his satisfaction. Kanin had his sword halfway from its scabbard. He heard Igris coming behind, shouting at people to move aside. They could reach the halfbreed, Kanin thought, surprised at the detached clarity of his mind. With his Shield at his side, he could cut through to Aeglyss. Kill him.
A firm hand on his arm twisted him aside. People were scattering, opening up a space of trampled, dirty snow. He was staring at Cannek, hearing the heavy breathing of one of the Inkallim’s great dogs. Kanin pulled his arm free, but Cannek reached out and seized it again.
“Not now, Thane,” he said softly. “Not now. He has his White Owls, and the Battle will defend him, if Shraeve commands it. And she will.”
“Release me,” Kanin hissed. The dog growled at the threat in his voice, but he did not care.
“How many swords do you have, Thane?” Cannek asked. He took his hand from Kanin’s arm, but did not release his eyes. “Not enough. Not today.”
Kanin stared at the Inkallim. The hard, insistent beat of anger was still there in his chest, but its mastery of him was broken for a moment. He looked down, over the heads of the crowd milling between them, and saw Aeglyss. The na’kyrim was watching him, a dead smile on his lips. Clouds of snowflakes swept between them.
“It was him,” Kanin said. “Fiallic should have won. Would have done, but for him.”
“There will be another time,” Cannek whispered. “He has mastered the Battle today, but not the Lore. Not the Hunt. Do you hear me? You are Thane of your Blood. If you die today there is none to follow you.”
Kanin let his blade slide back into its sheath. It was heavy on his hips, its presence still urging him to release it; use it. But Cannek was right. Fate favoured courage, but not always stupidity. He would die, with all his Shield, if he set himself against the White Owls and the Battle here and now. That did not matter in itself. What mattered was whether he could achieve the halfbreed’s death before his own. There would surely be another time, soon, when he could be more certain of that.
“The Haig army awaits us now. After that — if there is anything for us after that — we should talk, away from curious eyes and ears,” Cannek said. Kanin was no longer listening to him, though.
The crowd was dispersing. There was laughter, here and there; excited voices raised. The tramp of feet across the snow-clad hillside, clouds of breath pluming up. And from the Inkallim, only silence, and obedience. As the others drifted away, they closed in, like black birds thickening on carrion, around the killing pen. Shraeve, Banner-captain of the Battle, climbed out and limped towards Aeglyss. Two of the Inkallim who had ringed the stone enclosure vaulted in and moved towards Fiallic’s corpse. This was not how it was meant to be, Kanin was thinking. None of it. This is not fate, but ruin. The corruption of everything we desired. All our hopes. All shaking themselves to dust.
IV
Taim Narran watched Anyara’s departure from a distance, for his captors would not permit him to approach her. The sister of his own Thane, and he was denied the chance to bid her farewell, or to comfort her. She bore it well, he could see, and gave no sign of needing his comfort: straight-backed on her horse, looking about her openly and without faltering. But how could she not be feeling vulnerable, beset? She was being carried off to Vaymouth by those whose professed friendship had become the thinnest of skins across the meat of their contempt. They did not call her a prisoner, and she did not comport herself as one, but the distinction between that and hostage was slender; and hostage she surely was. Hostage and shield, for Aewult clearly meant to use her — and Taim himself, and Orisian even — to deflect, or to absorb, his father’s anger. Anger that might be savage, now that a battle had been lost, an army battered, a Chancellor mislaid.
Anyara left the camp of the Haig army in the midst of a long column of wagons, carrying the wounded and the sickly off towards Donnish. Taim stood and watched her go until the haze that lay along the coast swallowed her up. He had demanded of Aewult that he be allowed to accompany her, and the Bloodheir had smirked.
“No, Captain. I don’t want you and her hatching plots together, the way you and your Thane did. Anyway, I want you to see the end of this. I want you here with me. Your reckoning will come after I’m done with the Black Road.”
