brawl, and then to attempt the same upon the Guards sent to arrest him.
“This — ” he advanced down the line, and indicated the second kneeling prisoner “-is the ringleader of a mob from Ramarok on the coast. They were hungry because the seal hunters have gone south. They thought a family was hoarding food, so they burned them out of their house and slaughtered them-husband, wife, children-in the street. Clubbed them to death. Then they set upon one another. Killed another dozen.”
The High Thane stood behind the last of them: a long-haired young woman who was calmly watching Theor. The First returned her gaze, sensing that there was some meaning or intent in it, but unable to tease it out. Ragnor looked down at the woman, curling his lip in contempt. He grabbed a handful of her hair and shook her head roughly.
“This,” he snarled, “this one I am not sure of. She might be a mere tool, a mere agent. Or perhaps she is the thing itself: one of Avenn’s shadow-haunters. I don’t know, and I don’t care.” He shot a meaningful glance at Theor. “If she’s of the Hunt itself, I don’t care. She was rousing the villagers in the lands around Effen, preaching the coming of the Kall, filling them with the fire they needed to send them off across the Vale of Stones. All but emptied three villages, she did, and when she was commanded to cease, she disappeared, only to be found repeating her game two days later.”
Ragnor released the woman, slapping her hard across the back of the head as he stepped away. Guards moved into place behind each of the prisoners. They held cords in their hands.
“Ragnor, wait,” Theor said, taking a pace forward. He did not know if the woman was one of the Hunt, but if she was…
“No,” Ragnor said flatly. “I have no patience left, First. I will not wait any longer, for anything or anyone.” He nodded to the guards.
Theor stepped back. Vana, he realised, was not watching; she was staring up at a ram’s skull mounted high on the wall, pouring her attention into the polished bone, the curled horn. The cords slipped around necks. They were twisted tight at once. They dug into skin. Mouths stretched open, tongues fluttered. Eyes gaped. The woman struggled to rise, but the guard behind her kicked the back of her knee and pushed her down again. On each of the three throats a red blush spread; muscles and sinews stood despairingly taut. Something collapsed with a soft crunch.
A distorted rattle escaped the woman’s throat. Her executioner redoubled his efforts, tightening, crushing. One of the men-the one from Ramarok-died first. Then the woman, then the Horin man. They fell, or were pushed, forward, and lay crumpled on the dais.
Ragnor oc Gyre scuffed the woman’s long hair away from her face, exposing her protruding tongue and the string of saliva loosed from her mouth.
“Do you see?” the Thane of Thanes murmured. “Do you understand? I have gibbets and stakes and pyres aplenty. If I have to fill them all, use every one of them, I will have an end to this. However many have to die, I mean to cure us of this madness. This disease. I have had enough.”
Theor’s litter-bearers hurried to take up their positions, and watched him expectantly as he emerged onto the steps outside the Great Hall. It was snowing once more. The hundred Battle Inkallim were still spread across the yard in a great arc. Theor stood just outside the doors, rubbing his hands together. They tingled uncomfortably at the sudden transition from the warmth of the hall into the day’s bitter chill.
Vana oc Horin-Gyre appeared at his side. She paused, pulling up the seal-trimmed hood of her cloak. Her attendants hurried to fetch their horses from wherever they had been stabled.
“I saw a bear slain on the day of your husband’s interment,” Theor said quietly. “Ragnor’s own Shield quilled its breast with crossbow bolts. You saw it too. The High Thane himself laughed that it might be an omen, of the fall of a great lord or a sudden change in the order of things.”
Angain’s widow looked sharply at him, then returned her attention to the task of pulling on sleek calf-hide gloves.
“The Road does not grant us omens, of course,” said Theor. “But still. There is change in the air, I think. I fear.”
“Spare me any further involvement in your noble enterprises, First,” said Vana, and now the bitterness in her voice was unmistakable. “I thought I had the mettle to succeed my husband, to match his fervour, his strength. I find I do not. I am weary, and I have no remaining interest in the creed, or omens, or the wars you choose to fight. My family has already paid a high enough price.”
“It was never our intent, or desire, to do anything other than nurture the fire that your husband, alone amongst all the Thanes, kept alight. Many of the Inkallim who crossed the Vale were specifically tasked with keeping your children safe if — ”
“Then they failed,” Vana snapped. She flexed her fingers inside the gloves irritably. “You failed. Wain is dead. Kanin, by all accounts, is shunned by those now guiding the war. That vile halfbreed who first whispered thought of war in my husband’s ear rules in Kan Avor, I hear, with this Shraeve of yours serving as his Shieldmaiden. That is not what my husband hoped for.”
“There is much, I agree, that is unexpected in all of this — ” Theor nodded sympathetically “-but it is not given to any of us to predict fate’s course.”
“No?” Vana said. She glared at him, but he saw more pain than anger in her eyes. He felt a sudden sympathy for this woman who found her strength unequal to the challenges the world presented. “I’ll make a prediction for you: I will never have my son back, just as I will never see my daughter again. Ragnor wants me to summon him, as if anything I could say would change anything. I know my son, First. Wain is dead. Kanin would return only if there were none left to punish for that, deservingly or not. He will require a surfeit of blood, and still it will not heal him. In search of that healing he can never find, he will go on and on until he drowns in the blood of the dead.”
“As will we all, eventually,” Theor murmured as Vana walked away from him, descending the steps to where her grooms now waited with the horses. “It’s the fate of this world to drown in blood, sooner or later.”
III
“You’ve never heard of it before?” Orisian asked.
Yvane shook her head. “I’d never have believed it possible. I hardly believe it is possible, even now.”
She was walking alongside Orisian’s horse, trudging up the long, bleak track to Highfast. Her tolerance for riding had been thoroughly exhausted, and no one made any protest at her refusal, for she did not slow their progress. All of them, horses included, were bleary and sluggish. It had been two nights now since any of them had had any meaningful rest. Above, clouds spun and churned about the Karkyre Peaks. Gusts of eye-watering wind came tumbling down from the heights to sting their faces. Slabs of snow were scattered all across the mountains, clinging to whatever seams in the rocks gave them purchase and shelter. Most of the snow had been scoured from the track, but sometimes, when they were in the lee of some huge ridge or cliff, there were drifts deep enough to make progress painfully slow.
“We saw it, though,” Orisian said.
“We did. We saw something done for the first time, as far as I know, in all the world, in all its history. Myself, I was happier when I thought such a thing impossible. He is stronger than the Anain. He-one man, one na’kyrim-has killed…”
She splayed her hands, as if pushing away words, or thoughts, that she could not accommodate.
“It doesn’t change anything,” Orisian said.
“No?” Yvane grunted. “Tell your Fox friends that. They may disagree.”
Orisian glanced ahead towards Ess’yr and Varryn. They were thirty or forty paces further up the track, pushing on, heads down, with more stubborn resilience than anyone else could manage. Neither of them had spoken of what they had seen in those woods, when the Anain had appeared before them, and died. They alone had seen it killing the Black Roaders, and Orisian could barely imagine what that must have meant for them, to witness first the waking of the forest, and then its destruction; to see one of the beings they considered tutelary spirits of their lands, their lives, snuffed out like the feeblest of candle flames. Who, Orisian wondered, did the Kyrinin imagine would protect them from their restless dead, if the Anain could no longer safely venture near the surface of the world?
