— mind worked to anticipate her evasions.
“Do you think I am still in need of your protection?” he murmured, unwilling to allow anyone else to hear these words. “You think your promise to see to my safety not yet done with?”
Ess’yr returned his intent gaze, and for a moment he was captivated once again by those flinty eyes and the depths of grace they seemed to hold. The pale blue lines tattooed across her face were faint in this pre-dawn light; they almost danced with a life of their own at the corners of his vision. He could think of nothing else to say.
“Did you catch fish?” she asked him.
Orisian blinked. “What?”
“In the river.”
“Oh. No.”
She dipped her head, drawing his eyes down to her waist. A single silvery fish hung there, tied to her belt with strands of woven grass.
“I knew you would not,” Ess’yr said.
The derelict road bore them on down the valley, in amongst clumps of trees and long stretches of wet, boggy ground. Behind them, the Karkyre Peaks were hidden by thick grey clouds of mist and rain. The horses were subdued, discouraged by the foul weather. Those who rode them were little more enthusiastic, but at Orisian’s urging Torcaill did keep them to a steady, remorseless pace. Ess’yr and Varryn trotted along parallel to the column of warriors, drifting in and out of sight as the drizzle thickened and then slackened off again. They kept up easily with the horses.
Yvane did not fare so well. Orisian had known she would not. He and Rothe dropped back along the line of men and rode beside the na’kyrim for a time. She said nothing, made no complaint, but was obviously struggling. The road surface was scored across with little gullies, strewn with loose stones and scarred with pits where the cobbles had disappeared altogether. More than once Yvane stumbled. Had she been human, it would have been impossible for her to continue on foot; because she was not, Orisian felt, it was merely a bad idea.
“You’ll turn an ankle,” he called down to her eventually.
She ignored him, though he did hear what might have been a grunt — of either exertion or dismissal.
“Get up behind Rothe.” Orisian saw the expression of alarm that contorted his shieldman’s face.
“I managed to climb the Car Criagar, up and down, many times on these two feet,” Yvane said. “I walked the length of the Vale of Tears more than once. I can manage this road.”
“She doesn’t like horses,” Rothe said. “That’s fair enough. It’s her choice.”
Orisian frowned at his shieldman, but Rothe was now staring fixedly ahead, fascinated by the back of the nearest warrior.
“Ride with me, then,” Orisian said.
Yvane kept striding on. If anything, she picked up her pace a little, presumably hoping to either dissuade him or leave him behind. Irritated, Orisian gave his horse a sharp nudge and brought it to a halt across Yvane’s path. She almost walked into its shoulder. The lines of warriors parted around the two of them and flowed on.
“Listen,” said Orisian, “you will slow us down, sooner or later. You encouraged me in this undertaking, and I won’t have you now hindering me out of stubbornness, or whatever it is. I also won’t leave you behind on your own. Therefore, we are going to stand here and argue about it until you ride.”
Yvane glared up at him, drops of water beading her hair. She blinked misty rain out of her eyes. Orisian did not flinch as he once might have done. Instead, he raised his eyebrows expectantly and waited. It was Yvane who yielded.
“I never mastered the trick of riding. Tried a couple of times, at Koldihrve. Neither attempt ended well. Not for me, at least; the horses seemed to quite enjoy it.”
“All you have to do is hang on.”
“That is much what I was told on previous occasions.”
“But this time you just have to hang on to me, not the reins or the horse.”
Yvane displayed neither grace nor good humour, but she did, eventually, allow herself to be hoisted up behind Orisian. She clutched him so tightly about the midriff that he had to ask her to loosen her grip more than once.
The sky cleared, the air grew cold. Forest closed in along either side of the road. Everyone became tense, now that they could not see more than a few dozen paces in any direction. The tallest trees — elegant ash and soaring oak — almost touched their outermost branches together across the road. Orisian and the others advanced beneath a skeletal roof of leafless boughs.
Eshenna rode beside Orisian and Yvane for a time. Her pony was looking bedraggled and sorry for itself, but walked doggedly on amongst the warhorses.
“I’m feeling dizzy,” Eshenna said. She spoke to Orisian, but he had the feeling that her words were addressed to Yvane more than anyone. “If I close my eyes, I lose balance; my head whirls. I can’t hold on to a thought for more than a few moments.”
“I know,” grunted Yvane into Orisian’s shoulder.
“Can you still lead us to this woman?” Orisian asked.
Eshenna nodded. She was gloomy, her face drawn and lifeless as if she was sick.
“It feels as if she’s close. It’s getting hard to tell. Such storms are running through the Shared that it’s… difficult. The Anain, Aeglyss. It’s all too much.”
“Are the Anain here?” Orisian murmured. “Watching us?” He remembered, clearly, what Ess’yr had told him of the Anain, when they were in the Car Criagar. She had spoken of those then as though they were always present, as though the land was always inhabited by their incorporeal minds.
“We are beneath their notice,” Eshenna said, and grimaced. “They are no more likely to watch us than they are to watch a mouse, digging about in the moss. Still, they are here. They move, like ships, and we are just twigs caught up in their wake.”
“We might have been beneath their notice once,” Yvane muttered, “but now, who knows? The Hymyr Ot’tryn is near.”
“What’s that?” Orisian asked over his shoulder.
“It’s the Snake name for what you would call the Veiled Woods.”
“I’ve not heard of it,” Orisian said, but then hesitated at a flickering of memory. “Perhaps I have. In stories, maybe.”
“A stretch of forest, not far from here. One of the places, some say, where the Anain come a little nearer to the surface of the world.” Yvane glanced across at Eshenna. The younger woman was tight-lipped, staring at her pony’s neck.
“Even the Kyrinin get shivers down their backs thinking about that place, for all that they imagine the Anain are more or less benevolent,” Yvane went on. “They’re not stupid enough to think you could ever call them friendly. Even in the best of times.”
In places, the surface of the old road was slick with wet, rotted leaves. Too few wheels and feet had passed this way, in recent decades, to clear the detritus of each autumn. In the cracks and crevices and ruts, soil was accumulating. Grass had taken hold between and across cobblestones. The deeper they went into the wooded landscape, the more and more the road they travelled came to resemble little more than an overgrown grassy track. Where the turf was thickest, there were sometimes bulbous anthills dotting the sward, and swathes of mushrooms bubbling up. Saplings, some more than twice the height of a man, grew in the middle of the highway, straggly things straining thinly upwards in search of light. Their hidden roots had lifted the road’s surface, tilting the stones up on their shoulders.
Orisian grew ever more uneasy and doubtful of his choices. The further Highfast fell away behind them, the more remote seemed his reasons for coming this way. As the wilderness swallowed up the road before his eyes, so he felt as if it was drawing him into itself, distancing him ever more completely from the world of strife and conflict that lay beyond these narrow, tree-crowded horizons. A part of him — he wondered if it might be the honest part — accused the rest of cowardice. Did he secretly prefer to be Thane of just this small company, lost in this wild place where none could require great martial deeds or weighty decisions of him? Did he fear marching at the head of an army, facing the challenge of Aewult nan Haig and the Shadowhand, more than he feared whatever threat the forest, the White Owls, rumours of the Anain, could offer? Every step along this crumbling road was beginning to feel like flight. The trust he had placed in Eshenna, Yvane and the other na’kyrim seemed less certain with each passing moment.
