the earth. “Let his punishment be at their hands.”
He looked back to Mordyn and smiled. The crowd parted and the few Kyrinin came softly through it. The last surviving prisoner was weeping and shaking. He made no attempt to flee; simply stood there, and beat his chest in despair. The Kyrinin took him and bound his hands and his feet and laid him down in the middle of the street. A perfect circle of silent, attentive observers formed. There was an awful stillness about the scene: an expectant, anticipatory thrill. Mordyn could feel it himself, the yearning for this moment to culminate in cathartic violence.
The Kyrinin tore the man’s shirt from his body. Two of them produced knives. They began to carve long strips of skin away from his chest.
Aeglyss closed his eyes and lifted his head back and breathed in deeply, as if inhaling the screams.
“Sit, Chancellor. You must be tired.” He took Mordyn to the ancient bench and settled him onto it. “Thanes sat there once. And now you.”
Mordyn had to press his hands down against the rough stone to hold himself steady and erect. Aeglyss lowered himself onto the floor and sat there, cross-legged. The robe he wore was filthy, its hem frayed. He was looking at his fingernails. Delicately, he lifted one away from its bed. It fell like the petal of dead flower. Aeglyss grunted. He lifted the exposed fingertip to his mouth and licked it, watching Mordyn now.
“Too much for this poor body,” Aeglyss said. He sounded sad and tired. “My exertions in securing your presence here… I reached a little too far, I think. I am learning, but too slowly. Too slowly.”
He coughed, and bloody saliva crept over his chin. He dragged the back of his hand across it.
“I don’t know what to do with you, Shadowhand. You’re too precious a thing to be given up to the rest of them. They’d squander you. Waste you. Yet… oh, to put her aside would be too much for me. Too cruel.”
He hugged himself, wrapping his chest in his arms. Rocking. There was a sudden redoubling of the screams outside. Mordyn started at it. Aeglyss did not seem to hear it.
“I can’t. I can’t. How has it come to this? What did I do that such miseries should be visited upon me? I had no choice. That’s the truth in this. They’ll none of them love us, Shadowhand. Never. No matter what service we do them. They’ll always try to cast us out, curse our names, sooner or later. Or try to kill us. They’ll stake us up on stones.”
He sprang to his feet and strode forwards. Mordyn felt as though his skull would split asunder, such was the pressure building there. He closed his eyes, but still saw shadows and light moving on the inside of his eyelids. All reason was leaking out of his world. The na’kyrim ’s voice was within him, just as much as it was without. Nothing would still it. A fingertip prodded at his eyelid. He jerked his head to one side. A hand brushed his cheek.
“You think they love me now?” Aeglyss asked softly. “The White Owls, the Black Road? All these cold hearts yearning for slaughter? They don’t love me. None save Wain. Perhaps you think I love them? The White Owls are the people of my mother, but I don’t love them. Horin-Gyre is the Blood of my father, but I’ll not love them.”
Those taut lips were at Mordyn’s ear now. The words spilled from them, a mad, angry tumble. Mordyn heard them, but barely grasped their meaning. It was the sound of inchoate madness that held him, that made his heart flutter.
“I’ll climb up on their backs, I’ll raise myself up on the mounds of their corpses. But I’ll not love them. There’s no love, for the likes of you and I. We’re the outsiders, the hounds they want to run at their heels. They work us hard, and feast on the fruits of our labour, but it’s scraps from the table we get. We were born in the wrong place, or of the wrong father, or at the wrong time. You think Gryvan oc Haig loves you for what you’ve done for him? No!”
Mordyn groaned. He would fall away into unconsciousness in a moment, and he longed for that release. But even as he thought of it, the battering waves of darkness receded.
“Forgive me,” he heard Aeglyss say. “I must learn restraint. There is so much I still have to learn. I know what I must do with you, Chancellor. It’s just… it’s just that I fear to…”
The halfbreed’s voice was moving away. Mordyn cautiously opened his eyes. Aeglyss was stumbling across the floor, his feet scraping over the wooden boards. He drifted around one of the soaring stone columns.
