CHAPTER 2
This place, this city, shall henceforth be the seat of High Thanes; first amongst all cities, as we are now first amongst all Bloods. Vaymouth is mighty now, and shall be mightier still in years to come, for who can doubt that all the world will walk the road to its gates? All deeds of consequence, all acts of significance, shall be done here and nowhere else.
Memories of Tane will be dimmed and overshadowed. Kolkyre will be forgotten. The pride of those who dwell in distant Evaness will be blunted, their arrogant tongues stilled. We who call Vaymouth home shall live amidst the greatest power and the greatest glory this world has known since the Gods departed. Their radiant presence has passed, never to return, but see here what other lights a people may find amidst the darkness, what we may build with our own hands, and shape with our will: all the goods and coin of the world, flowing like tributary streams into the river of our streets and our marketplaces. Peace and prosperity and order. Great walls to shelter us, great towers to keep watch from. These are the stars by which we plot our course. These are the torches to light our path into the future.
The glories of the Gods are lost to us; if there are to be new glories we must fashion them for ourselves, carving them from the base matter of this abandoned world. This, the city, shall be their embodiment, and the place where they burn most brightly.
I
The two young girls walked hand in hand, whispering as they went. Anyara did not need to hear what they said to know that they were beyond the reach of the world. They were followed, as they wandered idly through the bare garden, by maids who carried songbirds in gilded cages, but they might as well have been entirely alone. The girls were enclosed in the perfect privacy of their own realm: the place in childhood where nothing mattered save whatever thought had hold of them at that moment; where adults were but faint and inconvenient clouds on the horizon of their secret concerns.
Anyara could remember such a place, though she had inhabited it only briefly. She and Orisian and Fariel had shared it, in the days before the Heart Fever: a few precious years in which everything had been bright and exciting, and fashioned for them and them alone. She was exiled from that place by the passage of time, by deaths. And now by distance, for she sat on a marble bench in a terrace garden of Gryvan oc Haig’s Moon Palace. These self- absorbed girls she watched were the children of some lady of the High Thane’s court.
Anyara shrugged deeper into her fur coat. Winter had followed her southwards. All the way down from Kolkyre, through Ayth-Haig lands, across the moors and on through the farmlands of the Nar Vay shore, it had been an intangible, morose hound dogging every step her horse had taken, eating up the land in her wake. There was a faint mist on the air now. Around this palace in which she was a comfortable, imprisoned guest, Vaymouth sprawled beneath a dank grey blanket. All sound was deadened by the thick air. The birds in their cages did not sing.
“It must seem a silly affectation to you, this fashion for birdcages.”
Tara Jerain, the wife of the Haig Blood’s infamous Chancellor, smiled down at Anyara.
“I hadn’t given it any thought,” Anyara murmured.
Tara gave her another complicitous, almost conspiratorial, smile.
“It’s kind of you to be so gentle with our foibles,” she said. “I don’t like them myself. The birds, I mean. May I join you?”
Without waiting for an answer, Tara settled herself on the bench. The many layers of fine fabric that enveloped her sighed and shifted over one another. Even in this dull light there were threads in there that shone and glimmered. The Chancellor’s wife clasped her hands in her lap. The cuffs of her cape were trimmed with the white fur of snow hares.
“Nobody was interested in songbirds until Abeh oc Haig decided she liked them.” She leaned a little closer to Anyara as she spoke. “Then, all of a sudden, every lady of the court-even the girls, intent upon being ladies one day-realised that they are the most fascinating and precious of things. Silly. Birds aren’t meant to sing in the winter, but still everyone must have one.”
“Everyone except you,” Anyara grunted.
“Oh, no.” Tara shook her head lightly. “I have one. Of course I do. Two, in fact. The best that money can buy, I’m told.”
Anyara wished this woman would leave her alone. She found more than enough that was hateful about her situation here in Vaymouth without being subjected to the babbling of the self-regarding butterflies who thronged the Moon Palace. She had heard of Tara Jerain, of course, even before she was brought here: the beautiful, cunning wife of the hated, still more cunning, Shadowhand. And Tara was indeed beautiful: eyes that even in this wintry light glittered like jewels, skin that bore a lustrous sheen of health. Her poise and confidence made Anyara feel like a child all over again.
“Those who think they know about such things tell me we’ll have snow here in a few days,” Tara mused absently. “Some years we have none at all, you know. I enjoy snow, myself. It makes everything look better than it really is, like fine furs and gems.”
Again, that warm smile. Anyara could think of no good reason why the Chancellor’s wife should suddenly have decided to make this pretence at friendship. She had paid her no attention before now. No one in the Moon Palace had.
On the day of her arrival, Anyara-aching, tired and feeling entirely bedraggled-had endured a brief and rather strange audience with Gryvan oc Haig himself and his wife Abeh. They seemed more than a little bemused-in Abeh’s case, offended-by her presence, as if she were an unexpected and unwanted guest they did not know what to do with. All of which served to irritate Anyara almost beyond concealment. She comforted herself by imagining that Aewult nan Haig might in due course learn precisely what the High Thane thought of sons who sent unsought hostages to their fathers.
Since that initial, clumsy welcome, Anyara had found herself all but ignored. She had fine chambers on the favoured south flank of the palace. She was given gifts of gowns and necklaces. Maidservants were assigned to her service. But almost no one spoke to her. She was given no reason or excuse to leave those fine chambers, and if she did so of her own accord, she found herself oppressively shadowed by those same, watchful maids, who would herd her back to her rooms as if she were a wayward, simple-minded sheep in need of penning. She had asked, once, to borrow horses so that she and Coinach could ride out towards the sea. She had not expected the request to be granted, and it was not.
“Your shieldman has been much remarked upon.”
Anyara glanced round. Coinach was standing a short distance away, by the gates that gave out onto these tidy gardens. He was rigidly straight-backed, staring ahead, steadfastly ignoring all the ladies and the servants and the children. It made Anyara smile, though she dipped her head to hide the expression from Tara Jerain. Coinach’s determination to retain his dignity even in these disquieting circumstances had a touch of youthful pride and dogged loyalty about it that she found very pleasing.
“He’s a striking man,” Tara observed. “And it’s so unusual for us here to see a woman with so… martial an attendant.”
“Things are a little different in the north these days,” Anyara said rather more sharply than she intended. She did not know whether it was Coinach or herself she was defending. “Very different. Perhaps if all of you — ”
Tara cut her short with a flourish of her smooth, ringed fingers.
“That’s not what I wanted to discuss with you, in any case. Really, it’s a little too cold to spend more time
