His unease was reinforced by the small rituals Ess’yr and Varryn followed. They never made a fire until darkness had fallen, and then only a small one that they ringed with a makeshift low screen of branches to muffle the light. When the time came, as her brother was decanting the embers of the previous night’s fire from the birch bark container he carried and sustained them in, Ess’yr would find a flat stone. She set it at the new fire’s side and placed a few scraps of food on it. In an almost inaudible voice, she murmured a few words. After she was done, Varryn would bow his head over the food and whisper the same incantation. In the morning they left the food behind them as they made their way onwards.
Orisian hesitated to ask Ess’yr what the act signified. His curiosity must have been poorly concealed, for on the third evening Ess’yr sat beside him at the fire.
‘The food is for restless dead. Those who walk. No anhyne to guard us here. If one of the restless comes in the night, they will take the food. Leave us.’
‘The restless dead,’ echoed Orisian, feeling the stirring of the darkness beyond the reach of the fire’s frail light. The unburied dead.
‘You fear the dead,’ he murmured.
‘Not fear. Pity. Only those who do not rest.’
Orisian was not sure how to behave with Ess’yr. He felt she was less at ease with him now than when they had been in the vo’an. It might be because of Varryn’s presence, or the fact that she was no longer his healer but his guard, guide and escort. Still, she did not mock him as Varryn did. She would talk to him and tell him things, if not with as much freedom as she had on occasion back in the camp. More often than her brother, she would wait for him and Rothe to catch up when they fell behind.
They came to a stream that bubbled along between moss-covered rocks. There was a pool where the water paused, gathering itself before rushing on down towards the valley that summoned it. While Varryn and Rothe sat in silence, Ess’yr took Orisian to the water’s edge and made him kneel down beside her. He did so gingerly, trying to protect his side. The wound had been hurting more for the last day or so.
She pulled up the sleeve of her hide jacket, exposing the pale, sculpted length of her forearm. He watched as she flexed her long fingers. She slipped her hand into the water with seamless delicacy, leaving barely a hint of its passing upon the surface. As she reached beneath the lip of the bank, she looked not at the water or at her arm but at Orisian. He could not look away from those utterly grey eyes.
Her face betrayed nothing: no expectation, no concentration. Its surface was no more ruffled than that of the pool. Her hand emerged, and cupped in it was a small, glistening fish. It was a mountain trout, its flanks speckled with red dots. Orisian laughed, and for a moment there was a smile on Ess’yr’s lips as if the sun had touched her.
‘You,’ she said.
He obeyed, sinking his hand into the water. He moved his hand along the bank, feeling the earth, brushing his fingertips over pebbles. He touched something alive and cold and smooth. Closing his hand with all the care he could muster, he raised the fish. As soon as he brought it within a breath of the air it gave a single, contemptuous twist and flicked out of his grasp and away.
His disappointment showed. Ess’yr smiled again.
They caught no more fish, and shared the meagre flesh of the one between the four of them. It was enough to make it the best meal they had eaten since leaving the vo’an.
Rothe pursed his lips as he peered at the wound in Orisian’s flank. Orisian was lying on the ground, his jacket hitched up.
‘How does it look?’ he asked.
Rothe gave a non-committal shrug. ‘It matters more how it feels.’
‘Not bad. It itches sometimes. Is it healed?’
‘Will be soon, if you treat it gentle. Still red.’ He sniffed at the paste-smeared bandage he had removed from over the wound. ‘Wish I knew what it was they’ve used on it, though.’
‘Whatever it is, it’s worked. I’ll settle for that.’
Rothe grunted and straightened.
Orisian pulled his jacket down and carefully righted himself, still wary of jarring the muscles in his side. ‘I’m sure they knew what they were doing,’ he said. ‘They are Kyrinin cures, all those medicines Inurian has. He never did anyone any harm with them, did he?’
‘No, but he didn’t cure all the ones he tried, either,’ said Rothe.
‘Well, anyway, this has worked.’
Rothe frowned at the poultice in his hand. Orisian glanced over to where Ess’yr sat further up the slope with her back to them. She had said it would be all right to take the dressing off, but shown no further interest. Varryn had disappeared some little while ago: scouting ahead, or hunting. As usual, he had not seen fit to explain what he was doing.
Rothe leaned close, fixing Orisian with a serious gaze.
‘We should go,’ the shieldman whispered. ‘Leave them. We are not their prisoners now, whatever they may think.’
Orisian shook his head, but Rothe was insistent. ‘This is taking too long. Anduran cannot be far. If we go straight downhill we would surely be in the valley in an hour or two. Orisian, these wights are no friends of ours. We don’t need them.’
Orisian shot a nervous look towards Ess’yr, afraid that she would hear what Rothe was saying. She had not moved.
‘They were told to take us, Rothe. I would get there faster if I could, but their vo’an’tyr told them to escort us, to see us out of their lands. They won’t let us go off on our own.’
‘We don’t need their permission,’ hissed Rothe urgently. ‘And this isn’t their land. It’s ours; yours. Now is the time to do it. You’re almost healed. Her brother isn’t here. She can’t deal with both of us alone.’
Again, Orisian shot a worried glance towards Ess’yr. Her head and shoulders remained as motionless and relaxed as ever. Yet he saw that her right hand rested upon her spear where it lay beside her, and he could not remember if it had been there before. He had a sudden taste of fear and a glimpse of something awful waiting a few paces into the future.
‘No, Rothe,’ he insisted as quietly as he could. ‘No. Stop now. We stay with them.’
The words felt unfamiliar and ungainly on his tongue as he uttered them. He knew why: he had never, in any sense that mattered, commanded Rothe before. He had never had to. His shieldman blinked, and for just a moment Orisian saw in his eyes the instinct to keep arguing. It was snuffed out. The tension vanished from the warrior’s face.
‘As you say,’ Rothe said, and Orisian could not hear in his voice a single trace of frustration or disagreement.
Shortly afterwards, Varryn returned and sat silently beside his sister. A squall of rain swept over them. It came down the valley from the north, drenching the forest and rattling the trees for half an hour. In the sodden aftermath, the Kyrinin shook their heads like animals to shed rainwater. Ess’yr leaned forwards so that her long hair hung in a curtain and ran tight fingers through it. Orisian watched her squeeze out droplets of water with a few long sweeps of her hand.
The child’s body was twisted where it had fallen, one arm bent and pinned beneath the torso. Rothe laid his hand on the dead boy’s shoulder and rolled him over. The limbs moved sluggishly. Death’s grip had been on him for just a little while, stiffening his joints but not yet locking them. Orisian glimpsed a ruined face—split skin flecked with fragments of tooth or bone, a lot of blood—before Rothe, kneeling down, blocked his view.
The corpse was shod with crude hide slippers. The leggings were of undyed wool. It was the clothing of a poor household: shepherds, perhaps, or woodsmen. The boy lay in a slight hollow. Trees leaned over him. The grass was lushly green and wet from recent rain.