“I’ve known from the first moment I found you. I made terrible sacrifices to bring you here. Terrible. Someone… important slipped through my fingers. The only one I could have trusted. The only one. Stolen from me, because I indulged myself; lingered in that awful place, and called my warriors to fetch you out of there. I lost her. And gained you, Shadowhand.
“Now that I have you, there will be none to gainsay me; none to deny me. They will not turn me away from their tables when they see that I hold the famed Shadowhand. They will not shut me out from their councils. No, they will beg me, they will entreat me, they will seek my favour. Mine! You can aid me, but I know… I’ve learned that aid is not given. Not when I ask for it. I must take it. Take what I need to put myself beyond their reach, beyond everyone’s reach.”
He stopped, poised in mid-stride, teetering like a frail, half-felled tree. He cocked his head to one side.
“Here they come. Now we shall see. Now there will be a decision.”
He looked towards the door, and it swung back on its rusted hinges. Wain stood there, seeing and dismissing the hunched figure of the Chancellor with a single sharp gaze.
“Temegrin is coming,” she said. “He has fifty riders at his back.”
Aeglyss nodded heavily. “He means to kill me, I think. Well. It’s good. Let him, if he can.”
More than two hundred marched out to meet the Eagle of Ragnor oc Gyre’s army, and even then Kan Avor was not emptied. Kyrinin warriors, Battle Inkallim, Wain and her Shield and fifty of her Blood’s spears, a hundred folk from the valleys and mountains of the distant north. They walked out through the city’s tumbled wall and onto the icy, wet fields beyond. Aeglyss and Wain led them, with Shraeve a few paces behind, and Mordyn Jerain at their side. They had put a cord around the Chancellor’s neck, and led him liked a leashed dog.
Aeglyss stumbled often as he walked. It was not only that the ground here was treacherous, sucking mud beneath a thin skin of ice, more marsh than solid earth; his legs seemed unequal to the task of bearing him. Wain helped him with one hand, dragging Mordyn along with the other. The great muted company drew itself up in loose array and stood watching Temegrin and his band of warriors come cantering up with the sinking orange sun at their backs, flags and pennants flying, mud and water and shards of shattered ice churning beneath the hoofs of their horses. Mordyn could feel their approach in his legs, rumbling up from the ground, shaking his bones. They looked magnificent, these warriors from beyond the Vale of Stones.
Temegrin sprang down from his horse, his feet crunching through ice as he landed. His coarse-skinned face was flushed with anger, Mordyn could see. He tried to remember what he knew of this man. He had certainly had reports of him, but so sluggish and disjointed had his memory become that he could not dredge them up. There were eagle feathers fluttering at the top of his boots as he stamped up towards Wain and Aeglyss. Silly, Mordyn thought. This is no place for birds. Not even eagles.
“So it’s true,” Temegrin snarled at Wain. “This is Gryvan’s Chancellor?” He looked at Mordyn with avaricious loathing.
“It is,” Wain said.
The Eagle grinned. “I thought it impossible, when I was told. I had the man who first reported it beaten for spreading lies and rumour. But behold! The Shadowhand himself.”
A dozen of his warriors had dismounted and lined up behind him now. Mordyn stared at the ground. This was humiliation more than he could bear, to be gloated over like a prized exhibit at some Tal Dyreen slave market of old.
“But when did you mean to send word to us, Wain?” he heard Temegrin asking, his voice seething with threat. “I had to come all the way from Kolglas to see with my own eyes, for we’ve had no word from you of this great boon that fate has granted our cause.”
She made no answer, and that angered the Eagle still more.
“How did he come here?” he shouted.
“Ask your questions of me,” Aeglyss said softly.
Mordyn risked a glance sideways. The halfbreed was standing limply, shrunken and fragile amongst these great warriors in their mail shirts. Mordyn could hardly bear to look at him, for dread burst in through his eyes at the very sight of that stooped frame. Temegrin perhaps could not yet see it, or sense it, for he ignored the na’kyrim. He reached out a huge gloved hand, stretching to take from Wain the cord that bound the Chancellor. She twitched it out of his grasp.
“Don’t try my patience, lady,” the Eagle snarled. “I command the High Thane’s army here. You’ll surrender
