, the thought of losing sight of him filling her with dread.

It was a hard, frightening dash. Every hump and hollow in the ground, every unseen ditch and tangle of bushes or brambles became a trap. Anyara lost all sense of direction and distance. She ran onwards, her breath growing ever shorter and her heart straining to burst out from her chest.

They blundered through a bed of nettles. The grass was longer now, and tugged at their ankles. By some unconscious hint of sound or smell, Anyara could tell that they had reached the Glas before it was visible. The riverbank was studded by low bushes and fringed by a narrow strip of tall reeds and rushes. Beyond, the water moved thickly in the moonlight. They came to a halt and looked back, listening for a moment. The night was silent.

‘We swim,’ said Inurian breathlessly. Anyara turned to regard the black, silent river with some trepidation. There was no time for doubt, though. Inurian was already pulling her into the water.

‘Swim downstream, across the current,’ he said, and struck out from the bank. She followed. The cold embrace of the river compressed her chest and made her skin feel hard. The current pushed at her. Inurian seemed to be moving away from her and she had to bite back a rush of panic. She concentrated on her stroke, fighting to keep a rhythm against the weight of her clothes and the river’s remorseless tug. At last more reeds loomed up out of the darkness, and a pale hand was reaching for her. Inurian hauled her out and she slipped and slithered through mud and up on to grass. She lay there gasping.

‘No time to rest,’ urged Inurian, dragging her to her feet.

She risked a glance back, but could see nothing.

‘We have to hurry,’ insisted Inurian. ‘We have to run.’

‘Are they coming?’ asked Anyara as she rushed after him, away from the riverbank.

‘I think she’s here. I think I can find her.’

They made less than fifty paces. Anyara fell. Inurian helped her up. All she heard was a soft thud and a tiny, surprised sound from Inurian, and then the na’kyrim was slumping to his knees, his hand slipping from her shoulder and sliding down the length of her arm.

‘I’m sorry,’ he murmured as he went.

She grabbed at him, trying to hold him up, and looked around. Still she saw nothing. As she scrabbled for a grip on his tunic, Anyara felt the shaft of an arrow sunk deep into Inurian’s back. She wanted to cry with frustration. He was too heavy for her to lift.

‘Get up!’ she shouted at him. ‘Get up, Inurian! We have to keep going.’

She heard something: it might be the splash of somebody entering the river.

He did get up, leaning on her. His head was hanging low. She managed to move him forwards and they began a lurching progress through the fields. She had no idea where they were going, but knew that it was movement that mattered. If they did not keep moving they were dead. Nothing else mattered.

‘She’s close,’ Inurian said weakly, and he breathed a name that Anyara did not catch.

‘Keep moving,’ she begged him. His weight was increasing. She was not sure how much longer she could bear him up.

She twisted her neck to look back, and she saw them. They were coming: Kyrinin coming out of the night. She took another step. Don’t stop, she thought.

She almost screamed when, without a sound, two shapes rose up a few paces in front of her: a man and a woman. Kyrinin, not human. White Owls, she thought, somehow ahead of them and waiting here. A flurry of impressions told her something was wrong, though. The cut and shape of their clothes was different from what she had seen on the White Owls in Anlane; their eyes, as they lifted bows with arrows already nestled against the strings, were not upon Anyara and Inurian but upon the hunters behind them.

‘Down,’ the woman said. Anyara fell, taking Inurian with her, as arrows hissed by in both directions. The two Kyrinin sprang forwards, going to meet her pursuers. She could hear someone else moving closer.

‘Anyara?’ someone was saying. She could not believe the name that went with the voice. She looked up. A big man was rushing past, naked sword in his hand, and in his wake came a smaller figure. She cried out in a potent mix of release and relief, and rose to embrace Orisian.

Kanin nan Horin-Gyre’s hands, so recently trembling with wonder at the victory he had won, shook now with anger. He strove to contain it. At this moment he should have been in the hall of Castle Anduran: they should all have been there, rejoicing in the destruction of the creed’s foes, marking the day when the Black Road was at last restored to the lands that had once been Avann oc Gyre’s. To feast in the halls of Anduran would realise the hopes of Tegric and his hundred when they sacrificed themselves on the march into exile; the hopes of generations of the faithful; most of all, the hopes of Kanin’s father. On the foundations of this day, new and greater hopes could be fashioned. It might not be the end of their journey to the Kall, but they had taken a great stride down the path that led to the creed’s dominion and the unmaking of the world.

