He laid a tiny cut into the skin of the baby’s arm. A bead of blood formed. An expression of offended puzzlement appeared on little Croesan’s face. He made a coughing noise that threatened to develop into sobs. Athol caught a fraction of the blood upon the very tip of the oathknife. With his thumb he began to rub the liquid into the blade.
‘You pledge your life to the Lannis-Haig Blood?’ asked Athol, and Naradin agreed softly.
‘You bend your knee to the Thane, who is the Lannis-Haig Blood?’
‘Yes,’ Naradin said.
‘None may come between you and this oath,’ said Athol sternly. ‘By this oath you set aside all other allegiances. The Blood shall sustain you and bear you up. You shall sustain the Blood. Speak your oath.’
Naradin took a deep breath and said, ‘I speak in the name of Croesan nan Lannis-Haig, son of Naradin and Eilan. By my blood I pledge my life to Lannis-Haig. The word of the Thane is my law and rule; it is the root and staff of my life. The enemy of the Blood is my enemy. My enemy is the enemy of the Blood. Unto death.’
Athol leaned forwards and laid the stained knife on the baby’s naked chest.
‘Unto death,’ he said, and turned away.
Naradin lifted his son in his arms. The baby was crying now. Eilan came and bound his wounded arm. There were tears on her cheeks as she kissed his soft forehead. Croesan the Thane took his grandson. He cupped the baby’s head in his great hand and gazed down into a face contorted by mounting unhappiness.
‘Hush, hush,’ whispered the Thane. ‘The Blood shall sustain you, little Croesan. The Blood shall sustain you.’
He put all his belief into the words. He meant them with all his heart, yet knew they were only a part of the bargain. The Blood would not sustain his brother’s daughter, imprisoned somewhere in this very city that Sirian had built. Croesan himself had held the crumpled message from his besiegers over the flame of a lamp and watched Anyara’s life burn away in his hand. He had no choice, just as there had been no choice but to bar the gates of the castle against his own townsfolk when the enemy drew too near. Yes, the Blood sustained its people. Sometimes too it made demands of them that would break the hardest heart, and Croesan’s heart had never been of the very hardest stuff.
Anyara found marks scratched on the wall of her cell. As far as she could tell, running her fingertips over them, they were nothing more than a counting of days: a dozen short, shallow lines gouged out of the stone by some previous inhabitant of the gaol.
Her own days passed with grinding slowness, every minute extending itself as if to savour her impotence. Even so, she found herself wishing it would slow still further, so that the moment when hope died would be delayed. Every morning she woke half-expecting that they would come and take her to be killed.
She leapt up and grabbed at the bars of the tiny window to test their strength, and found they were immovable. She tried to strike up conversation with one of the guards, choosing a man who seemed a fraction less implacable than the others. He did not respond to her approaches and gave no sign of even noticing when she smiled her finest smile and fingered the hem of her ragged skirt for him. For half a day she feigned illness in the hope that they might move her to a less secure place. She writhed upon her mattress, clasping her stomach and copying the sounds she had heard serving women in Kolglas make when they were giving birth. When a guard came in and asked her what was wrong she pretended she could not reply. The woman seized her hair and turned her face upwards, holding her like that for a few seconds before snorting and leaving. After a few hours had passed and no one else came she abandoned the pretence.
So much time passed that she almost started to believe they were not going to kill her after all. She resisted that thought. The hope she needed to find was a strong one, not one based on an illusion that the world was going to change its nature and become kind and merciful. She had to look after herself. It was what she had always done.
A family—mother, father and two young boys—was being executed in Anduran’s main square. Kanin nan Horin-Gyre was there to witness it. They had tried to hide food from one of the Bloodheir’s foraging parties. A poorly relaid section of boarding in the floor of their house betrayed a few bags of flour and dried meats, and condemned them all to death. None disputed the order that the children must die as well as their parents. The reasoning was common currency amongst the northern Bloods: if a life must to be taken, take those of any who might avenge it at the same time. Still, Kanin had commanded that the family should have quick deaths, their throats cut with sharp knives as they knelt blindfolded upon the cobbles of the square. Cruelty would not have added to the message their deaths were meant to send.
It was not the sullen resistance of these common folk that had brought a black mood down upon the Horin-Gyre Bloodheir. He expected little else; had expected more of it than he had found, in fact. Rather, it was the mere fact that he was standing here in the miserable drizzle watching them die while his true foes were ensconced behind unyielding walls. He had dared to imagine, as he struggled through the seemingly unending wilderness of Anlane with his army, that fate would be kind to them. He had hoped that the head of the Lannis Thane might be on a spike over the castle gatehouse by now. Instead he faced the prospect of a wearing siege, with time as great an enemy as the warriors on Castle Anduran’s walls. He strove for the humble acceptance of fate’s course his faith demanded, but it was hard.
This war had been a desperate enterprise from the start, conceived in the hope that fate would favour the bold. The border stronghold of Tanwrye was too stern an obstacle to be easily overcome, as the Horin-Gyre Blood had learned to its cost in the past, but when the halfbreed Aeglyss had appeared at the Horin-Gyre fortress of Hakkan, promising that he could deliver the aid of the White Owl Kyrinin, Kanin’s father Angain had glimpsed opportunity. Although Kanin felt nothing but contempt for the progeny of such obscene interbreeding—and Aeglyss had struck him from the start as a particularly distasteful and self-serving example of his kind—even he had been exhilarated by the possibility the na’kyrim offered up: an entire Horin-Gyre army smuggled through Anlane deep into enemy lands, reducing Tanwrye to an irrelevance. Before Kanin was born, when Angain himself was Bloodheir, the finest of the Horin-Gyre Blood had been slaughtered at Tanwrye by the army of Lannis-Haig. Angain’s younger brother had died there while Angain lay in his sickbed, prostrated by a wound taken in a bear hunt. Aeglyss offered the Thane not just vengeance but a kind of healing when he promised that he could open a path to the heart of Lannis-Haig.
Out in the centre of the square one of Kanin’s shieldmen was reading aloud the sentence. There was not much of an audience. Aside from the Bloodheir and some of his Shield, the only onlookers were a few groups of warriors huddled in their cloaks and a dozen or so residents of the city who had been dragged out to watch. They were poor folk, clad in ragged clothes and keeping their eyes down. They gave every sign of indifference to what was happening in front of them. Kanin knew, though, that they would spread word of Horin-Gyre justice through the small population left in Anduran.
The other Bloods of the Black Road had mocked Angain’s proposal at first, not least because the very idea of alliance with a Kyrinin clan was repellent to them. Even when grudging assent was granted, no more than a thousand Gyre swords had been lent, and those only in support of the feint against Tanwrye. More would come, the High Thane pledged, if fortune showed the way; it was obvious what he thought the likelihood of that was. And a hundred or so warriors of the Battle Inkall had come forward, of course, with Shraeve at their head. The thought still twisted a barb in Kanin’s guts. The Inkallim had betrayed his family all those years ago at Tanwrye, watching from a knoll while the Horin-Gyre warriors were overwhelmed, and he did not trust them now. Shraeve, though, had been the one who suggested that not just the Thane but all the ruling line of Lannis-Haig should die, and volunteered some of her warriors for an assault on Kolglas. Aeglyss had again delivered White Owl aid for that attack. However much Kanin despised the na’kyrim, his value was beyond dispute. Without the food and guides provided by the woodwights, he might have lost half his warriors on the march through Anlane; the other half would probably have been killed in skirmishing if the White Owls had been actively hostile.