He heard a splash and breathless, gasping curses behind him, and turned. Yvane was struggling to raise K’rina from where she had fallen. Water churned about them. Taim stopped to help, waving the rest of the men on. Orisian waded back against the force of the water, but K’rina was on her feet by the time he reached them.
“Is she all right?” he asked Yvane, but the na’kyrim did not hear, or ignored him.
As they moved away from him, a fleeting glimpse of something pale drew his eyes back up the stream. He looked that way, and saw nothing. Only the drooping trees that lined the banks. The water murmuring busily along. Clumps of rushes nodding at its edge.
Then something: a single movement from left to right, as of an indistinct figure passing a distant window. And another. White Owls, he realised, darting across the stream. They were at the furthest limit of sight that the dense forest and the wandering stream’s course would permit. The only sound was at his back, as his companions made their sodden way along the bed of the brook. He saw these silent, wan instants of motion as the Kyrinin crossed one by one, and it seemed to be happening in another place entirely, without connection to him.
Until one of them stopped, halfway across, and stared directly at him. Even at that distance, Orisian knew their eyes met. He could envisage precisely that intent grey gaze, and feel its questioning touch upon him. He was already turning as a second figure joined the first, and as a flurry of fluting bird calls came down towards him, riding the cold air that hung above the stream between the overhanging trees.
“They’ve seen us,” he shouted. “They’re coming.”
The waters were hateful now, thickening about his legs, hampering every desperate surging stride.
“Out of the water!” he shouted, but Ess’yr already had them clambering up onto the bank.
Orisian’s feet throbbed as he staggered onto the grass, his sodden, heavy leggings plastered to his skin.
“We need some clear ground,” Taim was muttering. “Can’t win against Kyrinin if we get spread out, scattered amongst the trees.”
Ess’yr was listening intently to the calls cascading through the forest.
“They gather first,” she said.
“Not mad, these ones, then,” said Yvane bleakly. “They know what they’re doing.”
K’rina was leaning against her, shivering. Looking at the frail na’kyrim, a wave of weariness and feebleness ran through Orisian. All he had achieved here, following instincts that had seemed so sure and certain, was to deliver them all to a futile death.
Ess’yr was not finished yet, though. She led them on, away from the stream. The warriors followed without urging, their fear rendering them at last pliant. Orisian could see in their slumping shoulders and their gaunt, empty faces that the forest, its rigours, its accumulation of threat, had defeated them and left them willing to cleave to any guide who appeared to grasp its subtle horrors.
So they came to a place where a great oak, its girth the token of its agedness, had created about itself a wide ring of ground untrammelled by briars or shrubs. When in leaf, its sprawling branches must have cast such shade that nothing but moss and the most meagre of grasses would grow there. Pigeons rattled out of its crown. Beneath it, Ess’yr turned and stood. Taim Narran looked about with a frown.
“Not much,” the warrior growled. “But if it’s the best we can do…”
“No more time,” Ess’yr said. She leaned on her bow, forcing its notched limb down towards the looped end of the string.
“You two get down,” Taim said to Yvane and K’rina, jabbing the point of his sword groundward. “Lie flat, and we’ll shield you as best we can.”
Yvane sank down onto her haunches. She had to tug at K’rina’s arm to bring the other na’kyrim down.
“We keep between them and the arrows,” Taim told the remaining warriors. “And keep as much of ourselves behind our shields as we can. Depending on what sort of mood they’re in, they may lose interest if they see arrows aren’t going to do the job. Happens sometimes, with Kyrinin.”
Not this time, Orisian thought. No one fights with only half their heart any more. He took his place with the others in that feeble shield wall beside Taim. Just seven of them altogether, each sunk down onto his heels, shrinking himself into a knot of tension behind his shield. They arrayed themselves in half a circle, with the two na’kyrim lying at its heart, and behind them the great bulk of the oak. Orisian could smell the wood of his shield, and the dry leather of the grip to which his hand clung with such desperate rigidity. He looked back. Ess’yr was kneeling over Yvane. The Kyrinin’s face was a mask of perfect concentration as she brushed the flights of her arrows with careful fingers, seeking flaws. Deciding, perhaps, in which order to let them fly. The very stillness of her features in such moments gave the branching, curving tattoos of her kin’thyn an almost painted beauty, Orisian thought. He saw Yvane watching him with narrowed eyes, and he turned back into his shield and flexed his fingers about the hilt of his sword.
“Now,” Ess’yr whispered with no trace of urgency.
And like massive, gale-driven drops of rain striking shutters, the arrows hit the shields. First one, then a second, then a rippling drumbeat of them smacking home. Orisian felt his own shield tremble against his arm. And again, this time spitting fine splinters into his eyes. He blinked and saw the very tip of an arrow protruding from the inner face of the shield.
There was a scraping, and a moaning, and a shifting of bodies. And one of the men was slumping back. Orisian leaned back a little to look towards the sound. The man’s lower leg was spitted by an arrow, feathery flights on one side of his calf, bloodied point on the other. Others shuffled clumsily sideways to close the gap he had left. Orisian heard the snap of the arrow’s shaft breaking, and the gasp, through gritted teeth, as the man pulled the arrow through his flesh.
Within the rhythm of the arrows on shields, there were now a few duller, deeper notes, as some thudded into the trunk of the huge tree behind them. And another sound joined the chorus: the thrumming of Ess’yr’s bowstring as she sent shaft after shaft skimming out just over the tops of the shields in answer.
“Stay down,” Orisian murmured, but he did not think anyone heard him.
A spear rattled off the rim of his shield. He ducked instinctively. Then a deep silence descended. Within its ominous emptiness, a bird-a real bird, this-sang a brief, nervous song some way away. Orisian glanced towards Ess’yr. She was hunched down low, head dipped beneath her shoulders.
“What now?” he whispered.
She shook her head and gave a brief, puzzled shrug of her eyebrows. It was such a human gesture it made Orisian smile.
Taim stretched up a little and peered out. Orisian waited a moment, then did the same. The forest stared back at them, blank and motionless.
“Can’t be that easy,” Taim murmured.
The wounded man had torn a strip from the sleeve of his shirt, and was binding it about his leg, grimacing in pain. He fumbled at the knot, his hands blunt and clumsy. Yvane made an irritated noise through her teeth and pulled herself forward on her belly. She slapped the man’s hands aside and did his work for him.
Orisian returned his attention to the forest, and strained to untangle the slanting tree trunks, the shifting shadows, the clumps of undergrowth. Nothing. No sign of anything save the silent, constant forest itself, complete and impassive. But he imagined White Owls crouching within that concealing mass, flickering messages to one another on spidery fingers, signalling intent. Taim was right, he was sure. It could not be this easy.
“They’re still there?” he asked Ess’yr.
She nodded.
Having completed her ministrations, Yvane slipped back to her place at K’rina’s side, brushing hair away from the na’kyrim’s face. It made Orisian think of Anyara, and he did not know why. He frowned, troubled by that image, which had the texture of memory yet could not, for a moment, find its place in his past. And then it came. It was the echo of Anyara doing just that: brushing their mother’s hair aside when it had fallen across her eyes as she lay sick… dying… in her bed. There had been a sheen of sweat across Lairis’ skin, the smell of malady in the air. From amidst the awful cull of the Heart Fever, amidst all its crippling horrors and sorrows, that was what his mind chose to retrieve now. That one quiet moment. A moment of gentleness in the presence of death.