Winterbirth (59 page)

'The ambitions of the High Thane may be the greater danger, in the end,' said Taim. 'I heard rumours, on my way.'

The Thane of Kilkry gave no sign of being surprised at such a suggestion. He regarded his hands as they lay in his lap. Time had slackened and paled their skin, and patterned them with spots and blemishes.

Lheanor ran one over the other thoughtfully.

'Dangerous to place too much faith in whispers,' he said without looking up, 'but still I'd place more in them than in the Haig Blood. Lagair, Gryvan's Steward here, always seems to be lurking at my shoulder these last few days. His words of condolence and concern are as hollow as a dead oak. Aid has been slow to come from the south; there's no more than a hundred or two here even now. The word is that there are great companies mustering at last, in Vaymouth, but where were they when my son was facing the Black Road ? I should have sent every sword I command with Gerain. Perhaps I should march them out now, lead them myself.'

Only then did he look up and meet Taim's sombre eyes.

'My master in Vaymouth forbids it, though. He forbids me to avenge the death of my own son. I am commanded to await his armies. And I am afraid, Taim. A Thane should not admit to it, but I am.

Somehow our enemies have brought the woodwights to their side, and if I march for Anduran, as my heart says I should, what of my villages, my people on my own borders? How has this come to pass, Taim, that Black Road and woodwight stand together against us? I never thought to see such a thing.'

'Nor I,' said Taim. 'But then, I never thought to see any of this come to pass.' He gave his head a single, sharp shake as if surprised at what he recalled. 'I thought the fighting in Dargannan would be my last. I thought I was going home, and would never leave my wife again.'

The narrow door creaked open and Ilessa, Lheanor's wife, entered bearing a tray of tiny cakes. She held it out to Taim. The warrior looked up at her with a weak smile. She wore her years with elegance, possessed of that altogether different kind of beauty that some women found in age.

'I am not accustomed to being waited upon by the wife of a Thane,' he said as he took one of the cakes.

She smiled. There was compassion in her eyes, a marvellous gentleness in her aged face. Taim had known Lheanor and Ilessa for much of his adult life, and knew that their feelings for him, and for Croesan and the others, were genuine and deep; strong enough to emerge even out of their own limitless sorrow.

'And I am not accustomed to playing the waiting girl,' Ilessa said, 'but I thought it better that it should be me who disturbed you. You are much in demand. The High Thane's Steward has been asking for you.

He seems to think you and he have much to talk about.'

Taim grimaced. 'Lagair can wait. I lack the strength to fence with one of Gryvan's mouthpieces at the moment. I might say something better left unsaid.'

'I told him I did not know where you were,' said Ilessa. She set the tray down and smoothed the front of her dress.

'In truth, I barely know where I am myself,' murmured Taim.

'How long will you be staying with us? I visited with your men this morning. They are weary.'

Part of Taim would willingly stay here, in this high, cramped chamber with only the sky and wind and gulls for companions, for weeks on end. That part of him had long ago been subjugated, though, by a warrior's sense of duty.

'Only a day or two, my lady,' he said with an almost apologetic smile. 'You know I must go on, to Glasbridge. Whatever is to become of me and my men, we cannot rest. Not yet.'

ANYARA POKED HER head out from the hut and found an expectant group waiting. A cluster of Kyrinin children stared at her. They looked soft, pale and harmless. One or two of the younger ones shuffled behind their older comrades as her tousled head appeared. As Anyara hauled herself out on to the wooden boards and stretched the sleep from her limbs, the children backed a few yards further away before re-forming their group. Beyond them, a woman paddled by in a little round boat of taut animal skins. Anyara watched as she coasted effortlessly off along the edge of the reedbeds. A flock of tiny birds burst from the reeds and went churning and chattering away. The lake wore a mirror calm. Scraps of mist hung over the water, obscuring the furthest shores, and the whole scene was eerily beautiful and still.

