not know whether, in it, he would have found her. He did not even know whether what he saw came from within her, or within him, or from somewhere else entirely. But it was, despite that, utterly beautiful to him. It was filled with light, and that light shone in her alabaster skin, and in her eyes, and in her fine, frail lips.
He reached out carefully, and touched her. As he had imagined doing so often. He laid his fingertips on the curve of her chin, and felt a gossamer strand of her gleaming hair brush the back of his hand. Through his fingers he felt her warmth, and it seemed to him that that was a part of the light too. He leaned towards her, sinking as if towards a dream.
And her hand was on his chest, gentle but firm. The slightest roll of her head took her skin away from his fingers. He felt the pressure of her hand on his breastbone. It was not urgent, not hard, but it was calmly insistent. She slowly pushed him back and lifted his face away from hers.
“No,” she said, soft as the movement of a feather, and the light receded. What he had seen, that place, that possibility he had caught a distant sight of, faded. He felt alone and reduced. But he nodded, just once.
Ess’yr let her arm fall back to her side. She closed her eyes. Orisian rose from the bed and walked away. He could remember the light, just. He could remember how it had made him feel. But not what it contained. Not precisely what it was that might have been.
Outside the cottage he found a colourless world, desolate. The stumps of felled trees. The cold prickle of drizzle on the air. A muffled, sluggish silence.
Yvane was sitting on a stump not far away. She was picking dried berries from a clay pot she must have found somewhere inside, placing them one by one into her mouth. She watched Orisian as he emerged and stood blinking up at the featureless clouds. He turned away from her. There was a path beaten into the grass. He followed it to the side of a tiny stream running in a narrow cut between concealing clumps of grass and rushes. He knelt down and scooped searingly cold water over his face. It ran from his chin and bubbled on his lips as he breathed through it.
He sat there and looked back towards the cabin. It looked lifeless, even now. It looked as though it belonged to the brooding forest that waited just a little way up the slope. Yvane was walking towards him, still eating those berries as she came. He ignored her, and stared at the timber walls, the slanting roof, the collapsed woodshed, as if the cottage and its contents were a mystery he might unravel by examination; as if it held a secret truth. But his mind was empty. For the first time in days-weeks-there was a hollow silence in him. Nothing.
“She will probably live, if the wound stays clean,” Yvane said, looking down at him. “If she’s tended.”
He nodded but said nothing. The na’kyrim offered him the little pot and the last of the wizened fruits it contained. He waved it away.
“If Varryn finds the medicines he’s out looking for now,” Yvane added. “It’s not the best of seasons for it — ”
“She will live,” Orisian interrupted her.
Yvane sniffed. “Probably.” She lifted the pot and tipped its contents into her mouth.
“She will,” Orisian said.
Yvane bent and raised a handful of water to her lips.
“I hope you’re right,” she said, after she had swallowed it down.
Movement at the door of the cottage drew Orisian’s attention. K’rina came hesitantly out into the damp, stumbling, her arms folded across her chest. She made her way northwards over the dark grass. Yvane saw Orisian was looking that way, and turned to follow his gaze. She sighed.
“I’ll…” the na’kyrim began, but Orisian shook his head.
“No need. See?”
Taim and one of the warriors were coming, returning from their foray out into the fogs and rains of the valley. They trudged steadily and slowly up towards the cabin, adjusting their path without a break in stride to intercept K’rina’s weaving course. Orisian and Yvane watched the two burly men close on the oblivious na’kyrim and gather her up, turn her about and ease her back towards the bed she had risen from. They were gentle, as if they shepherded a sick child, or a simple one.
“Before we left Highfast, I spoke with Eshenna about K’rina,” Yvane said.
Orisian stood up. The movement dizzied him.
“She was a kind and gentle woman, from the sound if it,” Yvane went on. “Too kind and gentle, perhaps. She cared for Aeglyss, back there in Dyrkyrnon, when no one else would.”
“Don’t, Yvane.”
“No, you should hear this. Why not? She made good fish traps, apparently. And knew the best places to put them. She caught a lot of fish. She used to sing to the children. Old Huanin songs. Her parents were — ”
“Yvane…”
“Why don’t you want to know?”
Orisian could have left her, walked away from her and taken refuge in the cottage. But something in him would not permit that. Something chose to face her. They were both quite calm. For once, there was not the slightest trace of argument between them.
“Because it’s not knowledge I can do anything with,” he said to her.
“Her parents… Ah, I can’t remember their names. Eshenna told me, but it’s so hard to keep things clear now.” Yvane rubbed her cheek wearily. “But it doesn’t matter. The point is that she had parents, they gave her life. She was a child once, and grew, and lived and thought and hoped and wanted. All of that wasn’t for this. Not be made into… this. To be used.”
“I know. She had a life. I know that. She didn’t deserve any of this. But how many of our lives turn out the way we hope they will? Na’kyrim, Huanin, Kyrinin. We none of us deserved any of this, did we?”
“It’s her love for Aeglyss… Whatever’s been done to her, it’s hung on the hook of her love for him. She’s the moth to his flame, or maybe it’s the other way round now. But it started with love.”
“It’s too late for this, Yvane. This is where we are. There’s no going back, no unpicking what’s brought us here.”
“You’re taking her to her death.”
“We don’t know that,” Orisian snapped. “Unless you know more than you’ve told me, we can’t be sure. Do you? Have you kept something from me?”
Yvane returned his gaze sternly.
“I know nothing more than you,” she said. “But don’t pretend you understand less than you do.”
“I might have led us all to our deaths. All of us, Yvane. We could all die. Every one of us. Do you want to know the name of every man’s parents? What about Ess’yr? Shall we drag her from her bed, demand that she shares with us her family, her life? I don’t know the name of her mother or her father. I don’t know where she was born, where she has been. I don’t know… Shall we…”
He faltered, suddenly becoming aware of how his voice was rising. There was a dampness on his face and when he touched a fingertip to it, he was surprised to discover that he was weeping.
“She will live,” Yvane said quietly.
“I…” Orisian mumbled, hearing the words as if someone else spoke them, “I… was born in Castle Kolglas. I learned how to hawk with my sister and my brother, along the shore. My mother sang. It was the greatest happiness… It was like joy when she sang. Her name was Lairis. My father’s name was Kennet. And my brother’s… my brother’s name was Fariel.”
He shook his head.
“We die,” he said. “We all die. Known or unknown, mourned or unmourned. All that we are, and all that we have been, passes. We all come to that same end, and it’s neither just nor deserved nor glorious. You don’t need me to tell you that, Yvane. And you know as well as I do, better than I do, that all of this-Aeglyss, everything-all of it has to stop, somehow. If it doesn’t… if it doesn’t we’re all lost.”
A brief fire in her eyes-the heat of anger-and sudden venom in her voice. “And it’s always na’kyrim, isn’t it, who pay the price? Every convulsion, every war, whatever its cause, it’s na’kyrim who get crushed in the middle of it. Too strange, too different… too feared…”
She lifted a hand to her brow, wincing in pain or distress.
“I’m sorry,” she muttered. “I’m sorry. It’s… I lose track of myself… I can’t tell what’s his, what’s mine. There’s so much hurt to draw on. Or perhaps it draws on me, on all of us. But I know… I do know. She’s all we- you-have. There’s nothing else to set against what he’s become.”