Instead . . . instead, Kanin stood and glared at the nervous warrior who stood before him. She was one of the best of his Shield, and had been charged with bringing Anyara and the na’kyrim from the gaol to the castle. It was no distance: the work of minutes.

‘You hold the Tarbains?’ Kanin asked. The words had to force their way out past the rigidity of his jaw.

‘We killed two. We have the others.’ She spoke quietly, with downcast eyes.

‘I want their heads on spikes above the gaol by dawn,’ Kanin hissed. ‘But others can see to that. You . . . you are dismissed, from my Shield, my army. You will walk back to Hakkan and kneel before my mother and tell her that I have commanded you to serve her as chambermaid and washerwoman.’

The woman did not need to be told to leave. She backed silently out of the room.

Kanin sat heavily in a chair. This room, a small one in the heart of Castle Anduran’s keep, had little left by way of furnishings. Most had been stripped out. Only a chair and table remained. The Bloodheir thumped his fist on the table. It did little to dispel his anger. Restless, he sprang to his feet again. He had promised his father that he would destroy the Lannis Blood, or die in the attempt. Now some girl, and the idiocy of his own people, was making it a lie.

‘Where is Cannek?’ he demanded of Igris, who stood unobtrusively in the corner. The woman who had failed Kanin so grievously was his responsibility, and Igris knew it as well as Kanin did.

The Hunt Inkallim entered even as his name was uttered. If Igris was relieved at the opportunity to stay silent, he did not show it.

‘You wished to see me?’ Cannek said. He glanced quickly around the room and, seeing only one chair and the Bloodheir pacing up and down, he stood where he was.

‘Every tracker you have, every dog, is to be on the trail. Find them for me.’

‘Yes. It is being done even as we speak, Bloodheir. They will not get far: a girl and a na’kyrim are not likely to escape the Hunt.’

‘Shraeve told me none would escape the Battle at Kolglas, but one did. They say the boy was mortally wounded but they can’t show me the body, can they? See that the Hunt does better, Cannek. I want to see that girl’s body.’

The Inkallim was unmoved by the bitterness in Kanin’s voice. He smiled: a faint, equable gesture.

‘If fate favours us,’ he murmured. ‘You may be interested to know others are already abroad. The woodwights are busy emptying their camp: dozens of them are making for the river. Quite why they’re so agitated, I don’t know. They are good trackers, though. It may help us.’

Kanin ceased his pacing and stared at the Inkallim.

‘Woodwights!’ he spat. I’ll not have them interfering. This is nothing to do with them.’

Cannek spread his hands in a gesture of impotence. The knives that lay along his forearms pointed out at an angle.

‘I am not sure you can prevent them, unless you wish to do so by force. As I say, they are already on the move. And... well, I dislike being the bearer of unwelcome news, but that na’kyrim of yours, who put on such a performance in the hall: he is with them.’

‘Aeglyss is not mine,’ Kanin snapped. ‘I thought he was in his sickbed.’

‘So he was,’ agreed Cannek. ‘The woodwights were caring for him, I believe. Anyway, he seems to have recovered. Enough to ride with them on the pursuit, at least.’

Kanin kicked the chair and sent it spinning across the room. Cannek watched it go with a neutral expression.

‘He wants the other na’kyrim,’ Kanin said. ‘I want the girl. If Aeglyss gets in your way, kill him too.’

Orisian leaned against the bole of a great oak. He fought the urge to vomit. The wound in his flank was throbbing, and he feared he had torn the new flesh there. The pain, and the head-spinning exhaustion he felt, had brought on waves of nausea. Never in his life had he run so far and fast.

Their flight from the river had been punishing. Varryn set a stern pace. His features showed little hint of it, but Orisian knew the Kyrinin was frustrated at their slowness. There was nothing to be done about that. At the best of times, no human could match the night vision of a Kyrinin, or their speed through the darkness. As it was, Orisian was hampered by the imperfectly healed wound in his side, Anyara was already weary and, most of all, there was the fact that Rothe was carrying Inurian in his arms.

The fighting by the river had been over quickly. Ess’yr and Varryn, with Rothe close behind them, had darted into the darkness. Orisian held Anyara. Even as he registered Inurian’s slumped form at his feet, the indistinct sounds of struggle reached him. There were fierce impacts, stifled cries and grunts, then a fearful, leaden silence. Rothe reappeared first. He turned this way and that, his unbloodied sword ready.

‘I couldn’t find them,’ he muttered. ‘Too dark for me.’

Ess’yr and her brother returned. The two of them whispered to one another, and then Ess’yr gave a sharp nod.

