‘Afraid of what?’ he asked.
Anyara almost laughed. ‘You choose,’ she said. Then: ‘Dying. Being alone. You, me, Rothe—we only have each other now.’
‘And we will not lose each other. But there may still be others, anyway. We have to hold on to that hope.’
‘Spoken like a true Thane,’ Anyara said. He looked at her sharply, to find a sad smile upon her face. ‘Well, you are, aren’t you? You must be.’
‘Oh, Anyara, I hope not.’
She squeezed him tightly, all of a sudden the elder sister once more.
‘If you are, you will be a good one,’ she said, releasing him from her grasp.
He looked at her. ‘Good or bad, I will have to try, won’t I? All my wishes are only wishes. I wouldn’t have chosen any of this—none of us would—but we are here nevertheless. If there is no one else, I will have to try.’
She took his hand in hers and they stood together like that for a little while, brother and sister side by side, looking out over the wasteland where the ruins lay silently beneath the winter sun.
When Yvane returned, she brought little deerskin packets of food, walking staffs and fur strips to bind around their boots.
‘Better than nothing,’ she said as she dropped it all into a pile at her feet.
‘Are you coming with us?’ Orisian asked her.
‘Yes, yes. Some of the way, at least. Perhaps all the way to Koldihrve.’
‘I’m glad.’
The na’kyrim gave a little laugh and shot a sharp look at him.
‘You shouldn’t be,’ she said. ‘It’s a bad sign, if you’d the sense to read it.’
He waited patiently for her to explain.
‘I don’t know what those Fox have found,’ Yvane said with a vague wave in the direction of Ess’yr and Varryn, still searching amongst the rubble below, ‘but I’ve seen enough to know I’d do well to spend a little time away from here. There’s tracks of dogs—big ones, too—and men in the freshest snow. Definitely been someone poking around in the night. And to have kept going through that storm, they must be very serious about their work.’
Orisian looked uneasily out over the ruined city. Nothing moved. The broken walls and crumbling stonework lay silent beneath their cloak of snow.
‘If I stay behind, whoever it is might go off on your trail but then again they might not. And even if they do, perhaps they’d dig me out of one of my hideaways before leaving. However much I like my solitude, I’m not stupid. I’ll take my chances with you.’
Orisian nodded.
‘Of course,’ Yvane added sharply, ‘if you hadn’t seen fit to turn up, all uninvited, I’d still have my nice quiet life to enjoy.’
‘The uninvited guests who came to my home cost me a good deal more than we’ve cost you,’ Orisian snapped, and scrambled down from the platform. Fresh snow crunched beneath his feet as he made his way to join Ess’yr. The Kyrinin was crouching down beside a heap of building stones, letting her delicate fingertips drift almost randomly across their pitted, lichen-strewn surfaces. Orisian stood behind her, caught for a moment by the shimmer of the winter sun on her hair.
‘Dog,’ she murmured. She turned her head and looked up at him with those clear grey eyes. She held a fingertip out, and he could just see a short, thick strand of hair on it.
‘Yvane says they’ve been in the ruins during the night. She’s coming with us.’
‘Best if we go now,’ said Ess’yr. She rose to her feet in a single flowing movement. ‘We cannot hide from them, so best to be in the open. Then we see them coming.’
They followed Yvane north along the base of the cliffs. All of them were tense, wary. Even Yvane seemed uneasy amongst the ruins. Orisian, for the first time in his life, longed for the feel of a sword at his hip, or any weapon better than the little knife he carried on his belt.
They came out of Criagar Vyne with nothing to disturb the silence save the sound of ravens croaking on the rocky heights above them. This time, with the furs Yvane had given them and her staffs to lean on, they were better equipped to brave the bleak lands beyond. It was enough to keep them almost comfortable even when they came out from beneath the shelter of the cliffs and the wind picked up.
On a day such as this—bright and wide—the mountains were a sight to behold. Orisian could imagine that the Car Criagar was asleep, resting in the lull before the next storm swept down from the Tan Dihrin. Great peaks surrounded them, studded by pinnacles and turrets of rock. The stillness was so deep that it was possible to believe they were the only living things to have trodden this path in innumerable years. All the vast age and patient indifference of the mountains was there like a taste in the air as they made their way northward.
Once the ruins were well behind them, the Kyrinin at least relaxed. The open slopes offered little chance of ambush. Even so, Varryn would now and then stand for a time looking back the way they had come. They rested a while in the early afternoon, quietly sharing food and water. The sun was almost hot upon their faces, but it did not last. Thin skeins of cloud appeared across the blue expanse of the sky and by the time they began to search for a suitable sleeping place, the Car Criagar was sinking back into the muffling grey light it seemed almost to crave. There was no rain or snow at least, and as Yvane led them to a notch in the hillside they could hope for a more comfortable night than some of those they had recently known.
Yvane knew what she was doing in choosing that hollow for the night: reaching into a crack beneath a pitted boulder, she withdrew a sack of kindling and firewood.
‘Better to have no fire,’ Varryn said.
Yvane emptied the sack out and began sorting the wood.
‘You can have no fire if you like,’ she said, ‘but I don’t like the cold. If anyone is following us, they’ll know where we are well enough with or without a fire.’
There was little talking after that. All of them were preoccupied by their own thoughts as the fire held their eyes and the night settled in, closing the world around them down into a small pocket of light.
It was as they settled to sleep that the sound came, as startling as the shattering of glass in the darkness: a brief howl. Moments later a second answered it. They seemed distant, but it was hard to tell.
‘Might be glad we have a fire, if it comes to it,’ was all Yvane said as the sound faded away and an unnerving silence descended.
The last thing Orisian saw before he passed into a shallow sleep was Varryn sitting straight and alert, bathed in firelight, his face turned out towards the night and his hands resting upon bow and spear.
In the morning Varryn was still seated where Orisian had last seen him, as if no more than a moment had passed. The weather had closed in. Yvane exchanged a few words with Varryn in the Fox tongue, but they said nothing to the others. At another time Orisian would have wanted to know what they discussed; now there seemed no point. There was, after all, nothing to do save press on, even if a score of Inkallim were treading in their footprints.
Their path now lay downwards and away from the highest peaks, but the Car Criagar would not let them go without one last reminder of its true nature. Low cloud, a hard wind and wet snow accompanied them. The further north they went, and the further from the heart of the range, the more characterless the slopes became. The dramatic rocks and screes of the heights were replaced by great featureless snow fields.
Orisian found himself striding along beside Yvane.