“Then why? Why fight against it? Why make it hard?”
“It should be hard, don’t you think?” she said at once, with just a hint of that old combative note. All her own that, none of it borrowed from the Shared. “That’s all that’s changed, now that Aeglyss has loosed his poison in the Shared: it’s made it easy. It’s taken away everything that should be there, all the restraints and hesitations and sympathies. It’s freed us all to surrender to the darkest of our instincts, the most painful of our memories. And I don’t want it to be so easy.”
She lifted her hands as if to beg for his understanding, but then let them sink back.
“He’s made of the Shared, the whole, something that separates us all, turns us inwards, and leaves us with nothing for company but our anger or grief or fear or hate. The one thing that binds and unites us, and he used it to divide us. He made us alone.”
Her voice fell as she spoke. She seemed suddenly so much older and more fragile than ever before that Orisian almost reached out to take her hands. Yet comfort felt like a lie to him. It had no place here or anywhere. And perhaps that was of Aeglyss’ making as well, but even if so it made the bleak thought no less certain, no less tenaciously rooted in his mind.
“You stay here, with Ess’yr,” he said. “There’s nothing more you can do. I’ll… I’ll take K’rina. No, not take her; I will only follow where she leads now, Yvane. I’ll force nothing on her, just keep her safe, as the Anain who fashioned her can no longer do. Justly or unjustly, the need-the desire-is in her. All I will do is give her the protection she needs to fulfil it. If that is a cruelty, and cold… I don’t know. It seems to me that it’s the smallest of the cruelties that lie ahead down other paths any of us-all of us-might follow.”
“Do you know where we are?” Orisian asked Taim softly as they stood together in the doorway of the cottage.
The warrior frowned out at the landscape slowly emerging from the thinning mists. A heavy dusk was gathering, settling itself across the dank, still valley, but in this last slow hour of the day it was yet possible to see some way over the grassland and the fields. A solitary owl-not white but pale like sand-was ghosting its way through the murk. There was no other movement. No sound.
“I’ve an idea,” he said. “South of Grive. Kan Avor can’t be more than a day’s walk, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“It is. But it’ll be a night’s walk.” Orisian grunted. “We’ve become creatures of darkness. I fear daylight more than the shadows now. And there’s no time to wait, in any case.”
Taim glanced back into the gloomy interior of the hut. Yvane was crouched at Ess’yr’s bedside, applying a fresh poultice of the herbs Varryn had brought back from the forest. The Kyrinin himself stood behind her, watching every movement with a dark intensity on his face.
“She can’t travel any further,” Taim said.
“No. Yvane will stay with her, tend her. It’s… it’s probably for the best in any case. I wouldn’t want her… either of them…”
Orisian let the sentence fade away. It was a fruitless thought. All thoughts seemed fruitless, defeated by the unfathomable obscurity of the future. It was as if an endless bank of sea fog lay across his path, impenetrable to foresight. He found he did not fear it, though. He almost welcomed it, for the promise of release it offered. Its dark, unknowable embrace could be no more harsh, no more painful, than that of the present or of his memories.
“Owinn is the only one left, I think,” said Taim. He nodded towards the young warrior seated on a tree stump, methodically cleaning the blade of his sword with a handful of wet grass. “The other two haven’t returned. We may have lost them. Or they’ve lost themselves.”
“Is he…?” Orisian was unsure how to ask the question, but Taim understood anyway.
“He seems calm. Untouched. Can’t be certain, of course. Nothing seems certain any more. But so far I’ve seen nothing in him to make me fear for him.”
“He can stay, then. Guard them. I would go alone, Taim, if I thought I could. I’d take no one but K’rina. But if we find trouble…”
“I know,” Taim said levelly. “I wouldn’t stay, even if you commanded me to.”
“I’m sorry,” Orisian said. “I truly am.”
Taim smiled. There was great weariness in it, yet Orisian was struck by how easily it seemed to come to the warrior’s lips. There was nothing forced or pretended about it.
“Enough sorrow already,” Taim murmured. “It mends nothing. Now we just see what happens.”
Orisian went to stand over Ess’yr. Yvane had moved away, crushing roots with the heel of her hand on the scored, frayed surface of an old table. Varryn remained, though, looking down at his sister. He stared at her with such concentration, with so knitted a brow and such narrow eyes, that it seemed he might almost imagine he could heal her grave wound by strength of will alone.
Ess’yr herself was awake; conscious, if only distantly so. Her eyelids were heavy.
“We will have to leave you here,” Orisian said to her. He did not bend towards her or reach for her, or do anything to close the distance between them. There was no bridge to lay across that gap now. He knew that. He could never draw any nearer to her than this, never know any more of her than what he already did. It was a terrible loss to him, that fading away into nothing of possibility. He could not even say whether he was capable of bearing it, for the burdens on his heart no longer differentiated themselves one from the other. They merely pressed down, a single, slow pressure that one day, he knew, would become insupportable in its collective weight.
It took her a moment or two to focus on his face. He wondered what she saw but could read nothing in her gaze.
“Taim and I will take K’rina a little further. As close as we can to wherever it is she wants to go. Tonight.”
At first he was not sure she could even hear him. Her lips, her eyes, remained motionless and placid. But then she moistened those lips with the tip of her tongue.
“Go well,” she whispered.
He nodded. It seemed wholly insufficient, yet there was nothing more in him to say. Nothing that the sadness within him would permit to rise to his lips, at least. To leave now would be to leave an ocean of words unuttered; to attempt to make words of the ocean would do nothing to drain it. He turned away.
“I think Inurian would find it good, what you do,” he heard Ess’yr say in that frail voice. “He would find it wise.”
“I hope so.”
He felt a powerful need to be outside, free of the confinement of that cottage. The rain might be gone, the mists cleared, but the cold air of the descending night still bore enough moisture to make its touch soft and fresh. He closed his eyes and lifted his face towards the sky.
He did not know how long he stood thus. No thoughts, none of the turbulence that had grown so familiar, troubled him. He simply stood, face uplifted, until the softest of movements at his side drew him back.
“My sister…” said Varryn, uncharacteristically subdued and hesitant “… my sister asks that I go with you.”
Orisian frowned.
“Stay,” he said. “Watch over her. She may need you.”
Conflicting emotions disturbed Varryn’s smooth features, like the shadows of the roiling clouds passing overhead. It was a momentary perturbation; he set his jaw firmly, pushed his chin out a fraction.
“No,” the Kyrinin said. “I will go with you.”
“Why?” Orisian asked, but Varryn had already turned and was ducking his head under the cabin’s lintel.
Orisian stared after him briefly. Then the sound of that owl, calling its melancholy notes out across the valley, drew him back to the soft night. There was nothing to see. Darkness had all but engulfed the land now. And when Orisian looked out into it, he saw not so much the absence of light as the absence of everything. A waiting void.
V
The dead came down the River Vay, drifting in lazy fleets, turning in the current. They bumped along the hulls
