Despite the press of bodies in the room, there was space around one table: the best table, close by the blazing fire. Wain, Shraeve and Cannek sat there, eating in silence. In the days since Kanin left for the Car Criagar, Wain and Shraeve had become the centre of all attention, the focus of the army’s strength, the wellspring of its faith. And so everyone kept a respectful distance from the sister of the new Horin-Gyre Thane and the mistress of the Battle . Cannek of the Hunt passed almost unnoticed, which was as he would wish it.
Shraeve disposed of the bread and meat in front of her methodically, without enthusiasm. One of her Inkallim came and placed a flagon of wine on the table.
‘I thought we should allow ourselves some celebration,’ Shraeve said in response to Wain’s questioning look. ‘They deserve it.’
Inkallim were coming out from the kitchens, distributing similar flagons around the room. They were met with roars and cheers that might have shaken loose the roof timbers. Cannek winced at the eruption of joy.
‘We agreed to keep it locked away,’ Wain said.
Shraeve smiled icily. ‘There’s not enough to cause any trouble, and they’ve fought hard enough to earn it, don’t you think?’
Wain glanced around, noting that none of the Inkallim were sharing in the bounty their leader thought they had earned. Shraeve had been more forward since Kanin had left. Before, she had been content to exert absolute power over her own Inkallim; now she was finding small ways to spread her net wider, as if she wanted to test Wain’s patience. It might have to come to a head, but tonight was not the time.
Cannek pushed away his plate, leaving half the food uneaten. He drained a cup of wine and rose.
‘I will leave you two fell ladies to your pleasantries,’ he smiled. ‘I’ve work to do tonight. We’re going to take a look down the road to Glasbridge.’
‘I’ve a dozen scouts out that way already,’ muttered Wain.
Cannek shrugged. ‘We of the Hunt like to feel useful,’ he said lightly. ‘You wouldn’t want us loitering around here at a loose end, would you?’
As her fellow Inkallim departed Shraeve laid down a chicken leg she had been gnawing. She pressed a cloth precisely against her lips, leaving small greasy stains on the material.
‘It is best to leave the Hunt to their own devices,’ she murmured. ‘However good your scouts are, Cannek’s are better. If there was only a single mouse in a field of oats, the Hunt could find it.’
‘Yet they cannot tell me what has become of Aeglyss, can they? Or is it will not?’
Shraeve gave a disinterested shrug of her shoulders. She was not looking at Wain; her eyes drifted idly over the crowds that filled the inn. Faces were reddening, now that the wine and ale were flowing, and voices grew louder.
‘He slipped by all of us,’ the Inkallim said. ‘The woodwights are cunning enough to test even the Hunt’s skills. Anyway, does it matter? Your brother made it clear he had no further use for him, or for the White Owls.’
‘It matters little,’ Wain replied. She was careful to keep her tone flat, unrevealing. In truth, she was uneasy that the na’kyrim had disappeared, and with him the alliance—however illusory—he had forged on Horin-Gyre’s behalf with the White Owls. Her father had always seen Aeglyss as nothing more than a key to unlock the door to Lannis-Haig, to be discarded once his usefulness was at an end. Now that the breach had come, though, Wain suspected it would have been better had they killed him. As it was, he was wandering around somewhere, out of their sight and out of their reach. However useful he had proved, he had also proven himself unpredictable, perhaps dangerously so.
‘I only regret that we don’t know where he is,’ she said, ‘and what he’s doing. I would not want him to turn up again unexpectedly, interfering.’
Shraeve gave her a sudden, bleak smile.
‘There is no wrong or right on the Black Road, only the unfolding of its inevitable course. You know that as well as I.’ Then she would say nothing else.
Wain took to her own room not long after. The evening had left a sour, unsettling twist in her thoughts. It did not overly concern her. The Black Road always went its own way; always confounded the expectations of those who walked it. Learning and accepting that was at the root of the creed. Yet . . . given their astonishing success in the last few weeks, it was strange that there was so little room in her mind for joy, for exultation. There were too many things casting small shadows across her to allow for that: Kanin pursuing his own, personal fate in the Car Criagar; Aeglyss and the White Owls off the leash; the Inkallim watching everything with their cold eyes. Wain was no longer sure this was the same war her dead father had set in motion.
Deep in the heart of the forest that the Huanin called Anlane, but they knew as Antyryn Hyr—the Thousand Tree-clad Valleys—the small band of White Owl Kyrinin paused in a glade. They had been walking for two days and two nights, following one of the First Tracks made by the God Who Laughed in the dawn of the five races. Ever since leaving the city in the valley, they had not paused: no sleep, food eaten on the move, no slackening of their steady, remorseless pace southward through the forests that were their home.
Only one of the faithless Huanin had managed to track their departure from the valley. They had killed her, and her hound, on the second day. It would not be fitting for one of the Huanin to follow where they were going. They had stripped her body and left it on open ground where the eaters of the dead would quickly find it.
The na’kyrim had remained bound all this time. They kept his arms lashed behind him, and kept him gagged, for they knew that he had a deceitful voice. The lies he told had the power to twist the hearer’s mind; the promises he made might put a hunger in the heart, but they had no more substance than the dew glistening on a spider’s web. It was in answer to promises broken, to hopes unfulfilled, that they had brought him all this way while their brothers and sisters hunted the enemy in the mountains beyond the valley. Every one of them would prefer to be amongst those making war upon the Fox, for they knew that this would be a war unlike anything that had gone before. The hated Huanin had ruled in the valley for hundreds of years, putting such a barrier between Fox and White Owl that only small raiding parties could make the crossing; now, with the strife between the Huanin tribes, the gate had been thrown open. The Black Road Huanin might have proved no more true to their word, no more trustworthy, than any others of their kind, but they had at least allowed hundreds of White Owls to march across the valley and into the enemy’s lands. It would be a bathing of spears to break the hearts of the Fox.
Still, all the promises of friendship, of alliance and benefit, that this na’kyrim had brought to the White Owls those many months ago had melted away like snow in the season of breaking buds. These warriors had seen with their own eyes the lord of the Huanin strike down the na’kyrim, curse him and cast him out from his councils and confidence. Where were the cattle, the iron that had been promised? Why were there still Huanin villages and huts standing on the naked ground that had been carved out of the Antyryn Hyr’s northern flanks? Why had the Huanin lords turned against the White Owls, after so much aid had been given? For all of this, there must be an answering. The na’kyrim was the child of a White Owl mother. They had made honest agreements with him, and held fast to them as they would with one of their people. He must answer for the ruin of those agreements.