I
Orisian left a trail of dead men behind him on the journey out of the Veiled Woods. One of those corpses weighed more heavily upon him than all the others combined, but each added its small burden. The White Owls harried them, like wolves at the heels of a dying stag, coming close enough to snap and wound, but never committing to a final, fatal struggle. Men died with arrows in their back, or with their throats cut while they stood watch in darkness.
Torcaill did his best to keep the battered company moving, resting only briefly, never straying out of one another’s sight. Orisian’s respect for the man grew. He was tireless, resolute. But for all his efforts, everyone knew that it was upon Ess’yr and Varryn that their best hopes of survival rested. The two Kyrinin ranged through the Veiled Woods without pause, ahead and behind, day and night. They moved soundlessly through the misty forest, quartering the ground in search of scents and sign. No one — Orisian least of all — tried to give them any commands. They were fighting their own war, generations old, against their clan’s enemy, and they knew its methods and necessities better than anyone. This was, in a way, what they had been seeking ever since Koldihrve, and now that it had come they went about their work with silent, bloody intensity.
The horses, that Torcaill had so wanted to keep, were long gone, abandoned to the wilderness. They could only have slowed, rather than aided, their flight through the tangled forest. The Veiled Woods seemed almost to be folded in upon themselves, trees and brambles and rocks and moss all bent inwards and intertwined in vast confusion. And all dripping wet, suffused with cloud, green and loamy. Not a place for humankind. Perhaps not even a place for Kyrinin, for whenever Orisian caught a glimpse of Ess’yr and Varryn their manner suggested a caution and unease that he did not think even their struggles with the White Owls could fully explain.
The oppressive otherness of the place ate away at his own spirit. Constantly, out of the corner of his eye, he thought he caught some fleeting movement. Whenever he followed such a hint with his gaze, he found nothing; just the mute vegetation, the still, convoluted trees. But there was something here, something more than human or Kyrinin, of that he became certain. The grass on which they walked was that of autumn, not winter. The leaves on the bushy undergrowth were still a patchwork of reds and browns and mottled greens. The tiny streams that gurgled their rocky way across the forest floor seemed to be giving a voice to a saturating presence that hung, untouchable, in the air and the soil. Sometimes, Orisian was almost certain the treetops stirred when there was no breeze to move them, and at night there would be sudden creakings and crackings as if the oaks and willows were twisting themselves into new shapes. He thought constantly, and fearfully, of the Anain.
Much of the time, they had to carry K’rina. The thin na’kyrim was often too feeble to walk, though whether it was feebleness of mind or body none could be certain. The raw scratches that had covered her when Orisian first saw her quickly faded into a dull net of scars, flat across her skin. Her distress came and went, with tears and with kneaded hands and trembling brow. Her eyes darted this way and that, or lay dead and sightless in their sockets; her lips shivered and worked in silent flurries, or locked themselves into taut closure. But never did she utter a word. Never did she give any sign of knowing where, or who, she was.
Neither Eshenna nor Yvane could tell Orisian what had happened — or was still happening — to K’rina.
“Will she recover?” Orisian asked Eshenna when they paused, sitting for a time on boulders cloaked in lichens. “Can you not even tell me that?”
“There’s nothing there,” Eshenna said. “She’s gone. Empty.”
Yvane shook her head slowly. “Not empty, I think. A dead space in the Shared, but it’s concealment, not emptiness. There’s something there.”
“So that’s what all this has been for?” Orisian asked. “You cannot even tell me what prize it is we’ve won with all these deaths.” He spoke carefully, wary of his battered mouth. It hurt less now, though there was sometimes still a dull throbbing in his jaw. The stitched wound in his cheek itched, and stung when he stretched it. His tongue was tender, and constantly stumbling over the unexpected gaps amongst his teeth.
Yvane scowled at him. “Her name’s K’rina, if you remember. And whatever has happened to her, I doubt she chose it. Look at her. Do you suppose she’s happy with the way things have turned out?”
Orisian sighed, and tugged at the grass. He was angry; at himself, the White Owls, Eshenna, the world. Even through that obscuring anger, though, he knew that however desperate was his desire to assign blame, K’rina deserved none of it.
“No,” he muttered. “How did she come to this state, though?”
“The Anain,” Yvane said. Eshenna winced at even the word, and the older woman shot her an irritated glance. “We’re amongst them here. I can feel them, hear their movement. And K’rina is a part of it, somehow.”
“And Aeglyss?”
“He has receded, a little. Sunk back into whatever hole his skull has become, since…” Yvane faltered. She did that more often now, running aground on her own feelings, or fears.
“Since Highfast,” Orisian finished for her, and she nodded.
It had come late one morning, perhaps the first after Rothe’s death, though Orisian could not be sure, for the passage of time had become an indistinct thing to him for a while. Eshenna had been suddenly on her knees, fists balled and pressing down into the mossy grass. She wailed, and the sound was so piercing and anguished that it turned every head, arrested every stride. Yvane had gone to help her, but she too was shaken by something, sent staggering. Orisian held her up, trying at the same time to reach out a hand to touch Eshenna’s back.
“What is it?” he had asked them.
“They’re dying,” cried Eshenna. “Disappearing.”
“Who?” He looked from Eshenna to Yvane, frightened by the extremity of whatever had taken hold of them.
“Highfast,” Yvane stammered. Her arm was shaking in his grasp. “Cerys is gone. Oh, he’s too bright, too dark… he’s burning them away. He’s a beast, a great beast gone mad.”
“Save us,” Eshenna had said then, and Orisian heard a terrible, hopeless pleading in her voice.
“There’s nothing but death,” Yvane said, more controlled but still unsteady and bleak-faced. “ Na’kyrim are dying, in Highfast. Aeglyss is there. For a moment… for a moment, there was no difference. He was the Shared, and it was him.”
Ever since that morning, Eshenna had been withdrawn. Haunted. She had been, when Orisian first met her in Highfast, urgent and eager; hungry, almost, to leave it behind and step out into the world. What had happened since then, Orisian thought, had been too much for her. Just a few days. That was all it took. That part of him still capable of sympathy regretted the savagery of the lessons the world had seen fit to teach her. But such sympathy as he could summon up was tinged by a cold recognition that such was the nature of the times in which they lived. If Eshenna was paying a price for her curiosity, it was less than others had paid for the recent twists and turns in the path of the world. He disliked the ease with which such thoughts occurred to him now, but he could not deny them.
They exerted little control over the route they followed. They went where ground and thicket and pursuit permitted, and that meant south and west, towards the towering Karkyre Peaks that they could sometimes glimpse through gaps in the branch-woven roof of the forest. However much Orisian wanted to retrace their steps to Highfast, Ess’yr told him with casual certainty that to attempt it would mean death on White Owl arrows or spear points.
“We’ll be out of here soon,” Yvane said to Orisian, as they sat sharing some of the last hard oaten biscuits.
Orisian looked around, aware that his sight and his thoughts alike were blurred and clumsy. They had been on the move since long before dawn, blundering their way through wooded gullies and rocky thickets. It was miserable, and punishing, but preferable to the alternative of waiting, motionless in the darkness, for Kyrinin to creep out of the moonshadows with murderous intent.
“Out of where?” he asked. “The Veiled Woods, you mean?”
Yvane nodded, trying to break a piece off a biscuit with her teeth, failing, and staring doubtfully at it. “The ground’s been rising under us since daybreak. Haven’t you noticed that the mountains are near?”
Orisian peered up through the latticework of branches over their heads. His eyes had, this morning, been fixed on the ground beneath his feet. He saw now that Yvane was right. The Karkyre Peaks were close. He could
