Then Varryn was running down towards them, swinging around the shoulder of that bare knoll. He leaped from a boulder to land lightly at his sister’s side, already hissing something to her in the Fox tongue as he hit the ground. Tension sprang into her shoulders.
“The enemy,” she said.
And with nothing more than that, no more warning, there were White Owls amongst them. Figures spilled over the knoll and came rushing down like a loose flock of great pale birds. Orisian had time only to lift his shield and snap his sword free of its scabbard before there was movement and noise all about him, a storm of it. A solid blow on the face of his shield knocked him back a couple of paces, but the Kyrinin who had struck him swept on by. Orisian had a glimpse of wide grey eyes, the dark and swirling kin’thyn, a rictus of a mouth. He was not sure the White Owl had even seen him.
The next assuredly did, for a spear darted at Orisian’s thigh. He knocked it down and aside and its tip punched into the mossy earth. The Kyrinin who wielded it dropped it and ran on, bounding past the wild flash of a warrior’s blade. They had not come to fight, Orisian realised. The White Owls were pouring through the thin rank his men had prepared to meet this supposed charge, not pausing to offer anything more than the most cursory of assaults. In two and threes, they came leaping over the crest of the knoll, sped down its flank and danced their lithe way through the cordon of slow and clumsy humans, and then were gone, plunging back into the forest. It was like the dolphins that breached sometimes in the Glas estuary: emerging for only the briefest of instants into the world of light and air, then gone again, back into the limitless blank ocean.
Not all those making up that bewildered, impotent cordon were human, though. And one of them at least was fast enough, and impassioned enough, to weave a furious dance of his own. In a single sideways glance, Orisian saw Varryn, a fervent smile upon his face, moving with impossible, lethal agility. The Kyrinin flicked out his arm, and his spear punched a neat hole in a White Owl’s neck, and was withdrawn before the victim had even begun to stagger. Varryn lunged to his side and caught another on the forehead with the spear’s butt, streaking a red split across the white skin; he spun and the spear was suddenly in flight, blurring up the slope and into the stomach of a third descending White Owl.
A flicker in the corner of his eye had Orisian ducking and lurching away from a shadow, but the Kyrinin who cast it was past him and gone in the same moment. He looked after the disappearing woman, and saw Yvane crouching down, her back to him, protective arms enclosing K’rina’s hunched form. And Taim Narran standing in front of the two na’kyrim, making a wall of his body and sword and shield. The warrior did not reach for any of the White Owls as they sprinted by; he let them pass. He saw Orisian looking at him.
“Get over here,” Taim snapped, and Orisian obeyed instinctively.
He stood at Taim’s side, a fraction behind him, and they watched the Kyrinin flowing around and beyond them. In every face that passed Orisian saw the same thing: some strange admixture of panic and confusion and fear. It was so far from the measured composure he associated with Kyrinin that he found it almost repellent.
As suddenly as it had begun, it was over. But Varryn was unwilling to let it end. He sent an arrow skimming between the tree trunks in pursuit of the last of the receding figures, ran forward a few paces and set another to his bowstring, then another. He sped into the dappled forest without a backwards glance.
There were a handful of dead White Owls, and one of Taim’s men. A spear was embedded in the warrior’s chest, broken off halfway down its length. It must have been almost an accident, Orisian thought, staring down at the youth’s corpse. They were not even trying to kill us, and still someone had to die. He knelt and gently closed the open, blank eyes.
Ess’yr climbed to the top of the knoll and crouched there, turning and lifting her head this way and that.
Orisian returned to Yvane and K’rina. They were rising carefully to their feet, the one supported and guided by the other.
“Are you all right?” he asked Yvane.
She looked at him, and for the first time he saw in her eyes the same empty despair that he felt lodged patiently and watchfully at the back of his mind. In Yvane it had come into its full, bleak flowering.
“This can’t go on,” she said. “Did you see them? Did you feel it in them?”
“What?” asked Orisian cautiously.
“Out of their minds. Didn’t know who they were, what they were doing. The weight of him, of what he’s done, too much for them.”
Orisian nodded, for the want of anything to say.
Yvane swallowed and seemed to recover herself a little.
“The White Owl clan is older than any of your Bloods. It’s older than the Kingship that came before, even. There were people who called themselves White Owls when the Whreinin still hunted through these forest, in the Age before this one.”
“When there were still Gods,” Orisian murmured.
“Perhaps. And you see? You see what they have come to? Slaughtering one another like maddened beasts. Running about, senseless. Lost children.”
“It’s what we’re all coming to, isn’t it?” said Orisian quietly. “We’re halfway there already. That’s why we have to go on.”
Ess’yr came down from the knoll. There was blood on the tip of her spear, Orisian noted. A glutinous smear of it, already drying.
“We must move,” she said.
The unfamiliar strain in her voice, as much as her words, alarmed Orisian. Her face was as elegantly expressionless as ever, but something was tightening within her.
“More come,” she said.
As if summoned up by that single terse statement, there were cries in the forest. Looping, bounding cries, like the voices of birds. Distant, Orisian thought, but drawing nearer. The sound was unearthly, a disordered, jumbled melody of stretched and falling notes. It could have been Anlane itself, the mind of that vast place, calling out. Or announcing its waking. Announcing its joining of battle.
“They hunt,” Ess’yr said. “We must go. Now.”
She led them on, moving now with insistent haste that they struggled to match.
“What about Varryn?” Orisian called after her.
“He will find his way,” she told him.
Yet another of the babbling streams that crossed Anlane like veins in its vast body blocked their path. Too wide to leap across, they would have to wade.
Ess’yr paused upon its bank, looking up and down its writhing rocky length.
“In the water,” she said, and stepped into the flow. She turned and began to splash down-stream, picking a nimble course between weed-clothed stones.
There was an instant of hesitation amongst those who followed her. Some of the men exchanged doubting, reluctant glances. But those calls were still in the air behind them, bounding through the treetops.
“Hurry,” said Orisian, and went after her.
His boots filled at once with the brutally cold water, as if seized by hands of ice. The current pushed at his heels, piling water up against the back of his legs. Sensation retreated, withdrawing up through his limbs, leaving his feet deadened to all save the dull pain of intense cold. He stumbled, constantly fearful of losing his footing on some slick and slimy stone. Behind him, he could hear the others following. Though in truth he did not know whether they followed him or fled those haunting voices that filled the forest.
The brook led them where it willed, cutting a more or less northerly course over gently sloping ground. The notion settled upon Orisian that he walked in waters that would soon be part of the Glas. He was carried homeward by some fragment of the single titanic movement that joined stream, and great river, and ocean. This stream down which he laboured might soon be waves lapping at the walls of Castle Kolglas. And with that thought, he realised that he was not moving homeward at all, for his home was gone. Whatever he was returning to, it was not home but something else.