Amonyn raised his faint eyebrows and gave a slight shrug.
“I have little experience of Thanes,” he admitted. “I think any man, though, whatever his station, will break if he takes all the weight of decisions, all the assaults of the world, upon himself alone.”
“You’ve seen K’rina?” Orisian asked.
Amonyn hesitated for a moment, as if debating whether to concede such a shift in the conversation. The decision was made, and he nodded.
“Do you understand what has happened to her?” asked Orisian. “Eshenna claims she is some kind of… weapon. Or trap.”
“It may be so,” Amonyn said. He was grave, his voice tinged with sadness. “Her essence is either gone, or so deeply buried as to be beyond giving any sign even in the Shared. When she is near, I feel…” He curled the fingers of one hand in the air, reaching for precision. Defeated, he let his hand fall back to his side. “There is a hunger there. A mindless hunger. And the spoor of the Anain are upon her, like the tracks of deer in the earth. Whatever has been made of her, they did the making.”
Orisian pursed his lips. His hands closed upon the lip of the desk. The wood felt brittle and dry beneath his grip. He looked at his palm and saw a bar of ash across it.
“There is something of her that reminds me of Tyn, the Dreamer,” Amonyn said, wincing at the memory. “Of what Aeglyss did to him. How he… emptied him, and then wore the empty shell himself. K’rina is a shell, but what is now within? Perhaps nothing.” He sighed. “But in truth no one here can tell you any more than Eshenna or Yvane have already done. To learn more about K’rina, we would need to go much deeper into the Shared than any of us would dare. What Eshenna has already discovered… It was an act of great bravery, or desperation, for her to search it out.”
Orisian nodded. “Too much for her, I think,” he said. “I regret that. It was at my insistence that she did it.”
“You won’t find anyone here eager to repeat the venture. The beast found his way inside our defences once already. We would not invite him in again.”
“It must be very difficult for you, to be frightened of the Shared,” Orisian said.
There was that instant of acute, appraising attention once more, as if Amonyn was surprised to hear such sentiments from a Huanin.
“It is,” the na’kyrim said quietly. “We have lost more than one home.”
“And until Aeglyss is gone, you can none of you return to the one that’s inside your heads.”
“We must exile ourselves from the Shared. K’rina’s wound was not serious. She has needed no more than the most mundane of ministrations. But there are those within these walls who are dying from their wounds, their ailments. I might save some of them, if I had the courage, or the strength, to allow the Shared to flow through me. But I do not. None of us do.”
Orisian looked up at the huge roof of the hall, dropped his gaze to the few surviving books collected on nearby desks. “You should stay, all of you. That’s what I came to tell you. You’d be no safer-probably less-out there on the roads, perhaps even in Dyrkyrnon. I will leave men here to guard you, and to keep Herraic and the others in order.”
Amonyn stooped elegantly to pull a fragment of parchment from a drift of ash. He frowned at it briefly then let it fall. It fluttered down, black and illegible.
“Not everything that is broken can be mended, however much we-you-might wish otherwise. Some things… do not mend.”
“I know that,” Orisian said. “Believe me, I understand that. I know that the past cannot be changed, cannot be undone. But the future… I still believe, still hope, that can be changed, can be shaped by what we choose to do. And enough has already been lost. We shouldn’t give up any more without a fight. Anything that’s worth preserving, it needs to be fought for now, don’t you think? Or there will be nothing left at all of any worth, any brightness.”
“Everyone has to choose their own battles to fight,” Amonyn said quietly. “We will see, though. Give us your warriors to guard us, and perhaps. Perhaps. There might be some of us willing to remain. You don’t mean to stay here yourself, though.”
Orisian shook his head. “I can’t see any other choice. If I hid away here…” The words faded, losing themselves.
The na’kyrim angled his head, smiling now with the very smile Orisian’s memory had put upon Inurian’s face.
“There’s always choice. We seldom understand our every reason for doing what we do, but somewhere, hidden or not, made or unmade, there’s always choice. We each choose our own battles, as I said.”
There was, high in the great keep of the ancient fortress, a wide chamber from which the Wardens of the Aygll Kings once exercised the power of those distant monarchs. They judged those who disturbed the peace of the long road Highfast guarded; they levied the tithes that paid for Dun Aygll’s palaces and for the many royal pleasures of their inhabitants; they marshalled the warriors who enforced peace upon the Karkyre Peaks, and all the land from Ive to Hent to Stone. As the road fell into ruin, as the Storm Years sent the mountain folk down onto the plains in search of easier, safer lives, as Highfast itself declined into its long slumber, so that chamber had grown quiet. Each dwindling of Highfast’s garrison had seen its inhabitants retreat into ever more restricted portions of the vast stronghold, withdrawing from many of its innumerable passages and halls and turrets. So this lofty chamber had emptied of voices, and populated itself instead with dust and silences and the webs of hopeful spiders.
Orisian called all his warriors there because he wanted privacy from Herraic and his sullen, subjugated men. Because he wanted light, and the sight of the sky, to be attendant upon this moment. From the windows here, where Highfast reached almost to its utmost height above its vast, precipitous pedestal, he could see an ocean of scudding clouds brushing over serried ranks of peaks.
“I will take K’rina into the north,” he said. “To the Glas Valley. As close as I can get to Kan Avor, and to Aeglyss.”
He looked not at the faces of those assembled before him, but at the old, indistinct carving of a crown set into the stonework above the door. He felt strangely unfamiliar to himself, as if some part of him had stepped aside from his tempestuous core, where fear and confusion and agonies of doubt boiled. He was unexpectedly calm.
“It is a journey she was meant to make, I think, until we-I-stole her away from it. Now she cannot make it alone, so I will take her. Past Hent, and through Anlane. Most of you are to stay here, and I’ll want your pledge to keep safe all who are within these walls, human and na’kyrim alike. Guard them against whatever may come from outside, or from within. It’s the only service your Blood, and your Thane, requires of you now.
“If there are ten of you who are willing to come with me, and with K’rina, I would welcome your aid. No more than ten, for there’ll be no battles if I can help it. At this time of year, this season, most of the White Owls should be quartered in their winter camps. With care, we might go entirely unnoticed. But I will take no one who does not come by their own free choice.”
Taim Narran stepped forward, of course, even before Orisian had drawn breath: a single, determined pace closer to his Thane. Others followed him, one by one, the only sound their soft feet on the flagstoned floor. And for Orisian there was both relief and guilt in the sight of them coming out from amongst their fellows. Offering themselves, and their lives, to him.
Afterwards, as the warriors departed, descending the long stairways, Taim Narran came to him.
“Are you sure?” was all the warrior asked him, gently.
“Not sure. I’ve seen and heard enough to make me think it needs doing. And I’m here; there’s no one else to do it. But you don’t have to come, Taim. Highfast will need a strong hand to hold it, and there’s no one I’d trust more than you. You’ve a wife and a daughter waiting for you who’ll need you after all this is done. I’d be glad to see you stay, truly.”
Taim Narran only shook his head sadly at that, and went after his men. Orisian and Yvane were left alone in the broad chamber, the na’kyrim watching him with hard eyes.
“Stay,” Orisian said to her. “You’ve done enough. More than enough.”
“I’ll come for K’rina. She deserves that much of us, at least. There should be someone of her own kind there to care for her, to watch over her. Someone who understands something of what she was, what her life was, before she became only a tool of those with wars to fight.”
“I care for her,” Orisian said. The fires in him were damped down, for now. He wanted only quiet. He would not argue with Yvane. And there was, in any case, a truth he could entirely understand in her subdued anger.
