that would be just right for you, I’m sure. Although there’s a grey, too, and he’s a wonderfully gentle creature…”
Tara chattered on, outlining the merits of various possible mounts. Anyara’s attention drifted as the soothing wine, Tara’s graceful voice, the soft light spilling in through the curtains, all conspired to lull her into comfortable distraction. She allowed herself briefly to wonder what it must be like to live this easy life, so abundant in its comforts. She mentally shook herself, hardening her lazy thoughts. Slaughter was still being done, far from these marble halls. Orisian and Taim Narran and countless others were still adrift in that storm. Her people were drowning in blood.
She set down the cup of wine and pushed it carefully away from her. She was suddenly ashamed to be sitting here, in such company, amidst such grace, while others fought and died on fields that felt immeasurably distant.
II
When a clear morning at last arrived, and the horses were combed and saddled, it was a grand group that rode out from Vaymouth’s southern Gold Gate. As well as Anyara and Coinach, Tara came with a pair of her maids, Eleth, three palace guards, the master of the stables and one of his boys. It was hardly the liberating solitude Anyara had half-hoped she and Coinach might be permitted, but it was movement, and change, and a brief escape from the encircling city walls, so she was determined to savour it.
They rode down the north bank of the River Vay, following a broad cobbled road through vast fields of stubble. Wagons and mule trains were brushed aside by the two guards who rode ahead, forced to the very edge of the road to make way for the riding party. Farmworkers and travellers and traders stood in the rough verge, watching with irritation or fascination or resentment, according to their disposition, as Tara Jerain and her retinue trotted splendidly past. Anyara paid little attention to all of this. She breathed deeply, and lifted her face to the breeze coming in from the west. The air had the sea on it, and that felt more like home than anything had in many days.
The fields were wide and flat, the sky ever-changing as rank after rank of long, twisted clouds processed overhead, the low sun winking in and out of sight behind them. They rode past a huge sprawl of jetties and quays and warehouses and inns. The tide was out, so beyond this mass of habitation and industry lay a prodigious expanse of dark mudflats, over which flocks of birds swept back and forth in coordinated precision.
On an open stretch of the shore, at the head of a beach of brown sand, was a cluster of trees and about it a short, green sward. Tara brought them to a halt there and dismounted. The maids unpacked bundles of cold meats and preserved fruits. Anyara went to stand with Coinach at the very edge of the grass. She could smell the strandline, the long-familiar but recently forgotten scent of rotting seaweed and brine and wet sand. She was pleased to see on Coinach’s face the same sad pleasure as she herself felt. He looked, as he stood there staring out to the immense flat horizon of the sea, more at ease than he had done for a long time. It felt good, that moment of shared sentiment, but it did not last. Tara walked over to them, bearing food.
“We come hawking along here sometimes,” the Chancellor’s wife said. “Do you like hunting?”
“Not particularly,” Anyara said, knowing it sounded ill-humoured, but not caring.
“Ah, well. I can imagine how hard it must be to take much pleasure in that kind of thing at the moment. Believe me, since my husband left to go north, nothing has tasted good to me. It must have been still harder for you, to suffer the losses you have this winter, and now to know nothing of your brother’s fate.”
Anyara grimaced. There was nothing she was less eager to discuss than Orisian, or anything that had happened since Winterbirth.
“I’m sorry,” Tara said at once, and she sounded entirely genuine, aghast at her own behaviour. “Please forgive me. It is inexcusable to talk of such things without invitation. This sea air makes me foolish. That, and the promise of my husband’s return. In seeking to offer comfort, I stumble about like an ignorant — ”
“It’s all right,” Anyara said to stanch the apologetic flow. “I’m glad for you. You must have been greatly concerned for the Chancellor’s safety.” And she found that she meant what she said. For all that Anyara disliked- detested-Mordyn Jerain, this woman’s love for her husband was all too apparent. It felt churlish not to acknowledge such feelings.
Tara nodded. “Oh, indeed. It was a misery, when so many terrible rumours were reaching us. I feel as though I am about to awaken from a bad dream. But what you and your family have suffered-my difficulties bear no comparison, especially now that they approach a happy resolution. Forgive me.”
“Look,” said Coinach quietly at Anyara’s side.
Far off along the beach, back towards the harbour and dockyards, figures were running over the sand. They were so distant it was impossible to tell what was happening, and no sound could reach so far across the onshore wind, but it looked to be a pursuit of some kind. Something in the way the figures moved-their urgency, their effort- implied violence. They reached the line of breaking waves. Anyara could just make out the white speckling of spray bursting up as the first of them struggled through the shallow water.
“How odd,” Tara Jerain murmured.
Someone fell, and the figures became indistinct, crowding in together in a dark mass. Sharp, angular movements suggested a flurry of knees and elbows.
“They’re killing him,” Coinach said.
“Surely not,” said Tara then, puzzled, doubtful: “Perhaps they caught him thieving.”
“Perhaps you should send your guards to intervene,” Anyara suggested. There was some-thing in the silent, savage scene she found unsettling. Even though it was safely distant, it had a simple brutality that felt as though it could all too easily reach across that stretch of sand. It soured the air.
“No, no,” Tara said. She was a little uneasy and distracted now herself. “Best not to interfere. There’s been a good deal of trouble recently, you know. I’ve heard that there has been much more… disturbance than is usual in the rougher parts of the city. As if some foul mood’s taken hold of everyone at the same time. No, best to keep away from it. Perhaps we should make ready to return.”
In so far as she thought of it at all, Anyara had assumed that the Shadowhand’s return would be marked by pomp, by ceremony or rejoicing, but it came suddenly and unheralded instead. She went, on the morning after their ride to the shore, to break her fast with Tara Jerain, as had quickly become their habit, and the Chancellor was simply there, sitting at the finely laid table. He was thinner than Anyara remembered. His skin had an ashen, bloodless quality.
Until now, these meals had been far more comfortable-almost pleasurable-occasions than Anyara would have expected. Tara was an easy companion, always ready to smooth the conversation along in gentle fashion. This morning was different, and from the moment of her first step into the room, Anyara sensed the change.
Mordyn was a deadening, darkening presence; nothing like the casually confident and eloquent man Anyara remembered from Kolkyre. He barely acknowledged her arrival at the table. His eyes flicked briefly in her direction and then sank back towards his food. He sat in a tight knot, his arms pressed close in at his side, his chin nestled down into his chest.
Tara Jerain said nothing. She greeted Anyara with a nod and a small smile, but they were frail tokens, the afterthoughts of a mind entirely elsewhere. In countless little ways, she betrayed her disquiet: snatched glances at her returned husband, the restless movement of her hands from platter to mouth to lap to table, the concern that pinched the skin at the corner of her eyes into nests of lines. Anyara was silenced by the oppressive unease. Even the serving girls moved quietly and hesitantly about their business.
There were a dozen questions Anyara could have asked. Longed to ask. She did not dare to utter any of them. Mordyn Jerain had always intimidated her, but this was different. Now the bleak silence he imposed simply felt too weighty to disturb.
She picked half-heartedly at the food before her. Her heart sank with the realisation that despite her determination to resist, she had come to believe the many subtle hints that once the Chancellor returned, all might be resolved in a satisfactory way. She had permitted a tentative blossoming of hope, seduced perhaps by Tara’s companionship and the comforts of the Palace of Red Stone, and sloughed a few fragments of her caution and suspicion. Well, the Chancellor had returned, and he brought not relief but some strange shadow. Anyara glanced at