‘To the forest,’ she said. She was distracted in a way Orisian had not seen before, as if her thoughts were elsewhere. ‘One escaped. Many spears will come soon.’

‘We must get to Anduran . . .’ Rothe started to say.

‘You will die,’ Varryn said.

‘There is nothing left in Anduran,’ said Anyara, and that had been the end of it.

Rothe stepped forwards to carry Inurian as soon as it was obvious that he could not stand, let alone run. Ess’yr snapped the shaft of the arrow in the na’kyrim’s back. Inurian groaned. Orisian felt an awful emptiness at the sound.

‘Shouldn’t we get the arrow out of him?’ Anyara asked him.

‘Not now,’ said Varryn before Orisian could reply. And with that he was off, plunging into the night.

Orisian kept as close to Anyara as he could. He longed to speak with his sister, to ask her what had happened since that terrible night at Kolglas, but there was not a moment to catch breath. He could only stay by her, make sure she knew he was there.

Now, panting and aching amidst the first trees of the forest, it was a struggle for him to stay on his feet. Varryn and Ess’yr stood together, gazing back the way they had come. Anyara flung herself down at the base of a tree nearby, her head resting against its bark, rasping breaths rushing in and out of her. Rothe laid Inurian down on the turf, and sat beside the na’kyrim. The shieldman’s great frame was hunched and shrunken, his arms hanging limp. Orisian stumbled over and knelt next to him.

‘Are you all right?’ he managed to ask.

Rothe nodded. Even in the gloom, Orisian could see that his shoulders were heaving as the big man struggled to regain his breath.

‘Inurian?’ Orisian asked.

‘Still lives,’ Rothe said. ‘But he is badly hurt. I’m sorry.’

A sudden flapping sound, and a shape leaping towards him, made Orisian cry out. A scrap of the blackest shadow swept down from amongst the trees and folded itself noisily on to the ground. Rothe too had started away, but then there was a sharp croaking noise, and the shieldman gave a pained laugh.

‘It’s that cursed crow,’ he muttered.

Anyara came over. ‘Idrin. It’s Idrin. He followed us all the way.’

And then, as the very first smudge of light appeared in the sky, she told them what had happened. Neither Rothe nor Orisian, nor the two Kyrinin when they came and squatted down to listen, said a word as she spoke of Inkallim and White Owls, of Aeglyss the na’kyrim and Kanin the Bloodheir. When she had finished Orisian told his own tale.

They were quiet for a little time. Ess’yr crouched at Inurian’s side. She laid a hand upon his cheek. They could all see that the na’kyrim ‘s face was tight and washed out of any trace of colour. His breath rustled. There was an extraordinary tenderness in Ess’yr’s touch upon his face and the still, strange set of her expression. For some reason he could not quite identify, that scene—the Kyrinin woman and the ailing na’kyrim, the leafless trees crowded round and the midnight-black crow that stood close by its master, all illuminated by the tenuous, mournful morning light—made Orisian’s heart ache acutely. He turned away.

Varryn roused himself. Almost hidden amidst the densely woven tattoos, there was a grave look upon the Kyrinin’s face as he regarded his sister.

‘We must move,’ he said. ‘We lose time.’

‘Perhaps they are not following,’ said Orisian, craving even a few more moments’ rest.

It was Ess’yr who replied, though she did not raise her eyes from Inurian’s pale face. ‘We killed three,’ she said. ‘They will come.’

‘We go higher,’ Varryn told them. ‘Then follow the sun. Back to the vo’an.’

‘Wait,’ snapped Orisian. He could feel a sudden surge of anger colouring his cheeks. He was tired, and for this moment at least did not want to be ordered about by Varryn. ‘We have to think. Rothe, we have to head for Glasbridge now, don’t we?’

‘There’s nowhere else, if Anduran’s taken.’

‘We could try for the road, follow it down.’

‘Perhaps, but not yet. Better to keep to the trees until we’re further south. If we can get close enough to Sirian’s Dyke, we could make a run for it, join the road there. They can’t have taken the Dyke yet?’ He looked questioningly at Anyara. She shrugged.

‘All right,’ said Orisian. He was avoiding Varryn’s gaze now, afraid that if he met the Kyrinin’s eyes he might falter. ‘We’ll do that. We stay together until then. What about Inurian? Can we get the arrow out?’

‘Leave it,’ said Ess’yr, and though her voice was calm it was firm. ‘He dies if it moves.’

It drained Orisian’s assertiveness away. He looked at Ess’yr, and saw how her hand lay on Inurian’s chest, like a mother’s on her sick child.

‘Rothe, can you carry him further?’ he asked quietly, and the shieldman nodded.

