“No, no,” he gasped. His thin hands went to the sides of his head. New blood bloomed at his wrists, blushing through his bandages. The healing woman took a step backwards, away from him and towards the doorway that led out into the bright, safe world beyond. She could smell death here, in the air and the hides and the earth of the lodge. It should, perhaps, be burned when the na’kyrim was gone.
“Wait,” Aeglyss snapped, reaching out to her, clawing the air. His eyes were pressed shut. “Do not leave me.”
With a great effort he shifted to the edge of the pallet. He opened watery eyes, swung his feet out to rest on the ground.
“A passing moment only. It is so… so much, you see. You could not imagine. The Shared runs in me like… it boils.”
“You are bleeding,” the woman observed.
Aeglyss glanced at the bloodstained bindings and gave a faint shrug.
“Leave it. It’s not… you must do something for me. Go to the Voice. Tell her I would talk with her.”
The Voice of the White Owls was an old woman, silver-haired, stooped, slow. She wore the pale, speckled feathers of the owl around her neck. She leaned on a staff of oak. She whispered as she came, murmuring phrases that had been passed down over centuries as tools to focus and clear the mind. The healing woman followed in her footsteps.
They found the na’kyrim on his knees in the centre of the lodge, beside the ashen remains of the fire. He was flexing the fingers of his right hand, opening and closing them again and again. Both Voice and healer hesitated in the lodge’s entrance, like deer catching danger on the wind.
“Do you mean to live or die?” the Voice asked.
Aeglyss looked up. At first his expression was blank, as if he did not recognise her, or did not speak the people’s tongue. Then the clouds cleared from his eyes and he grimaced.
“Live. Help me up.”
The Voice nodded to the healing woman, but she hesitated, reluctant.
“Help me up,” rasped Aeglyss, and such was the weight of that command that even the Voice took a step forwards before she caught herself. The healing woman was faster, and more pliable. She went to the na’kyrim ’s side, and he hauled himself up onto his feet, anchoring himself with handfuls of her clothes.
“Even after I have survived the Breaking Stone, there are those who would deny me my place here,” said Aeglyss bitterly. “Do not imagine I am deaf, or blind, to it.”
“Some are afraid,” said the Voice. “Others are uncertain. Bad dreams assail us in the night since you returned. We are afflicted by ill tempers, mistrust. The people fear that your presence discolours their thoughts. They say you have clouded my judgement; that you have done so before, and do so now. That you betrayed us to your Huanin friends. They say we should take the life that has been spared by the Breaking Stone. Others say it is not for us to take a life that the Stone refuses.”
“Bad dreams? Nothing that stalks this camp is anything more than a faint echo of what burns inside my head. What you feel is a breeze, a moth’s flutter. I suffer the full storm, waking or sleeping.”
Still he clung to the healer’s shoulder, unable to support his own weight. He was more than a head taller than the old woman, but wasted and lean, like a sapling spindling its way up towards distant light. She was steady beneath the burden.
“And I was the betrayed, not the betrayer,” muttered Aeglyss. “But you, Voice? What do you say? What conclusions have you reached in all your pondering, your delay?”
“I have not decided,” the Voice said carefully. “There has not been enough talk. Not yet. You live, for now, and I…” she stumbled over her words, twitched her head in a kind of sudden uncertainty that no Voice should every display “… there is no decision yet. Until there is a decision, you cannot die. That must be enough.”
Aeglyss laughed. The healing woman started away from him, alarmed at the raucous human sound. He held her there at his side; leaned on her.
“Not enough. No. Never enough. Never…”
He swayed. His eyelids fluttered, his chin sank down towards his chest. The healing woman, freed of some intangible restraint that revealed itself only by its absence, darted away from him, making for the protection of the Voice. Aeglyss staggered a few steps to one side. The Voice watched impassively. The na’kyrim steadied himself. His eyes opened, clear and sharp once more. He lowered himself gingerly down onto the sleeping pallet, and smiled ruefully at the two women.
“It will take time, for me to learn. To control this. I need one thing from you, though. Now, not later, not after any decisions. I will give the White Owls a gift of great strength in time, Voice, but first, you must do this one thing for me: send spear a’ans south. There is a woman, a Heron-born na’kyrim, who will come to me from out of the south. We — I — must have her.”
The Voice was shaking her head. She tried to deny him. His brow furrowed. His mouth tightened. He held out his hands, palms up, towards her.
“You must do this one small thing for me, Voice,” he whispered. Quite soft. Quite calm, but his voice was daggers in her ears, a cold compulsion in her heart. She nodded once and went, shivering, from the lodge, the healing woman close behind, casting fearful, awed glances back over her shoulder.
And in the lodge, Aeglyss the na’kyrim sank back on the pallet of juniper and hazel boughs. He held his arms flat at his sides, a little away from his body. His lips trembled now, in pain or fear or horror. The blood came freely from his wounds, saturating the cloth wrappings about his wrists, falling in viscous drips down amongst the twigs and fronds beneath him.
II
The road ran up from the south towards Kolkyre through flat farmlands. Inland, low hills filled the eastern horizon; to the west there was nothing but foaming waves rumbling on weed-strewn beaches and, far out beyond those breakers, the distant hump-backed mass of Il Anaron.
The High Thane’s army snaked its way up the coast beneath wintry clouds. Aewult, the Haig Bloodheir, rode at the head of the column. The last of his ten thousand warriors were the better part of a day behind him, still straggling out of Donnish even as the Bloodheir came in sight of Kolkyre. His host had become a rough, ill- disciplined thing during the long march from Vaymouth. There had been trouble in Donnish the night before: drunken warriors thieving from the townsfolk, then fighting with the hawkers and pedlars the army sucked to itself as a rotting corpse drew flies. There had been desertions, too. Many of the men in this army had only just returned from war against the rebellious Dargannan-Haig Blood. They had expected rest and revels, not another punishing march and the promise of battle against the Black Road.
The Bloodheir remained ignorant of most of the problems afflicting his army. Those who commanded his companies judged it wiser to manage the difficulties as best they could, rather than to risk the Bloodheir’s ire by reporting them or — still worse — suggesting that he slow the remorseless pace of his advance. They all knew why Aewult drove onward so quickly, with so little regard for the cohesion of his forces. He hated the harsh realities of the campaign: the cold and the wet; the potholed roads; the hours in the saddle; the impoverished, dirty villages through which they passed. The Bloodheir wanted to win his victory and get back to his palace in Vaymouth as a matter of the utmost urgency.
So when the vanguard of the army of the True Bloods swept down the long, gentle slope that led to Kolkyre’s southernmost gate, the Bloodheir himself was in its midst. His heralds blew horns and his bannermen snapped flags back and forth. The giants of his famous Palace Shield, haughty in their shimmering armour, let their horses run on and came hammering down the cobbled road like harbingers of glory.
Orisian oc Lannis-Haig stared up at the soaring spire of Kolkyre’s Tower of Thrones, oblivious of the crowds gathered around him. A blustery wind was driving sheets of grey cloud eastwards off the sea. Seagulls were spinning about the Tower’s summit, playing raucous games with the gale. They cut wild arcs and curves across the sky, screeching at one another as if in celebration. When Kilkry had been first among the Bloods, the Tower of Thrones was the axis around which the world turned. Now its austere grandeur remained but the worldly power of its inhabitants was more circumscribed.
