Fate had played a cruel trick in the last days before the army was to march. Life began to loosen its grip upon Angain oc Horin-Gyre. His strength slipped away and all his desire was not enough to let him take the field. So when the time had come, Kanin and his sister Wain had knelt at the side of their father’s bed, the scent of his sickness filling their nostrils, and promised to put an end to Lannis-Haig for him.
The executioners were tying back their victims’ hair. One of the boys—the younger one to judge by his size—was struggling against fear. His lips were shaking, convulsed by the half-strangled sobs that filled his throat. Kanin saw but did not note it. His thoughts had strayed far from what his eyes observed.
They had come so close to success. The attack across the Vale of Stones had trapped most of Lannis-Haig’s strength to the north; the castle at Kolglas was fired and the Thane’s brother killed; the town of Anduran itself had fallen pitifully easily. Yet it had not been quite enough. The castle held, and the Thane within waited for his allies to come to him. If Tanwrye had been assaulted a few hours earlier, or Kanin himself been a single day later in emerging from Anlane, there might have been hardly a warrior left in Anduran to man the castle. Croesan might have been caught exposed upon the road between his capital and Tanwrye. That had been the intention; the hope. On such fine margins did fate work its will.
Out on the square, blades cut through flesh. Four bodies toppled forward. Legs kicked; heads jerked in time to a slowing beat. Blood poured over the ground, running in intricate patterns along the countless channels between the cobblestones. Kanin wheeled his horse about and nudged it towards the merchant’s house he and Wain had made their own.
Wain. His other half; his stronger half, he sometimes thought. He knew very well that the majority of warriors they commanded feared her far more than they did him. The fervour of Wain’s belief in the Black Road, and in the Blood, was a beacon for all of them. Those things burned in Kanin’s breast too, but in Wain they were informed by a passion so ferocious its light could blind.
Angain had often tried to make his son marry. None of the brides Kanin had been offered—the fawning daughters of great landowners, even the mesmerisingly beautiful niece of Orinn oc Wyn-Gyre—had been a match for his sister. Kanin could not imagine himself marrying until he found a woman who could be measured against Wain and withstand the comparison.
He found her upstairs in what had once been quite a grand bedroom. The merchant whose family had lived here must have been a gifted trader, for the house was as finely fitted out as any Kanin had seen in his homeland save the homes of Thanes and their kin. Wooden panels carved with hunting scenes covered the walls. Ornate iron stands held flickering candles. There were wolf and bear skins laid out on the floor. They had been found in the loft, with dozens of others forgotten or abandoned by the fleeing family.
Wain was seated before a long, narrow table. She had set a burnished shield up on it and was grimacing at her distorted reflection as she ran an antler comb through her hair.
‘Done?’ she asked, without looking round.
‘It is done. I would rather have had them working on the walls.’
‘Four more pairs of hands will not make the city any more fit to meet an assault,’ said Wain. ‘Four cut throats may yield a good deal more food.’
‘Indeed.’ Wearily, Kanin unbuckled his leather tunic and cast it to the floor. The light shirt he wore beneath was soaked through.
‘I’ll have someone light a fire,’ his sister said.
He crossed the room and took the comb from her hands. ‘In a while. Let me do that. You’ll pull your hair out before you straighten it.’
He stood in silence for a few minutes, unteasing her hair with methodical persistence. Concentrating upon the task distracted him from his troubled thoughts. Her locks were beautiful, even dirty and knotted as they were. He could smell smoke and grime and sweat on her.
‘You’ve been labouring?’ he asked.
‘With the machine-makers. There’s enough timber and rope here to make a hundred war engines. It’s the hands skilled in the making that we lack; we lost some of our best back in the forest. Still, another few days and we’ll be throwing the ruins of their precious city down their throats.’
‘Another few days. And a week after that to break down the walls or the gate. Or two weeks? Or six? Have we got that long, Wain?’
She shrugged. Looking down at her hands resting in her lap, Kanin could see that she was toying with her rings. It made him smile. The habit had been with her as long as he could remember, and he could summon with perfect clarity the sight of her, an ungovernable, independent child sitting in her night robes and doing the same thing: turning, always turning, the ring on her finger. It happened when her mind was working, as if her thoughts moved with such force that they had to have some external echo. She had long since stopped noticing when she did it, and if ever Kanin pointed it out—which he sometimes did, with a studied air of innocence—she would glare at him with such annoyance that he laughed. That too reminded him of when she was young, of her severe expression whenever she had observed something that offended her child’s sense of what was right.
‘The guards told me you went to see our prisoners the other day,’ he said to diffuse the temptation of teasing her.
‘I did.’
‘And?’
‘The girl has more strength than I expected. Not as feeble as most of them seem. She is afraid, though, like all of them. They live in fear.’
‘What about the halfbreed?’
Wain’s reflection showed her lack of interest. ‘I don’t think he’s said a word since he was locked up. The guards stay out of his way. We should kill him and have done with it.’
Patience had never been a part of Wain’s armoury. When they had been children she had always been the one to court a scolding by loosing her dogs too soon on a hunt or venturing out on the ice too early in the season, before the adults judged it thick enough. Kanin knew it was hard for her, this inactivity. That was why she had gone to bait the Lannis-Haig girl. It was why she drove the workers making the siege engines so hard.
‘You never know when even a rat is going to have its use,’ Kanin said. ‘Look at Aeglyss. He’s served a purpose. Still, we’ll see. After they’ve stewed a little longer in the castle we can let them watch while we finish the girl. Maybe we should kill the halfbreed at the same time.’
Wain’s hands had become still. As a rule, it meant she had reached some conclusion. Kanin met her reflected eyes. She was excited.
‘It’s coming soon,’ Wain said. ‘I can feel it in my bones. The Road is going to turn, one way or the other. What do you think? Light or darkness for us?’
‘One or the other, Wain,’ he said. ‘One or the other. Aid will come to us from the north, or to Croesan from the south. This is a horse we can only stay astride. We cannot lead it where we will.’
‘Yes, yes,’ and he heard that fierce certainty in her voice that he knew so well, ‘but still I say something is coming. One way or the other.’