Varryn and Ess’yr led, as always. Sometimes they ran, sometimes they slowed to a long-strided walk. Much of the time, they were travelling uphill. Orisian noted it, and knew it was adding to the distance they had to cover to Sirian’s Dyke, but he said nothing. It took all his energy to keep moving forwards. In any case, he could see the sense in putting more rough ground between them and any pursuers. It might not make a difference—his father’s shieldmen used to say that a White Owl could follow the trail left by a wind-borne leaf—but any chance was better than none.

Orisian’s legs had nothing left to give him and he could see that Anyara had passed into a place where will alone kept her from falling. Rothe’s breathing was becoming tortured, as if each step drained the air out of him. On they went, in spite of it all.

Some time after noon they began to track more directly across the face of the slopes. It was less punishing upon the muscles, but their exhaustion was such that each footfall became treacherous. Slick grass, unseen roots and the angle of the ground tricked the weary eye, betrayed heavy legs. Orisian and Anyara almost fell several times, their feet sliding away beneath them. Even Rothe, burdened by Inurian’s insensate form, stumbled more than once, lurching like a drunken man but always just keeping his balance.

Finally, when Orisian, Anyara and Rothe had slowed to no more than a clumsy plod, the two Kyrinin came to a halt at the base of a leaning tree. The three humans slumped down and stretched themselves out. Orisian was not sure if he would ever be able to rise again. As he stared up, Idrin flapped in across his field of vision and settled on an overhanging branch. The great black bird cocked his head, looking down at the pitiful figures strewn on the ground beneath him. Orisian closed his eyes.

‘An hour. No more,’ he heard Varryn saying.

It was not sleep that came upon Orisian then, but a kind of daze. His mind fogged over and he thought he was floating upon some river that gently rocked him to and fro. Time slipped by. He heard Idrin cawing, and in his dreamlike state the distant sound was transformed into a man calling out over a great distance. He thought he heard his father, far away.

It was Inurian’s moans that roused him at last. He looked around. Anyara was sprawled across the turf, far into slumber. Even Rothe had succumbed, his barrel chest rising and falling to sleep’s unique tempo. Inurian had not moved from where he had been set down. Vague, disjointed sounds were slipping from his lips. It was the sight of Ess’yr that caught and held Orisian’s attention. Again she was at Inurian’s side. She gazed down into his face, and stroked his brow. She was whispering to him. As Orisian watched, she looked up and met his eyes. The flow of her murmurings never faltered. There was no blame or accusation in her gaze, yet Orisian felt a sudden flush of embarrassment, almost shame. He closed his eyes once more. There was something between Inurian and Ess’yr that demanded privacy.

When Orisian woke, befuddled and cold, he was confused for a moment, wondering why it was a clouded sky that greeted him and not the stone of Kolglas, and why he felt hard ground beneath him and not his bed. Aching, he lifted himself up and remembered.

Anyara, Rothe and Ess’yr were all awake, sitting near Inurian. Above, Idrin was hopping from branch to branch. Almost before Orisian had noticed his absence, Varryn was bounding up out of the forest. He gave the curtest of nods to his sister, who rose lithely to her feet and hefted her bow.

‘We turn back,’ Varryn said to the rest of them. ‘The enemy are below, and ahead. We are too slow.’

‘Turn back?’ gasped Anyara in disbelief.

Varryn ignored her. ‘We go higher.’

Rothe groaned. ‘That is madness,’ he said. ‘We can’t climb forever. There must be a way on to Glasbridge.’ For the first time in his life, Orisian heard a raggedness in his shieldman’s voice. He could only guess what it must have cost the man to carry Inurian so far already.

There was a sharp, still moment in which the Kyrinin and Huanin warriors stared at one another, neither willing to break off the gaze. It was sundered by a sudden croak from Idrin as the crow dropped from his roost and swept down to the grass at his master’s side. Inurian stirred, a breathy murmur escaping from his lips. Ess’yr was the first to reach for him, and Orisian looked worriedly over her shoulder as she felt for the na’kyrim’s pulse at the hinge of his jaw. His delicate eyes opened. They flicked about as if he did not know where he was. They darted from Ess’yr to Orisian, and a weak smile appeared upon his colourless lips.

‘I am cold,’ Inurian whispered.

‘We have no furs,’ said Ess’yr, letting her hand fall away from his throat.

‘Forgiven,’ murmured Inurian.

Idrin hopped closer and pecked at the sleeve of Inurian’s tunic.

