All within that concealing stand of trees felt the calm and quiet that currently embraced them to be a treacherously fragile, even deceptive, thing. A lie, told by a world that had turned into a savage and cruel mockery of itself, and could betray at any moment those who forgot how much had changed.
Orisian squatted down beside Ess’yr, holding his water pouch out to her. She blinked the offer away.
“We’ll be moving soon,” he said quietly. “Once it’s as dark as it’s going to get.”
The Kyrinin rolled her head, stretching her long neck.
“When you choose,” she said.
“I’m grateful for your aid in this,” Orisian murmured. Grateful for many things, in truth, few of which he could easily put into words.
“This opens the way north, yes?” Ess’yr said. “We move closer now, to the place we belong. To the war we must fight.”
She meant the White Owls, he knew. She and her brother believed they were travelling towards their own personal renewal of the brutal contest between Fox and White Owl; towards the discharge of a lethal duty that had been upon them ever since the fighting at Koldihrve. Vengeance, Yvane would no doubt dismissively call it, as Orisian himself might once have called it. He thought-he felt-a little differently now, though those feelings were imprecise, as hard to grasp and examine as vapours.
“Where did it come from?” he asked. “The hatred between Fox and White Owl, I mean.”
“From the beginning,” Ess’yr said softly, without inflection. “From the shape of things. From the pattern the Walking God made. He spoke with many animals, not one, as he walked. Without difference, there is no pattern at all.”
It was an answer that gave him nothing, but he had not really expected otherwise. To his surprise, though, Ess’yr had a little more to offer.
“It is not thought amongst my people,” she murmured, “that strife, and pain, and hate came to us only with the leaving of the Gods. These things have always been in the world, in its differences. They are part of what was made. When the Gods left, it was balance that was lost; not suffering that was found.”
Orisian nodded, though Ess’yr was not looking at him, and though her words gave rise to an inchoate sorrow in him.
“But there was no balance, even before the Gods departed, was there?” he said. “We killed the wolfenkind. Every one of them.”
“Still, it was balance the Gods sought,” Ess’yr said. She sat there cross-legged, straight-backed, with her hands upon her knees and now she did fix him with a steady gaze. “They chose to make us many, not one. They chose to put unlikeness into the world, where before there had been none. It must be, I think, that they believed such difference could bring balance. If it brings strife also, it must be that they thought that a fair price.”
Her eyes held him. The richness of her voice held him. He felt himself drawing nearer to her, to her life and her people. It took him, for a moment, out of the chill, fearful present; took him somewhere safer, better.
“My dreams have lost their balance,” he said, as much to himself as to Ess’yr. “When I manage to sleep at all. It’s cruel to find sleep so hard when the nights are at their longest.”
“They become shorter.”
“The nights? Do they?” He fell silent for a moment. Grief came up in him, rising in his throat, through his cheeks, touching his eyes. “Winter grows old, then. I missed its turning.”
Ess’yr said nothing. The last fading light that reached into the heart of the copse caught the tattoos that crossed her cheekbone, set the slightest glint in her soft grey eyes.
“We used to celebrate on the longest night,” Orisian said thickly. “In Kolglas. It’s the night when winter’s strongest, but also when it begins to lose its grip. There was feasting and dancing. And my mother sang.”
The immediacy of the memories was frightening, their intricate weight-grief and comfort too inextricably entwined to tell one from the other-so great that he felt himself buckling. But her voice was there, in his mind, coming to him across an impassable chasm of loss. He heard it, and at once it was gone, melting away into the sounds of the cold dusk, the accumulating darkness. The losing of it robbed him of whatever comfort it had offered; left him only with the grief. The bitter anger.
“Time to go,” he said through trembling lips.
Ive Bridge huddled in stony silence on the south bank of the river. Orisian remembered passing it as he made his first journey to Highfast, and he had thought it an unappealing place then. Now, it appeared ominous in its bleak isolation: squat houses crowded in on what little flat ground the terrain offered, and the bridge itself, hooking over the river like a bent finger. All of it was indistinct and menacing in the darkness, with only the faintest of moonlight to pick out its inanimate forms. A few lamps or torches burned in windows, but most of the village was all greys and blacks and imagined danger. He could just catch the soft scent of woodsmoke on the breeze. That smell too spoke to him with a threatening cadence these days.
Orisian could hear the River Ive down there in the crevasse it had made for itself on the far side of the houses, grinding and foaming in its mountain bed under the bridge. Somewhere beyond that noise, out in the utterly impenetrable darkness, lay the road that led on and up into the Karkyre Peaks, to Highfast. If he thought of that too clearly or carefully, doubt came crowding in upon him. He did not know how much trust to put in his own thoughts and instincts now, and chose instead-as much as he could-to hold his attention upon the present, the immediate.
Figures were moving down the rugged slope towards Ive Bridge: Ess’yr and Varryn, and a dozen warriors led by Torcaill. They did not follow the main trail that snaked its way into the village, but descended instead over steep, boulder-strewn ground, creeping from moonshadow to moonshadow. It would not be long before they reached the first outlying cottage.
Orisian rolled away and scuttled like a beetle-bent almost double, with his shield strapped across his back-to join Taim and the others. They waited in a cutting through which the trail passed before it began its descent into Ive Bridge. A fell sight: dark forms with a dusting of moonlight upon them, gouts of steaming breath rising from the horses, bared blades. Orisian hauled himself up astride his mount.
“They’re almost there,” he said quietly to Taim Narran.
The warrior nodded, and eased his way to the front of the column.
“Go carefully,” Taim said as he rode on. “Keep your reins tight until you’re told otherwise.”
The horses were wary at first, distrusting the dark road. It made them careful and quiet, at least, but still Orisian felt the tension of possible discovery. The slightest rattle of harness or slip of hoof on a loose pebble sounded loud, punctuating the background rumble of the river. No new lights were lit in Ive Bridge, though. No alarm went up. He could see no sign of movement down there. Even Ess’yr and the others had disappeared from sight, as if they had been swallowed by the rock or the shadows.
They covered perhaps half the way down to the village before a sudden strangulated cry broke the night’s skin. Even as its last anguished echo trailed away, Taim Narran was kicking his horse on. The long blade of his sword flashed once, a shaft of captured moonlight, as he flourished it, and then he was pounding off down the road. Orisian and the others followed. After that, it was a chaos of thudding hoofs, a jolting, jarring charge in which Orisian saw almost nothing but his horse’s neck pumping up and down before him.
They burst into the heart of Ive Bridge before anticipation or fear had any chance to take root in him. The darkness made everything sudden and bewildering. Figures-men and horses-jostled all about him. Shouts and the clatter of hoofs and ringing of blades echoed from every stone surface, shivering back and forth on the cold still air until they lost all form and became a single raucous accompaniment to the slaughter. And slaughter it was, rather than battle.