lips into his mouth, sucked that wet breath of the sky from them. Ess’yr’s eyes were slowly closing.
“We need shelter,” he said.
Yvane nodded curtly.
K’rina was trying to rise again. Taim Narran pressed her down with a hand upon her shoulder. Orisian looked around. The dead lay all about, some in strangely twisted or contorted poses, other looking as if they had fallen asleep. Of the three Lannis warriors who had survived, two stood staring silently outward, though it was difficult to tell whether they were watchful or simply lost in distraction. The third, the man who had let K’rina slip away from him, was still whimpering into his hands. Lost not in distraction but in the miasma of dismay and despair Orisian could sense thickening just beyond the boundaries of his own thoughts. He saw all this, and found it faintly unreal and distant, as if he viewed it through the translucent gauze of the thinnest curtain.
Varryn came running, spear in one hand, a mass of leaves and stems and bark in the other. He rushed in and dropped to one knee beside his ailing sister; opened his fingers to show his bounty to Yvane. The na’kyrim stared at the herbs and then grunted.
“If that’s the best we can do,” she said.
“The forest edge is near,” Varryn reported dully. “Open ground. A Huanin hut. Empty.”
“We should go,” Orisian said at once.
Yvane grimaced. “She won’t move well. We need to get the arrow out first.”
They carried Ess’yr back to the stream down which they had fled earlier. She moaned as they went, lapsing in and out of consciousness. Every agonised sound that escaped her lips rasped on Orisian’s ears and made him wince.
At the water’s edge they laid her down on her side. Yvane quietly and calmly cut away Ess’yr’s jacket with a knife, peeling it back from her shoulder. The na’kyrim whispered to Varryn in the language of the Fox as she worked. His expression betrayed no reaction to her words. His gaze never strayed from his sister’s face. Orisian turned his head aside, averting his eyes from the blood caking Ess’yr’s skin.
He looked back in time to see Yvane setting down a crushed handful of the herbs mixed with moss. She had squeezed it into a neat, flat compress. Then she nodded to Varryn. He took the protruding shaft of the arrow in both hands and snapped it cleanly off, close to the flights. Ess’yr gasped, the pain finding her even in whatever distant, detached place she now resided. Orisian’s eyes widened in sudden understanding as Varryn took hold once more of the broken shaft.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“Be quiet,” Yvane told him. “This needs doing.”
She rotated and stretched Ess’yr’s arm a little, flexing the shoulder blade beneath her pristine skin. And Varryn pushed the arrow deeper. Its point burst bloodily out from Ess’yr’s back. She jerked and groaned, but Yvane held her. Varryn moved quickly round behind his sister, took hold of the gory head of the arrow and pulled it, with a single, firm movement, through her body. Rivulets of blood trickled from both new and old wounds.
They washed her with water from the river, working back through the gore to expose and clean the tears in her skin. Orisian had to fight off waves of nausea, and his hands shook as he opened them to let the water he cupped there spill across her breast and shoulder. It was not horror or disgust that had hold of him, but fear. The thought of this woman dying made him feeble. Helpless.
Once the wounds were bandaged, poultices securely strapped in place, Varryn slung his sister over his shoulder and strode away northwards without another word.
“Thank you,” Orisian said to Yvane as she rose, wiping mud from her knees. She did not reply, but went to help K’rina get to her feet.
Taim already had the three warriors moving, following Varryn. He watched Orisian with an unreadable expression.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
Orisian shook his head then shrugged. He did not know the answer to that question, and it seemed entirely unimportant to him.
“We should hurry,” he said, stooping to pick up his shield. “The White Owls might come back.”
“They’d probably have returned already if they were going to. Some kind of madness in them, to fight as they did. Should have waited for darkness, picked us off one by one. Not the Kyrinin way, running onto swords and shields like that. As if they didn’t care any more about their own lives. Perhaps they don’t care enough about ours to try again.”
They went in a straggling single line through the fringe of Anlane, moving with less caution now than once they had. It did not take long for the forest to begin to thin. The trees were interspersed with stumps where the tallest and straightest of their brethren had been felled. Soon enough, there were more stumps than standing trees, and they came out at the crest of a long, shallow grassy slope. At its foot was a woodsman’s cottage. Its shutters and door hung open. Crows roosting on its roof scattered upwards. Varryn was already halfway down the slope.
Orisian paused there, amongst the last of the saplings, Anlane’s outliers. Beyond that cottage, stretching out into the grey veils of soft rain, was the Glas Valley. Flat ground scattered with clumps of trees, dotted here and there with lonely buildings almost lost in the mist. Home. But he felt neither welcomed nor relieved. It had been a kind of desperate hope that brought him here, yet now he could imagine nothing good coming of this return. And still, despite that terrible foreboding, he felt it was where he had to be. If he belonged anywhere, it was here, in this bleak moment; and if there was any purpose he could claim as his own, it awaited him somewhere out there in the mist. In his homeland.
II
Kan Avor dominated the grey skyline like a challenge. Kanin smiled at the sight of its jagged, broken towers, its crumbling sprawl. A great rotten bruise on the earth. His pleasure was not engendered by the city itself, though. It was what it signified that woke his venomous, obsessive desires and promised them fulfilment. In his imagination visions crowded in upon him: an endless succession of different deaths for Aeglyss. He could smell the halfbreed’s blood, hear his wails, see his head springing free from the stump of his neck or his stomach split open by a single slash from a sword. He could feel his own hands about the halfbreed’s throat, the bones in there cracking and splintering beneath his iron grasp.
Kanin fought to rid himself of these all-consuming imaginings, but could do no more than cordon them off in a part of his mind, so that though he still heard their intoxicating whispers and still felt that unbridled longing for the release their realisation would bring him, he had the space within his skull to think clearly. To do what needed doing.
The main body of his ragged army was streaming ahead of him, struggling through the marsh and mire towards Kan Avor. Lannis folk, most of that vanguard. They spread out as they advanced. Not an army at all, in truth. Just a mob given licence to visit vengeance upon their most hated enemies, blinded for the moment to the truth that they did so in service to another enemy. They would be worthless, Kanin knew, as soon as they met any organised resistance. But they could still serve a purpose, and it was a matter of complete indifference to Kanin whether a single one of them lived to see tomorrow’s dawn. As was his own survival, as long as he achieved his goal before death claimed him.
His horse was restless beneath him, eager to follow the rushing figures ahead. He gave the reins a gentle tug, and muttered a soothing word or two to the animal. Sheets of heavier rain swept through, intermittently obscuring Kan Avor’s looming form. All the land around the ruined city was turning into a swamp. Kanin did not mind. The mists and rain offered some concealment.
He twisted in the saddle and looked down the neat line of his Shield. Igris was despondent and sullen, rainwater trickling from his hair down over his cheekbones. Behind stood two hundred Black Road warriors, all on foot, all silent and grim-countenanced. This was all that Kanin had managed to retain his hold upon. The rest had rebelled, or disappeared, or gone mad. The Glasbridge they had left when they marched out that dawn was a chaos of warring bands, frenzied killing, hungers of every kind let off their leash.
“We move round to the south,” Kanin told Igris. “Let those Lannis idiots draw out what they can of the