‘Ah,’ Inurian said. ‘Still loitering around.’ He smoothed the glossy feathers on the crow’s back. ‘Go home, friend. Back to your brothers, Idrin.’

The great black bird looked quizzically at the na’kyrim, head angling this way and that. Then, without warning, he sprang up into the air and with a few strong sweeps of his wings Idrin was gone, climbing up between the trees and heading out into the wide grey sky to the south. Ess’yr whispered something in her own tongue, and Inurian gave a slight shake of his head in response. He closed his eyes. When he spoke, he caught Orisian by surprise.

‘I was sure you still lived, Orisian. It is good to be proved right, for once.’

‘You are always right,’ Orisian said, fearing that his voice might crack.

That brought a smile back to the na’kyrim’s face, but still he did not open his eyes. ‘Is Anyara here?’ he asked.

‘I am,’ she replied.

‘Good.’

Orisian saw that Ess’yr had placed her hand over Inurian’s. She did not squeeze it, merely resting her skin against his. It was impossible to tell whether he felt the touch.

‘Tell me where we are,’ Inurian said.

Orisian expected one of the Kyrinin to reply, but Ess’yr barely seemed to be breathing and Varryn held himself some distance away. He was facing out towards the silent forest. He gave no sign of having heard Inurian.

‘We are on the southern edge of the Car Criagar,’ Orisian said. ‘Rothe is here as well. He has been carrying you.’

‘Thank him for me,’ whispered Inurian. Orisian glanced at his shieldman, and the big man inclined his head in acknowledgement.

‘Where are we heading?’ Inurian asked.

Orisian hesitated at that. Still neither Varryn nor Ess’yr showed any inclination to respond to Inurian’s questions.

‘We were going down towards Glasbridge. There are White Owls pursuing us, but now Varryn says they…’

Inurian lifted his head from the ground. His eyes flicked open once more. ‘Varryn?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Orisian. ‘Ess’yr’s brother.’ He could see that Inurian was no longer listening. The na’kyrim looked around, and his gaze settled upon the tall Kyrinin warrior standing with his back to them. He clearly knew who Varryn was, but his expression was unreadable. With a wince, Inurian let his head sink back.

‘You are in good hands,’ he breathed, though his voice was toneless and flat.

‘He says the White Owls are ahead of us now. He wants us to go up, away from the valley,’ Orisian continued.

He thought at first that Inurian had not heard him, or had fallen once more into unconsciousness. A moment later those grey eyes met his own. There was a cargo of meaning in the gaze that Orisian could not quite grasp, but it lasted for no more than a second and it was to Ess’yr that Inurian spoke. He said something to her in the Fox language. Ess’yr tensed at his words. Her hand flinched where it lay upon Inurian’s. Varryn turned to face them. Orisian realised that some decision had been made; whatever Inurian’s words had been, they had changed the future for the Kyrinin.

‘Follow them,’ Inurian said to Orisian. ‘They know where to go.’

Within a minute, they were moving once more.

They climbed higher and the air grew colder with each hour that passed. They no longer ran; Rothe’s strength had at last reached its limit. For once, the Kyrinin did not show any sign of urgency, as if speed was no longer what mattered.

They came to a river, much larger than any of the other streams they had crossed, and turned to follow its course upwards. Orisian began to feel a nagging sense of familiarity. For the first time since they had begun their flight, he felt he ought to know where he was.

‘It must be the Snow River,’ said Anyara.

She was right. There was no other watercourse of any size that flowed from the Car Criagar in these parts.

‘It must be,’ he agreed. ‘I can’t see why we’re following it, though.’

Their exchange roused Rothe from his trance-like exhaustion. He lifted his head and looked around without breaking his stride.

‘It is the Snow,’ he said. ‘It’ll only lead us into a trap if we keep going.’

Orisian realised at once what he meant. He had never seen it with his own eyes, but his uncle’s hunters had talked of the gorge through which the upper reaches of the Snow passed. At its head it grew sheer-sided and narrow, ending in a high waterfall where the Snow spilled from the crags. The hunters called those falls Sarn’s Leap, and called them cursed as well. Few went there. When a man reached the falls there was nowhere to go but back the way he had come. Already the land to either side of them was rising in rocky ridges like the funnel of a wildfowler’s nets.

‘Ess’yr,’ Orisian called, ‘there’s no way through here. We can’t get past the falls.’

She ignored him.

Inurian murmured something. Rothe slowed and looked down at the na’kyrim he bore, as if surprised that he was still alive.

‘Trust her,’ Inurian was saying.

