Winterbirth (19 page)

'The Black Road , sire!' he shouted. 'It's marching out of Anlane! Thousands, burning farms, burning homes.'

There were mutters of disbelief around the table. The Thane's shieldmen were bodily lifting the farmer from his feet and bearing him backwards, out of the chamber.

'My own farm, there on the forest's edge, is gone, lord!' the man cried.

'You say there are others who tell the same story?' Croesan asked.

And soon enough all believed it. Farmworkers and herders, woodsmen and hunters were arriving in Anduran, all of them flying from the destruction of their homes and lands. In the first few hours of darkness, an army had come out from beneath the forest's silent canopy on to the open fields. Somehow, by some unimaginable means, the enemy had crossed all the wild and trackless immensity of Anlane, through the domain of the savage White Owl Kyrinin, and brought an army to within reach of Anduran itself: an impossibility had come to pass.

Whole families poured into the city through the night, loaded on to carts or riding on scrawny horses, fleeing their homes and seeking safety. In the darkness, fear worked its way into hearts. Rich and poor, mighty and humble alike came to the conclusion that their best hope lay in flight. By winter's first dawn the road south to Glasbridge was in its turn filled with a steady stream of townsfolk. And by that same dawn there was an army in sight from the walls of the castle.

Croesan had known then that the town at least was lost. Tanwrye was his Blood's great bulwark against the Black Road : its strength had always been relied upon to block the route through the Vale of Stones.

Anduran's own walls were in poor repair, half of its garrison — already reduced by the demands of Gryvan oc Haig — was on the road for Tanwrye. Croesan's castle might be held against assault; Anduran itself could not.

That too was when he understood that he, and his Blood, had after all unlearned things they once knew.

Peace had worked a malign flaw into their memories. They had forgotten that to stand against the implacable Black Road required a fire in the heart and in the blood to match that which burned in the northerners; that their guard could never be dropped. Croesan had thought himself mindful of the dangers. Now, breathing in the ashes of Anduran, knowing that half the inhabitants of the city had fled in terror before the enemy was even sighted, he tasted the cost of misjudgement.

The Thane was roused from his black reverie by the sound of someone coming up behind him.

'You should not stand so exposed within sight of your enemy,' said Behomun Tole dar Haig. 'I saw crossbows down there earlier.'

Croesan grunted. 'They're too busy setting fires,' he said.

Behomun stood beside him for a moment, gazing out across the rooftops, through the haze. 'They will regret their actions when the rain and cold come.'

'They are not foolish,' muttered Croesan. 'They have spared the barns, and many of the houses. They know what they are doing.'

'I came to see if you would return to the council. It is becoming a trifle overwrought below. Your people would benefit from a firm hand to guide them.'

'My people once more, I see. They belong to Gryvan when he needs them to fight for him in the south, but they are mine again now.'

Behomun shrugged. Since the siege began, something of his insouciant arrogance had left him. 'That was no part of my meaning,' he said softly.

'Perhaps. But this should never have happened. The High Thane thinks of the south, always the south.

He drools over the riches of the Free Coast and Tal Dyre like a fox in a lambing field. When Kilkry ruled, the other Bloods sent men here, to our lands, to guard against the Black Road . Now it's our warriors who are summoned to the south. There's the result: a sky filled with the smoke of our homes.'

'There's no point in you and I debating the rights and wrongs of it, and in all honesty I would have little heart for it. My own family is trapped here just like yours. What's done is done.'

'It is done,' echoed Croesan distantly.

'The town could not be defended,' Behomun said, guessing the Thane's thoughts. 'We would likely all be dead if you had made your stand upon the walls instead of here in the castle.'

'I know that well enough. Too many are dead in any case, though.'

'You could not have taken more in. Every corridor is choked with families. There are more people than horses sleeping in the stables.'

Croesan nodded. It was a strange thing, to find Gryvan's Steward so devoid of argument and conflict.

'You could have left,' he said, looking Behomun in the eye.

