with all their suffering, all their deaths, lost to memory. None of it of consequence now, yet all of it real and heavy.
“Do you want to rest?” he asked Yvane quietly.
“Don’t be silly,” she muttered, a reassuring touch of the old brashness there in her voice. “It’s hardly any distance now.”
Orisian nodded and resumed his descent.
“Plenty of places they could have chosen to sulk in, though,” he heard Yvane saying irritably behind him. “Seems a bit overexcited of them to burrow quite so deep.”
The na’kyrim had gathered in a chamber where Highfast’s hollow roots brushed the precipitous surface of the mountain. The shutters at the windows were propped narrowly open, giving a glimpse of the immense open spaces, the plummeting drop, that lay outside; admitting a dull light and cold threads of unceasing wind.
Simple beds filled much of the room, and many were occupied by the sleeping or the sick or the weak.
“Look at this, look at this,” Yvane murmured in distress as they walked the length of the chamber.
In even the plainest, most human of na’kyrim faces Orisian had until now always seen some trace of their Kyrinin parentage: a composed serenity, an elegant balance in their features or those calm grey eyes. Now he saw only wounds, of body and spirit alike. Eyes had the nervous restlessness of the hunted and hounded. Skin was marred by sores or cuts or burns. Cheeks had sunk into hollow bowls, sucked in by hunger or misery. One woman lay unmoving save for the constant, silent working of her thin lips, a smear of burned and raw flesh disfiguring one side of her face and crusting up across part of her scalp. The wound was coated in a slick white salve, but it looked inflamed. Orisian was glad that she had her eyes closed, for he feared what he might see there had he met her gaze.
He felt his anger as a pain in his chest. It knotted itself there, and because he fought to keep it locked away, it raged all the more brightly and bitterly. It clamoured for release, demanding that there must be punishment, that only the suffering of the guilty could answer this suffering of the innocent. But he refused it. He had never known its like, never known this hot, sharp conviction, like a howl inside him, that the only healing he could ever hope for was with a sword in his hand and blood upon its blade. But still he refused it.
Eshenna was seated on one of the beds closest to the windows. Little gusts of wind stirred her hair. Her hands were folded in her lap like white fallen leaves.
She looked up as Yvane sat beside her on the thin mattress. Orisian saw the same thing in her eyes he had seen in so many others: a defeated, drained emptiness.
“This is where I belonged,” Eshenna murmured as she looked down once more to her hands. She held some tiny fragment of cloth there, twisting it around her long fingers. “These are the people I belong to. I should never have left. I should have been here.”
“No,” murmured Yvane.
“We couldn’t have made any difference,” Orisian said. “None of us. Not here.”
“I know,” Eshenna whispered. “That’s not why I should have been here.”
And Orisian understood her. He felt the same longing rising up in him: not to have been here in Highfast when Aeglyss came, but to have slipped Rothe’s grasp when his shieldman dragged him out of Castle Kolglas on the night of Winterbirth. To have plunged back into the fire and the fury and been at his father’s side. Try to save his father, try to save Inurian. And, in failing, to be released from the burden of all that had flowed from that one night.
He closed his eyes. All his anger easily folded itself into a shaming despair, a profound sense that nothing was as it was meant to be. He should have paid the same price that had been demanded of Kylane and Kennet, Rothe and Inurian. And he could have wept then, thinking of his mother and brother, bound in linen winding sheets, riding the corpse-ship out to The Grave. For the first time he understood, not with his head but with his heart, what had been inside his father all those years since the Heart Fever stole away Lairis and Fariel. It was not grief; it was the desire to have gone with them. It was guilt at having let them go alone.
He blinked at Eshenna.
“Where’s Amonyn?” he managed to ask.
“The Scribing Hall,” she told him.
“I know the way,” Orisian said.
The cavernous space of the Scribing Hall felt cold and dead. Wet ash was piled thickly against some of the walls and smeared across the floor. In one corner was a great, precarious heap of half-burned timbers, fragments of shelves and tables and chairs. Thick black soot streaked the walls and darkened the ceiling. Everything, everywhere, lay beneath the finest grey dust of destruction. A few meagre stacks of books and manuscripts had been assembled on some of the surviving desks. Many were scorched, their edges charred and curled. It was a pitiful remnant of the innumerable writings Orisian had seen when last he entered this library.
“That’s what remains to us of all the labours since Lorryn first came here,” Amonyn murmured. “More than two and a half centuries.”
Orisian remembered seeing him on his first visit to Highfast; one of their Council, he thought, though they had never spoken as far as he could recall. There seemed to be a consensus amongst the na’kyrim that this man, as much as any, was now their leader. He was tall and handsome, still possessed of a certain grace and air of physical power despite recent hardships. He was subdued, though. Sorrowful and weary.
Orisian stirred a strandline of ash with the toe of his boot.
“Cerys… the Elect… died here,” said Amonyn. He sighed. “It would have broken her heart to see it thus. It breaks all our hearts.”
“Asking too much to start again,” Orisian said. It was half-statement, half-question.
Amonyn pressed long, milk-nailed fingers into his eyes. There was a strength about him, but it was not an unopposed strength. It was there, and evident, because it was required. Because the man it fortified was beleaguered.
“There are those who wish to leave this place and never return. Too much grief here. Too much horror.”
Orisian nodded silently. Amonyn lifted his gaze towards the small windows high on the far wall. They admitted only a watery light.
“This was meant to be a sanctuary for us,” the na’kyrim said. “And in the end it was one of our own kind who breached it. It was the Shared, ours alone, that undid us. But then, sanctuaries can only ever come to one of two ends: they cease to be required or they fail. It was never likely that Highfast’s end would be of the first kind, I suppose. That would have been asking for deeper changes in the world than are common.”
“Where would you go if you left?”
“Dyrkyrnon, for most.”
“I imagine there’s no place there for a Scribing Hall, or a library.”
“It seems unlikely,” said Amonyn quietly.
“You should stay. All of you.”
Amonyn glanced sideways at him. A shrewd, thoughtful look.
“It would be, for many, the harder choice to stay. Something was lost here, and it could never be recovered. Safety, for a people who find the world ill-provided with that quality. They-we-trusted this place.”
The na’kyrim studied Orisian as intently as a gemsmith examining a stone.
“There was less sadness in you when last you were here,” he said. “Less darkness. Eshenna has told me a little of what you have seen since then. She expressed some concern about you.”
“She need not worry.”
“No?” Amonyn sighed. “Such wounds as you bear are difficult to conceal from na’kyrim. From some of us, at least. Doors that were once open in you are now barred. Windows have been shuttered. It is not unusual for any of us, when we are bruised, to retreat in the hope of avoiding further injury.”
Orisian crossed to one of the smoke-blackened desks and rested back against its edge. The solitude and disconnection he had for so long now felt growing within him were softened for a moment by a vivid sense of Inurian’s presence. He could recall his lost friend’s face with fresh clarity, envisaging it graced with a sympathetic smile. There was much about Amonyn that reminded him of Inurian.
“I’ve not chosen to bar any doors,” he said, “but… things have changed. All those I most valued are dead, or have been parted from me. And I am Thane now. I imagine Thanes must always be somewhat alone.”