Cliffs towered above them when they at last came to a halt. The Snow River was sunk deep in a gigantic furrow of stone. They rested beside it and drank. The sound of Sarn’s Leap came from somewhere up ahead, a continuous hiss of cascading water. It was hidden around a curve in the gorge.

‘What now, then?’ demanded Rothe.

Orisian was staring at the thick stand of willows that lay between them and the waterfall. The trees thronged the floor of the gorge. There was no way round them. He knew what they were.

‘We go on,’ Ess’yr said to Rothe. ‘They will not follow.’

‘There’s nowhere to go,’ muttered Rothe. ‘This is a cursed place. Sarn had no luck here. No one does. Why shouldn’t they follow, and trap us at the falls?’

Ess’yr turned her back on him.

‘It’s a dyn ham,’ explained Orisian. ‘A burial ground. It must be an old one; abandoned. The Kyrinin dead are in the trees.’

His shieldman looked doubtful. ‘So that’ll keep the White Owls off us? Fine, but what do we do once we’re at the falls? Fly? They only have to wait. There’s no way out of here, Orisian.’

‘There is,’ said Varryn.

Orisian felt a sharp premonition of something awful. The Kyrinin’s voice had a dead finality about it. The decision had been made some time ago. This was the crux of it.

Inurian was lying on the ground. He raised himself on one elbow and beckoned Orisian.

‘Listen to me, Orisian. In the mountains above us there is a ruined city. You know it?’

‘Criagar Vyne? I’ve heard of it.’

‘Ess’yr can show you the way. There is a woman there: Yvane, a na’kyrim. She can give you shelter. I don’t think the White Owls will go so far into Fox lands. Perhaps the Black Road won’t either.’ He clasped a hand to his mouth to smother a racking cough. When he lowered it again there were flecks of blood on the palm.

‘But we have to get to Glasbridge, or to Kolglas. We must…’ Orisian fell silent as Inurian seized his arm in a vice-like grip.

‘No, Orisian,’ the na’kyrim said raspingly. ‘Think. It won’t take the White Owls more than a few hours to run you down. You’re not in the valley now: you’re in the forest, and that’s Kyrinin territory.’ Inurian’s grey eyes held Orisian fast. They burned with an intensity unlike anything Orisian had seen there before. ‘Anduran’s gone, perhaps Tanwrye as well. Glasbridge will be next. Get Anyara to safety, Orisian. Yvane can get you to Koldihrve, on to a boat there. Both of you.’

Orisian found tears in his eyes. He was barely listening to what Inurian said. ‘You will come with us,’ he said defiantly, though he could not keep a tremor from his voice.

Inurian closed his eyes. ‘No,’ he said. His strength was failing. His hand fell away from Orisian’s arm.

‘Yes!’ Orisian shouted, taking hold of Inurian. The others turned at the sudden outburst. Ess’yr came up on his shoulder. Inurian murmured something to her in the Fox tongue. She reached down and began to prise Orisian’s hands away from the na’kyrim.

‘He cannot come,’ she said in a level tone.

Orisian pushed her away. ‘He comes with us!’ he cried. He looked from face to face. ‘He comes with us,’ he insisted once more.

Anyara was crying without a sound, tears leaving tracks through the dirt upon her cheeks. Ess’yr and Varryn said nothing. Their eyes met his with a steadfast gaze. Only Rothe looked away. The shieldman bowed his head.

‘Rothe,’ Orisian said, ‘you have carried him this far.’

Rothe cleared his throat and gave an uneasy flick of his head, as if shying away from his thoughts.

‘He will stay,’ said Varryn. ‘We cannot carry him. The climb...’

‘Climb?’ shouted Orisian, driven by some deep instinct to turn his anger upon Ess’yr. ‘Why did we come this way if you knew we could not take him with us? We should have gone some other way.’

The pain he saw in the delicate, normally impassive face of the Kyrinin woman was more than he expected. Its depth took the heat out of him. She said nothing.

‘He knows,’ Varryn was saying. ‘His idea. There is no other way.’

Orisian hung his head. There was a desolate impotence in him he had felt only once before, five years ago, watching a black-sailed boat sail out from Kolglas for The Grave, bearing bodies wrapped in white winding sheets.

‘You should have told me,’ he said in a broken voice. In that moment he felt a fluttering touch upon his hand. Inurian’s long fingers were brushing his skin.

‘Be still, Orisian,’ the na’kyrim murmured. His eyelids were fluttering. ‘Be still,’ he breathed again. ‘Be strong. I will rest here a while. You must go on.’

‘I won’t leave you here,’ Orisian groaned.

