Varryn was already moving away, drifting silently ahead, deeper into the forest. Taim watched him go. It was a grim border they were crossing now. Whatever lay beyond it could only be horrific, if its limits were circumscribed by such tokens of mutilation. It was not, Taim expected, going to be a place welcoming of humankind.
“Eyes open,” he murmured to the men nervously gathered around. They were, all of them, staring fixedly at the limp squares of skin.
“Eyes open, hands ready,” Taim said more sharply, gesturing them onwards with a sweep of his arm.
They bedded down that night on a gentle slope amidst a stand of uniform, straight ash trees. There was to be no fire, of course. The only shelter from the persistent but thin mist of drizzle was the thick canopy of intermingled branches and a few holly trees clustered along one side of their campsite. It would be a hard, miserable night, Taim knew, but he doubted anyone had been expecting much sleep.
Taim unrolled the blanket that he would fold about himself to fend off the worst of the night’s chill. The ground was at least softened a touch by a thick layer of dead leaves. A strange mumbling distracted Taim from this unappealing prospect. Coming out of the darkness like the muted babble of a tiny brook: a faint and frail voice.
Taim followed the sound. It took no more than half a dozen paces to reveal its source. Sitting there, arms folded, legs crossed, his head sunken, was one of the warriors. Eagan. A young man-barely twenty-born in Grive. Son of a beekeeper, Taim remembered. He had fought well at Ive Bridge. Now he was lost in some waking dream. His senseless whispering was relentless, and strained despite its quietness. His head dipped and rose in shallow nods, as if keeping time with some beat in his ramblings that no one else could detect.
“Eagan,” Taim said softly, standing over the warrior.
There was no response, only that wordless rambling, rushing on and on.
Taim bent and put a hand on the man’s shoulder. Eagan looked up. His lips still moved, still danced, but there was suddenly no sound at all. In the deep gloom of the forest floor Taim could not see his eyes clearly but was almost certain he would have found no recognition there. He squeezed the shoulder more tightly.
“Eagan,” he said again.
And the man snorted. Shook his head once, sharply. Unfolded his arms.
“Sir?” Eagan asked.
“Stretch yourself out. Try to get some rest.”
Taim returned, thoughtful, to his own blanket. A little further down the slope, he could see the figures of Ess’yr and Orisian kneeling together in the leaf litter. The Kyrinin brushed dead leaves from the surface of a flat stone. She began to break apart one of the flat, round oatcakes they had brought as rations from Highfast, and spread the crumbs out on the stone. Orisian did the same, copying her every action with an eerie precision.
Taim knew what it was. He had seen the Kyrinin perform this same small ritual before, making offerings to ward off the attentions of the dead. It was a part of their strange beliefs, and the amounts of food thus wasted were of no consequence, so Taim had never raised any protest. But for a Thane of a True Blood to share in the act? Watching them now, with their careful, measured movements and almost reverential manner, half lost in the shadow and darkness, it would have been possible to mistake them for two Kyrinin.
Taim lay down, flat on his back. He was glad that he was-he hoped-the only one to have seen Orisian in such close communion with the Kyrinin woman. It was unsettling enough for some of the men to note how clearly comforting and easy their Thane found Ess’yr’s presence, how attentively he sometimes watched her. For all the disarray and riot the world had fallen into, there remained boundaries that many would not willingly see crossed.
Taim closed his eyes, not in hope of sleep but in search of distracting, warming memories that might take him away, however briefly, from this cold forest. The wound in his leg, taken at Ive, ached dully. The muscle was stiff and sore. He reached for the image of Jaen’s face, the texture of her skin beneath his fingers, the knowing affection of her smile. And he reached too, with hand rather than mind, for his sheathed sword. He held it to his chest, and clasped it tight.
