As night began to fall, a rough wind shook its way through the treetops. Torcaill turned the column off the road and chose a small clearing for a campsite. His warriors were silent and subdued. They disliked the forest, its suffocating density. Orisian wondered how much longer these men would follow his lead without question. The wind was rising, rocking the trees and rustling through the undergrowth. Those who had tents struggled to stake them into the ground. The men who must sleep without shelter were casting about for places where they might find some small protection from the elements.
Rothe tried to light a fire. The wind kept swirling down into the clearing and scattering the flakes of bark that he had cut for kindling. The shieldman muttered under his breath as he set down his flint and scooped the bark back into a little pile. Orisian squatted beside him.
“There’s a lot of unhappy men here, aren’t there?” he said softly.
Rothe glanced at him, then concentrated on striking sparks.
“It’s not of much consequence, whether a warrior’s happy or not. He does as he’s commanded. You needn’t worry about that. However much any of them grumble, they’ll follow you.”
Orisian wished he could share Rothe’s confidence. He glanced round, to find Ess’yr standing behind him. She was watching Rothe’s hands as he methodically chipped spark after spark out of the flint.
“We heard the enemy,” she said. “Before. They call like birds.”
Rothe looked up at that. Orisian stood, feeling the stiffness in his legs and back as he did so. His body had still not reconciled itself to so much time spent on horseback.
“White Owls?” he asked her. “Are they near?”
She gave the slightest, most delicate of shrugs. “Cannot say. Perhaps not. They moved…” she stretched a graceful arm out, a little south of east. “But others might be near. The weather favours the hunter.”
As if to emphasise her words a violent gust of wind rushed through the clearing, tumbling twigs and dead leaves along. Orisian ushered Ess’yr to one side, putting a little distance between her and the closest of Torcaill’s warriors. He might have touched her elbow, or her back — applied a gentle pressure to indicate his desire to move — but there was something in the simple thought of such contact that made him nervous.
“Yvane and Eshenna were talking about the Anain before,” he said, once he was confident that none could overhear them. “They say they’re awake. Moving. And that we’re close to places… to their places.”
Ess’yr gazed back at him, waiting for a question. In the half-light of dusk, her face seemed to him like a soft mask; the gentle curves of her tattoos like some pattern impressed upon pale silk. It was too dark for him to see her eyes clearly. They were shadows.
“Is it true?” he asked. “Do you think they’re here, around us?”
“Always,” she replied, and he heard her voice quite clearly even though the trees all about were roaring and creaking in the wind. “We walk on their backs. When we touch a tree, we touch their arm. The roots are their bones.”
“They’re waking, though. That’s what all the na’kyrim say: they’re moving closer to the surface. Why? Do you know?”
“Such a thing is not to be known. They are not like us, not like Huanin or Kyrinin. You do not ask why the river flows, or why the fire moves as it does. If the Anain rise, they rise. If they act, they act. That is all.”
“Yet your people seek their favour. Your anhyne, the catchers of the dead. They guard you, don’t they?”
Ess’yr regarded Orisian inexpressively. She blinked, sheathing and then unsheathing the deep, dark pools that her eyes had become.
“My thought is that the Anain favour none and nothing. Some of my people say they ended the war between Huanin and Kyrinin to end our suffering. I think not. It think they ended it because it disturbed the balance in their world. If we are beneath their gaze, if they wake, we will not choose the ending. The seal pup does not choose if the storm takes it out to sea. The storm does that.”
Later, as Orisian lay in his tent, his mind sank down into a half-sleeping fog. The rushing of the wind through the trees was transformed into the breaking of waves. He saw himself standing on the shore looking out towards Castle Kolglas. The sea was high, far higher than he had ever known it. Huge foaming breakers roared in and pounded at the isolated castle. It was breaking apart beneath the onslaught. He felt an awful dread churning in his chest.
He woke once. The gale had fallen away. Cold prickled across his cheeks. He could hear Rothe breathing. He closed his eyes and slept.
IV
Four men died in the night. A hard frost had come, brittling the grass and casting its white sheen over everything. The ground crackled beneath Orisian’s feet. He left a trail of dark prints behind him, pressed into the cold dusting. He shivered and sniffed as he walked.
Rothe showed him the bodies. One — a guard — lay at the foot of a shallow slope, stretched out against the thick base of a tree. The other three lay where they had settled down for the night. In the evening they, like everyone else, had wandered about beneath the trees, pursing their lips and weighing up the options. They had chosen a place where the ground seemed even, the grass dry, and they had unrolled their sleeping mats, made a pillow of their jacket or shield or a rock. They had lain down and pulled their blankets tight about them. And they had died there, silently, in the darkness. Their throats had been cut. Their blood had made puddles on the forest floor.
Orisian looked into the face of the corpse nearest him. He looked away again quickly, repelled by that too- familiar vision of death, but he had time to see the bruises on the man’s face where someone had roughly clamped a hand over his mouth.
“They killed the sentry first,” muttered Rothe. “Then these three, just because they were within reach, on the edge of the camp.”
“Kyrinin?” Orisian asked dully.
“Beyond doubt. I’ve seen this kind of thing before, in Anlane.”
“They could have killed us all.”
“There may only be a handful of them. Perhaps someone stirred while they were about their work; perhaps they thought they were about to be discovered. They’d always rather be cutting throats in the darkness than facing up to a real fight.”
“It’s a pity Varryn and Ess’yr were sleeping on the other side of the camp. They might have heard something.”
“Perhaps.”
Torcaill was going from corpse to corpse, collecting swords. He paused beside Orisian.
“We should turn back, Thane,” he said. “There’ll be more dead if we don’t. I can’t put outriders ahead of us now. They’d not survive half the day.”
Orisian took one of the sheathed blades from the warrior and turned it in his hands. There were notches and crude patterns scratched into the scabbard; the metal cap on its end had a simple design of dots punched into it. An incongruous little strand of red-dyed string was tied about the hilt.
“What’s this?” Orisian asked, running a fingertip over the string. “Do you know why he had this on his sword?”
Torcaill frowned at it. “No, sire. A token from some girl, perhaps. Or a reminder of some enemy he had killed. I don’t know.”
“What was his name?”
“Dorvadain. Dorvadain Emmen.”
Orisian glanced over his shoulder. Varryn and Ess’yr were there. They had come silently across the frosted grass and now stared at the dead men. Orisian looked back to the sword in his hands for a moment, then returned it to Torcaill.
“Will you do something for me?” he asked Varryn quietly.
The Kyrinin waited.
“I want to know how many White Owls there are. Where they are, where they are going. I don’t want to be
