“My lady?” Anyara said.
Tara did not respond. She seemed fixated, to the exclusion of all else, upon her hands and the angry red welts that were already appearing there.
“My lady?” Anyara repeated. “Is everything all right?”
Slowly, Tara looked up. Her exquisite features had none of their usual lustre. She looked almost plain, as if her beauty had been washed out of her. At first, she gave no sign that she even recognised Anyara. She stared at her blankly.
“What do you want?” she asked at length, blinking like someone waking from sleep.
“I had hoped to talk to you about — ”
“No, no. Not now. I’m sorry.” Tara waved a limp hand as she spoke. Desolate sadness; weeping, blistering burns laid across her fingers and palm.
Anyara stepped back, reluctantly dipping her head, disappointed to find her intentions thwarted. But Tara spoke again after a moment.
“Wait. Wait. I have… I seem to have burned my hands.”
“Eleth’s here,” Anyara said. “I’ll send her for a healer. For bandages and salves.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
Anyara glanced at Eleth, who nodded and rushed away with evident relief. Turning back into the moist, scented heat of the bathing room, Anyara carefully advanced. Tara’s arms hung loose at her sides now. The spilled charcoal murmured in fiery whispers on the floor. The orange light of those braziers that still stood danced across the innumerable tiles, the smooth stone.
“We have nothing like this where I come from,” Anyara observed.
“No? No, well I suppose we are privileged to enjoy such indulgences here.”
“Perhaps we should find some water, to cool…”
“No,” Tara said. She wiped sweat from her brow with the back of one of her marred hands. “The healer will bring some, no doubt. The pain is… the pain is only pain.”
Anyara nodded. There was a depth of sorrow in this woman she recognised. Remembered. Loss was the only thing she knew that could at once so fill and so empty someone.
“You saw him in Kolkyre, did you not?” Tara asked. “Before he was captured?”
“Your husband. Yes, I did.”
“Was he then as he is now?”
“I am not sure I know what you mean, lady.”
“Has he changed? Is he as you remember him?”
Anyara had no idea what it would be best to say. She should be calculating how to win Tara’s favour. That had been her intent, after all, in seeking her out. There was no one else she could think of-no one with any influence-in whose ear she might find even a trace of sympathy. Yet calculation felt tawdry and futile in the face of such aching, familiar distress. “He seems… distracted. Graceless, if you will forgive me, in a way he was not before. He frightened me even then, my lady, if I am honest, but now… now he frightens me still, but in different ways.”
Tara stared at her in silence. Anyara feared she had forfeited whatever connection might have been possible between the two of them. But then the Chancellor’s wife nodded and hung her head.
“It is not true, what is being said-what he has said-about my Blood,” Anyara ventured. “About my brother.”
“Truth is a rare currency these days,” Tara said dully. “If you find it in short supply, you are far from the only one. What was it you wanted? My help?”
“I thought…” Anyara hesitated. She felt sweat upon her forehead, at her temples. A drop of it traced a crooked path down over her cheekbone. “You know it’s not true, I think. You understand that there is something wrong in all of this.”
“It is not my concern,” said Tara. A sad, reflective smile tugged at one corner of her mouth, bunched her cheek for a moment. She stared at the blank wall, and the smile faded.
Anyara could hear rapidly approaching footsteps: soft-slippered feet padding along the corridor. In a moment, she would no longer be alone with the Chancellor’s wife.
“Something has gone wrong,” she said again. “And whatever’s happening, it can’t be just about my Blood, or Kilkry. These lies must have a greater purpose. I don’t know what your husband saw… I don’t know what happened to him when he was captured by the Black Road — ”
“Enough,” said Tara sharply.
“Don’t you feel that everything’s going wrong? Doesn’t this all feel as if everything’s getting twisted out of shape?” Anyara persisted, beyond fear or caution now, hearing Coinach saying something to those arriving outside the chamber; delaying them, on her behalf. “Your husband… he said something strange to me, the other day. He said I had been in the forest, in Anduran, as if he was there with me, though I never met him until Kolkyre. He hasn’t… he hasn’t mentioned a na’kyrim to you, has he? A man called Aeglyss?”
The Shadowhand’s wife shook her head slowly. She kept watching Anyara, intelligent eyes unblinking, as Eleth came hurrying in, half a dozen others with her: maids and healers. One carried a slopping bucket of water, another great rolls of bandages, a third armfuls of vials and stoppered bottles. The eldest of the men bustled over to Tara Jerain, casting a puzzled glance at the overturned brazier, carefully skirting its scattered contents.
“What happened, my lady?”
“I pushed it over,” said Tara faintly, holding her hands out for examination. “It was very stupid of me. I felt in need of… noise.”
Anyara backed away, step by step, towards the doorway. Tara’s thoughtful gaze never left her, even as the healers muttered over her wounds, and began to spread salves over them.
*
The carriage had an escort of thirty men when it left Vaymouth. It rattled through the city streets in a cacophony of clattering wheels and hoofs. Half the lancers raced ahead, ruthlessly sweeping the streets clear of bystanders. There was urgency, for they had been late leaving the barracks beside the Moon Palace. The Captain in charge of the escort had been unexpectedly summoned to attend upon the Chancellor himself, and then kept waiting, frustrated and listless, while the morning sank into a grey and muted afternoon. The audience, when it came, had been mysteriously pointless: a fierce repetition of previous orders, an insistent emphasis on the need for haste. The Captain left the meeting feeling both somewhat battered and thoroughly puzzled that he had lost so much time for no discernible purpose beyond being forcefully reminded of the urgency of his mission.
The column burst from Vaymouth’s northern gate like a hound loosed in pursuit of a stag. The horses pounded up the road, shadowing the winding course of the Vay River upstream. The carriage shook, rocking from side to side. The great expanse of the Vaywater lay at least two days’ journey to the north-east. There, on the lake’s only island, was the village of In’Vay, and its ancient, crenellated tower. It was a place with a bloody history, a place of execution and slaughter. More than three centuries ago, the warlords of the Taral plains had taken Lerr, the Boy King, there when they betrayed his trust to seize him at parley. It was there he had died, last of his line, strangled in the Lake Tower, his body weighted with stones and sunk into the Vaywater’s embrace. It was there the Aygll Kingship had been finally, irretrievably extinguished and the Storm Years birthed.
Now another fallen lord was being carried to the Lake Tower. Those who rode in escort whipped their horses to a lather in hope of making up the time that had been lost in Vaymouth. The winter days were brief, though. In the shadows cast by its last light of the sun, they had parted from the great road that drove north to Drandar; their path was less travelled, taking an easterly curve.
There was only one great inn to offer shelter on this stretch. They stopped there to feed and water their horses, and get what rest they could before the next dawn. The carriage stood, square and silent, in the yard to one side of the inn all through the night. Eight men guarded it and the prisoner it contained, some sitting atop its flat roof, others leaning against its wheels, others walking in long, careful circuits of the yard, the inn and the whole hamlet.