but…”
The words trailed away. Orisian lifted his head and looked into her eyes. So imperturbably calm and knowing, those flinty windows, yet revealing nothing of what lay beyond them, within.
“I understand,” he said. “I will keep them safe.”
The thought came to him suddenly, woken by the sorrow of potential partings, potential loss.
“Will you wait for a moment?” he asked her.
He found a cord of his own, sealing the mouth of a canvas bag that held only a few remnant scraps of food. Long enough, he thought.
He sat cross-legged on the cold, damp grass and began looping a chain of knots into the cord’s length. He was clumsy, but stubbornly persisted. Each knot he moistened with the tip of his tongue, as he had seen Ess’yr and Varryn do, long ago in the vo’an where he had woken from wounded slumber to her face.
One for the time before the Heart Fever, a bright memory of family. Then one for his mother, one for his brother, one for his father. The memories came clearly, carrying equal parts of comfort and misery. One for Inurian, one for Anyara. That last hurt him more than he expected, for its texture of distance and parting. But he remembered her strength and her unruly vigour, and found a smile. One for Rothe, too raw and recent to linger upon, no matter how much he longed to recall only the man’s gruff companionship and loyal affection. And the last of them, tightening into the strand, clenching itself into permanence, for Ess’yr. For what might have been, in a world, or a life, other than this one.
He wept a little, running his finger over what he had made, but nor for long. He took it to Ess’yr, who had been standing patiently some way down the slope.
“Will you bury it for me, if the time comes?” he asked her.
She took it from him, cupping it, coiled like a thin, sleeping snake, in her hand.
“Not in a dyn hane,” she said. “Not with the true people.”
“No,” he said. “I understand. But somewhere? Somewhere fitting for a Huanin?”
She regarded him silently for a few breaths. He felt like reaching out to her, touching her, trying to convey how deeply this request expressed his heart. But, soon enough, she nodded in assent and closed her hand about the cord of his life.
IX
Ever since riding out from Highfast, the conviction had been growing in Taim Narran that he was moving towards his death. That he would never again see Jaen or his daughter. That his grandchild would be born, and would grow, without him. He did not fear death. He had seen countless others fall to it, and learned its banal and crude flavour, over the years, but that had never taught him fear. The Sleeping Dark promised only an eternity of unbeing: no pain, no grief, no suffering. Nothing to fear but a great deal to regret: the sorrow his absence would inflict upon those he left behind, the sights, the people he would never see again. The immense incompleteness of everything he would leave behind, for there would always, inevitably, be uncounted things he should have said or done, messages he should have conveyed.
The trees came first in ones and twos, scattered across the long, shallow slope they were descending. Then clumps of them, more and more, until they merged into a single unbroken canopy. Anlane closed itself above and behind them.
Taim felt his tension mount in response to the deepening of the shadows. This place had been a battleground for his Blood from the moment Sirian first wore the title of Thane. It had been a meagre, intermittent kind of war, the struggle against the depredations of the White Owls, but a war nonetheless, and a savage one. Merciless. Anlane could never, to someone of Taim’s upbringing and experiences, be anything other than a bad memory.
The trees crowded about them, a numberless host moving imperceptibly slowly to smother them. Perhaps even absorb them. Taim was aware of a change in the air. It was as if they had entered the body of some immense sleeping creature, and burrowed now ever deeper into its living flesh. It was not warm, but the wind was gone, the sharp edge of the cold dulled. New scents drifted up from the forest floor: wet bark, rotting leaves.
Soon, much sooner than he had hoped, Taim was ducking to avoid branches that reached out across the dwindling trail the Fox had found for them to follow. The path narrowed to something only deer or boar might pass along without difficulty. Twigs and outstretched tendrils of ivy brushed Taim’s legs and the flanks of his horse, to the animal’s increasing displeasure. Behind him, he could hear men cursing as boughs grazed face or scalp.
And then there was a huge tree lying across the trail, coated in slick moss, a thin crust of half-melted snow lining the length of its trunk. To one side its great root plate had been torn out of the earth and stood now like the flattened, upraised hand of a giant. To the other, its branches had, in their crashing descent, crumpled a huge swathe of the woods into an impenetrable tangle of shattered timber, bent and bowed saplings. Its fall had torn a great rent in the otherwise inviolate canopy, a wound in the skin of Anlane. Taim felt the cooler breath of the sky drifting down onto his face. There was a fine drizzle on it. Rain, not snow, he thought. That at least was something to be thankful for.
He sighed and twisted in his saddle. Orisian was not far behind, waiting expectantly for word.
“We’re done with horses, I think,” Taim said.
They walked on in silence. The land folded itself in creases, humps and hollows around which tiny brooks trickled. There were outcrops of rock with trees growing from their crannies. Again and again, the path disappeared altogether, to human eye at least. Each time it did so, Ess’yr or Varryn would be waiting some little way ahead, almost invisible amidst the undergrowth and shadows until betrayed by movement, beckoning the laggard Huanin onward.
Taim sent two men forward: four more eyes, inadequate as they might be, to ward against surprises. Necessary as the abandonment of the horses had been, being on foot in such foreign terrain had darkened the already fragile mood. There was an almost palpable sense of vulnerability amongst the warriors. They had the skittishness of sheep, starting at every sound-real or imagined-and darting their eyes this way and that. Only two of the party did not seem to share this nervous trepidation, Taim saw when he glanced back over his shoulder. Yvane, who led K’rina steadily along. And Orisian. Whose calm was almost unnatural. Almost unsettling. He looked to Taim like a man whose burdens, whose fears, were becoming less rather than more. That Taim found troubling.
Ess’yr and Varryn and the two scouts Taim had sent out were standing together up ahead. As he drew near, Taim was at first unsure of what he was seeing. A spindly sapling had been cut off at chest height. The break was clean and angled: the work of a blade rather than of wind or heavy snow. It had left the thin, shortened trunk with a sharp point. And onto that point, and then down like thin cuts of meat impaled on a vertical spit, five small squarish pieces of some strange material had been forced. Like a child’s pretence at flags, Taim thought vaguely as he leaned closer, puzzled.
One of the crude pennants was torn and ragged where some animal seemed to have been gnawing at it. Another had some faded swirling blue insignia upon it. That shade, and those shapes, had a familiarity to them that he could not at first resolve.
Orisian, kneeling and lightly touching one of the scraps between thumb and forefinger, spoke the conclusion Taim’s own mind belatedly approached.
“Skin.” Orisian withdrew his hand without haste.
“Huanin and Kyrinin,” Ess’yr confirmed. Her distaste, disgust even, was evident.
Yvane brushed past Taim’s shoulder and squinted at the gruesome array of flayed squares.
“Ettanaryn,” the na’kyrim grunted. “Not of the usual sort, though.”
“What are they?” Orisian asked.
“When the a’ans roam far in the warm season, they mark the edge,” Ess’yr told him. “The furthest reach.”
“It’s an old way of marking the limits of hunting grounds,” Yvane grunted. “Clan territory, for those clans that still live by the oldest traditions. Not like this, though. Not with skin.”
“Huanin and Kyrinin,” Ess’yr observed quietly. “All fresh cut. No more than two, three days.” She flicked a fingertip at the palest fragment of skin, with its dull blue patterns. “White Owl kin’thyn. They cut the face from one of their own.”