There was a corpse in the street outside Jaen Narran’s house in Kolkyre. She stared down at it from one of the upper windows. Some youth-sixteen or seventeen, she judged-who had been killed in the night. Dogs came nosing about. The few people who ventured out from their homes disregarded both the dogs and the human carrion that attracted them. They seemed wilfully blind, as if a surfeit of horrors and troubles had left them incapable of acknowledging another.
Jain leaned out and shouted at the dogs. They looked up at her, still stretching out towards the dead flesh of the youth. She beat the open shutter with the palm of her hand, but the dogs did not fear her. They turned back to the corpse, sniffing at it. Jaen took the bowl of water from beside her bed and slapped its contents out towards the beasts. They loped away then, without panic. They would be back, she knew.
An old man walking stiffly down the street had stopped to watch. He stared up at her now, puzzlement on his face. Jaen glared at him, then withdrew, pulling the shutters closed behind her.
The killings and the fighting and the fires and the cries came mostly at night but, like some rot slowly expanding beyond the darkness that had formed it, they colonised each passing day more aggressively than the one before. All of Kolkyre had taken up arms, and though the greatest hatred was reserved for the Black Road army encamped outside its landward walls, there was too much of it to be entirely absorbed by that single, inaccessible foe. The anger found other outlets for its immense unspent reserves, and turned the city in upon itself.
Jaen heard all the tales from the servants in the Tower of Thrones, or from the homeless Lannis folk she supplied with food and blankets and firewood: murder and thievery, feud and suspicion. Those who hailed from lands beyond the Kilkry or Lannis Bloods were dead by now, or hiding behind barred doors and closed windows, too fearful to dare the unruly, hostile city streets. Those who were wealthy had turned their homes into fortresses, protected by hired clubmen. The Guard fought brief wars against gangs of the hungry and the desperate and the mad. Order was never more than a transient presence, liable at any moment to be rent by some new upwelling of chaos.
Jaen thumped down the rickety stairs, letting her feet convey her frustrations to the boards. Her daughter Maira was there, leaning back in a cushioned chair. Though the child in her was yet too small to swell her belly, she rested a hand there nevertheless, gently protective. Her husband Achlinn was hanging a pot of water to boil over the fire, hissing at the heat of the glowing embers.
“You rise earlier every day,” Jaen said to her daughter.
Maira smiled. It was an exhausted smile, but contented too.
“I don’t sleep, and I’d sooner be up than lying there awake. Not that Achlinn thanks me for it.”
Her husband grimaced in mock demonstration of his suffering. He was a gentle man, Jaen had always thought. Good enough, just, for her precious daughter. This placid scene was enough to blunt Jaen’s ill humour.
“Are our guardians awake?” she asked.
Maira nodded towards the door in the rear wall.
“They went to get a little rest. I told them it would be all right. I feel bad, each of them having to stand watch over us for half the night like this.”
Jaen grunted. “Too bad for them I need to go to the Tower this morning, then. One at least’ll have to do escort duty.”
The two gruff Guardsmen had been assigned their protective responsibilities by Roaric oc Kilkry-Haig himself. At first Jaen had thought it unnecessary and faintly embarrassing. Now she valued their taciturn presence. Part of her regretted her refusal of the Thane’s offer to take up residence in the Tower of Thrones itself. She found its austere isolation, looming over the rest of the city like an intrusion from some other, entirely unconnected place, unsettling, and had preferred this comfortable billet in a house much closer to the quarter where the displaced people of her own Blood had settled. But each day-and more particularly night-here amidst the city’s gradual disintegration made her doubt that decision more. On Maira’s behalf, if not her own. Perhaps the time had come to seek the security of the Tower’s impregnable stone.
The corpse had gone by the time she ventured out onto the street, following cautiously behind her scowling guard. Someone must have dragged it away. She was glad. There was a dog sniffing the ground where it had lain. The animal looked up at her with a disappointed expression as she passed.
A crowd had gathered at the gate in the low wall encircling the mound from which the Tower of Thrones needled its way up into the sky. The guards were beset by showers of shouted demands, interspersed with aimless
