“It does. But I leave as much of the plotting as I can to others now. I’ve hung up my sword. There’s a new Captain in Castle Anduran: Torcaill. He’s…”
Anyara let the voices fade from her awareness. Time. There was never enough of that.
They stepped onto The Grave. A wind-scoured, bare isle beneath the rugged headland of Dol Harigaig. Anyara could feel the spray from the waves breaking along the island’s western shore. The wind cast her hair across her face.
It was called Il Dromnone first, and people said it was the body of a fallen giant. It became The Grave during the Heart Fever, when the harboursides of Kolglas and Glasbridge filled every day with bodies wrapped in cerements, and the corpse-ships ploughed back and forth with cruel regularity. Lairis and Fariel had come here. Now she had brought Orisian to join them, certain in her heart that it was what he would have chosen.
She cradled the clay pot containing his ashes in her arms as she walked over The Grave’s uneven, slick rocks. Taim had carried Orisian out of Kan Avor through a day and long night, without stopping, to a cottage on the edge of Anlane where others waited. They had built a pyre amongst tree stumps, looking out over the valley, and consigned him to the flames. Afterwards, Anyara knew-though the na’kyrim would not speak of it-Yvane had gone back into Kan Avor with Taim. And what, she wondered, must it have cost the warrior to return to that place, having once escaped it? They had gone back and found K’rina’s body, and buried it out in the marshlands by the River Glas.
But Anyara had not been there, for any of it. Now she would mourn in her way. Yvane, Coinach and Taim stood by the boat on flat rocks. She walked away from them, going alone across the naked isle, buffeted by the wind, tasting the sea on her lips. When she came to what she thought was the highest point in The Grave’s low emergence above the waves, she stopped and stood, and savoured for a moment this wild and free place. The wind was bringing tears to her eyes. It was not grief. Not yet.
She held the urn in both hands and lifted it up, showed it to that little group gathered back at the water’s edge. Then she turned and showed it to two more watchers.
High up, on the precipitous slope above the cliffs of Dol Harigaig, two pale and distant figures stood. They were too far away for Anyara to see clearly, but she knew that Varryn and Ess’yr had eyes much sharper than her own. She was not sure, but she thought one at least of them raised an arm in acknowledgement of her gesture.
Anyara hugged the urn to her and knelt down. She did cry then, briefly. She folded herself over that hard clay vase, and was angry, and sad, and frightened. She let those feelings go, on the wind; imagined them tumbling and skimming away over the foaming crests of the waves into the north.
She took the lid from the urn, and let the wind take her brother’s ashes too.
“Forgiven,” she whispered as she watched it clouding away, dusting itself over the rocks, spinning on gusts into the sky.
“Forgiven, of course. But there was nothing to forgive.”
As the corpse-ship readied itself to depart from The Grave, a small rowboat was lowered noisily over the side. Yvane climbed down into it, and a single oarsman-the strongest of the crew. He flailed his way across the waves and the wind to a narrow gravel beach nestled among gigantic black boulders on the southern flank of Dol Harigaig. He drove his tiny craft up onto that beach, the pebbles hissing as the keel ploughed into them.
Yvane clambered out, ungainly but dry-shod, thanked the man and walked towards Ess’yr and Varryn, who had descended to meet her. No words were exchanged between na’kyrim and Kyrinin. They climbed together up onto the high ground, going slowly and carefully over first a winding trail made by wild goats, and then on the damp, slick turf of the headland. Ess’yr moved easily, though one arm was still bound up in a tight sling.
They walked for a long time along the Car Anagais that formed the steep northern shore of the estuary, skirting the tree line as they went. The land was empty, for the Fox were much reduced, and no vo’an remained south of the Vale of Tears. Perhaps in future years. Perhaps.
Late on the second day, as the greater ramparts of the Car Criagar came into sight ahead of them, they turned northward, and began the long descent through hills and wooded vales towards the Dihrve Valley.
They parted then. Yvane and Varryn went on ahead to find a place to camp for the night. Ess’yr went down to the thickets along the side of a narrow, gurgling stream. She found there a stand of willow, and cut a stem. She chose a good one, straight and healthy, on the brink of giving forth its fresh, dagger-shaped leaves. She trimmed its cut base to make the wound clean and neat. Then she pushed it into the soft, moist earth close to the bank of the stream. She opened the hole it had made by rolling her wrist, swaying the stake round in widening circles, and then withdrew it and laid it flat on the ground.
From under her belt she brought a folded scrap of deerhide. As she could work with only one hand, she had to put it down on a fallen log in order to open it out and take hold of the knotted cord it contained. She knelt and gently lowered the cord into the hole the willow stake had made. Her long fingers carefully pressed it in deep, to make sure it was settled and secure there. She paused, head bowed, in reflection for a few moments.
Ess’yr rose, and planted the staff of willow over the cord. She firmed it into place with her foot and stepped back. The willow stood tall and perfectly erect. She nodded once to it, respectfully, turned and walked away. To find her brother and the na’kyrim. To join them beside a fire, and eat and rest and anticipate the coming of a new season.
Epilogue
Anyara
With all my heart, I would be with you now. I try not to fear for you. I remind myself that you were always the stronger of us. Even when there were three of us, I think perhaps you were the strongest, though I did not understand it until later.
Rothe died. Torcaill can tell you how and why, if you want to know. We are the last of home now, you and I, the last of Kolglas. I look around me, and I see familiar faces, but I miss those I knew in Kolglas.
I want more than anything to walk with you through the market in Kolglas again, and to go hawking with you along its shore, and to steal warm bread from its kitchens. That is what I mean to do. It is what I hope to do. But that may not be how this ends. I do not know if I can make any difference in any of this, but I think I see at least the outline of something that perhaps needs to be done. And I choose to try to do it.
You do not deserve the burden, but there is no one else. If I am gone, I leave to your care our Blood and our home.
I think now, looking back, that we all die, little by little, as each of those we love departs before us. Forgive me, sister, if I have gone before you.
Orisian
