“The first thing I feel when I wake up is fear,” Eshenna repeated in a flat voice. “That is already breaking me apart.”
The three of them went together to the shed at the end of the yard, each carrying a candle that they had to shield against the shifting of the cold dusk air. They entered in silence, and set the lights down, and gathered about K’rina. She did not respond to their presence. She just lay there, curled on her bed of straw; perhaps asleep, perhaps not.
Yvane gently roused K’rina and lifted her onto her knees.
“Can you hear me?” Yvane asked quietly.
K’rina remained blank. Silent. Yvane backed away and Eshenna took her place, kneeling in front of K’rina.
“Be careful,” Yvane said. She was resigned now. “Go no further, no deeper, than you must.”
“I know,” Eshenna replied as she reached up and brushed K’rina’s hair away from her eyes. She laid one hand on the na’kyrim’s cheek, the other on her hand where it rested in her lap. In another place, between other people, it could have been a loving contact, Orisian thought. A gesture of affection.
“I’m sorry,” he said. The words came of their own accord. He suddenly felt guilty, even ashamed, that he had forced this. Yet it was necessary, his instincts insisted.
“Keep quiet,” Yvane said.
Eshenna closed her eyes, bowed her head a little. Her breath fluttered out of her. Her shoulders sagged. She might almost have been falling asleep. K’rina remained wholly impassive. The two of them sat thus, linked in their different, unnatural trances, for so long that Orisian’s doubts began to reassert themselves.
“It’s not working,” he whispered to Yvane. She splayed her hand at him, irritably demanding silence. She was frowning in concentration.
Somewhere outside, diminished by distance, Orisian thought he could just still hear the harsh calling of the crows. The sound seemed to him to have a hostile edge to it now, as if mocking his hopeless efforts to oppose forces that could not be opposed, or understood. He flailed about like a drowning man in a flood, he thought. Perhaps all he could hope for was that he did not drag too many others down with him. He caught himself before that despair took too firm a hold. Could he even trust it as wholly his own?
A faint hiss from Yvane brought him back from his dark, distracted reverie. Eshenna was gasping. Her jaw cracked open and shut, the joint creaking as her muscles spasmed. A blush was spreading through her cheeks and brow, brightening and deepening with every desperate breath.
Orisian looked at Yvane in concern. She narrowed her eyes.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t tell what’s happening.”
Eshenna jerked, almost as if she was trying to pull away from K’rina, but she did not-or could not-release her grip. Her spine curved and flexed, snapping her head back then down again into her chest.
Orisian saw Yvane wincing, her brow creasing. She shrank away from the other two na’kyrim.
“What is it?” he asked her.
“Something…” she whispered, then shook her head sharply, as if beset by a host of biting flies.
Orisian could hear-or feel-a roaring, like a distant waterfall, or a storm blowing through trees. But it was inside his head, not outside, in the bone of his skull and the substance of his thoughts. It bled darkness from the edges of its sound, blurring shadows across his vision. The world was tumbling away from him, or he from it. The cramped shed around him swelled, rushing out to become a vertiginously immense space.
“Separate them,” he said, reeling at the dizzying sense of dislocation. He reached out and took hold of Eshenna’s arm, trying to pull it away from K’rina. “Help me,” he hissed at Yvane.
There was an instant of reluctance, a hesitant fear, and then Yvane too had hold of Eshenna, and was murmuring urgently to her.
“Come back, Eshenna. Come back. Can you hear me? Come back to yourself.”
Orisian could barely hear her above the rushing within his skull. The sensation of falling was sickening.
It was only with the greatest difficulty that they could part the two of them. K’rina slumped limply to the straw. Eshenna fell back into Orisian’s arms. He laid her down as gently as he could. She was calm now, though tremors still inhabited her hands, and when her eyes struggled open, her gaze was unfocused. Orisian found himself cradling her head, and could feel the dampness of sweat in her hair. Her stone-grey eyes blinked up at him.
“She’s empty,” Eshenna gasped. “Nothing there, just a pit that falls away for ever. Into nothingness. It wanted to take hold of me, and I could not prevent it. But it didn’t know me. That’s the only thing that saved me. It’s made for someone else, waiting for someone else, or I would have been lost. Swallowed up and caged in there for ever.”
She was crying, though whether it was from pain, or fear, or relief Orisian could not tell.
“Be still,” said Yvane. She spoke to Eshenna, but it was K’rina she was looking at, in the flickering light of the candles, and it was a look of suppressed horror or perhaps grief.
“Was it Aeglyss?” Orisian asked.
“No, no,” Eshenna said, casting a desolate glance towards the prostrate na’kyrim. “It’s what’s in her; what’s been made of her. She wasn’t meant for us. We should never have taken her. We should never have interfered. We’ve ruined everything.”
There were voices outside in the yard. Footsteps on the paving stones, a muttered conversation, and then a rapping at the door that shook it on its old hinges.
“The Black Road, sire,” Torcaill shouted. “They’re on the road south of here, close enough to reach us tomorrow from the sound of it. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands.”
“All right,” called Orisian. Then, more softly: “I’m coming.”
He cast a last worried glance at Eshenna and met her tear-filled eyes.
“I have to go,” he said.
“It’s true, what I said before,” she breathed.
“What?”
“Someone has to kill him.”
VI
Kanin hated the sight of Hommen. This miserable and meek little town was where word of Wain’s death had first reached him. It was here that he had watched Shraeve win leadership of the Battle in combat, and save Aeglyss’ life in doing so. It was here that his life and his faith had been brought to ruin. And perhaps all the world with them. On his journey north, he had seen plentiful signs of the dereliction into which a once-noble enterprise was slipping.
He and his company had skirted the edge of the vast army sprawled around the landward walls of Kolkyre. Like ants teeming about a corpse too thick-skinned for their jaws to pierce, the forces of the Black Road had spread themselves across great swathes of farmland. A stench, of burning and death and animals, hung over the fields and camps. Riding through the fringes of this disorderly host, Kanin saw bodies lying bloated by the side of the track; men and women howling with glee as they mobbed together to beat a Tarbain tribesman; a warrior kneeling in the mud, weeping uncontrollably, hands resting limp and upturned on his thighs.
Beyond Kolkyre, they made camp for the night a short way from the road, and in the freezing darkness a band of looters, reckless or starving or mad, tried to steal their horses. They killed two of Kanin’s guards before his warriors could be mustered to drive them off. His Shield took one alive, though only because Kanin intervened to preserve the man’s life for a time. He questioned the prisoner himself, but got little sense from him. The man was of the Gaven-Gyre Blood, a carpenter from Whale Harbour. He would not, or could not, give his name, or that of any captain he followed. Nor could he explain how the faith and duty that led him to leave his home and march to battle had been corrupted into banditry and murder. Kanin cursed him, and struck him, and walked away. He heard Igris behead the carpenter as he stooped back into his tent.
As they followed the road along the bleak shoreline towards Hommen, they passed through a broken, almost deserted, land. Many of the farmsteads and hamlets bore the black scars of fires. Doors hung loose or had been torn away completely. Outside an isolated cottage, a dead child, a boy, was impaled on a stake. Frost had laid a crisp white veil over his face. Crows had taken his eyes and opened his nose and shredded his lips.