The inn was already crowded. Thirty or forty commoners of the Gaven-Gyre Blood had taken it over. Wain had her warriors turn them out. She meant to shut herself away in a room, and sleep for as long as her restless mind and body would permit. Such was her hope, but nothing came of it. Her thoughts were too turbulent to submit to slumber. She lay in the darkness with her eyes open for a while, then rose and pulled on her boots and jerkin and leggings, and went out into the yard.
It was a still night, and quiet, but it spoke to her of a change in the weather. She had grown up in Castle Hakkan, where every winter brought intensive tuition in the art of reading the air and the wind and the sky. Snow was coming, she thought. That would be a good thing. No one chose to fight in this season willingly, but if it must be done, it would surely favour the cause of the Black Road. The enemy they were to face could not know winter quite as intimately as did the Gyre Bloods.
The guards attending to the horses noticed her presence and busied themselves, taking on an air of exaggerated alertness. She gazed up. The clouds that would bring the snow were not here yet. The night sky glittered with innumerable stars, strewn across the firmament like grains of luminous sand. The moon was bright. Wain’s breath plumed mistily upwards and dispersed onto the chill air. A fox barked once, out near the river. Drunken laughter, good-humoured, was drifting out from one of the cottages. Then she heard another sound, at first unclear. She turned. It was Kyrinin voices, high and sharp on the clear air, but meaningless to her. For a moment she imagined it to be an argument amongst dogs, a dispute amongst birds. Then she caught the tone of alarm, the anger and fear that animated the incomprehensible words.
Wain hesitated. She did not know quite what held her back. It was an imprecise trepidation. She shook it off and strode out into the moon-washed field. A handful of warriors straggled after her. The White Owl camp was in tumult. Some of the Kyrinin warriors had already scattered out from amongst the crude tents and now stood some distance away, staring back, taut like dogs sensing danger but not yet understanding it. A knot of White Owls remained at the centre of the encampment, milling about in a way she had never seen amongst Kyrinin before. Some were shouting, their voices strained. None seemed even to notice Wain’s arrival.
She pushed her way through, and still none of the Kyrinin paid her any heed. Their attention was fixed upon the small patch of ground they had encircled. Aeglyss was lying there, half-curled on his side, one arm stretched out. His hand shook, jerking back and forth over the grass. His eyes were clamped shut. A low groan forced its way out between his teeth. Wain took a step forwards, intending to lift him bodily, but stopped short. Even in the flattening, colourless moonlight, and with the flickering shadows cast by small campfires, it was clear that something was wrong.
Aeglyss lay on a great disc of dead grass: a near-perfect circle much paler than the rest of the field. Within that circle, the grass was not only dead but unnaturally long, sprawling in great matted swathes. It was as if a great clump of whip-like stalks had come surging up out of the ground, and then died back in almost the same instant. And as her eyes picked out more detail, Wain saw that there were tendrils of now-dead and brittle grass wrapped around the wrist of the na’kyrim ’s outstretched arm; another hung about his neck like some rustic ornament, a third spiralled around his leg. There was soil smeared across his face and through his hair. A slick of blood, black by the light of the moon, had spread from the wound in his wrist. He jerked convulsively. There was a strange, warm smell on the night air that Wain could not place. It was redolent of ploughed fields, wet logs. It did not belong.
The White Owls were agitated, yapping and whining at each other. Wain saw Hothyn — the one she took to be the closest thing these savages had to a leader — standing opposite her, staring down at the na’kyrim. For once, his face had an almost human animation. She saw horrified fascination. Whatever had happened here, it had produced something more complicated than simple fear amongst those who witnessed it. The Kyrinin seemed paralysed by bewilderment.
“The na’kyrim ’s sick. Get him indoors,” Wain said to her own warriors as they pushed up behind her.
They did as she commanded. The Kyrinin raised no objection, as she had half-expected they might. They watched as a couple of Wain’s Shield lifted Aeglyss between them. Strands of grass came with him, reluctant to release their grip. The warriors carried him back towards the inn. Wain followed, and a few paces behind her Hothyn came like an attentive, watchful hound.
“I can find no wound, other than scratches, save those he already bore,” the healer sighed as she washed the na’kyrim ’s blood from her hands. “Those holes in his wrists have opened up again. I have given him fresh bandages. That’s all I can do for him.”
The young woman shrugged. She seemed to Wain to be inexperienced, unsure of her knowledge and skills, but she was the best they had been able to find amongst the companies in Sirian’s Dyke. It took no great talent, in any case, to see that what afflicted Aeglyss was not merely to do with his body.
He was calmer now, but occasional tremors still shook his arms. His lips trembled. Sometimes he groaned or muttered barely audible nonsense. He had twice slipped into fraught laughter: a harsh, angry kind of cackle. Wain wondered if his mind had finally broken. The thought that, after all that had happened, this man might now betray her hopes by succumbing to madness made her angry.
The healer glanced nervously at Hothyn. The Kyrinin stood silently in the corner, as he had done throughout her examination of Aeglyss. His inhuman eyes never left the na’kyrim, never acknowledged the existence of anything save that gaunt form prostrate on the bed.
“Get out,” Wain said irritably to the younger woman. She bowed her head and left.
Aeglyss was murmuring again. Wain leaned over, straining to catch some of the words, but it was not even a human tongue he spoke in. Some woodwight cant, perhaps. His breath stank, an exhalation of decay, as if his flesh was rotting somewhere on the inside. Wain grimaced, and saw then that his eyes, so close to her own, were open: chips of grey stone, now shot with a net of red lines, like a myriad of tiny fissures exposing the meat that lay beneath their surface. She jerked her head away, repelled by such proximity.
“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.
Aeglyss smiled feebly. “Nothing. I thrive.”
Wain snorted.
“You shouldn’t mock,” Aeglyss rasped. “It reveals the depths of your ignorance. I grow stronger.”
He laughed, but it was too much for him. The sound contorted itself into a wheezing cough that rocked his shoulders. Spittle flecked his chin. Wain turned away in disgust. Hothyn, she saw, remained fixated upon Aeglyss. The Kyrinin stood quite still, wide-eyed.
“I still live,” Aeglyss snapped. “They came for me, in their fear. They meant to quiet me, and silence me, and break me. Ha! They did not know! I still live, and they fled away, through the…”
His words collapsed into another fit of coughing. Wain looked back to him.
“You’re ranting,” she muttered. “Are you mad, then?”
“No. Not mad.” He sounded angry. “This isn’t madness, you stupid.. Not madness. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know.” And as quickly as that, the anger was gone and what she saw in his face, and heard in his voice, was fear, confusion. Almost childlike; a sickening feebleness.
“I don’t understand,” he murmured. “What do the Anain care for me? What offence have I given to them? I’ve done nothing… yet they come and tear at my mind, try to snuff me out. They think they are the masters of everything. Or perhaps they don’t think at all. Perhaps.. ah, what does it matter? I am beyond them. Even them.”