‘You know him? Inurian, I mean. He has been to visit your camps?’
‘I saw you, with the big man, and I knew you. I saw you before, three summers before, with Inurian in a boat. Close to the shore. You did not see me, but he knew I watched. He made a sign.’
‘We never landed on the Car Anagais,’ Orisian said, thinking quickly, wondering how to make the most of Ess’yr’s willingness to talk. ‘I always wanted to come with him into the forest. I knew he was coming to your camps, and I wanted to go with him. He always put me off.’
Ess’yr looked him in the eye. ‘Why do you want to come to us? Huanin do not come to a vo’an.’
‘I know many of my people do not like the Kyrinin. They are afraid, I suppose, but it has never been like that for me. I just . . . I just wanted to see what your camps were like. To see how you lived. It’s hard to explain, but for the last few years I have often wanted to ... to be somewhere else than my home. Somewhere different, new. And I wanted to see where Inurian comes from, and where he went on his journeys, I suppose.’
‘He is important for you.’
‘Yes. He has been very kind to me in the last few years.’
Ess’yr brushed a hair from across her face. The gesture was so casual, so inconsequential, that for a luminous instant Orisian was held by it and freed of all the world beyond that sculpted hand and its languid movement. Ess’yr was quite still for the space of a few breaths. Then she stood up as if arriving at some conclusion.
‘Come. I will show you. Perhaps Inurian wishes it.’
She led him out of the vo’an. As they walked in silence, she ahead and he behind, Orisian reflected that Rothe would have seen this as a chance to escape; to overpower Ess’yr and flee. It was not something Orisian considered for even a moment, though. He doubted he could best the Kyrinin woman even if he tried, and in any case Rothe remained alone in the camp. His shieldman would view it as a grave failing, Orisian knew, but he could not possibly leave Rothe behind. There was, as well, his sense that he owed Ess’yr a debt. He might have died had she not found him and brought him here.
They came to a place where the ground levelled out. The earth was boggy and moss-covered and gave beneath Orisian’s feet. Ahead stood a dense grove of willows. From somewhere amongst the trees came the sound of trickling water. Ess’yr drew him to a halt a short distance from the willows. A few small birds, startled by their approach, darted deeper into the thicket. Orisian opened his mouth to speak. Before he could do so he found her thin finger touching on his lips, as light as air.
‘Breathe lightly,’ she said. ‘Speak soft. This is not your place. You are watched.’
Orisian waited for Ess’yr to explain.
‘This is a dyn hane. A place of the dead. The body goes into the earth. A willow staff is planted in the hands. If it buds, the spirit will go to Darlankyn. If it does not bud, they remain. Then they are kar’hane: the watchers.’
Peering ahead, Orisian could see that amongst the dense-packed, curving trunks and branches of the willow trees were scattered a few thin, leafless poles that must be the unregenerated burial staffs of Kyrinin. The sight of them made him imagine ghostly eyes upon him. The countless branches of the living willows brushed sighingly together. Each tree, he realised, marked the grave of a Kyrinin, its roots entwined about their bones in the soft earth.
‘Sent to the willow,’ Ess’yr said softly.
A cold grave, thought Orisian to himself, in wet ground by a forest stream. He had long known that the Kyrinin buried their dead instead of burning them as his own people did. He could not remember ever hearing about the trees, though. It occurred to him that he might, when riding with his father or with Croesan’s household on the hunt, have passed by such places as this. How many hundreds of Kyrinin might have lain in their dead slumber beside his horse’s hoofs?
‘The kar’hane do no harm, if you have goodwill,’ she said as they walked back towards the vo’an.
‘And those who are not of goodwill?’ asked Orisian.
Instead of answering his question, Ess’yr said, ‘Inurian likes the dyn hane. He names them places of peace. This is why I show you.’
‘Thank you,’ Orisian said to Ess’yr.
As they made their way into the centre of the vo’an, she directed his gaze toward the face sculpted out of branches. As always, it appeared sinister to him, as if a writhing mass of snakes had been suddenly frozen in place.
‘You ask what that is. It is...’ Ess’yr paused, searching for a word or phrase that did not come easily to her lips, ‘... a catcher of the dead. It is anhyne. An image of the Anain.’
In the moment she uttered the words he could see it, and wondered why he had not guessed it before. The Anain were unlike all the other Races; closer to the Gods, as some would have it. If they had a form at all, which many claimed they did not, it was that of wood, bough and leaf come to life. This, the unknowable thought of the green earth coursing through the forests and wild places of the world, was what the Kyrinin had sought to represent.
Everything Orisian knew of the Anain was half-legend, gleaned from tale and rumour. There were no more than a handful of stories of humans who had encountered one of them and almost all had dark endings. One of those tales every Huanin or Kyrinin alike knew welclass="underline" at the end of the War of the Tainted, when the Kings had cast down Tane and crushed the strength of the greatest Kyrinin clans, the Anain had roused themselves. They had raised a vast forest—the Deep Rove—where there had been none before, swallowing up Tane and all the lands about it. It set a wild, impenetrable barrier between the human armies and the Kyrinin fleeing away into the east. It, as much as the siege and breaking of Tane, had ended the bloodshed. And here, in the peaceful heart of the vo’an, was a representation of that awful power, watching over the playing children and the wandering goats.
‘What does it mean?’ asked Orisian, finding himself speaking in hushed tones.
Ess’yr frowned slightly. It was a strange sight upon her normally undisturbed features, as though some bird had passed for a moment across the sun and cast a flicker of shadow over her face.
‘If the body does not come to the dyn hane, the... spirit will not rest. The anyhne is the guard against this. It brings the Anain close. They guard against the restless dead.’
The restless dead, Orisian thought. That was a fit name for them. He did not believe in ghosts—not the kind he understood Ess’yr to mean—but there were other ways for the dead to be restless.
‘I didn’t know there were any Anain here,’ he said.
‘They come before the eye in few places. What you call Deep Rove. Anlane where the enemy is. Din Sive. But the eye is not all. They fill the green world. You do not see them, but they are here.’ She would say no more after that. It was enough to leave Orisian wrestling for hours with a sense, still more acute than what he had felt before, of being watched. No matter that Ess’yr said the Anain were a protection, he had no wish to lie beneath the gaze of such legends. That night he craved the stone walls of Kolglas, their solidity and unchanging presence, in a way he had not for years.
Orisian was woken by hands that stripped the furs from over him, and urgent voices that tore at the slumber clogging his ears. His first instinct, still half-asleep, was to struggle and fight against the bodies that seemed to crowd in upon him. There were too many, and he abandoned any resistance. He was pulled and pushed out into the cold night. Blearily he looked around.
A great crowd of Kyrinin was gathered before his tent: so great that he thought every man, woman and child of the vo’an must be assembled there. They stood in silence, their eyes fixed upon him. Those who had roused him melted into the crowd, leaving him standing alone, still a little unsteady. The forest was bathed in radiant moonlight, casting an ethereal glow over the colourless faces that confronted him. He looked up and saw a great white full moon hanging in the sky overhead.