'True, but I am Steward of the Thane of Thanes here. I had some notion of duty.' Behomun glanced wistfully towards the west. 'It was probably a foolish choice. Now I must trust to your walls to keep my wife and children safe.'

'I hope they do so,' said Croesan.

'It cannot be long before relief comes. Lheanor will come from Kolkyre, or your own people from Glasbridge and Kolglas. The Black Roaders have over-reached themselves, however much they preach humility. There are no more than a few thousand of them in the city. So long as Tanwrye holds, and we do the same here, they will go no further south.'

'Oh, yes. They will lose this war. But my Blood has already paid too high a price for the victory.'

Croesan shook himself as a shiver ran through his back. 'Come, we had best go down. I have indulged myself by remaining here. I have duties too.'

* * *

As they made their way northwards, down from the high ground through the ever-thickening forest, Anyara found herself watching the back of the female Inkallim walking in front of the horse. She had never dreamed that she would set eyes upon one of them. The Inkallim - warriors and acolytes, executioners and assassins - were the stuff of whispered childhood tales. Lack of sure knowledge about them had allowed such an accumulation of rumour and myth that they had become, in the minds of those living south of the Stone Vale, colossal, gore-drenched incarnations of death itself.

Anyara wondered how many this lean, wiry woman who marched before her had killed. Women did not take up arms amongst the Haig Bloods. Her father had once told her that necessity had made it commonplace throughout the Bloods of the Black Road, not just amongst the Inkallim: they needed every warrior they could find in the early years of their exile beyond the Vale of Stones, when there had been wild Tarbain tribesmen to subdue and pursuing armies of the Kilkry High Thane to repel. Whatever the reason, it was proof of the cruel demands the Black Road made of its followers.

They halted for a while and Anyara sat with her back against a tree. She and Inurian were kept apart.

One of the Inkallim brought her some dry biscuits. He freed her hands so that she could eat. When he was gone she turned them this way and that, examining the raw weals about her wrists. They hurt, but it was nothing she could not bear.

She rested her head back against the tree trunk. Looking up through the naked branches, she watched the passage of heavy grey clouds across the sky. Rain was coming. The days after Winterbirth were often rain-soaked in the Glas valley. She was distracted from her thoughts by a dark flash of movement high in the tree beneath which she sat. She angled her head to try to catch its source. Almost hidden in the very crown of the tree, she saw a black bird hopping from one branch to another: a crow. She looked away, only for something to make her turn back. The crow sat there, patiently riding a branch's movements back and forth. It came to her, with absolute certainty, that this was Idrin, Inurian's crow.

She opened her mouth, and closed it again, not knowing what to do. She looked for Inurian. He was sitting thirty or more paces away. He was watching her. She raised her eyebrows at him, wondering how to convey her news. She could not be sure, but she thought there was the faintest hint of a smile on his lips then and, so fast it could easily have been missed, a flicked wink of one eye as he turned away from her.

The hours flowed into one another. She lost her sense of direction. The stars were obscured at night and the sun hidden during the day by banks of cloud. She shivered, and ached, and slept poorly.

Occasionally, Aeglyss would ride alongside her and watch her in provoking silence. She struggled to ignore him, and would not meet his strange, half-human eyes.

In those long, lonely hours on horseback, she found herself prey to bleak thoughts and imaginings that she could not fend off. Her father had laughed that night in the feasting hall, when the jugglers had played their part. He had been happy. She could see his face when she closed her eyes. She could see his slumped figure as well, propped limply against the castle wall. She had not seen Orisian's body in the courtyard; it could have been there, nevertheless.

Inurian was somewhere behind her on the trail, and a longing to be near him filled her. Orisian had always been closer to the
na'kyrim
than she had. Somehow the knowledge that Inurian, perhaps alone in all the world, could see into her heart and lay bare the pain and fears she held caged there had made her keep some distance between them. For all that, he had never been anything other than kind and now he was all she had left. He alone remained of all the people who had filled spaces in her life.

