She looked up as Yvane sat beside her on the thin mattress. Orisian saw the same thing in her eyes he had seen in so many others: a defeated, drained emptiness.
“This is where I belonged,” Eshenna murmured as she looked down once more to her hands. She held some tiny fragment of cloth there, twisting it around her long fingers. “These are the people I belong to. I should never have left. I should have been here.”
“No,” murmured Yvane.
“We couldn’t have made any difference,” Orisian said. “None of us. Not here.”
“I know,” Eshenna whispered. “That’s not why I should have been here.”
And Orisian understood her. He felt the same longing rising up in him: not to have been here in Highfast when Aeglyss came, but to have slipped Rothe’s grasp when his shieldman dragged him out of Castle Kolglas on the night of Winterbirth. To have plunged back into the fire and the fury and been at his father’s side. Try to save his father, try to save Inurian. And, in failing, to be released from the burden of all that had flowed from that one night.
He closed his eyes. All his anger easily folded itself into a shaming despair, a profound sense that nothing was as it was meant to be. He should have paid the same price that had been demanded of Kylane and Kennet, Rothe and Inurian. And he could have wept then, thinking of his mother and brother, bound in linen winding sheets, riding the corpse-ship out to The Grave. For the first time he understood, not with his head but with his heart, what had been inside his father all those years since the Heart Fever stole away Lairis and Fariel. It was not grief; it was the desire to have gone with them. It was guilt at having let them go alone.
He blinked at Eshenna.
“Where’s Amonyn?” he managed to ask.
“The Scribing Hall,” she told him.
“I know the way,” Orisian said.
The cavernous space of the Scribing Hall felt cold and dead. Wet ash was piled thickly against some of the walls and smeared across the floor. In one corner was a great, precarious heap of half-burned timbers, fragments of shelves and tables and chairs. Thick black soot streaked the walls and darkened the ceiling. Everything, everywhere, lay beneath the finest grey dust of destruction. A few meagre stacks of books and manuscripts had been assembled on some of the surviving desks. Many were scorched, their edges charred and curled. It was a pitiful remnant of the innumerable writings Orisian had seen when last he entered this library.
“That’s what remains to us of all the labours since Lorryn first came here,” Amonyn murmured. “More than two and a half centuries.”
Orisian remembered seeing him on his first visit to Highfast; one of their Council, he thought, though they had never spoken as far as he could recall. There seemed to be a consensus amongst the na’kyrim that this man, as much as any, was now their leader. He was tall and handsome, still possessed of a certain grace and air of physical power despite recent hardships. He was subdued, though. Sorrowful and weary.
Orisian stirred a strandline of ash with the toe of his boot.
“Cerys… the Elect… died here,” said Amonyn. He sighed. “It would have broken her heart to see it thus. It breaks all our hearts.”
“Asking too much to start again,” Orisian said. It was half-statement, half-question.
Amonyn pressed long, milk-nailed fingers into his eyes. There was a strength about him, but it was not an unopposed strength. It was there, and evident, because it was required. Because the man it fortified was beleaguered.
“There are those who wish to leave this place and never return. Too much grief here. Too much horror.”
Orisian nodded silently. Amonyn lifted his gaze towards the small windows high on the far wall. They admitted only a watery light.
“This was meant to be a sanctuary for us,” the na’kyrim said. “And in the end it was one of our own kind who breached it. It was the Shared, ours alone, that undid us. But then, sanctuaries can only ever come to one of two ends: they cease to be required or they fail. It was never likely that Highfast’s end would be of the first kind, I suppose. That would have been asking for deeper changes in the world than are common.”
“Where would you go if you left?”
“Dyrkyrnon, for most.”
“I imagine there’s no place there for a Scribing Hall, or a library.”
“It seems unlikely,” said Amonyn quietly.
“You should stay. All of you.”
Amonyn glanced sideways at him. A shrewd, thoughtful look.
“It would be, for many, the harder choice to stay. Something was lost here, and it could never be recovered. Safety, for a people who find the world ill-provided with that quality. They-we-trusted this place.”
The na’kyrim studied Orisian as intently as a gemsmith examining a stone.
“There was less sadness in you when last you were here,” he said. “Less darkness. Eshenna has told me a little of what you have seen since then. She expressed some concern about you.”
“She need not worry.”
“No?” Amonyn sighed. “Such wounds as you bear are difficult to conceal from na’kyrim. From some of us, at least. Doors that were once open in you are now barred. Windows have been shuttered. It is not unusual for any of us, when we are bruised, to retreat in the hope of avoiding further injury.”
Orisian crossed to one of the smoke-blackened desks and rested back against its edge. The solitude and disconnection he had for so long now felt growing within him were softened for a moment by a vivid sense of Inurian’s presence. He could recall his lost friend’s face with fresh clarity, envisaging it graced with a sympathetic smile. There was much about Amonyn that reminded him of Inurian.
“I’ve not chosen to bar any doors,” he said, “but… things have changed. All those I most valued are dead, or have been parted from me. And I am Thane now. I imagine Thanes must always be somewhat alone.”
Amonyn raised his faint eyebrows and gave a slight shrug.
“I have little experience of Thanes,” he admitted. “I think any man, though, whatever his station, will break if he takes all the weight of decisions, all the assaults of the world, upon himself alone.”
“You’ve seen K’rina?” Orisian asked.
Amonyn hesitated for a moment, as if debating whether to concede such a shift in the conversation. The decision was made, and he nodded.
“Do you understand what has happened to her?” asked Orisian. “Eshenna claims she is some kind of… weapon. Or trap.”
“It may be so,” Amonyn said. He was grave, his voice tinged with sadness. “Her essence is either gone, or so deeply buried as to be beyond giving any sign even in the Shared. When she is near, I feel…” He curled the fingers of one hand in the air, reaching for precision. Defeated, he let his hand fall back to his side. “There is a hunger there. A mindless hunger. And the spoor of the Anain are upon her, like the tracks of deer in the earth. Whatever has been made of her, they did the making.”
Orisian pursed his lips. His hands closed upon the lip of the desk. The wood felt brittle and dry beneath his grip. He looked at his palm and saw a bar of ash across it.
“There is something of her that reminds me of Tyn, the Dreamer,” Amonyn said, wincing at the memory. “Of what Aeglyss did to him. How he… emptied him, and then wore the empty shell himself. K’rina is a shell, but what is now within? Perhaps nothing.” He sighed. “But in truth no one here can tell you any more than Eshenna or Yvane have already done. To learn more about K’rina, we would need to go much deeper into the Shared than any of us would dare. What Eshenna has already discovered… It was an act of great bravery, or desperation, for her to search it out.”
Orisian nodded. “Too much for her, I think,” he said. “I regret that. It was at my insistence that she did it.”
“You won’t find anyone here eager to repeat the venture. The beast found his way inside our defences once already. We would not invite him in again.”