To Taim, Aewult reeked of fear. The Bloodheir might not even recognise that as what he was feeling, but Taim had no doubt. Aewult was afraid. And he was angry. Those were his reactions to defeat, and those were his reasons for his treatment of Anyara and Taim himself.
The entire army had the same stench. Like a stockman, granted by long familiarity the ability to read the mood of his animals, Taim could gather all the little signs and shape them into an instinctive understanding of the men around him. Everything — the downcast eyes, the bluff, forced laughter, the men staggering drunkenly about after dark — all of it spoke eloquently to him of trepidation. This army had the splinter of defeat lodged in its heart, and it would remain there, and fester, unless and until a cleansing victory was won. The men, the individual threads within the weave of the army, promised one another that they would be clambering over drifts of Black Road dead soon; they muttered around their campfires, painting word pictures of the terrible slaughter that they would visit upon their enemies. But it was lies; hopeful lies they told one another to stave off the doubts within.
New companies were coming up from the south. The grim mood opened its arms as they arrived and drew them in. Every man here on the plain outside Kolkyre knew that there was a terrible battle moving towards them. As surely as the turning seasons, violence was coming. It was like a dark, roiling storm approaching from the horizon. None could see beyond it. That the army of the Black Road had mysteriously slowed to a crawl, lingering in the empty lands along the north coast of Kilkry territory, only made the waiting harder and gave the foreboding more time to sink its roots deep.
Whenever Taim’s gaze fell upon Kolkyre, with its ever-present seagulls circling above, and the Tower of Thrones defiantly punctuating its skyline, he feared that the future might be even bleaker than most imagined. The gates of the city were closed. Haig warriors were posted on each of the roads outside them. Nothing, and no one, came or went from Kolkyre save by sea. So, Aewult had pledged, it would remain, until Roaric oc Kilkry-Haig recovered his proper humility and complied with the demands made of him. And so, Roaric seemed to indicate by his mute refusal, he was content for it to remain. Neither man would earn respect or credit from this, Taim thought, but while he felt contempt for Aewult, he felt only pity for Roaric. The young Kilkry Thane had come into his power in evil times, and by evil circumstance, and his nature made him unsuited to facing the challenges of this moment. Perhaps he would learn, in time; perhaps, by the time he learned, it would be too late.
Taim wandered through the outskirts of the encampment, listless and dispirited. The men Aewult had set to watch him — surly, uncommunicative swordsmen — shadowed him at a few paces’ distance. Taim paused to watch a gang of camp followers slaughtering a pair of pigs. The animals screamed and struggled. They were scrawny, and not likely to make good eating, but fresh meat was growing rare and precious. A youth held one of the pigs down while a woman cut its throat and it bled.
The morning after Anyara’s departure, Taim discovered what her presence had meant to him personally. The whole camp was submerged beneath a miasma of steam and mist and smoke, through which sunlight shone in fragmentary rays, lighting frosted grass and iced puddles in the mud. Guards came to him and unceremoniously removed him from the tent in which he slept, herding him across the crunching ground.
There was a pile of barrels, some of them broken, and behind that a lopsided wagon that had lost a wheel and rested on the stub of its axle. Scattered around the wagon were a dozen or more men, sullen and gaunt. Each one of them was seated, or curled up, on the ground, wrapped in a blanket, and with a shackle running from his ankle to a spike hammered into the frozen soil. A pair of guards were sitting precariously on the elevated end of the wagon, muttering to each other.
As Taim silently allowed them to chain him down, and hobble his legs with cords, one of the guards leered at him from his lofty perch.
“The first time you try to pull up the spike, it’s a beating,” the man barked. “The second time it’s a killing.”
They gave him a blanket that smelled musty and old, and a platter of unidentifiable food. He pulled the blanket tight about his shoulders, closed his eyes and waited. And that was how he spent most of each day that followed.
Taim made no complaint to his guards, sought no gentler treatment, no finer food, no warmer cloak. He