‘You will, because I ask you to. You have always trusted me and you must trust me in this. Aeglyss is coming for me. I can hear him, inside my head. That is why I have come with you this far, to draw him in to this place where he can go no further. His Kyrinin will not willingly go beyond the dyn ham, and neither will Aeglyss if he has me. But you must keep going. Others might come: Horin-Gyre or worse. This only delays them. You cannot tarry.’

Orisian shook his head.

‘Where is Ess’yr?’ Inurian asked, and she moved forwards and knelt down.

Orisian followed nothing of what passed between them. It was murmured, in the fluid language of the Fox, but his mind was numb in any case and he could not tear his gaze from Inurian’s elegant hand that lay still beside his own. He sensed from Inurian’s tone that he was asking Ess’yr a question. She did not reply at once. Varryn took a few quick steps closer and snapped something. He was angry. Ess’yr gave an answer, and her brother spun away and strode towards the dyn hane. Inurian was smiling. Ess’yr bent and laid a kiss upon his lips.

‘Go,’ whispered Inurian.

It was a moment before Orisian realised the command was meant for him. He shook his head again.

‘Take him, Rothe,’ said Inurian. Ess’yr had risen and was walking away. Her shoulders were rigid, as if only their strength contained something within her.

Rothe took hold of Orisian’s arm. ‘Come away,’ he said.

Anyara knelt down and embraced the na’kyrim. ‘Goodbye,’ she whispered, then she stood up and followed after the Kyrinin.

‘Orisian...’ Rothe said, but Orisian shook his hand off and held Inurian as his sister had done. He tried to enclose his body, to gather it to himself. He could feel Inurian’s ribcage rising and falling, hear his faltering breath.

‘Go,’ said Inurian in his ear. ‘He is close. Go, Orisian. I will not forget you.’

‘I will see you again,’ said Orisian, and he let Rothe pull him gently to his feet and lead him away.

The forest breathed its soft, even breath. Twigs stirred in the faintest of breezes. An owl roosting high against the trunk of an oak blinked and peered down as fleet-footed shapes sped beneath. On a rocky knoll, a black bear nosing for insects in mulch-packed crannies raised its head and turned this way and that, teasing a scent out of the air. Snuffling in irritation, it scrambled down from the rocks and padded away. Bounding forms swept past the knoll, emerging from and disappearing into the forest in the space of a few moments. Mice cowered amidst the springy turf as silent foot-falls shook their domain. A single dead leaf, one of the last vestiges of autumn, spiralled down and was tumbled in the wake of a rushing figure before it resumed its descent.

Inurian stood by the river. The dyn bane was at his back. The sound of the falls filled his ears. The winter sun had broken through and was lighting the highest parts of the cliffs. The bitter edge was gone from the air. It was very beautiful, he thought. This had always been his favourite time of year.

A face drifted before his inner eye, that of Ess’yr. It bore with it more pain than he could countenance. He set it aside and looked to the still forest downstream. He waited; for how long, he could not say.

How strange it is, he thought, to come to such an ending. I am not done with life. Can it really all be so easily ended? Of course it can, he told himself. It had been a path woven of a thousand small chances, the intersection of countless other lives: one wandering na’kyrim happening upon a good man in a castle in the sea; another eaten away by anger and bitterness; a fevered woman long ago sowing the seed of a cult, her garbled words reaching out over all the years to set Thane against Thane; an arrow in the darkness. Just one arrow.

He saw shapes moving amongst the trees. There was no sound to mark their coming. He knew them for what they were. They emerged at first one by one, then a score. A wide arc of Kyrinin stood facing him. And still there was no sound save the rushing water.

Inurian swayed a little. It had been a terrible struggle to rise to his feet. Although the pain had all but gone now, he thought the effort had sundered something deep inside him. He had the sense of his thoughts trying to lift away and drift upwards. He had to fight to hold them to him. He glanced up. The sky was a field of pure blue. The light seemed to have such clarity that he could have seen to the end of the world had the rock walls not pressed in so close about this place. For a moment he was rising, floating towards that blue expanse. He caught himself and drew his gaze back to the clearing.

Aeglyss was there now, sitting astride a brown horse. He had passed through the line of Kyrinin and was watching Inurian. The horse was breathing hard and jinking around, breaking up the soft, wet earth.

Aeglyss passed his reins to one of the Kyrinin and swung out of the saddle. He patted the horse’s neck as he stepped forwards. He came up to Inurian.

‘You look weary,’ he said, tilting his head a little to one side.

‘I am tired,’ agreed Inurian. In his mind the words were clear, yet they sounded heavy and slurred in the wintry air.