Anyara had not known what to expect of the
vo'an.
Now, after a night's uneasy sleep, she was still unsure. Like everyone, she had heard tales of how the Kyrinin kept great bonfires burning night and day, or how their children never played but only practised the killing arts of bow and spear. Or how their old women ate the dead. She was tempted to remain in the hut they had been given and hide away from the unfamiliar sights and sounds and smells that lay outside. These were, after all, Kyrinin, and their kind had killed more than a few of hers over the years. But it was a belief deeply ingrained in her that fear — like grief, or pain - must be mastered, lest it become master in its own right. She did not want Orisian, and certainly not Yvane, to think she was unsettled by this place. So she went walking alone through the
vo'an,
and forced herself to hold her head up and look about her. The gaggle of children followed silently, attentively, in her wake.

She saw a young woman, perhaps her own age though it was hard to tell, dextrously gutting fish with a bone knife. A pair of men, barefoot and leaning on their spears, watched her go by from behind the blue turbulence of their tattoos. She heard lilting voices and from somewhere further away the casual, pitter-patter beat of a small drum being tapped. She smelled the smoke of small fires, meat cooking and the rich scent of the hides stretched over so many of the huts.

Few people paid her much heed, save the group of curious children. It did not feel threatening, but neither did it feel comfortable or entirely safe. She could not read this place as she was able, through birth and belonging, to read Kolglas, Anduran or even Kolkyre that she had only visited a handful of times.

The Kyrinin knew she was out of place just as she did. They did not speak when she was close enough to hear, ignorant though she would have been of what they were saying. Their lack of interest in her was, she felt, as deliberate and conscious as any pointed stares would have been.

It was with some relief that she came to the edge of the settlement, where the platform met the shore.

She stepped down on to the ground and walked a little way along the water's edge. The children did not follow her. Tall reeds thronged the shallows and as she tracked a slight curve of the shore they cut off her view of the
vo'an.
Save for the smokesign in the pale sky, she might have been utterly alone in a wilderness. She found a place where the reeds gave way for a stretch and sat on a rock there, gazing out over the lake's flawless surface.

Even as she watched, the morning's thin mist parted and she glimpsed the towering peaks of the Car Dine to the north. She had the sense then of being in a borderland, poised between two worlds. Over the Car Criagar whence she had come lay the real world, of towns and markets and humankind. In the opposite direction, out beyond the Car Dine, lay something else altogether: the fearsome Great Bear Kyrinin; Din Sive, the most ancient forest in all the world, filled with shadows, and then the Tan Dihrin that touched the roof of the sky. Between this quiet lake and the Wrecking Cape which lay uncounted days' journey to the north, there might not be a single human village or farm. She felt herself to be terribly small and fragile, the land and sky to be terribly unlimited.

She had felt something similar five years ago, when she emerged from the grip of the Fever into a world without her mother and her older brother. She felt unutterably vulnerable for months, poised between the tortured sleep of the Fever and a future which she barely recognised. She mastered that feeling in the end, along with the grief that could have crippled her. Now her strength was being tested again. She needed to hold firm, and not just for herself. It had not been just for herself that first time, either. Even then, in the wake of the Fever, part of it had been for Orisian.

She rose briskly to her feet. On impulse, she picked up a small stone and flicked it out over the water.

She watched the ripples spreading out from its fall for a few seconds before turning back towards the
vo'an.

She found Orisian and Rothe sitting on the edge of the platform outside the hut, their naked feet dangling down over the water. The sight was so incongruous - the probable Thane of one of the True Bloods sitting with his shieldman in the midst of a Kyrinin camp as casually as if they were on the harbour's edge in Kolglas -that Anyara almost laughed.

'What's happening?' she asked.

'Nothing,' said Orisian. 'Varryn came to check on us, but he's gone back to Ess'yr, wherever she is.

We're waiting for word.'

Anyara lowered herself down to sit beside them.

'Where's Yvane?'

'Gone off,' grunted Rothe. 'On her own. Didn't say where.'

Orisian was picking at a splintered crack in the planking. 'She'll be back soon, I'm sure,' he said.

'We're trusting her a lot, for someone we hardly know,' observed Anyara.

'Indeed,' agreed Rothe, 'and the Kyrinin, too.' To Anyara's keen ear it sounded like a complaint born more out of habit than conviction. And he had not called them woodwights.

