He laid a hand on Wain’s cheek. Her eyes half-closed at the touch, and Mordyn thought he glimpsed both ecstasy and horror in her face, just for a moment, before it settled back into blank repose. The lone Kyrinin had turned away, moving soundlessly to gaze out from the open window.
“I have the Chancellor of Gryvan oc Haig,” Aeglyss said, letting his hand fall away from Wain’s skin. “I cannot turn away from that. Cannot set aside what is being offered me. Everything, everything is possible.”
His voice was rising, taking on a shrill, unstable edge.
“Shraeve, do you understand?” He was staring at the Inkallim. She remained silent, unmoving. “I can only hold one mind. Securely, unbreakably. Only one. Oh, I must crack my own heart today. Do you understand?”
Aeglyss was wringing his hands, kneading them together like a man consumed by uncontrollable grief.
“I cannot… I am too weak. Even Orlane could not do more. If I lay myself across two of them I will be too thin, too feeble.” He turned back to Wain, who was watching him without any hint of emotion, and smiled at her through tears. “Forgive me for my weakness, beloved. Forgive my failings. If I had known… I did not know I would have to take away what I have given you.”
He spun away again, as if he could not bear to set eyes upon her. “Raven, do you not understand? We must have this…” Aeglyss extended a bony finger towards Mordyn. The Shadowhand shrank away from the gesture. “I must. And to have him, I must give up what I hold most dear. But it would be too cruel to leave her without that light, now that she has known it, to withdraw the shelter of my wing. She would not understand it… me. She would not forgive.”
He hung his head.
“Shraeve?” he said. Plaintive. Imploring. Insistent. “Have you not yet seen enough? Do you not yet believe in what I make possible?”
The Inkallim stared at him for a moment or two, then slowly, slowly, she turned her head towards Wain nan Horin-Gyre. Mordyn felt himself, and all the world, poised between two forms, caught in a shapeless moment beyond which it might become one thing, or another, wholly different.
“Shraeve,” Aeglyss whispered.
And she was moving: one long stride, and two, and one of her blades was coming out over her shoulder. Mordyn wanted to close his eyes, but could not.
Wain stood quite still. She was watching Aeglyss, though his back was turned to her. Her face was calm. It remained so even as Shraeve reached her, and even as the blade descended. Mordyn saw metal flash down, heard a dull sound, a soft breath. Aeglyss howled, and the pain in that cry struck the Chancellor blind and deaf and stilled his mind and froze his heart. He drifted in a small death of darkness and silence.
“Do you see? Do you see?”
Mordyn Jerain blinked and came back to himself. He did not know how long he had been lost. He was still slumped where he had been before, against the bench where the long-gone Gyre Thanes once sat. He could still hear the dripping of water, still feel the grain of the floorboards beneath his fingers.
But now Aeglyss had hold of his head, one hand pressed to each of Mordyn’s temples, and the na’kyrim was leaning in to fill his field of vision.
“Do you see?” Aeglyss demanded again. His voice filled Mordyn with grief, and with anger and with fear. It crowded out his own thoughts and left no room for his own feelings. He could not breathe. Nor could he turn his head, but out of the corner of his eye he could see a body on the ground, and Shraeve standing over it. She still held her sword. It hung straight down at her side. Something — blood — was dripping from its tip. The Kyrinin warrior was at her side, staring down at the corpse.
“Do you see what I have given up for you, Shadowhand?” Aeglyss demanded of him. His eyes were bloodshot, tear-filled, anguished. “Do you understand the price I have paid? What I… I have killed a Thane’s sister for you. One who loved me. Would have loved me for ever, without fail. Are you worthy? Are you…”
The na’kyrim broke off, turned away, shaking and choking. Freed of the pressure of those mad eyes, Mordyn could suck in a great breath of air. He lifted his arm. Never had he felt so devoid of strength. Aeglyss recovered himself and fixed him once more with an unrelenting gaze. Mordyn felt a mounting pulse in his head; not his own heartbeat, it was faster, harder than that, hammer blows pounding against the inner curve of his skull.
“Now,” rasped Aeglyss, “now you will see what wonders I can bring, Shraeve. Now you will see that you are right in thinking me the answer to the world’s need.”
Mordyn tried to struggle, he commanded his arms and legs to lash out. Yet they barely stirred. The strings that bound his body to his will were loosened. He made to cry out — he did not know whether in fear or abuse — but no sound louder than a croak escaped his constricting throat.
“There is no more time,” Aeglyss whispered. “Not for any of us. No more time for hiding or hanging back. We must race now, Shadowhand; race for the sun and the light and the glory. And death will take the hindmost.”
Mordyn felt tears on his face. The hands that clasped his head were throbbing, beating against his temples with their insistent heat and force. His sight was blurring and darkening from the edges. He felt himself to be falling away inside his own head, descending into darkness. He could see nothing but those inhuman eyes before him. They were dwindling, but it was him who was receding, not them. And in the space he left behind him, another was rushing in, and he could feel the grief, the exultation, the delirious potency of that other as if they were his own.
The Shadowhand briefly imagined himself embracing Tara, his precious wife; smelling her hair, feeling her cheek against his. He managed, just for a few transitory instants, to hold her, and feel again the wonderful lightness of love. Then he was pulling away even from her. He reached out as he fell, but she was gone. He was gone.
The shutters were closed in the Palace of Red Stone. The fires and the braziers were stoked up, curtains drawn across every door. But still Tara Jerain felt cold. Ever since the Crossing, Vaymouth had been in the grip of chill winds coming down all the way from the Karkyre Peaks, perhaps from the Tan Dihrin itself. They laid frosts across the gardens and the rooftops, had even once, briefly, locked every drinking trough and washerwoman’s tub in ice.
The Shadowhand’s wife walked alone through the echoing corridors of the Palace at dusk. She carried a candle, cupping its flame with her hand, following its shimmering light down the marble ways. She had nowhere to go, and nothing to do, this night. Her maids were drawing her a bath, and spreading fresh silks across her bed, but she was restless and not yet ready to sink back into the warm waters or into sleep.
Each of the last half-dozen evenings had been the same. With the onset of dusk, Tara found her mood darkening in turn. An imprecise, indefinable anxiety began to seep into her thoughts. She could settle to no task, and find no distraction. This fretful stirring of her mind forced her body into motion. It brought no great easing of her worries, but the act of pacing through the halls and passages kept them in the background.
And what was it that so undermined her ease? She could not say, though of course her persistent fear for her husband’s safety was a part of it. Word had come to Vaymouth of Aewult’s defeat — humiliation, some murmured when they thought themselves safe from prying ears — outside Glasbridge, but her unease had already taken root before that grim news. Perhaps it was only weariness, for her sleep had been a poor and wretched thing for some time now. She woke in the morning with heavy eyes, and a heavy heart, and fading memories of distressing dreams. She was not alone in suffering thus, she had gathered. There was something in the season, or in the air coming down out of the north, inimical to restful sleep, it seemed.