In the afternoon they unbound Anyara and Inurian and at last let them sit together while the horses were watered at a stream. She pressed her face into his shoulder. Still she would not cry, but the contact met a raw need in her. Inurian was massaging and probing at his right knee. He left off to put his arm around her shoulders.

'Be strong a while longer,' he said.

'Yes. I know, I know.'

'You noticed Idrin, then.'

Anyara smiled at him. It was better not to talk about all the other things that teemed in her thoughts.

'Has he been following us all the way?' she asked.

'Oh, yes. He has always been stubborn. It is a trait of crows in general which he has refined to its purest form.'

'When we were young, we used to tell each other that the Inkallim could turn themselves into crows,'

Anyara murmured.

'Perhaps you had heard people calling them ravens. An easy confusion for children. But no; the Whreinin and the Saolin were the only races made with the talent of shapechanging. The Anain have no true shape at all, and so cannot be counted.'

'I half-thought the Inkallim were just a story anyway,' Anyara said wearily.

'A pity they are not.'

They were quiet for a little while after that. Anyara found other recollections of childhood fears drifting into her thoughts: the debris of long evenings she, Orisian and Fariel had spent trying to scare each other with whispered tales.

'Is Aeglyss like one of the
na'kyrim
in olden days?' she asked. 'The ones that were so terrible?'

Inurian shook his head slowly.

'No, I don't think so. That was all a very long time ago, Anyara. There's no need to fear something so long gone. Aeglyss is strong, certainly: the Shared seethes around him. But I don't think he really knows how to use it. There are so few of us now, we've forgotten most of what the
na'kyrim
knew all those years ago. There've been no great masters of the Shared for a good three centuries, not since the years after the War of the Tainted. Anyway, the tales of them have probably been bloated by fear and by the passage of time.'

'Well, I hope no more stories will be coming to life,' Anyara said.

'I hope so too,' replied Inurian. There was a distance and seriousness in his tone that made her want to shiver. He sensed it, and gave her a broad smile.

'Do not worry,' he said. 'No more stories.'

Soon after, their captors came and dragged them once more to their feet.

A steady rain had been falling for the two hours since the Inkallim made camp. They were spread along the edge of a field of rough grass, with a scrawny copse of alder trees behind them. The few Kyrinin - ten or twelve - who had stayed with the party after they left the sheltering forests of Anlane had taken cover beneath the trees. A scattering of crows was huddled in the branches above, waiting for the rain to pass.

The Inkallim had set up makeshift awnings as soon as they came to a halt, hacking down thin saplings from the copse and spreading capes and canvas sheets between them. They were clustered beneath them now, talking softly, cleaning their weapons and chewing on biscuits and dried meat. They held little pots out to collect the rain-water, and drank from them. Their horses were tethered at the edge of the copse.

Inurian and Anyara had been left, their hands and feet bound, to sit without protection upon the dank grass. Their hair and clothes soaked through, they watched the few cattle that were listlessly grazing out in the centre of the field. Anduran was less than an hour's walk away. The rain-blurred shapes of the city's buildings were dimly visible to the north. There was no smoke there now; the fires must have been dampened down.

Aeglyss wandered across to them and squatted down, ignoring the rain. Inurian lowered his eyes and stared at the patch of ground between his feet. .

"What's happening?' demanded Anyara. 'Why have we stopped?'

'We are to be met by Kanin nan Horin-Gyre. It is an honour,' smiled Aeglyss.

'The Horin-Gyre Bloodheir? They're the ones doing this? Well, he could just as easily have met us in Anduran, beneath a roof.'

Aeglyss shrugged. 'Who knows why the powerful do the things they do? I am told he wanted to meet us outside the town.'

'He'll only kill us anyway,' muttered Anyara. 'Probably wants to do it out of sight.'

'Oh, not you, my lady,' Aeglyss assured her. 'He was content to have some of your family taken alive.

He can find a use for you, I am sure, or his sister will. If you want to fear someone, I would choose her.'

He glanced at Inurian, who was pointedly ignoring the exchange.

'Your friend here may be another story, naturally. The Bloodheir may well prefer to see him dead.

Unless I can dissuade him, of course.'