“I’d like to see the moon,” she said.
But Coinach gently interposed himself.
“They sometimes have guards out on the terraces. Best to let me go first.”
He pulled open the great shutter, and the cold night air swept in. Anyara closed her eyes for a moment, savouring its cleansing flow over her face, through her hair.
“Come,” Coinach said. “There’s no one here.”
They stepped out onto the narrow terrace. Before them Vaymouth was a dark ocean, speckled with just a few faint points of light, bounded by the smooth, dark curve of its walls as they swept away into the distance. The Moon Palace rose, a lambent mass, above the city’s heart, as if some wan, sickly giant had hunched his shoulders up out of dark earth. Anyara turned about, searching instead for the true moon. It stood just above the city wall, bright and large. She gazed up at it, letting its light fill her eyes and her mind for a moment. Then she dropped her head, and looked back to the sleeping city.
“Vaymouth’s bigger than I ever imagined,” she said. “I knew but didn’t know. That sounds stupid, doesn’t it?”
“No, my lady.”
“I’m afraid,” Anyara said abruptly, surprising herself. She had not meant to say that, yet the sound of the words seemed right. Fitting. “I thought I could bear everything, anything, if I had to. I thought I’d mastered it, but now it’s growing heavy again, all the fear and the sorrow. I don’t want to be frightened. I hate it.”
Coinach was looking at her, but his face was in shadow and she could not be sure what expression he wore. She did not know quite what she wanted from him. Still, she felt an unexpected easing within her, now that she had permitted this small fraction of her fragility to show itself.
Out in Vaymouth’s great darkness: a blooming orange glow, much stronger and larger than any of the other tiny lights shining there. Anyara frowned at it, puzzled. Coinach followed her gaze. The glow spread, and splayed itself outwards and upwards, a fiery fist swelling and then unfurling thick fingers of flame that reached for the star-strewn sky.
“That’ll be an unpleasant waking for someone,” Coinach said softly.
There was another, further off, in an entirely different quarter of the city: another seed of fire that flickered into being and then built and built. The nocturnal silence that had seemed so natural before now felt out of place. The flames clambered ferociously higher and higher, their hearts turning white, but no sound reached the Palace of Red Stone. There was scent, though, the first bitter trace of smoke in the air.
“Look, there’s a third,” Coinach said, pointing out into the night.
“And there,” said Anyara.
It seemed that every part of Vaymouth had its own eruption of consuming flame. The Moon Palace was growing dimmer, obscured by drifting smoke, its reflected moonlight outshone by a wilder, more sinister light. And the first sounds reached Anyara’s ears: a murmur of calamity, anguished cries blunted and flattened by distance, the roaring of delirious firestorms made into a whisper.
“What’s happening?” she wondered.
“I don’t know.”
Anyara shifted uneasily. There was too much of the quality of her dreams about this. Too much of the madness she felt running beneath the skin of the world, like a black river under a carapace of ice.
“We should never have come,” she said, staring out at the beacons of destruction that marked out the whole territory of the city. “I thought we could serve best by letting Aewult have his way. I thought there might be opportunity… but none of it’s turning out as I hoped. We should have fought our way out of Aewult’s camp rather than let him make us prisoners.”
“I would gladly have made the attempt, my lady, had you asked it of me. He had some ten thousand warriors, so I fear it might have proved difficult. Still, I would have made the attempt.”
“I will see it!” Gryvan oc Haig snapped at Kale.
That flare of anger was enough to make the shieldman nod curtly and avert his eyes.
“As you wish, sire,” the lean warrior said, nudging his horse on ahead.
“I will see what’s done to my city!” Gryvan shouted after his guardian. “It is my right, my duty!”
His own vehemence shocked him, and made him a little ashamed. He glanced uncomfortably around. Many in the mass of riders were looking at him. All, at least, had the grace to turn away when his own gaze fell upon them. It was unwise, Gryvan knew, to flaunt his anger-his confusion, if he was honest-so brazenly, before so many eyes, but his grip on his emotions grew daily less sure. They tore their way up through him, every setback bringing them closer to boiling over. He imagined them as some pack of beasts clawing at his innards, consuming him from within.
A hundred of his warriors, led by Kale and the rest of his Shield, surrounded him. He was within the walls of his own impregnable, wondrous city. Yet despite all of this, Gryvan felt exposed. Assailed. The faces of his people, who thronged the streets this morning and watched his passing from every window and doorway, seemed inimical to him. But he could no longer tell whether that was their true character, or whether he only painted them with his own bitter bewilderment at the course of events.
“The Captain of your Shield is quite right, sire,” Mordyn Jerain said, settling his own horse into step with Gryvan’s. “The city’s mood is fragile. Caution would be wise.”
“They set a dozen fires,” Gryvan hissed, wrestling his voice into submission. “Ten people dead, I hear. Someone thinks they can torch my city with impunity. Well, I’ll see their handiwork. And then I’ll see them, whoever they are, broken on wheels, and spitted on stakes and have their heads rolled in the dirt at my feet.”
“Quite so. I wish we could have spoken before riding out, though. There is much I wanted to discuss with you today. Had you not been already mounted when I reached the palace…”
“Now, suddenly, you want to talk? Well, it can wait an hour or two yet. Gods, does this not sicken you with fury? How can you be so unmoved? We made this city what it is together, you and I. It’s your child as much as mine.”
“Children heal quickly, sire.”
Gryvan heard-or imagined, he could not be sure which-dismissive insolence in that reply and twisted in his saddle to snarl at his Chancellor. But Mordyn was looking away, angling his head up towards the rooftops.
“What’s that?” Mordyn muttered.
Gryvan’s anger faltered. He crushed the reins in his frustrated hands. But there was a sound, clattering in over the tiled roofs. Gryvan listened for a moment or two, teasing it out from amongst the rattle of hoofs on cobbles. He did not know what to make of it at first. Its nature was elusive, as if it both belonged and did not belong in the city. Then he had it. Riot. Mob.
“Swords,” he cried at once. He bared his own blade.
Kale was riding towards him, shouting at the lines of warriors as he came.
“You should turn back, sire,” the shieldman said to his Thane, quite calm. “There is disorder up ahead.”
“No,” said Gryvan flatly. In this, suddenly, he found an answer to all the tumultuous ire that had been building in him for so long. His body knew what kind of release it required, and already his heart was pounding in anticipation. He dug his heels into his horse’s flanks and the great beast sprang forward.
A crowd was surging through a little marketplace. It tore at shuttered windows, rendered barrels, stalls, even an old abandoned wagon, down to fragments of wood, and then sent that debris flying up in a cloud of useless missiles. It surged around the well at the centre of the square, and crushed its human bodies against the stone parapet. It overturned a massive watering trough and broke in the door of a long-empty hovel.
Down upon this ravening beast, the High Thane’s hundred warriors fell like thunder. Gryvan himself was in the midst of the storm, seized by a bloodthirsty rage. He and his father, and his grandfather before that, had made this city and its people all that they now were. That there should be arson, that mobs should rampage through the streets-these things were an affront to the Haig line. They wounded him as surely as any blow to his own flesh. He would wet the streets of his wondrous city with the blood of those who offered such grievous offence.