He recognised her at once: Tara Jerain, the Chancellor’s wife. He had seen her riding at Mordyn’s side during the ceremonial review of the High Thane’s army before they had marched south. Such a presence once experienced was not forgotten.
‘Ah,’ said Mordyn, springing to his feet. ‘Taim, this is my wife, Tara.’
Taim rose and inclined his head as graciously as he could manage. ‘I am honoured to meet you, my lady.’
‘And I you,’ replied the woman in a voice as luxuriant as her jewellery. ‘I am sorry not to make your acquaintance on a happier day.’
Taim was a touch surprised that the Chancellor’s wife should refer so directly to the source of his distress, then he recalled the rumours that surrounded this woman. There was no shortage of them, and all suggested that she wielded almost as much influence, in her own way, as her husband. She was a worthy wife to the Shadowhand and would, Taim supposed, know all that Mordyn did about events in the north.
‘I asked Tara to join us,’ the Chancellor was saying, ‘in case there was anything she could do to make your men more comfortable here in the city. She can find them anything they need.’
‘Indeed,’ Tara confirmed. ‘Food, drink, the care of healers. Tell me what your men require, and it is theirs, Captain Narran.’
‘Their needs will be well seen to,’ Taim said, unable to keep an edge from his voice. He felt as if he had been waylaid. He was being dismissed; delicately, sympathetically, but quite deliberately.
The Chancellor’s wife gave a subtle nod, her eyes fluttering shut for the briefest of instants as if a breeze had touched them. ‘As you wish,’ she said.
‘You, at least, will rest here for a time,’ suggested Mordyn. ‘I will have a room prepared.’
Taim turned to the Chancellor. He caught himself before he gave full vent to his feelings.
‘Thank you, but my tastes are simple. I will rest with my men, and prepare for the journey on to Kolkyre. And to Anduran.’
‘You will not wait, then, for the High Thane to return?’ asked Tara, her voice all innocent inquiry. ‘Surely he can only be two or three days behind you on the road?’
Taim smiled at her. It was required of him, even though he felt that what mattered now, all that mattered, was waiting for him somewhere in the north.
‘I must go, my lady,’ he said. ‘My place is at my own Thane’s side. And I have a wife of my own, one I wish more than ever to see again.’
Anduran and Glasbridge, the greatest settlements of Taim’s Blood, were as villages compared to the enormity of Vaymouth and the masses of its population. People churned up and down the streets as thickly as fish in a drawn net. Taim had refused the Chancellor’s offer of an escort and a mount. He knew the way to the barracks well enough, and he craved release from the oppressive solicitude of Mordyn Jerain and his household. Now, struggling through the crowds, he was less certain. Although he had been in the capital of the Bloods twice before, its rough exuberance and scale still wrought a disorientating effect.
Strange smells and sounds assaulted his senses: spices and herbs he did not recognise; music made upon instruments unknown in the north; now and again the cadences of languages foreign to him, the odd native argot of Tal Dyre traders or the coarse-sounding olden form of his own tongue that was still spoken in distant parts of the Ayth-Haig Blood. He was jostled this way and that but knew there was no point in complaining.
Taim wondered at the way life continued in all its chaotic vigour. His own world was shaking, its foundations cracked by Mordyn Jerain’s news, yet it was a day like any other in these streets. Far away on the northern border of his homeland, men might be dying; men he knew well from his own time in the garrison at Tanwrye. Here, the traders hawked their wares and the townsfolk went about their business. He felt a kind of loathing for the people all around him.
The barracks themselves lay in the centre of the city. It was a long walk. In time the turreted and balconied spires of the Moon Palace, where Gryvan oc Haig’s family lived and ruled, came into view above distant rooftops. Around one last corner the press of the crowds thinned as the street gave out on to a wide square. The city’s barracks stood austere and massive on its far side. There were performers dotted across the open space, juggling or working sleight-of-hand tricks for appreciative knots of spectators. One was a firewalker whose olive skin and coloured tunic and pantaloons said he was a wanderer from the Bone Isles of Dornach. Amongst his audience a small, lean man darted this way and that, the rags he wore shaking as he bounced from foot to foot.
‘They are not gone,’ he cried to the sky. ‘It is not true. I have seen them, they watch over us still. I met the Gatekeeper on a street in Drandar. The maker! I walked in the Veiled Woods, and saw the Wildling there, feasting on a deer he had killed.’
A madman, Taim thought. The executioner’s axe would have been over his neck for such words once. Monach oc Kilkry had been merciless when the fisherwoman of Kilvale gave birth to the Black Road . Convinced that such heresies could bring only misery and chaos, he did not flinch even when the strife turned into civil war. Now no one even listens. No one cares about such things, not here where Gryvan rules. Once, stability and order had been the whole purpose of the Bloods. They had, after all, arisen as an answer to the tumult of the Storm Years after the Aygll Kingship fell. Now, it seemed to Taim, they served a different purpose: that of supporting the ambitions of the Haig Blood.
Taim passed in through the barrack gates, ignoring the stern gazes of the guards. He found his men in a hall at the furthest corner of the sprawling maze of buildings, yards and armouries. It was then that the burden of his position, and of his news, grew so heavy as to be almost unbearable. He saw exhaustion in the bodies and eyes of his men. They were grimed by the dirt of travel and their clothes were worn. At the far end of the hall the injured and sick lay upon pallets. He could offer none of the rest and comfort they all so deserved, and must raise them up for the long journey to home and, perhaps, a greater battle than the one they had left behind.
It was not so very difficult in the end. Taim took pride in their weary resolution, but for all his tiredness he did not sleep well that night.
Anyara’s cell in Anduran was cold and comfortless. All they gave her to eat was a thin gruel with a few chunks of dispirited grey bread floating in it. It was brought to her by guards, some of them women, who never spoke. They stood and watched her as she ate. She sensed their contempt for her, and sometimes something stronger: hatred almost. It made her angry. She was the Thane’s niece, incarcerated in her own homeland by intruders. It was she who had the right to hatred, not her gaolers. Her anger boiled over just once. She flung her bowl at the feet of a guard and spat curses at him. He regarded the gruel sprayed across his boots, and then struck her with the back of his hand. She yelped and clutched her nose in a vain attempt to stem the blood that sprang from it. He hit her again, on the side of her head, and knocked her down. He picked up the empty bowl and carried it away, slamming the bar across the cell door in his wake. After that, Anyara kept her feelings on a tighter leash.
In the nights she craved sleep as a kind of escape. It came only grudgingly. She lay on the battered mattress they had given her, curled like a worm in the stone gut of some great animal that had swallowed her. The Black Road haunted her exhaustion. To her it was a desolate creed. The whole idea that your life, and the death that would end it, was fixed from the moment of your birth was loathsome to her, yet her own impotence now seemed a bitter echo of it. All the strength she had cultivated over the last five years counted for nothing. Others had decided upon a cruel death for her, and there was not a thing she could do.