Orisian was unperturbed. 'Well, Inurian did send us to her. I always trusted what he told me; I won't stop now.' He looked at his sister. 'In any case, what choice do we have? We do need help, out here.

We'd have been dead by now if it had just been the three of us.'

They lapsed into silence. Anyara had faith in her brother's judgement; in most things, at least. Growing up amongst men, amidst warriors, could teach a great deal to a girl with the eyes to see, and Anyara had those. She wondered if Orisian was aware of the way he sometimes looked at Ess'yr. Perhaps he did not even know that his eyes followed her with a particular attention that, to Anyara, was instantly recognisable. She had seen men look at her that way in the last two or three years.

It was, though, not a look she had seen from her brother before. His interest in Jienna, the merchant's daughter in Kolglas, had been embarrassingly apparent but it had been an unfocused, over-awed kind of fascination. There was little that was childish in the way he watched Ess'yr. It worried her. Any such union would be unthinkable to most of her race, but it was not Ess'yr's inhumanity that bothered Anyara most. Rather, it was fear for Orisian's feelings that stoked her unease. Ess'yr was too hard, too far from what he knew, to be a safe object of her little brother's affection. And she had been Inurian's lover. That was a river with dangerous currents, Anyara thought: one Orisian should have the wit not to swim in.

She could see signs of a change in her brother. He had always been a thinker, always able to see, or imagine, things she could not. But she had been the strong one, on the outside at least, since their mother and brother had died. Before that, it had been Fariel who shone most brightly. Now events were demanding something new of Orisian, and in response to that call he was perhaps beginning to unearth parts of himself that had long been overshadowed. He might be a good Thane, if he lived long enough.

Even so, Anyara still saw in him the boy she had chased up and down Kolglas' stairwells, and she was not at all sure that boy could fit Ess'yr into the puzzle his life had become.

Varryn came to fetch them an hour or so later. Wordlessly, he gestured for them to follow him into the heart of the
vo'an.
There, in an open space ringed by skull-adorned poles, Ess'yr was kneeling. A great, bizarre face woven of willow branches stood to one side.

'It's a soulcatcher,' Orisian murmured when he saw Anyara looking at it. 'They think it protects them from the dead. It's supposed to be one of the Anain.'

It disconcerted Anyara. The fact that the Kyrinin would invoke such sinister creatures as the Anain was too blunt a reminder of the chasm of difference that lay between her and them.

'Stand here,' instructed Varryn.

Without further explanation, he went to kneel at his sister's side. He picked up a deerskin bowl that held a dark, viscous liquid. Ess'yr had closed her eyes. Her face was still, almost as if she was asleep. Varryn immersed the point of a long, thin needle in the liquid. He rolled the tool around the bowl, soaking it.

Anyara frowned in confusion.

'The
kin'thyn,'
Orisian said. 'She's killed her first enemy.'

Anyara grimaced as Varryn set down the bowl and moved closer to his sister, the dye-coated needle poised and ready.

'He's going to tattoo her?' she said, almost disbelieving.

There was not so much as a twitch in Ess'yr's face as the skin of her cheek was pierced. Varryn pricked out curling lines, the track of his work marked by beads of blood and dye. Slowly, the pattern took shape. There was something horribly fascinating about the process. This scarring of a woman would never be permitted amongst the Haig Bloods, yet here it was being enacted as a mark of respect. Anyara wondered how Orisian would feel about Ess'yr's perfect skin being thus marred. When she glanced at him, his expression was one of such rapt attention that she was not sure he would think of this as a marring at all.

It lasted almost an hour. Varryn never faltered; Ess'yr never opened her eyes or made a sound. The blood flowed, the
kin'thyn
swooped and swirled its way across the skin. Kyrinin who wandered past sometimes paused to watch for a little while, but seldom tarried long. Though the children were more interested, even their numbers dwindled as the long minutes passed. Eventually Varryn sat back and set needle and bowl aside. He took up a cloth and carefully dabbed at Ess'yr's face.

Ess'yr's eyes flickered open. She gave her brother a simple nod and rose to her feet. She looked over to where Orisian, Anyara and Rothe were standing. 'I thank you,' she said. 'What for?' Orisian asked her.