Kan Avor was a black and grey mass out near the river, like the stump of some titanic fallen tree. The ruined city, freed from its watery bonds after more than a hundred years, had outlasted the dam built to drown it. Now, Wain saw dark strands of smoke strung out from amongst Kan Avor’s ruins by the wind. Someone had lit fires there; someone had claimed the ancestral home of the Gyre Blood itself as their campsite. She turned her horse towards the dead city.
It was difficult going, their way constantly obstructed by stagnant pools and seemingly bottomless mud, but Wain picked out a winding path over ground that was almost solid. Here and there, exposed by the retreat of the Glas Water, bones jutted up out of the silt. The empty eye sockets of a half-buried skull stared at her. Many of the faithful had died on this ground, two and a half centuries ago.
The warriors behind her became widely separated. Most of them were on foot, and this was no place for marching. She ignored their difficulties. A score or so of riders kept up with her, including all six of her Shield, and that was enough. As they drew close to Kan Avor, its crumbling walls and shattered towers loomed over them. More grim than the sight of those walls themselves was the burden they bore. High up on what little remained of the city’s great outer rampart hung bodies, dangling like the carcasses of slaughtered animals. Crows hopped along the top of the walls, calling to one another. The dead were not warriors. They bore the clothes of farmers or villagers.
Wain and her company rode on through the desolate outer parts of the city. The buildings here were poised halfway between being the work of men and of nature, so long had they been subject to the moulding of wind and water. Clumps of waterweeds were rotting in the streets. With each pace of their horses they came closer to the cluster of great buildings that had once dominated the city’s heart, until at last they rode into the shadow of a derelict tower. It stood the height of six men above them, and in its heyday must have been much taller, for it had been decapitated by time. Rubble was strewn across the approach to the palace from which it rose. The base of the walls had a greenish-blackish tint where the water had lapped against them year after year. A statue lay half-shattered before the wide gateway. Since its descent from the heights above it had acquired a patina of moss and weed. The gates themselves were long gone, perhaps salvaged before Kan Avor was finally abandoned. The smoke of half a dozen fires rose from somewhere within.
Wain halted her horse beneath the arch of the gate, pausing there in the shadow to stare at the scene within the precincts of the collapsed palace. In a wide courtyard, amidst the mud and tumbled stones, arrayed around their fires, were fifty or more Kyrinin. Every pair of eyes, every grey gaze, was locked on her. There was a moment of perfect silence, save for the wind above them and the crackle of a fire above which a dog was spitted.
She looked back over her shoulder, mindful now of how few warriors were within easy reach of her call.
“The Bloodheir’s sister.”
A thrill of recognition ran through her at the sound of that voice, an instant shiver that carried a whole host of sentiments in its wake: anger, alarm, surprise… anticipation, was it? Excitement? She turned slowly — deliberately so — and saw Aeglyss rising from beside one of the fires. As he stood and languidly stretched his back, a cluster of Kyrinin close by him rose too.
Wain kept her eyes on the na’kyrim, gesturing for her Shield to draw up behind her.
“He is Thane now, halfbreed,” she said. “Not Bloodheir any more.”
Aeglyss nodded and ran both hands through his pale hair, pulling it back from his face. It was longer than it had been the last time Wain saw him. He held it there behind his head and then let it fall across his shoulders.
“Thane,” he repeated, savouring the word as if it were a morsel of food. “Thane, then. It is, I suppose, in the nature of Bloodheirs to become Thanes sooner or later.” He glanced at the dog roasting over the fire. “Can I offer you some meat, Thane’s sister? We are not prepared for visitors, but what is mine is yours.”
“I believe my brother made it clear to you that we had no wish to see you, or your friends, on our lands again.” Wain nudged her horse a few paces into the courtyard, opening a space for her warriors to advance and spread themselves on her flanks. The animal was uneasy. Perhaps it had never smelled Kyrinin before.
“Did he?” Aeglyss murmured, with a little shrug of his shoulders. “I confess my memory is not all it was. I find myself much more drawn to the future now than to the past. Such a bitter thing, the past. So full of disappointments, don’t you think?”
Wain’s mind was racing. Aeglyss had disappeared some time ago, after Kanin had confronted him outside Anduran. The breach then had seemed irreversible; the breakdown of any alliance with the White Owls unquestionable. Yet here he was, the halfbreed her brother so detested, camped at the very heart, the home, of the Gyre Bloods with his little warband. And there were changes in him. His skin, always pallid, was now waxen. There were dark blotches pouched beneath his eyes, a wasted fragility about his frame. And yet his voice had a stronger spine of arrogance, a fuller, deeper timbre, than it did before. His gaze — those piercing, transfixing inhuman eyes — held Wain; she felt it on her skin, her body, like hands. Her heart was beating faster. A hollowness was in her stomach, almost fear, almost.. something she could not quite name.
“Are you responsible for the dead on the walls?”
Aeglyss frowned, angled his head to squint up at her against the sharp light.
“Ah, not entirely. They didn’t die by my hand, at least. White Owl spears did the deed. It can’t trouble you, surely? They’re nothing: Lannis strays, hiding away amongst these ruins when we arrived. I’d thought to find you and your brother here, not unhomed farmers.”
“These are not your walls to decorate as you see fit. Kan Avor is the rightful possession of Ragnor oc Gyre. We hold it empty, ready for him to claim and occupy.”
Aeglyss shrugged. “If you won’t eat with me, you might at least dismount. We should talk, you and I. There are things you should know.”
He held out his hands to her. She noticed for the first time that there were bandages around his wrists. And she felt as though those outstretched hands had taken hold of her, had laid themselves on her arms and were drawing her towards him: drawing her into a gentle, warm, firm embrace. To dispel the sensation, she kicked her horse forwards. It trotted to the edge of one of the fires, stirring up ash and dirt before it shied away from the flames. Every one of the Kyrinin had stood up now. They gathered beside and behind Aeglyss.
The na’kyrim laughed, and the laugh flowed over Wain like water. It was a living, liquid thing. An unnatural thing, she thought, not remotely human. Not remotely mirthful.
“I am so very tired of being refused,” Aeglyss said. He hung his head, letting his arms fall back to his sides. “So long I had nothing else…” he jerked his head sideways, wincing, like a man beset by a stinging insect “… nothing else.”
Wain glanced at the warriors who flanked her. On every face she saw some intimation of the confusion, the disquiet, that writhed beneath. She knew it was in them because it was in her too; it was in the very walls of this decrepit courtyard. Aeglyss was breathing it out with the spent air from his lungs, breathing it over them.
“Get down,” she heard him say, and her legs and arms were already obeying him. For a sluggish moment she was an observer, watching her body as it swung out of the saddle to the ground. She shook herself, and was standing there by her horse’s head, holding its reins.