cast it was past him and gone in the same moment. He looked after the disappearing woman, and saw Yvane crouching down, her back to him, protective arms enclosing K’rina’s hunched form. And Taim Narran standing in front of the two na’kyrim, making a wall of his body and sword and shield. The warrior did not reach for any of the White Owls as they sprinted by; he let them pass. He saw Orisian looking at him.
“Get over here,” Taim snapped, and Orisian obeyed instinctively.
He stood at Taim’s side, a fraction behind him, and they watched the Kyrinin flowing around and beyond them. In every face that passed Orisian saw the same thing: some strange admixture of panic and confusion and fear. It was so far from the measured composure he associated with Kyrinin that he found it almost repellent.
As suddenly as it had begun, it was over. But Varryn was unwilling to let it end. He sent an arrow skimming between the tree trunks in pursuit of the last of the receding figures, ran forward a few paces and set another to his bowstring, then another. He sped into the dappled forest without a backwards glance.
There were a handful of dead White Owls, and one of Taim’s men. A spear was embedded in the warrior’s chest, broken off halfway down its length. It must have been almost an accident, Orisian thought, staring down at the youth’s corpse. They were not even trying to kill us, and still someone had to die. He knelt and gently closed the open, blank eyes.
Ess’yr climbed to the top of the knoll and crouched there, turning and lifting her head this way and that.
Orisian returned to Yvane and K’rina. They were rising carefully to their feet, the one supported and guided by the other.
“Are you all right?” he asked Yvane.
She looked at him, and for the first time he saw in her eyes the same empty despair that he felt lodged patiently and watchfully at the back of his mind. In Yvane it had come into its full, bleak flowering.
“This can’t go on,” she said. “Did you see them? Did you feel it in them?”
“What?” asked Orisian cautiously.
“Out of their minds. Didn’t know who they were, what they were doing. The weight of him, of what he’s done, too much for them.”
Orisian nodded, for the want of anything to say.
Yvane swallowed and seemed to recover herself a little.
“The White Owl clan is older than any of your Bloods. It’s older than the Kingship that came before, even. There were people who called themselves White Owls when the Whreinin still hunted through these forest, in the Age before this one.”
“When there were still Gods,” Orisian murmured.
“Perhaps. And you see? You see what they have come to? Slaughtering one another like maddened beasts. Running about, senseless. Lost children.”
“It’s what we’re all coming to, isn’t it?” said Orisian quietly. “We’re halfway there already. That’s why we have to go on.”
Ess’yr came down from the knoll. There was blood on the tip of her spear, Orisian noted. A glutinous smear of it, already drying.
“We must move,” she said.
The unfamiliar strain in her voice, as much as her words, alarmed Orisian. Her face was as elegantly expressionless as ever, but something was tightening within her.
“More come,” she said.
As if summoned up by that single terse statement, there were cries in the forest. Looping, bounding cries, like the voices of birds. Distant, Orisian thought, but drawing nearer. The sound was unearthly, a disordered, jumbled melody of stretched and falling notes. It could have been Anlane itself, the mind of that vast place, calling out. Or announcing its waking. Announcing its joining of battle.
“They hunt,” Ess’yr said. “We must go. Now.”
She led them on, moving now with insistent haste that they struggled to match.
“What about Varryn?” Orisian called after her.
“He will find his way,” she told him.
Yet another of the babbling streams that crossed Anlane like veins in its vast body blocked their path. Too wide to leap across, they would have to wade.
Ess’yr paused upon its bank, looking up and down its writhing rocky length.
“In the water,” she said, and stepped into the flow. She turned and began to splash down-stream, picking a nimble course between weed-clothed stones.
There was an instant of hesitation amongst those who followed her. Some of the men exchanged doubting, reluctant glances. But those calls were still in the air behind them, bounding through the treetops.
“Hurry,” said Orisian, and went after her.
His boots filled at once with the brutally cold water, as if seized by hands of ice. The current pushed at his heels, piling water up against the back of his legs. Sensation retreated, withdrawing up through his limbs, leaving his feet deadened to all save the dull pain of intense cold. He stumbled, constantly fearful of losing his footing on some slick and slimy stone. Behind him, he could hear the others following. Though in truth he did not know whether they followed him or fled those haunting voices that filled the forest.
The brook led them where it willed, cutting a more or less northerly course over gently sloping ground. The notion settled upon Orisian that he walked in waters that would soon be part of the Glas. He was carried homeward by some fragment of the single titanic movement that joined stream, and great river, and ocean. This stream down which he laboured might soon be waves lapping at the walls of Castle Kolglas. And with that thought, he realised that he was not moving homeward at all, for his home was gone. Whatever he was returning to, it was not home but something else.
He heard a splash and breathless, gasping curses behind him, and turned. Yvane was struggling to raise K’rina from where she had fallen. Water churned about them. Taim stopped to help, waving the rest of the men on. Orisian waded back against the force of the water, but K’rina was on her feet by the time he reached them.
“Is she all right?” he asked Yvane, but the na’kyrim did not hear, or ignored him.
As they moved away from him, a fleeting glimpse of something pale drew his eyes back up the stream. He looked that way, and saw nothing. Only the drooping trees that lined the banks. The water murmuring busily along. Clumps of rushes nodding at its edge.
Then something: a single movement from left to right, as of an indistinct figure passing a distant window. And another. White Owls, he realised, darting across the stream. They were at the furthest limit of sight that the dense forest and the wandering stream’s course would permit. The only sound was at his back, as his companions made their sodden way along the bed of the brook. He saw these silent, wan instants of motion as the Kyrinin crossed one by one, and it seemed to be happening in another place entirely, without connection to him.
Until one of them stopped, halfway across, and stared directly at him. Even at that distance, Orisian knew their eyes met. He could envisage precisely that intent grey gaze, and feel its questioning touch upon him. He was already turning as a second figure joined the first, and as a flurry of fluting bird calls came down towards him, riding the cold air that hung above the stream between the overhanging trees.
“They’ve seen us,” he shouted. “They’re coming.”
The waters were hateful now, thickening about his legs, hampering every desperate surging stride.
“Out of the water!” he shouted, but Ess’yr already had them clambering up onto the bank.
Orisian’s feet throbbed as he staggered onto the grass, his sodden, heavy leggings plastered to his skin.
“We need some clear ground,” Taim was muttering. “Can’t win against Kyrinin if we get spread out, scattered amongst the trees.”
Ess’yr was listening intently to the calls cascading through the forest.
“They gather first,” she said.
“Not mad, these ones, then,” said Yvane bleakly. “They know what they’re doing.”
K’rina was leaning against her, shivering. Looking at the frail na’kyrim, a wave of weariness and feebleness ran through Orisian. All he had achieved here, following instincts that had seemed so sure and certain, was to deliver them all to a futile death.
Ess’yr was not finished yet, though. She led them on, away from the stream. The warriors followed without urging, their fear rendering them at last pliant. Orisian could see in their slumping shoulders and their gaunt, empty faces that the forest, its rigours, its accumulation of threat, had defeated them and left them willing to cleave to
