Mordyn groaned. He would fall away into unconsciousness in a moment, and he longed for that release. But even as he thought of it, the battering waves of darkness receded.
“Forgive me,” he heard Aeglyss say. “I must learn restraint. There is so much I still have to learn. I know what I must do with you, Chancellor. It’s just… it’s just that I fear to…”
The halfbreed’s voice was moving away. Mordyn cautiously opened his eyes. Aeglyss was stumbling across the floor, his feet scraping over the wooden boards. He drifted around one of the soaring stone columns.
“I’ve known from the first moment I found you. I made terrible sacrifices to bring you here. Terrible. Someone… important slipped through my fingers. The only one I could have trusted. The only one. Stolen from me, because I indulged myself; lingered in that awful place, and called my warriors to fetch you out of there. I lost her. And gained you, Shadowhand.
“Now that I have you, there will be none to gainsay me; none to deny me. They will not turn me away from their tables when they see that I hold the famed Shadowhand. They will not shut me out from their councils. No, they will beg me, they will entreat me, they will seek my favour. Mine! You can aid me, but I know… I’ve learned that aid is not given. Not when I ask for it. I must take it. Take what I need to put myself beyond their reach, beyond everyone’s reach.”
He stopped, poised in mid-stride, teetering like a frail, half-felled tree. He cocked his head to one side.
“Here they come. Now we shall see. Now there will be a decision.”
He looked towards the door, and it swung back on its rusted hinges. Wain stood there, seeing and dismissing the hunched figure of the Chancellor with a single sharp gaze.
“Temegrin is coming,” she said. “He has fifty riders at his back.”
Aeglyss nodded heavily. “He means to kill me, I think. Well. It’s good. Let him, if he can.”
More than two hundred marched out to meet the Eagle of Ragnor oc Gyre’s army, and even then Kan Avor was not emptied. Kyrinin warriors, Battle Inkallim, Wain and her Shield and fifty of her Blood’s spears, a hundred folk from the valleys and mountains of the distant north. They walked out through the city’s tumbled wall and onto the icy, wet fields beyond. Aeglyss and Wain led them, with Shraeve a few paces behind, and Mordyn Jerain at their side. They had put a cord around the Chancellor’s neck, and led him liked a leashed dog.
Aeglyss stumbled often as he walked. It was not only that the ground here was treacherous, sucking mud beneath a thin skin of ice, more marsh than solid earth; his legs seemed unequal to the task of bearing him. Wain helped him with one hand, dragging Mordyn along with the other. The great muted company drew itself up in loose array and stood watching Temegrin and his band of warriors come cantering up with the sinking orange sun at their backs, flags and pennants flying, mud and water and shards of shattered ice churning beneath the hoofs of their horses. Mordyn could feel their approach in his legs, rumbling up from the ground, shaking his bones. They looked magnificent, these warriors from beyond the Vale of Stones.
Temegrin sprang down from his horse, his feet crunching through ice as he landed. His coarse-skinned face was flushed with anger, Mordyn could see. He tried to remember what he knew of this man. He had certainly had reports of him, but so sluggish and disjointed had his memory become that he could not dredge them up. There were eagle feathers fluttering at the top of his boots as he stamped up towards Wain and Aeglyss. Silly, Mordyn thought. This is no place for birds. Not even eagles.
“So it’s true,” Temegrin snarled at Wain. “This is Gryvan’s Chancellor?” He looked at Mordyn with avaricious loathing.
“It is,” Wain said.
The Eagle grinned. “I thought it impossible, when I was told. I had the man who first reported it beaten for spreading lies and rumour. But behold! The Shadowhand himself.”
A dozen of his warriors had dismounted and lined up behind him now. Mordyn stared at the ground. This was humiliation more than he could bear, to be gloated over like a prized exhibit at some Tal Dyreen slave market of old.
“But when did you mean to send word to us, Wain?” he heard Temegrin asking, his voice seething with threat. “I had to come all the way from Kolglas to see with my own eyes, for we’ve had no word from you of this great boon that fate has granted our cause.”
She made no answer, and that angered the Eagle still more.
“How did he come here?” he shouted.
“Ask your questions of me,” Aeglyss said softly.
Mordyn risked a glance sideways. The halfbreed was standing limply, shrunken and fragile amongst these great warriors in their mail shirts. Mordyn could hardly bear to look at him, for dread burst in through his eyes at the very sight of that stooped frame. Temegrin perhaps could not yet see it, or sense it, for he ignored the na’kyrim. He reached out a huge gloved hand, stretching to take from Wain the cord that bound the Chancellor. She twitched it out of his grasp.
“Don’t try my patience, lady,” the Eagle snarled. “I command the High Thane’s army here. You’ll surrender this man to me.”
“He is not for you,” Aeglyss said.
“Silence! Silence! Don’t dare speak to me, halfbreed.”
Temegrin shook with rage. He swept his head back and forth, contemptuously surveying the strange throng assembled before him.
“Shraeve,” he shouted. “Is this what the ravens have come to, consorting with halfbreeds and wights and traitors? Where does the Battle stand in this?”
“I am here to watch, and to learn, and to witness fate’s unfolding of its intent.”
Temegrin threw his hands up in exasperation. “Madness! Wain, out of respect for your father and your brother, I give you this chance to come back to the straight and level path. Come away from this place. Bring the Shadowhand with me to Kolglas, and you will be honoured amongst-”
“She will not go with you, Eagle,” Aeglyss interrupted.
At that, Temegrin finally turned his full, ferocious attention upon the na’kyrim. He took two long, fast strides to stand in front of him.
“I told you to hold your tongue. You are not fit to speak, or to breathe, in the company of the faithful. Of warriors. Of humans.”
Then, to Mordyn’s horror, Aeglyss turned his head and looked directly at him. And smiled. A sad smile, fit to break a man’s heart. The Chancellor was filled up with fear at the touch of that smile, taken by a sudden urge to cry out a warning to Temegrin, to fall to his knees and hide his face in his hands.
“You see,” whispered Aeglyss, and Mordyn did not know if the words were spoken out loud or only in him, for him. “You see. This is how it will always be. Hatred. Always.”
And it seemed to Mordyn that Aeglyss was growing, and spilling a shadow from his shoulders and from his long hair, and that the air was thickening, the light of the setting sun an orange mist that turned everything to its own sickly shade. And the great crowd of his followers was stirring, rising up and murmuring.
Temegrin lunged at Aeglyss, who made no attempt to avoid his grasp. Mordyn groaned, unable to breathe now, seeing everything with a terrible clarity. His ears were ringing.
The Eagle had Aeglyss by the throat, both hands like claws, and was bellowing into his face.
“What will you do, mongrel? What do you think you can do? You’re nothing! I could crush your neck, break it, with one hand. What are you going to do?”
And Aeglyss, inexplicably, was grinning at him: a mad, wet grin.
“We’re none of us more than sticks in skin, Eagle,” he hissed between taut lips. He raised his frail hands, set one on each of Temegrin’s forearms.
The Gyre warrior was a powerful man. Aeglyss was almost nothing, like the survivor of a famine. His form was all bone and angles. Yet, impossibly, it was the Eagle who released his grip, who found his arms forced back and held fast by those lean inhuman hands. Temegrin’s face was twisted by some sort of horror or pain. Aeglyss had hold of his wrists, and was laughing.