Aeglyss was removing his riding gloves now, folding them over his belt and flexing his fingers. The horse behind him was still shifting about, shaking its head.

‘Are you dying?’ he asked.

Inurian closed his eyes for a moment. ‘I am,’ he said.

‘Come back with me. The White Owls have good healers. Perhaps we can keep you alive.’

Inurian shook his head with care, fearful of dizziness. ‘No,’ he said.

‘But this is foolish,’ said Aeglyss. ‘Why die such a wasteful death? Come back with me. Teach me what you know. Stand with me.’

Inurian was silent. Something was rising from the pit of his stomach, drifting up through his chest. His legs, which had felt so heavy not long before, were now weightless. He could hear the feeble beating of his heart.

‘Do not leave me. I need you,’ said Aeglyss softly. ‘Please.’ He was imploring, grief-stricken almost. Inurian pitied the other man in that moment.

‘I cannot stay,’ Inurian said. He struggled to focus on the face before him. A fine network of thin red lines was strung across Aeglyss’ eyes. He had the skin of a corpse. An angry wound marred his lower lip. There were other, deeper marks that only Inurian could have sensed.

‘You’ve over-reached yourself, haven’t you?’ he said. ‘Attempted something that was almost beyond you.’

Aeglyss flicked a hand dismissively, though Inurian felt the irritation in the gesture as well.

‘Some woman, spying, eavesdropping. I chased her off.’ He looked over Inurian’s shoulder. ‘Clever, to put the dyn bane across the trail. Whose idea was that? The White Owls’re hungry for Fox blood, but this will turn them aside. For now. It doesn’t matter, of course. You’re the one I came for.’

‘I may be dying,’ Inurian said, ‘but your sickness is the greater, Aeglyss. It will destroy you. You must know that.’ He coughed, and felt salty fluid in the back of his mouth. His throat was burning.

‘Please,’ whispered Aeglyss again, and this time his voice was a caress. Inurian felt the other’s will laying its dark fingers upon his thoughts. He hungered to do as Aeglyss asked: to free himself of his suffering, to cling to precious life. This is how it happens, he thought. He shook his head.

‘You’ve not the strength to bind me to your will. Not the skill, certainly.’

For long moments Aeglyss stood there, as immobile as his Kyrinin followers, staring. Inurian blinked. There was a cloudiness spreading across his vision, bleeding in from the edges like a fog, and he could see little but Aeglyss’ face. He thought he saw many things there: the old anger and hunger, but also something in the eyes and the set of the brow that spoke of puzzlement and pain, like a child who did not understand why he was being punished.

‘Last chance,’ Aeglyss said. ‘I will forgive you all your insults, if you come back with me. Teach me.’

‘No.’

Aeglyss turned on his heel and walked away. Inurian felt a strange surge of release.

‘Aeglyss, wait,’ he said.

Aeglyss glanced back.

‘They will kill you sooner or later,’ Inurian said. ‘The White Owls, or the Black Road, or the Haig Bloods. You think you can play their games, be a part of it all. But you can’t, Aeglyss. They’ll not love you for seeking to be one of them.’

Aeglyss seized a spear from the hand of the nearest White Owl. His teeth were bared in a grimace of fury. He strode up to Inurian and drove the spear through his midriff, impaling him upon its shaft.

‘No games, little man,’ hissed Aeglyss.

Inurian slumped. Aeglyss held him up.

‘You once called me a dog that thought it was a wolf. Tell me now, Inurian. Which am I now? Dog or wolf?’

‘You have a dog’s heart.’

‘Very well. But it beats more strongly than yours.’

‘I’ve made my choice,’ murmured Inurian and felt his last strength passing out between his lips and into the sharp air. It was easier than he had expected to let go.

Aeglyss spat upon his cheek and released the spear. Inurian fell on to his side. Aeglyss stepped back.

‘I’m sorry,’ Inurian murmured.

‘Finish him,’ Aeglyss said in the White Owl tongue. The Shared sang in the words, put a core of command and insistence into them that could not be denied. The Kyrinin poured forwards. They crowded around Inurian and he disappeared beneath a frenzy of stabbing spears and stamping feet. Aeglyss stood and watched for a while, then went back to his horse. He gave one sharp cry, of some kind of pain or anger, as he swept up into the saddle.

Riding away, Aeglyss was hunched low. He did not look back. The Kyrinin fell in behind him and were soon swallowed by the woods. The bloodied corpse of the na’kyrim from Castle Kolglas lay alone on the damp grass, waiting for the carrion birds. The sound of the falls rolled on.