In the gathering darkness it was difficult to see much, but the man’s voice sounded strained to Orisian.
“And you?” he asked. “Are you hurt?”
“Nothing serious, sire. The woman with the crossbow: my knee met her helmet when I rode her down.”
“Were you followed?” Taim demanded. He was holding the horse’s reins, stroking its neck while another warrior examined its wound.
“No.” The scout shook his head emphatically. “It was just the two of them stumbled across me. Both dead. They were careless, wandering around looking for a deer or hare for the pot, I think, not someone to fight.”
“And Ive Bridge?” Orisian asked.
“Not more than three score spears to hold it, sire, as far as I could see. And only half of those look to be trained warriors.”
“No Inkallim?” asked Taim.
“None that I could see. Couldn’t go too close, but no, I don’t think so.”
“Good enough,” Taim grunted. “We’ve likely got them overmatched, then.”
“We should wait until the night’s got a firm hold,” said Orisian quietly. “Let them get bleary with sleep. K’rina and Eshenna and Yvane can stay hidden here, with a dozen men.”
He half-expected Taim to demur, to try to persuade him to remain behind with the na’kyrim, but the warrior said nothing. Orisian glanced up through the leafless branches towards the bruised sky. The cloud was thin; the moon, risen long ago, a diffuse disc.
“There should be enough light to see by. And if there isn’t, we’ll have Kyrinin with us. They won’t.”
They had not made camp in the little patch of woodland. No tents were set up, no fires were lit, despite the searing cold. They merely sheltered there, from the desultory snow and from the revelatory daylight. Men and horses were crowded into the heart of the copse, all made listless and irritable by the enervating tension. Some sat on the damp ground, dicing or muttering softly to one another, or chewing on cured meats and oatcakes. Most stood by their horses, keeping them quiet.
Sentries were scattered through the fringes of the thicket, watching the snow-dusted fields and rough slopes all around. Low hills rolled their way westwards, sinking into the huge coastal plain. There were scattered farms and villages, fading in the distance into a flat haze of grey. Snow showers had come and gone all day, by turns revealing and obscuring grim signs of unrest and ruin. For a time a dark smear of smoke marked the site of some burning barn or farmhouse; later a dozen twisting, frail columns rose elsewhere, betraying the campfires of some roving band of reavers; once a great company of riders could be seen, sweeping across the very lowest slopes.
All within that concealing stand of trees felt the calm and quiet that currently embraced them to be a treacherously fragile, even deceptive, thing. A lie, told by a world that had turned into a savage and cruel mockery of itself, and could betray at any moment those who forgot how much had changed.
Orisian squatted down beside Ess’yr, holding his water pouch out to her. She blinked the offer away.
“We’ll be moving soon,” he said quietly. “Once it’s as dark as it’s going to get.”
The Kyrinin rolled her head, stretching her long neck.
“When you choose,” she said.
“I’m grateful for your aid in this,” Orisian murmured. Grateful for many things, in truth, few of which he could easily put into words.
“This opens the way north, yes?” Ess’yr said. “We move closer now, to the place we belong. To the war we must fight.”
She meant the White Owls, he knew. She and her brother believed they were travelling towards their own personal renewal of the brutal contest between Fox and White Owl; towards the discharge of a lethal duty that had been upon them ever since the fighting at Koldihrve. Vengeance, Yvane would no doubt dismissively call it, as Orisian himself might once have called it. He thought-he felt-a little differently now, though those feelings were imprecise, as hard to grasp and examine as vapours.
“Where did it come from?” he asked. “The hatred between Fox and White Owl, I mean.”
“From the beginning,” Ess’yr said softly, without inflection. “From the shape of things. From the pattern the Walking God made. He spoke with many animals, not one, as he walked. Without difference, there is no pattern at all.”
It was an answer that gave him nothing, but he had not really expected otherwise. To his surprise, though, Ess’yr had a little more to offer.
“It is not thought amongst my people,” she murmured, “that strife, and pain, and hate came to us only with the leaving of the Gods. These things have always been in the world, in its differences. They are part of what was made. When the Gods left, it was balance that was lost; not suffering that was found.”
Orisian nodded, though Ess’yr was not looking at him, and though her words gave rise to an inchoate sorrow in him.
“But there was no balance, even before the Gods departed, was there?” he said. “We killed the wolfenkind. Every one of them.”
“Still, it was balance the Gods sought,” Ess’yr said. She sat there cross-legged, straight-backed, with her hands upon her knees and now she did fix him with a steady gaze. “They chose to make us many, not one. They chose to put unlikeness into the world, where before there had been none. It must be, I think, that they believed such difference could bring balance. If it brings strife also, it must be that they thought that a fair price.”
Her eyes held him. The richness of her voice held him. He felt himself drawing nearer to her, to her life and her people. It took him, for a moment, out of the chill, fearful present; took him somewhere safer, better.
“My dreams have lost their balance,” he said, as much to himself as to Ess’yr. “When I manage to sleep at all. It’s cruel to find sleep so hard when the nights are at their longest.”
“They become shorter.”
“The nights? Do they?” He fell silent for a moment. Grief came up in him, rising in his throat, through his cheeks, touching his eyes. “Winter grows old, then. I missed its turning.”
Ess’yr said nothing. The last fading light that reached into the heart of the copse caught the tattoos that crossed her cheekbone, set the slightest glint in her soft grey eyes.
“We used to celebrate on the longest night,” Orisian said thickly. “In Kolglas. It’s the night when winter’s strongest, but also when it begins to lose its grip. There was feasting and dancing. And my mother sang.”
The immediacy of the memories was frightening, their intricate weight-grief and comfort too inextricably entwined to tell one from the other-so great that he felt himself buckling. But her voice was there, in his mind, coming to him across an impassable chasm of loss. He heard it, and at once it was gone, melting away into the sounds of the cold dusk, the accumulating darkness. The losing of it robbed him of whatever comfort it had offered; left him only with the grief. The bitter anger.
“Time to go,” he said through trembling lips.
Ive Bridge huddled in stony silence on the south bank of the river. Orisian remembered passing it as he made his first journey to Highfast, and he had thought it an unappealing place then. Now, it appeared ominous in its bleak isolation: squat houses crowded in on what little flat ground the terrain offered, and the bridge itself, hooking over the river like a bent finger. All of it was indistinct and menacing in the darkness, with only the faintest of moonlight to pick out its inanimate forms. A few lamps or torches burned in windows, but most of the village was all greys and blacks and imagined danger. He could just catch the soft scent of woodsmoke on the breeze. That smell too spoke to him with a threatening cadence these days.
Orisian could hear the River Ive down there in the crevasse it had made for itself on the far side of the houses, grinding and foaming in its mountain bed under the bridge. Somewhere beyond that noise, out in the utterly impenetrable darkness, lay the road that led on and up into the Karkyre Peaks, to Highfast. If he thought of that too clearly or carefully, doubt came crowding in upon him. He did not know how much trust to put in his own thoughts and instincts now, and chose instead-as much as he could-to hold his attention upon the present, the immediate.
Figures were moving down the rugged slope towards Ive Bridge: Ess’yr and Varryn, and a dozen warriors led by Torcaill. They did not follow the main trail that snaked its way into the village, but descended instead over steep, boulder-strewn ground, creeping from moonshadow to moonshadow. It would not be long before they reached the first outlying cottage.
Orisian rolled away and scuttled like a beetle-bent almost double, with his shield strapped across his back-to join Taim and the others. They waited in a cutting through which the trail passed before it began its descent into
