“Perhaps you do,” she said. “Perhaps you think you do. But still she is used. By the Anain. By us. Na’kyrim have learned-hundreds of years have taught us-to find caring and trust and safety only in one another. In our own. If there is anything of K’rina left, lost in the Shared or sealed away inside her body, she deserves to look out and see a face like her own. And I played my part in helping you to find her. Whether that was wise or not, I don’t know, but I’ll not walk away from her now.”
She left him there, and he stood for a time breathing the damp air, tasting its age and its abandonment. Listening to the timeless, unending wind tumbling over the skin of the fortress. Watching as flurries of snow began to swirl once more past the windows.
When he at last stirred himself, he went to find Ess’yr and Varryn. He said not a word to them, nor they to him. He merely settled himself onto a bench and watched them. They rolled spare bowstrings about their fingers and packed them away in pouches. They sewed new seams into their hide boots where they had started to split. They sighted along the shafts of their arrows in search of imperfections, smoothed the feathered flights. They inspected their water bags for wear and for leaks.
All of this they did unhurriedly, silently. That concentration, that graceful intensity of attention and purpose, was soothing to Orisian. It spoke to him of acceptance, of calm accommodation to the future the world offered up. For so long, as a child searching for solace in the wake of the Heart Fever, he had imagined that there might be other kinds of lives than his, ones that rode the tempests of the world with greater ease. He had seized upon every hint that Inurian let slip about the ways of the Kyrinin, taking them to be tokens of just such lives; fragmentary promises that other possibilities existed beyond the walls of bereaved Castle Kolglas.
He could still summon up some trace of those childhood hopes, but it was the memory of them that offered comfort now, not their substance. He knew more; was no longer that child.
Varryn stood tall, and held his long spear straight at his side. For the first time in many days, he looked directly into Orisian’s eyes and spoke to him.
“We go now into the lands of the enemy?”
Orisian nodded wordlessly, feeling that faint, still peace drift away. And he watched as the thinnest of smiles tightened on the Kyrinin warrior’s face. As the tattoos that told the tales of the deaths he had wrought flexed on his skin.
“Then I will wet my spear with their blood. And they will learn the Fox still live.”
V
Eska of the Hunt left her dogs behind in Glasbridge and walked alone into the Glas Valley, towards Kan Avor. There was deep snow across the fields, but still she shunned the roads, the better to avoid any inconvenient attention. It found her in any case.
Before she was out of sight of Glasbridge’s dark outline hunched down on the western horizon, she saw three figures coming towards her across a pristine expanse of snow. They laboured, though whether that was due to the depth of snow, or because like many others in this ravaged valley they were sick or starving, she could not tell at this distance. It hardly mattered. They did not have the look of warriors, certainly not Inkallim, and thus, even hale and hearty, were unlikely to be any threat to her. She strode on along the line of a snow-buried ditch, ignoring them.
One of the men called out to her as they drew near, angling across the great white field to intercept her course. His accent marked him as Gyre, from the Bloodstone Hills; most likely, she thought, the Frein Valley. She had been there once, tracking the killer of one of the Lore. She had always had a talent for voices, for reading them and remembering their cadences. It had been useful, on occasion, in her service of the Inkall.
She read disorder and desperation in this man’s voice. She marched on, head down. The snow crunched crisply beneath her booted feet.
“Wait, there,” the man shouted again.
Eska still did not look round, but she could hear that they were close now, too close to ignore. She must either run-she could easily outpace them, no doubt-or face them. There might be something to be gained, she supposed, in talking to them. Some fragment of information, perhaps. That was, after all, the currency she dealt in, and the substance of the task Kanin oc Horin-Gyre had bestowed upon her.
She stood still, and turned to face the three men. They were grimy and gaunt. Hungry, she judged, but not yet quite enfeebled by it. One at least had a feverish look that suggested illness. She quickly made the necessary assessment: a staff one leaned upon, a hammer hanging from a belt, a tiny knife, a scabbarded sword that must have been stolen or looted from the dead. They were much like scores, perhaps hundreds, of others scattered all across the Glas Valley: ordinary folk who had marched in the wake of the Battle, fired by faith or greed or hope, only to find the business of fighting an ill-supplied war in the midst of winter more brutal and breaking than they had imagined. Debris left behind as the stronger, more vigorous flood had swept on into the south.
“Any food?” the nearest of the men asked without preamble.
Eska shook her head silently.
His eyes tracked her lean lines, tracing the form of her muscles beneath her hides. His gaze lingered for a moment upon her spear, darted down to her leather boots.
“No food,” he mumbled. “Where are you going?”
“Kan Avor,” she said. “Have you been there?”
The man shrugged. She saw a flicker of unease, perhaps remembered horror, in the eyes of one of his companions, though.
“I would be interested to know how things stand there,” she said. “Who you saw there. What is happening.”
“Nothing good,” the first man rasped. The others clearly deferred to him. “Too much…” He wrinkled his nose, as if at a foul stench.
“Too much of what?” Eska enquired, and as soon as she did so, saw that her efforts would be fruitless. The man grimaced. He was angered.
“Too much of everything,” he muttered, then: “You’re not like us, not like everyone else. Who are you?” His tone, the way he stared avariciously at Eska’s boots, made clear that his curiosity was not born of any desire for friendship.
“I am of the Hunt Inkall,” she said levelly. That was as much as she would share.
“One of Tegric’s Children? Ha, ha.”
He sounded enthused at the thought of such reputed prey. It was absurd. In normal times, such men should be cowed by her presence, her implied abilities. Such calculation was clearly beyond them now. They, like so many, had abandoned their judgement in favour of baser, more feral urges. Eska saw it all around her in recent days. Some seemed barely affected by the strange, ubiquitous sickness of the mind; many-most, she thought-were slowly, incrementally slipping into madness. She had even found herself becoming increasingly ill-tempered, murderous rage sometimes held at bay only by a lifetime of habitual self-discipline.
Now, though, regarding these wretched men, she thought in dispassionate, practical terms. They were clearly disinclined to provide her with any useful knowledge. So be it. They could not prevent her escape, but if by some bizarre chance word of her approach preceded her to Kan Avor and there fell into an unfriendly ear, matters might become unnecessarily complicated.
She felt faint regret as she came to her decision. These lives would end without having greatly aided in the advancement of the creed. But then, each and every life could only be as it was written, nothing more and nothing less. Fate had brought these men to her; she was but its tool in this.
The ringleader advanced, leering as he did so. She staggered him with a blow from the butt of her spear into his ribcage. The same movement, rebounding in a smooth arc, satisfying in its precision, brought the barbed spear-point back to lay open the second man’s face. She glimpsed the blood-flecked bone of his cheek as she spun on one foot and crouched, punching the base of her spear into the snow for support, straightening a leg to crack her heel into the third’s knee. He howled and hobbled sideways. The snow tripped him.
Eska rose. The first of her assailants had recovered his balance, and was clumsily drawing that purloined sword with all the facility of one who had never held such a weapon in his life. She drove her spear into his belly
