“But we’ve no Oathmen, have we?” Torcaill called after him. “They’re all dead. Or lost.”
“I’m to do it,” Taim said as he walked, perhaps too softly for the other man to hear. “I’m to wield the knife.”
The boy was eight years old. Small and nervous. Perhaps more than nervous, for he paled as his gaze settled upon the knife held in his mother’s open palm.
“In the name of Sirian and Powll, Anvar and Gahan and Tavan and Croesan, the Thanes who have been; of Orisian oc Lannis-Haig, the Thane who is now; and of the Thanes yet to come, I command you all to hear the bloodoath taken,” Taim intoned. The words sat strangely in his mouth. They were ancient, weighty words that only Oathmen should speak. “I am Thane and Blood, past and future, and this life will be bound to mine. I command you all to mark it.”
The boy was looking up at him now, eyes wide. Taim tried to smile at him, but found the expression difficult, as if it knew it did not truly belong in this moment. He turned instead to the mother, and held out his hand.
“The blade is fresh-forged?” he asked her. “Unbloodied? Unmarked?”
“Never used,” she murmured, and passed the short simple knife to him.
Behind him, Taim could hear feet scraping on the floor as someone shifted position. Not Orisian, he suspected. The Thane had worn a solemn demeanour from the moment this woman first came to him asking that her son should take the bloodoath. The first time his name would be at the centre of this, the ritual heart of his Blood, and it was happening in exile from their rightful lands, in a hall borrowed for the occasion, with a mere warrior playing the makeshift role of Oathman. In the shadow of uncounted deaths. Not how any of them would have wished it to be, yet there was a weight to it, an importance. Taim felt it as much anyone, perhaps more than most. He tightened his grip upon the blade, and moistened his lips. He took hold of the boy’s wrist and gently twisted it to expose the white skin of his underarm.
“You will give of your blood to seal this oath?” he asked the child.
A moment’s silence, and then the boy whispered, “I will.”
“Speak up, boy,” Taim said softly. “Let them hear you.”
“I will.” Louder this time, but still tremulous. Good enough, Taim thought.
“By this oath your life is bound to mine,” he said. “The word of the Thane of Lannis is your law and rule…” His tongue stumbled to a halt. Something had gone awry, and after a moment he realised what it was. Lannis-Haig, of course. It should have been Lannis-Haig. But something hardened in him, and he went on. “Your law and rule, as the word of a father is to a child. Your life is the life of the Lannis Blood.”
He heard the softest of murmurs amongst the onlookers. Some, at least, had noticed his omission. None raised any protest. Such was the nature of the times.
Taim drew the blade across the boy’s arm. He felt the briefest, instinctive tensing of the muscles, the slight tug against his firm grip. The child looked away. It was a shallow cut, and clean. A neat line of blood swelled out, but did not run.
“You pledge your life to the Lannis Blood?” Taim asked.
The boy nodded once, still averting his eyes.
“You must say it,” Taim murmured.
“Yes.”
“You bend the knee to the Thane, who is the Blood?” Taim released the boy’s arm. He set his thumb against the flat of the knife, smearing a trace of the child’s blood across it.
“I do.”
“Then none may come between you and this oath.” Taim stared at the thick fluid smudged across the dull metal. Such small things, this deed, these words, yet containing so much. Containing within their narrow bounds as much of his own life, as much of his history and meaning, as anything could. The mother must have thought the same, to seek out this moment for her son. Fleeing from horrors, she had found herself in an unknown town, destitute, amidst chaos; yet there too she happened to find her Thane, and from that turn of fortune she sought to give her child this boon. Perhaps the boy would not recognise it for the gift it was. Perhaps that would only come later; perhaps never.
“None may come between you and this oath,” Taim said. “By it you set aside all other allegiances. The Blood shall sustain you and bear you up. You shall sustain the Blood. Speak your oath.”
The boy looked up from his wound. And Taim found he could smile at him now, an honest smile of reassurance and encouragement.
“I am Tollen Lanan dar Lannis-Haig… dar Lannis… son of Cammenech and Inossa. By my blood I pledge my life to Lannis. The word of the Thane is my law and rule; it is the root and… and staff of my life. The enemy of the Blood is my enemy. My enemy is the enemy of the Blood. Unto death.”
“Unto death,” Taim said. He pressed the hilt of the oathknife into the boy’s hand, and watched those thin fingers close about it. “Unto death.”
“I didn’t know there were so many of our people in Ive,” Torcaill said, after they had retired to a table in one corner of the barracks’ main hall. Many of those who had gathered to witness the taking of the oath had dispersed. A few remained, scattered around nearby tables, taking grateful advantage of the food provided by the town’s Guard.
“So many?” Orisian said. “Less than a hundred, if you leave out our warriors. A handful, no more.”
“True enough,” Torcaill persisted, through a mouthful of dry bread, “but they’ve come a long way to reach here. There could have been fewer. Far fewer.”
“I suppose so,” Orisian murmured.
Taim watched him as Orisian absently scratched at the scar across his cheek. He looked tired, but there was a certain stillness to him now, a settled quality that seemed new. Perhaps the boy-Tollen-had not been the only one offered an anchor by the taking of his oath.
“Those who’ve come so far already will have to move on again now,” Orisian said quietly. “We should spread the word that their flight’s not finished yet. It’s not safe for any of us to remain here.”
“No,” Taim agreed. He kept his voice low too, recognising Orisian’s instinct to keep such conversation from uninvited ears. Yvane and Eshenna, he noticed, were maintaining a studious, and somewhat contrived, inattention. The two na’kyrim, though they sat at Orisian’s side, paid no heed to his words.
It might well be that these na’kyrim already knew more of his Thane’s thoughts than Taim did himself. He had the sense that Orisian had deliberately excluded him, and Torcaill, and all the other warriors, from much of what passed between the three of them. He neither regretted nor resented that fact. A Thane could take such counsel as he saw fit, and Taim was in any case all but certain that their discussions concerned matters he understood-and desired to understand-nothing of.
“Ive is lost-and so are all who remain here-as soon as the Black Road chooses to make it so,” Orisian said.
“It is,” Taim confirmed. “Tomorrow or the day after. Soon, in any case. Erval tells me the fighting men are already slipping away; fleeing with their families. The only thing that’s delayed the end so far is that the Black Road seem to be losing discipline just as we are. But with or without leadership, they’ll overrun us.”
Orisian nodded. “I mean to take K’rina north.”
A horrified expression instantly appeared on Torcaill’s face.
“North?” the younger warrior gasped. Taim hissed at him, and extended a monitory finger. Out of the corner of his eye, he could already see heads turning at some of the other tables.
Torcaill spoke more softly when he went on, but he did not disguise the disbelief, the disapproval, in his voice. “We’d be stepping from storm into fire if we go north. What safety could we possibly find there?”
“How much can we find anywhere?” Orisian quietly countered. “There’re Black Road armies to the south and the west; too many for us to cut our way through. Nothing to the east but mountains, hunger and cold. Miserable as it is, that’s the best chance for most of these people, but it’s not for us. You want your Thane wandering off to starve in the wilderness? Chased off by the Black Road?”
“But what’s to the north?” Torcaill muttered.
“There’s Highfast,” Orisian said quietly.
“We don’t even know if it’s still standing,” Torcaill said. “It could have a thousand Black Road swords inside it.”
