Anyara had not known what to expect of the vo’an. Now, after a night’s uneasy sleep, she was still unsure. Like everyone, she had heard tales of how the Kyrinin kept great bonfires burning night and day, or how their children never played but only practised the killing arts of bow and spear. Or how their old women ate the dead. She was tempted to remain in the hut they had been given and hide away from the unfamiliar sights and sounds and smells that lay outside. These were, after all, Kyrinin, and their kind had killed more than a few of hers over the years. But it was a belief deeply ingrained in her that fear—like grief, or pain—must be mastered, lest it become master in its own right. She did not want Orisian, and certainly not Yvane, to think she was unsettled by this place. So she went walking alone through the vo’an, and forced herself to hold her head up and look about her. The gaggle of children followed silently, attentively, in her wake.
She saw a young woman, perhaps her own age though it was hard to tell, dextrously gutting fish with a bone knife. A pair of men, barefoot and leaning on their spears, watched her go by from behind the blue turbulence of their tattoos. She heard lilting voices and from somewhere further away the casual, pitter-patter beat of a small drum being tapped. She smelled the smoke of small fires, meat cooking and the rich scent of the hides stretched over so many of the huts.
Few people paid her much heed, save the group of curious children. It did not feel threatening, but neither did it feel comfortable or entirely safe. She could not read this place as she was able, through birth and belonging, to read Kolglas, Anduran or even Kolkyre that she had only visited a handful of times. The Kyrinin knew she was out of place just as she did. They did not speak when she was close enough to hear, ignorant though she would have been of what they were saying. Their lack of interest in her was, she felt, as deliberate and conscious as any pointed stares would have been.
It was with some relief that she came to the edge of the settlement, where the platform met the shore. She stepped down on to the ground and walked a little way along the water’s edge. The children did not follow her. Tall reeds thronged the shallows and as she tracked a slight curve of the shore they cut off her view of the vo’an. Save for the smokesign in the pale sky, she might have been utterly alone in a wilderness. She found a place where the reeds gave way for a stretch and sat on a rock there, gazing out over the lake’s flawless surface.
Even as she watched, the morning’s thin mist parted and she glimpsed the towering peaks of the Car Dine to the north. She had the sense then of being in a borderland, poised between two worlds. Over the Car Criagar whence she had come lay the real world, of towns and markets and humankind. In the opposite direction, out beyond the Car Dine, lay something else altogether: the fearsome Great Bear Kyrinin; Din Sive, the most ancient forest in all the world, filled with shadows, and then the Tan Dihrin that touched the roof of the sky. Between this quiet lake and the Wrecking Cape which lay uncounted days’ journey to the north, there might not be a single human village or farm. She felt herself to be terribly small and fragile, the land and sky to be terribly unlimited.
She had felt something similar five years ago, when she emerged from the grip of the Fever into a world without her mother and her older brother. She felt unutterably vulnerable for months, poised between the tortured sleep of the Fever and a future which she barely recognised. She mastered that feeling in the end, along with the grief that could have crippled her. Now her strength was being tested again. She needed to hold firm, and not just for herself. It had not been just for herself that first time, either. Even then, in the wake of the Fever, part of it had been for Orisian.
She rose briskly to her feet. On impulse, she picked up a small stone and flicked it out over the water. She watched the ripples spreading out from its fall for a few seconds before turning back towards the vo’an.
She found Orisian and Rothe sitting on the edge of the platform outside the hut, their naked feet dangling down over the water. The sight was so incongruous—the probable Thane of one of the True Bloods sitting with his shieldman in the midst of a Kyrinin camp as casually as if they were on the harbour’s edge in Kolglas—that Anyara almost laughed.
‘What’s happening?’ she asked.
‘Nothing,’ said Orisian. ‘Varryn came to check on us, but he’s gone back to Ess’yr, wherever she is. We’re waiting for word.’
Anyara lowered herself down to sit beside them.
‘Where’s Yvane?’
‘Gone off,’ grunted Rothe. ‘On her own. Didn’t say where.’
Orisian was picking at a splintered crack in the planking. ‘She’ll be back soon, I’m sure,’ he said.
‘We’re trusting her a lot, for someone we hardly know,’ observed Anyara.
‘Indeed,’ agreed Rothe, ‘and the Kyrinin, too.’ To Anyara’s keen ear it sounded like a complaint born more out of habit than conviction. And he had not called them woodwights.
Orisian was unperturbed. ‘Well, Inurian did send us to her. I always trusted what he told me; I won’t stop now.’ He looked at his sister. ‘In any case, what choice do we have? We do need help, out here. We’d have been dead by now if it had just been the three of us.’
They lapsed into silence. Anyara had faith in her brother’s judgement; in most things, at least. Growing up amongst men, amidst warriors, could teach a great deal to a girl with the eyes to see, and Anyara had those. She wondered if Orisian was aware of the way he sometimes looked at Ess’yr. Perhaps he did not even know that his eyes followed her with a particular attention that, to Anyara, was instantly recognisable. She had seen men look at her that way in the last two or three years.
It was, though, not a look she had seen from her brother before. His interest in Jienna, the merchant’s daughter in Kolglas, had been embarrassingly apparent but it had been an unfocused, over-awed kind of fascination. There was little that was childish in the way he watched Ess’yr. It worried her. Any such union would be unthinkable to most of her race, but it was not Ess’yr’s inhumanity that bothered Anyara most. Rather, it was fear for Orisian’s feelings that stoked her unease. Ess’yr was too hard, too far from what he knew, to be a safe object of her little brother’s affection. And she had been Inurian’s lover. That was a river with dangerous currents, Anyara thought: one Orisian should have the wit not to swim in.
She could see signs of a change in her brother. He had always been a thinker, always able to see, or imagine, things she could not. But she had been the strong one, on the outside at least, since their mother and brother had died. Before that, it had been Fariel who shone most brightly. Now events were demanding something new of Orisian, and in response to that call he was perhaps beginning to unearth parts of himself that had long been overshadowed. He might be a good Thane, if he lived long enough. Even so, Anyara still saw in him the boy she had chased up and down Kolglas’ stairwells, and she was not at all sure that boy could fit Ess’yr into the puzzle his life had become.
Varryn came to fetch them an hour or so later. Wordlessly, he gestured for them to follow him into the heart of the vo’an. There, in an open space ringed by skull-adorned poles, Ess’yr was kneeling. A great, bizarre face woven of willow branches stood to one side.
‘It’s a soulcatcher,’ Orisian murmured when he saw Anyara looking at it. ‘They think it protects them from the dead. It’s supposed to be one of the Anain.’