the innumerable tiles, the smooth stone.
“We have nothing like this where I come from,” Anyara observed.
“No? No, well I suppose we are privileged to enjoy such indulgences here.”
“Perhaps we should find some water, to cool…”
“No,” Tara said. She wiped sweat from her brow with the back of one of her marred hands. “The healer will bring some, no doubt. The pain is… the pain is only pain.”
Anyara nodded. There was a depth of sorrow in this woman she recognised. Remembered. Loss was the only thing she knew that could at once so fill and so empty someone.
“You saw him in Kolkyre, did you not?” Tara asked. “Before he was captured?”
“Your husband. Yes, I did.”
“Was he then as he is now?”
“I am not sure I know what you mean, lady.”
“Has he changed? Is he as you remember him?”
Anyara had no idea what it would be best to say. She should be calculating how to win Tara’s favour. That had been her intent, after all, in seeking her out. There was no one else she could think of-no one with any influence-in whose ear she might find even a trace of sympathy. Yet calculation felt tawdry and futile in the face of such aching, familiar distress. “He seems… distracted. Graceless, if you will forgive me, in a way he was not before. He frightened me even then, my lady, if I am honest, but now… now he frightens me still, but in different ways.”
Tara stared at her in silence. Anyara feared she had forfeited whatever connection might have been possible between the two of them. But then the Chancellor’s wife nodded and hung her head.
“It is not true, what is being said-what he has said-about my Blood,” Anyara ventured. “About my brother.”
“Truth is a rare currency these days,” Tara said dully. “If you find it in short supply, you are far from the only one. What was it you wanted? My help?”
“I thought…” Anyara hesitated. She felt sweat upon her forehead, at her temples. A drop of it traced a crooked path down over her cheekbone. “You know it’s not true, I think. You understand that there is something wrong in all of this.”
“It is not my concern,” said Tara. A sad, reflective smile tugged at one corner of her mouth, bunched her cheek for a moment. She stared at the blank wall, and the smile faded.
Anyara could hear rapidly approaching footsteps: soft-slippered feet padding along the corridor. In a moment, she would no longer be alone with the Chancellor’s wife.
“Something has gone wrong,” she said again. “And whatever’s happening, it can’t be just about my Blood, or Kilkry. These lies must have a greater purpose. I don’t know what your husband saw… I don’t know what happened to him when he was captured by the Black Road — ”
“Enough,” said Tara sharply.
“Don’t you feel that everything’s going wrong? Doesn’t this all feel as if everything’s getting twisted out of shape?” Anyara persisted, beyond fear or caution now, hearing Coinach saying something to those arriving outside the chamber; delaying them, on her behalf. “Your husband… he said something strange to me, the other day. He said I had been in the forest, in Anduran, as if he was there with me, though I never met him until Kolkyre. He hasn’t… he hasn’t mentioned a na’kyrim to you, has he? A man called Aeglyss?”
The Shadowhand’s wife shook her head slowly. She kept watching Anyara, intelligent eyes unblinking, as Eleth came hurrying in, half a dozen others with her: maids and healers. One carried a slopping bucket of water, another great rolls of bandages, a third armfuls of vials and stoppered bottles. The eldest of the men bustled over to Tara Jerain, casting a puzzled glance at the overturned brazier, carefully skirting its scattered contents.
“What happened, my lady?”
“I pushed it over,” said Tara faintly, holding her hands out for examination. “It was very stupid of me. I felt in need of… noise.”
Anyara backed away, step by step, towards the doorway. Tara’s thoughtful gaze never left her, even as the healers muttered over her wounds, and began to spread salves over them.
*
The carriage had an escort of thirty men when it left Vaymouth. It rattled through the city streets in a cacophony of clattering wheels and hoofs. Half the lancers raced ahead, ruthlessly sweeping the streets clear of bystanders. There was urgency, for they had been late leaving the barracks beside the Moon Palace. The Captain in charge of the escort had been unexpectedly summoned to attend upon the Chancellor himself, and then kept waiting, frustrated and listless, while the morning sank into a grey and muted afternoon. The audience, when it came, had been mysteriously pointless: a fierce repetition of previous orders, an insistent emphasis on the need for haste. The Captain left the meeting feeling both somewhat battered and thoroughly puzzled that he had lost so much time for no discernible purpose beyond being forcefully reminded of the urgency of his mission.
The column burst from Vaymouth’s northern gate like a hound loosed in pursuit of a stag. The horses pounded up the road, shadowing the winding course of the Vay River upstream. The carriage shook, rocking from side to side. The great expanse of the Vaywater lay at least two days’ journey to the north-east. There, on the lake’s only island, was the village of In’Vay, and its ancient, crenellated tower. It was a place with a bloody history, a place of execution and slaughter. More than three centuries ago, the warlords of the Taral plains had taken Lerr, the Boy King, there when they betrayed his trust to seize him at parley. It was there he had died, last of his line, strangled in the Lake Tower, his body weighted with stones and sunk into the Vaywater’s embrace. It was there the Aygll Kingship had been finally, irretrievably extinguished and the Storm Years birthed.
Now another fallen lord was being carried to the Lake Tower. Those who rode in escort whipped their horses to a lather in hope of making up the time that had been lost in Vaymouth. The winter days were brief, though. In the shadows cast by its last light of the sun, they had parted from the great road that drove north to Drandar; their path was less travelled, taking an easterly curve.
There was only one great inn to offer shelter on this stretch. They stopped there to feed and water their horses, and get what rest they could before the next dawn. The carriage stood, square and silent, in the yard to one side of the inn all through the night. Eight men guarded it and the prisoner it contained, some sitting atop its flat roof, others leaning against its wheels, others walking in long, careful circuits of the yard, the inn and the whole hamlet.
Those who did not keep watch ate well beside roaring ashwood fires, and drank well. Yet their spirits were not greatly lightened by such comforts. They felt the burden of their grave duty, and knew they would have need of punishing haste if they were not to come late to In’Vay. Many of them slept poorly, and some worse than that. By the morning, eighteen of them were crippled by twisting cramps in their guts. They could not sit straight astride their horses, let alone attempt the pace required that day. Acutely mindful of the Chancellor’s wrath, the Captain barely hesitated: he beat the inn’s master into unconsciousness, then left the sick behind and went with his eleven remaining men on up the road.
In the low hills that marked the northern limits of Haig lands, they came to a ford. The eyeless man within the carriage heard the wheels splashing through the water, grinding over pebbles. He was shaken roughly back and forth, clinging to his chains to keep himself from being thrown from his hard seat. His thighs and arms were already bruised from the violence of his journey. There were no gentle surfaces within this cold box, and he had no blankets or cushions to soften the blows.
There was a pause once the wagon came out from the river. He savoured the moments of comparative quiet. His ears still rang from the clamour that had filled his moving prison, every harsh sound that had been trapped in there with him, but now at least he could hear too the soft chuckling of the river, the distant call of some bird circling overhead.
Then, too soon, they were moving again, the carriage rumbling slowly up an incline. The noise gathered strength, shaping itself slowly into the formless sense-numbing roar he had come to know. This time, though, it was interrupted. Other sounds-sounds that did not fit-intruded and broke the rhythm of wheels and hoofs. Shouts. A horse’s scream. Something falling, something thudding against the side of the carriage. Something cracking and breaking under a wheel. He was thrown onto his side as the carriage veered suddenly. He felt it tipping, one set of wheels lifting from the road, then it crashed back and went unsteadily on. More cries. More confusion. Then silence.
