spoke loudly these days. He sat in a capacious high-backed chair. He did not fill it as Orisian guessed he might once have done. Lheanor was hunched forwards a little, hands laid across one another in his lap, shoulders pinched in.
“No,” Orisian acknowledged. “He might not. I don’t want to cause trouble for you, but I may leave some behind me.”
Lheanor’s right hand stirred, the fingers fluttering as if to dismiss such a minor concern.
“A little more trouble will make no difference when there’s so much of it already in the air. We’ve been told no Kilkry spears will be needed in the coming battles either, you know. Aewult wants our men scattered, sent home, even the ones Roaric brought back from the south. My son’s… unhappy.
“And to bind the wound with salted bandages, I am requested — requested, mark you — to help in defraying the costs of this war, and that against Igryn. It’s not the Chancellor himself who asks, of course. One of his scribblers, his counters, comes quietly and does the asking for him.” Lheanor shook his head. “They’ll not come knocking on the door of your treasury yet, Orisian. Not until you’re back in Anduran. But knock they will, and stretch their greedy hands out.”
“You’ll give them what they want?” Orisian asked.
“Oh, yes. I bent the knee to the Haig Blood, as has every Thane of my line since Cannoch. And what’s the value of an oath if we set it aside when the fulfilment of it becomes onerous, painful? The only other choice would, sooner or later, be war with Haig, and with Ayth and Taral. That way lies chaos: the very thing the Bloods were made to end. Anyway, it’s not a war we could win.”
The Kilkry Thane leaned sideways in his throne, looking past Orisian to the ranks of his shieldmen arrayed along the far wall. Rothe was there too, standing tall and alert despite his still-bandaged arm.
“Let us walk in the gardens,” Lheanor said as he rose, heavily, from his chair. “I find it does not help my mood to sit still for too long.”
They went out into the chill air. Their guards followed behind, out of earshot but close. Orisian thought Lheanor would be cold, but the old man gave no sign of discomfort, as if the state of the world around him could no longer impinge on his thoughts. They set out along one of the garden’s broad paths, curving away around the side of the hillock that supported the Tower.
“You’re going to Highfast, then?” Lheanor said.
“Yes. I’ve seen — and heard — enough to make me think… I’m not sure. Perhaps armies are not the only kind of strength we need in this. But I’ll stay there only briefly. I mean to meet Taim Narran at Kolglas. I’m told there’s a good path from Highfast across the Peaks to Hent and then down to the coast.”
“Good? I don’t know. Passable, yes, if you don’t wait too long, and if you’ve no wagons to haul. The Karkyre Peaks can be nasty in the winter.” Lheanor flicked a glance at the sky. “Not quite yet, though, I suppose.”
“What did you make of the word Bannain brought from Highfast? About Aeglyss, the Shared?” Orisian felt like a charlatan, pretending to discuss weighty matters with the Thane of a True Blood. He wondered if he would ever feel as though he belonged at the side of such a man.
Lheanor shrugged. “I worry about grain harvests, about tithes, about the Shadowhand’s games. The worries of na’kyrim… well, some problems are best left to others. How can the likes of you and I oppose things that cannot be met with a blade, or an emissary, or cold coin? Don’t mistake me, though: Cerys and her people at Highfast, they’re a precious thing. Giving that place to the na’kyrim was not the least of Kulkain’s wise deeds, not by a long way.”
“Have you said anything about it — Bannain’s message — to Aewult?”
“Ha! You really think the great warriors of Haig would care what a few na’kyrim think? Aewult would not listen to any counsel drawn from such a well. It would only feed his contempt for us, to learn that we gave it any credence ourselves. We have a few slender threads of tolerance left for the children of two races, your Blood and mine. But Haig? No. Even if they believed it… oh, there are old hatreds that could easily be stirred back into life. If people start to think there are na’kyrim mixed up in this war, how safe do you suppose any of them, anywhere, would be?”
“They took a risk, in sending Bannain to you,” Orisian murmured.
“I like to think they trust me, as they have trusted my ancestors. Unfortunately, I fear they do not really understand how much power has leaked away from the Tower of Thrones.”
Crows that had been strutting across the neat lawns in serried ranks flew off, cawing in irritation, as the two Thanes approached.
“They believe it’s their garden more than mine,” Lheanor said as he watched them go. “You’re taking your Kyrinin with you, are you?”
“I am. They expect to be killing White Owls soon, and that… pleases them.” He remembered well the smile that had burst from Ess’yr’s flawless face at the news: a rare prize.
“I can’t say I’ll be sorry to see the back of them. I know they helped you, and that makes them friends of my Blood as much as yours, but word gets out, no matter how much care it’s guarded with. There’d be a mob at the door demanding their deaths before too much longer.”
“I know. I’ve brought more problems with me than I would have wished.”
“Not you. Horin-Gyre. Haig. They’re the ones who’ve crafted our troubles. And a foolish father, too ready to grant his son’s desire for battle.”
There was such a weight of sadness in Lheanor’s voice that Orisian could almost feel its tug himself. He looked at the Thane of the Kilkry Blood and saw not a mighty leader but an old man, bowed by loss, beset by guilt.
“I wake up every day,” Orisian said, “and… every morning I have to learn to believe it all over again: that they really are gone. A dozen times a day — no, more — I think of something I want to say to one of them, or ask. My father, my uncle, Inurian. My mother, even, and Fariel.”
“There are a great many things I wish I could say to my son.”
“You still have a son. Perhaps you should say them to him.”
The Kilkry-Haig Thane glanced at him, and Orisian wondered if he should tread more carefully. But he did know something of this; in the matter of dead sons, of grieving fathers, he could claim some knowledge.
“I don’t know you well, sire,” he went on, “so you must tell me if I speak out of turn. My father lost a son, and I lost him because of that. Grief took him away from me before the Inkallim did.”
“I walked here sometimes with Croesan, you know,” Lheanor murmured. “And your father and mother once, perhaps more than once, years ago. We talked about… what?” A frown crumpled the old man’s face, and then passed. “I’m not sure. Nothings, probably. For ones such as us, Thane, there are too few people in whose company we can be
… idle. You come to treasure those you do have, and therefore are wounded by their passing.”
Lheanor paused, looking down at the path on which they walked. One of the flat stones had lifted a little, disturbing the smooth surface.
“Look,” Lheanor muttered. “The frost’s got under that.”
He made an irritated noise at the back of his throat and waved one of his shieldmen over. He pointed the stone out to the warrior.
“Find one of the gardeners and get them to relay that.”
The man trotted off to carry out the command. Lheanor led Orisian on around the Tower of Thrones. They walked in a great, slow circle while overhead the clouds flowed in from the west.
“A man never speaks out of turn when he offers well-meant advice,” Lheanor said. “My loss — my loss I find to be unbearable. Yet it is less than yours, and you remain unbowed by it. Unbroken. Thus it seems you are made of better stuff than me.”
“No, that’s not-” Orisian began, but Lheanor stilled him with an upraised hand.
“I envy you your youth. It’s an armour against many things, youth. You refuse to play games with Aewult and the Shadowhand. I allow them to set fences about me, my Blood, my army. You do not. Whether what you intend is wise or not, I do not know; but I do know that I envy you the will to make the attempt.”
The old Thane bent to snap a dead twig from a bush by the path. He pointed with it down towards a sweep of grass by the wall.
“I think I want to plant trees down there. Something that flowers in the spring, with white blossom, perhaps. My wife likes white blossom. That’s one thing that does not change, isn’t it? Whoever dies — even if we die
