“Each day, I grow stronger,” Aeglyss said softly. “Each day, I sink deeper. I learn. Things are revealed to me.” He leaned down close to Amonyn, sniffing at him. “You na’kyrim. You… halfbreeds. There is nothing you can keep from me. You, least of all.”
He rose, and loomed over Cerys. She was stretching out an arm, trying to take hold of Amonyn’s hand. She did not want to die, but she wanted him to die even less.
“You were my own kind,” Aeglyss was saying. She paid him no heed. All that mattered was that she touch Amonyn, that neither he nor she should be alone. “But you want nothing to do with me. I know that. So be it. I am not of your kind any more. I am something else, and I am to have nothing: no companions, no sanctuary, no… It does not matter. The Anain may hunt me, take everything that I love, if they want. You can plot against me. No matter. I take what I need, Elect. There is to be no more trust, no more talking. Not in all the world.”
He came down onto his hands and knees, crouched over her like a dog. She felt his lips brushing her ear.
“You should not have tried to keep secrets from me. I know you have the Shadowhand here, Elect,” he said. And then he collapsed. Tyn lay curled on the floor, his shallow, rattling breath the only sound save the heavy footsteps of Herraic’s warriors coming running.
They buried Rothe in the clearing where he had fallen. Torcaill was disapproving, Orisian knew, eager to be away from that threatening place with its smothering mists and enclosing trees, but he said nothing. Eshenna and Yvane were uneasy, fearful no doubt of any intrusion upon this domain of the Anain, but they raised no complaint. Orisian dug the grave himself, first with a short blade one of the warriors lent him, to break open the soft, wet earth, then with his hands, clawing out great fistfuls of the black soil. Others helped, but he barely registered their presence or their exertions.
The few horses that had not been lost in the sprawling, frantic pursuit and skirmishing through the forest grazed on the glade’s wet grass. Ess’yr and Varryn sat on a log, watching. Sentries looked nervously out on all sides, knowing they had little chance of anticipating any attack. Torcaill himself knelt, cleaning Rothe’s sword. All of this Orisian knew, vaguely, was around him. It seemed like nothing to do with him. He just dug.
They lowered Rothe into the ground. Torcaill laid the sword on his chest, folded his arms across it. Then Orisian laid Rothe’s shield over his hands. As he straightened, the warriors — not many more than twenty of them alive now — stepped forwards, ringing the shallow grave. As one, they bent and began covering Rothe with earth. Orisian watched that face he knew so well gradually, incrementally disappear.
“He deserved a pyre,” he murmured. His jaw throbbed. His mouth was swollen and tasted foul, of blood and ruin. He could not speak well, or clearly.
“He did,” Torcaill agreed. “But this is the best we can do for him. It’s better than others have had, today.”
“They all deserved better. But him especially.”
After it was done, they covered the grave with dead wood and stones.
Orisian sat, numb and cold, while one of the warriors — he did not even know his name — cleaned the dried blood from his face. Probing with his tongue, he could feel the empty sockets of the teeth he had lost. It was not until the needle and sinew began to close up the great gash across his cheek that he felt the pain. It was sharp and insistent enough to cut through the fog that enshrouded his mind. He closed his eyes and endured it as the stitches went in.
Afterwards, Ess’yr beckoned him over. She said nothing, but made him sit at her side. She had collected a few clumps of some pale green moss-like plant. Now she chewed on a little of it. After a few moments, she touched a thumb to his chin and pressed his mouth open. She removed the moist, pulped mass from her own mouth and gently pressed it into the space between his cheek and gum. The juices that oozed from it made his wounds sting.
Wreaths of mist drifted amongst the treetops all around. Orisian stared blankly at them. His gaze slipped down and rested on K’rina. She was sitting cross-legged, rocking back and forth. She turned her hands over, and back and over again, examining them as if she had never seen such strange objects before. The tiny scratches all over her skin were like a fine net. No word, no sense, had passed her lips since they had found her; no sign that she was anything more than a madwoman, lost in the forest. That was the treasure Rothe and the others had died to deliver into Orisian’s hands.
Someone shouted out. Men were running. Ess’yr was on her feet, raising her bow.
“They’re coming again,” Orisian heard. It might have been Torcaill’s voice. He looked at Rothe’s grave. Someone leaped across it, rushing with sword drawn to meet whatever danger now came.
Dull and distant, without thought, Orisian reached for his own blade and rose to his feet.
For two days they waited. Guards stood outside the door behind which the monster lurked. Or possibly lurked. Cerys and others went back and forth from that gloomy chamber, spending hours at Tyn’s bedside, and learned nothing. They found nothing save silence, and a dead, empty space in the Shared. The Dreamer breathed, his eyes moved beneath their lids, but there was no life in him. His body was truly a shell now, an empty, abandoned shell. There was no Tyn, no Aeglyss. The wounds in his face and his wrists dried, but did not heal. Cerys sat and stared into that gaunt face, as if by merely looking she might find some answer. But none came. The Shared was still, unresponsive. The Dreamer did not stir. The iron chain around her neck grew heavier.
Amonyn lay in his own quarters, alive but bruised both without and within. Herraic came to see Tyn himself, and fretted and frowned impotently until Cerys asked him to leave. Mordyn Jerain hesitated between life and death, his wounds half-healed. Olyn stayed in the crows’ roost, and would not emerge. Highfast was paralysed, prostrated by trepidation and gloom and uncertainty. Snow fell, and laid white blankets across the roofs and battlements and courtyards.
During the short hours of daylight, the Elect could busy herself with her duties. She could find enough activity to fend off the darkest of her thoughts. It was an illusory, temporary calm but necessary. At night, she had no such defences, and could not even take comfort in Amonyn’s company. Guilt and doubts circled her, snapping at her.
She wondered if she had failed Tyn, through some lack of wisdom or lack of knowledge in the ways of the Shared. Not for the first time, she thought of Inurian. He might have been Elect instead of her, had he stayed in Highfast. Had that been what he wanted from life. Would his failures have been less?
Now and again, in the sleepless night, Cerys would shake and scold herself for giving in to such futile self- doubt. It served no purpose to play these games. What was done, was done. Still, dawn would find her at the Dreamer’s bedside. She rested her elbows on his sheets, held her chain of office clasped in her hands. She closed her eyes and wondered if Tyn was still there, somewhere, and if he would hear her when she asked for his forgiveness.
Then, on the morning of the third day: “Elect.”
She opened her eyes. Tyn was gazing at her. He was smiling. And it was not Tyn.
“They are here.”
He was rising from the bed, casting aside the sheet. She could only watch.
“Did you think I had gone? No, Elect. Just waiting. I do not mean to leave this place empty-handed. And I do have friends, after all. Would you like to meet them?”
He came around the bed to her side, took her hand in his. There was no warmth in his skin, only the cold of dead flesh.
“Walk with me, Elect. Show me your mighty library, your precious store of wisdom that fills you with such pride.”
She saw — or thought she saw — him enshrouded by a vast cape of shadow that swelled up behind him like a living thing. It drowned out the world, leaving her alone with him, the two of them alone in a dark domain where the very air was made of his thoughts, the ground upon which she walked was made of his hatred for her and for all things.
They moved, though she could not say which of them led the other. A door opened, and there were men there. Warriors. Guards, she vaguely remembered. She saw them faintly, as through a veil. They were saying something, but their words were only sounds that fluttered up against her and fell away, spent and meaningless.
“No,” she heard Aeglyss saying, and his voice was all about her, in her blood and her bones. “The Elect and I are going to the library. You, you are going to the gates. Open them. Open Highfast.”
