Angain’s widow looked sharply at him, then returned her attention to the task of pulling on sleek calf-hide gloves.
“The Road does not grant us omens, of course,” said Theor. “But still. There is change in the air, I think. I fear.”
“Spare me any further involvement in your noble enterprises, First,” said Vana, and now the bitterness in her voice was unmistakable. “I thought I had the mettle to succeed my husband, to match his fervour, his strength. I find I do not. I am weary, and I have no remaining interest in the creed, or omens, or the wars you choose to fight. My family has already paid a high enough price.”
“It was never our intent, or desire, to do anything other than nurture the fire that your husband, alone amongst all the Thanes, kept alight. Many of the Inkallim who crossed the Vale were specifically tasked with keeping your children safe if — ”
“Then they failed,” Vana snapped. She flexed her fingers inside the gloves irritably. “You failed. Wain is dead. Kanin, by all accounts, is shunned by those now guiding the war. That vile halfbreed who first whispered thought of war in my husband’s ear rules in Kan Avor, I hear, with this Shraeve of yours serving as his Shieldmaiden. That is not what my husband hoped for.”
“There is much, I agree, that is unexpected in all of this — ” Theor nodded sympathetically “-but it is not given to any of us to predict fate’s course.”
“No?” Vana said. She glared at him, but he saw more pain than anger in her eyes. He felt a sudden sympathy for this woman who found her strength unequal to the challenges the world presented. “I’ll make a prediction for you: I will never have my son back, just as I will never see my daughter again. Ragnor wants me to summon him, as if anything I could say would change anything. I know my son, First. Wain is dead. Kanin would return only if there were none left to punish for that, deservingly or not. He will require a surfeit of blood, and still it will not heal him. In search of that healing he can never find, he will go on and on until he drowns in the blood of the dead.”
“As will we all, eventually,” Theor murmured as Vana walked away from him, descending the steps to where her grooms now waited with the horses. “It’s the fate of this world to drown in blood, sooner or later.”
III
“You’ve never heard of it before?” Orisian asked.
Yvane shook her head. “I’d never have believed it possible. I hardly believe it is possible, even now.”
She was walking alongside Orisian’s horse, trudging up the long, bleak track to Highfast. Her tolerance for riding had been thoroughly exhausted, and no one made any protest at her refusal, for she did not slow their progress. All of them, horses included, were bleary and sluggish. It had been two nights now since any of them had had any meaningful rest. Above, clouds spun and churned about the Karkyre Peaks. Gusts of eye-watering wind came tumbling down from the heights to sting their faces. Slabs of snow were scattered all across the mountains, clinging to whatever seams in the rocks gave them purchase and shelter. Most of the snow had been scoured from the track, but sometimes, when they were in the lee of some huge ridge or cliff, there were drifts deep enough to make progress painfully slow.
“We saw it, though,” Orisian said.
“We did. We saw something done for the first time, as far as I know, in all the world, in all its history. Myself, I was happier when I thought such a thing impossible. He is stronger than the Anain. He-one man, one na’kyrim-has killed…”
She splayed her hands, as if pushing away words, or thoughts, that she could not accommodate.
“It doesn’t change anything,” Orisian said.
“No?” Yvane grunted. “Tell your Fox friends that. They may disagree.”
Orisian glanced ahead towards Ess’yr and Varryn. They were thirty or forty paces further up the track, pushing on, heads down, with more stubborn resilience than anyone else could manage. Neither of them had spoken of what they had seen in those woods, when the Anain had appeared before them, and died. They alone had seen it killing the Black Roaders, and Orisian could barely imagine what that must have meant for them, to witness first the waking of the forest, and then its destruction; to see one of the beings they considered tutelary spirits of their lands, their lives, snuffed out like the feeblest of candle flames. Who, Orisian wondered, did the Kyrinin imagine would protect them from their restless dead, if the Anain could no longer safely venture near the surface of the world?
“But still,” Orisian said quietly, “it doesn’t change anything.”
Yvane looked at him. He met her gaze without flinching, and saw nothing in her of the fire, the challenge and argument that had so often been there. She was instead thoughtful and grave. After a time, she pursed her lips and looked away.
“The Anain know now that they can’t oppose him. If they thought to use K’rina against him… Now they cannot even protect her, or guide her, for if they rise up, Aeglyss has proved he can kill them. Ha.” Her curt laugh was sad, mournful. “They raised a forest once, to still a war. Now this one man is too much for them. And no; I suppose it doesn’t really change anything. We merely go from dark to darker.”
The doors of Highfast were closed. They stood tall and narrow, ancient but firm. Thick snow was falling as Orisian led his company across the arching stone bridge that tenuously wedded the mountain to the pinnacle from which Highfast clambered in mounting buttresses and walls and towers into the sky. Orisian had his collar high and tight about his neck, but still meltwater trickled down from his numb face and spread its chill beneath his jerkin. Snow layered every flat surface of the fortress, a succession of white ramparts stepping towards cloud.
The guards-disembodied voices crying out from hidden windows or battlements-refused to open the great doors. That angered Orisian.
“Bring your Captain here,” he shouted into the blizzard, standing in his stirrups as if that would strengthen his voice. “Herraic still lives, doesn’t he?”
They had to wait then, hunched down in their saddles, heads turned away from the wind-blown snowflakes. No one spoke. The ride up from Ive Bridge had been a miserable, punishing journey. To be denied shelter now that they stood at the very gate of their destination was unbearably, unacceptably bitter.
“I’d not thought to see you here again, sire,” came Herraic’s familiar voice from above, stretched and buffeted by the wind.
“Open the gates, Herraic. You know me well enough. I’ve forty men here needing shelter, half a dozen of them wounded or sick.”
“But it’s not just men, is it, sire? Forgive me, forgive me, but I see woodwights and na’kyrim there in your ranks. It’s ill fortune, ill-timed, that you bring them to our door.”
Orisian looked round. His warriors lined the bridge, stretching back in double file, the last few all but obscured by sheets of snows. He could see Yvane and Eshenna, uncomfortably sheltering between horses in the midst of the column, and K’rina, tiny, tied tight to Taim’s back. Ess’yr and Varryn were almost hidden, standing at the rear. It must have taken a keen eye to find them. Or a suspicious one.
“They ride with me, Herraic,” Orisian shouted angrily up at the invisible Captain of Highfast. “You’ve seen them all before, save one. You know they’re no threat.”
“Things change.” There was regret in his words, though he still shouted them into the storm. “I like it no better than you, sire, but things change for the worse. Trust’s too rare, the dangers too great, for any chances to be taken now. Since you left… there’s been too much blood shed since you last came to my gate, sire.”
Orisian slapped his thigh in exasperation.
“Herraic!” he shouted, his ire swelling his voice and bearing it up against the walls of the fortress. “Do you truly mean to bar your doors against the Thane of a Blood that’s fought and suffered alongside your own for more than a hundred years?”