“Drinan? Why?”
“Woodwights. So the folk there claim, anyway. They’re convinced there’s White Owls on the move.” Elach shrugged. “I don’t know what to believe these days. There’s been some barns burned, some cattle stolen; that much is certain.”
Taim stared at the back of his clasped hands in thought. He had hoped for more than two hundred. His Blood had always thought itself strong. Had they been so deluded in that? Where had all that imagined strength gone, to leave them with fewer than a thousand warriors to take the field? He knew where it had gone, of course: it had been whittled away by a few too many years of peace, gnawed at by the Heart Fever, caged and slaughtered at Tanwrye, cut down at Grive, at Anduran and Glasbridge. And in pursuit of Gryvan’s victory over Igryn oc Dargannan-Haig.
“We could muster hundreds more from amongst the townsfolk,” Elach murmured. He sounded almost reluctant, as if he said such things only because it was expected of him. Taim hid a momentary frown of annoyance behind a hand raised to brush his brow. He had hoped for more in many ways.
“Only those who know which end of a sword to hold,” he said. “Fishermen and farmers who’ve never felt a spear in their hand’ll be worse than useless against the Black Road. We’d do well to get whatever hunters and woodsmen there are here organised, though. Get them out into Anlane, to watch our flanks and hunt for woodwights. Send fifty of them to Drinan; get your three dozen men back from there.”
Elach shook his head: despondent, rather than disagreeing. “We’ve lost a lot of them already. The woodfolk, I mean. They’ve been going out of their own accord, looking for survivors, or for someone to kill. We found the bodies of five yesterday, just inside the forest. I don’t know whether or not there’re woodwights out there, like folk say, but I do know there’s Hunt Inkallim. They’ve been seen.”
“The Hunt?” Taim repeated, unable to keep the surprise from his voice. “I thought… we were told it was only Horin-Gyre, and a few of the Battle. You’re sure the Hunt’s here?”
Elach grimaced. “My scouts have seen their dogs, and heard them. I’ve stopped sending men up the road. The few that don’t die come running back here like frightened hens. But the Hunt’s the least of our worries, Taim. Maybe it was only Horin-Gyre when all this started — I don’t know about that — but there’s a lot more than that come across the Stone Vale now.”
The old warrior rose to his feet and stretched his back.
“We’re still getting a few stragglers who manage to sneak out through the forest. Some even paddle down the coast holding on to driftwood, but most of those ones drown before they get here, I think. Anyway, they all say there’s thousands more Black Roaders coming down from the north. Every Blood, not just Horin; armies at Targlas and Grive, as well as Anduran and Glasbridge. One girl said she’d seen hundreds — hundreds, mind you — of Battle Inkallim marching down past Anduran.”
Taim watched in silence as Elach went to the window and stared up at the sky. In the space of a few sentences, the older man had undercut the foundations of all Taim’s half-formed plans. Had it only been the exhausted, diminished forces of the Horin-Gyre Blood he faced, he — and Orisian — might have been able to turn them back without any aid from Aewult nan Haig and his host. Now… now a multitude of dangers presented themselves to his imagination. Aewult had close to ten thousand men, but he thought he was marching against a far weaker foe. If the Battle itself was indeed fielding hundreds of its ravens, what lay ahead would be far bloodier, far more savage, than any of them had anticipated.
“It’s true, is it, that Orisian’s our Thane now?” Elach asked, still standing by the window. “You saw him in Kolkyre?”
“It’s true. He went by a different road, but he will be here within a few days.”
“What times, to have a child as Thane.”
“He’s no child,” Taim growled. “And he’s Thane by right, and by duty.”
Elach grunted and returned to his chair. “So he is. I pity him as much as the rest of us. His family gone, our lands lost. We’ll be lucky if there’s more than splinters left of us once the High Thane and the Black Road have hammered away at each other for a while.”
Taim slapped the table. “Enough, Elach.” He rose and took his scabbarded sword up from where he had leaned it against the wall. “You have a wife, if I remember rightly. Where is she?”
“Stryne. I sent her to Stryne, after Glasbridge fell.”
Taim buckled his belt and settled his sword on his hip. “Go and join her. You’ve done what you can here. Clear whatever you want to take with you out of this place by nightfall. I’ll sleep here tonight.”
Elach’s expression lurched from alarm to relief and back again. He started to protest, without conviction. Taim pulled the door open.
“Don’t argue, Elach. The burden you’ve shouldered here is mine to bear now. Go. Take care of your wife.”
Taim Narran slept little that night, and not at all the one that followed. Instead, he laboured. He laboured to put back together what he could of his Blood, and to build for it some defences against whatever lay ahead.
In an inn by the waterfront, he found an Oathman — the only one, it appeared, to have escaped the chaos beyond Kolglas. The man, a little drunk and extremely shocked, was told he was now the Master Oathman of the Lannis Blood. The Naming of infants, the taking of the Bloodoath, the burning and mourning of the dead, all these things must continue. Taim Narran made it clear to the newly elevated Master Oathman that it was his responsibility to ensure they did so.
Men were sent to retrieve everything of value that survived within Castle Kolglas, and Taim had it stored under guard in the town’s gaol. He gathered all the merchants to be found in the town together and instructed them in what their Blood required of them in such times. Their consequent generosity swelled the nascent treasury in the gaol a little further. Taim ordered that the size of the town Guard be doubled, and tasked them with ensuring that there was no hoarding of food. He emptied part of the garrison’s barracks — sending the warriors to camp outside the town — and had all the sick brought there to be cared for. Fifty volunteers were armed with spears and knives from the garrison’s stores and dispatched to Drinan. They carried orders summoning the warriors Elach Mell had sent there back to Kolglas, and commanding them to bring with them all the cattle and grain that Drinan could spare.
Taim himself took thirty of his men along the coast towards Glasbridge. They got less than halfway before they found a pack of Tarbain tribesmen looting and burning an abandoned mill. A few of the northerners escaped; most of them did not. Soon afterwards figures could be seen moving along the forest’s edge. Ahead, far up the road, riders were visible. Taim turned his men around and returned to Kolglas. That night he set more than a hundred sentries along the town’s northern boundary, and went himself to every one of them in the rain-filled darkness to ensure that none doubted the importance of wakefulness.
He did all this while secretly dreading what would happen if the Black Road came pouring down the coast; knowing that if they did come, his hundreds of men were unlikely to be enough. There would be nothing he could do save stand and die with them, and hope to give the people of Kolglas enough time to escape. He did it all while longing with every fibre of his being to return to his wife and his daughter and to take them in his arms and await with them the birth of his grandchild.
And then, at dusk on the third day, when the Black Road still had not come, a moment Taim had both hoped for and feared arrived. He went with apprehension clenched in his chest and two dozen of his veteran warriors at his side to the southern edge of Kolglas and stood looking down the coast towards the distant sunset. His exertions, and the paucity of sleep, had left his head heavy, his neck stiff, his legs aching. He felt, standing in that gloaming, watching the waves sighing up along the shore, as old as he had ever done. He did not have to wait long. Out of the gathering gloom, coming like a dark, roiling river beneath clouds turned orange and red by the sinking sun, Aewult nan Haig’s army arrived.