Bloodheir (21 page)

“You didn’t tell Orisian to stay here, though, did you?”

“No. I’m an old man, and one with more than a trace of fear clouding his eyes. I have no right to try to dissuade a young Thane whose Blood is fighting for its life from whatever course of action he chooses.

Anyway, we – your Blood and mine – have an army of quarrels with Haig already. One more will make little difference.”

“He would have listened to your advice, I’m sure.”

Lheanor gave her a kindly smile. “I did give him some, though not on the matter of staying here. But whatever the subject, he needs it less than he – or you – might imagine. He’s no fool, your brother. He gave me some advice of his own, and it was welcome. And wise.”

The Thane hung his head then, and watched the cobblestones flowing beneath his feet as he walked. He appeared disinclined to expand upon what had passed between him and Orisian. Anyara restrained her curiosity. She could not guess what advice her brother had seen fit to give this powerful old, man. But then, she reflected with a touch of sadness, Orisian was Thane now. He had ceased to be just her younger brother, who she could by turns tease and protect. Now, he stood at the head of the Blood. He could march away into strife and leave her behind; he could exchange advice with Lheanor oc Kilkry-Haig; he could choose to risk the enmity of the High Thane himself. Everything, all the world in all its smallest details, had changed since the night of Winterbirth. Even Orisian.

They followed the flagstone path up the mound, through the wintry gardens, and into the Tower of Thrones.

Lagair Haldyn sat with his wife, both of them sullen and uncommunicative. They formed a cold island in the lapping water of merriment, their eyes resolutely downcast. Roaric was glowering at the Steward.

“I don’t know why they don’t just leave, since they make their boredom so obvious,” the Bloodheir muttered under his breath.

Anyara glanced over at Lagair. He had a slab of meat impaled on his knife, and took a bite from it as she watched. He caught her eye and flicked her an unconvincing smile before turning to his wife. An air of disapproval hung about the two of them, Anyara thought. Perhaps they were offended by the way the departure of the Haig army was being marked. If so, their stubbornly glum presence at this feast served as an effective reminder that Gryvan oc Haig was never truly absent; the High Thane’s shadow was not removed merely because his warriors had marched on.

“I don’t suppose they’ll stay much longer,” Anyara said to Roaric. “Just long enough to remind you they’re still here.”

“No, no,” Lheanor was crying in exasperation. “I want wine, more wine.”

A harassed girl, her efforts to fill the Thane’s beaker with ale thus rebuffed, hurried away. She looked, to Anyara, as though she was close to tears. Lheanor rattled his empty cup on the table and cast about for someone who could give him what he wanted. Ilessa, his wife, laid a gently restraining hand on his arm.

He calmed at once.

“Some sickness, a disturbance of the guts, has sent half the kitchen girls to their beds,” he explained to Anyara. “We’ve had to borrow hands from everywhere else. There’s stable boys carving meat and washerwomen baking bread. Most of them have no idea what they’re doing.”

Now that it was pointed out to her, Anyara could see that the servants rushing about the hall did not have the usual air of proficiency. She could see old women and red-faced men, boys carrying overladen plates. As she watched, two of them almost collided in their haste to keep the supply of food and drink flowing.

“It’s bad luck to have so many fall sick,” she murmured.

Lheanor grunted. “Life’s way of reminding us that no day is ever so sunny that a little cloud may not appear. Still, it’s no great trial. There’ll be a few sore feet and aching backs by the end of the night, that’s all.”

Coinach was sitting at the near end of the table running down the length of the hall. Anyara watched him trying to fish something out of a flagon of ale that stood before him. He had half-risen from his bench, and wore a frown of concentration as he chased whatever had fallen in there with a finger. He looked, Anyara thought, like some ordinary village boy just then.

Someone further down the table was picking out a tune on a whistle. The melody danced its shrill way up and up, accompanied by shouts and laughs of encouragement, then collapsed in a flurry of missed notes. There was mocking applause.

“Ah, here we are,” Lheanor said. An old woman – short and a little hunch-shouldered – had brought a jug of wine and was refilling his cup.

“Do you see, Anyara?” the Thane said with as broad a smile as Anyara had seen on him since she arrived in Kolkyre. “Us old folk have our uses still. It took an old, wise head to find me my wine. How long since you’ve served at table here, Cailla?”

The woman edged away from the table, clearly unwelcoming of such attention.

“Many years, sire. I keep to the kitchens these days.”

“Yes. You served me when I first ate in this hall as Thane, though. I remember.”

Cailla nodded and headed off with the empty jug. Someone set a fresh loaf of bread down on the table in front of Anyara and she caught the rich, hot smell of it. It was a smell she loved, but it carried some bitter memories with it now: the kitchens in Castle Kolglas, where rows of loaves would stand cooling; the hall there, where her father would never again feast as Lheanor did now. She was not even certain if that hall survived. Everyone said that the castle in the sea had burned, but how much of it was ruined she did not know.

Those thoughts occupied Anyara for a time. She ate sparingly, watching all that happened and feeling very much alone. She almost wished that she could sit alongside Coinach on the benches of the long table. However warm and welcoming Lheanor and the others might be, Coinach was the only one of her Blood who was here. No matter how little she knew of him, that one fact was enough to mean that they shared something important.

The meat and bread were cleared away. It was a messy, clumsy process, since so many of the servants were new to it. Eventually, though, the platters of sweet cakes and dried fruits, honey and oatbreads, began to emerge from the kitchens. The mood of the hall softened. Thoughts were drifting towards sleep.

Anyara could feel weariness settling over her, and wondered whether tonight she might be granted a dreamless, gentle slumber.

She heard Lheanor make a contented, approving noise in his throat, and turned to look. Cailla, the aged kitchen maid, was leaning over the Thane’s shoulder, setting down a bowl of stewed apples. She did it carefully, with a deftness that belied her years. Anyara’s head began to turn away. Her eyes lingered for only an instant, but it was long enough to see – if not, at first, to understand – what happened next.

Cailla was straightening. Her right hand slipped smoothly beneath the cuff of her left sleeve and drew something out. Lheanor was glancing up at her, smiling, even as he reached for his cup of wine. The thing that Cailla was holding caught a spark of yellow light from the torches. She made a sudden movement.

Lheanor jerked in his chair; his cup went flying. Roaric turned to look. Beyond the Thane, Anyara saw Ilessa’s old, kind face as she too glanced round. Anyara was frozen, paralysed by incomprehension. Her mind stumbled over what her eyes told her. Ilessa’s features were stretching themselves into a mask of horror.

Roaric was starting to move, surging up. Cailla was reaching, thrusting her knife at the Bloodheir’s face.

Roaric dodged the blow. Ilessa’s mouth was open, screaming or wailing. Roaric bore Cailla backwards and down. Anyara’s stare swung back onto Lheanor, and stayed there.

The grey-haired Thane of the Kilkry Blood was slumped limply, sinking. His head lolled to one side. He was looking at Anyara, his eyes quite still and clear. And his blood was pumping out of the wound in his neck, spilling on his shoulder and down his chest and onto the table, a terrible dark red flood that did not stop.

There was a cacophony then. An eruption of sound and movement that overwhelmed the senses. Within it, distinct amongst the welter of noise, Anyara could hear a rhythmic pulse, like the slow, wet beat of a drum. It was Roaric, hammering Cailla’s head against the stone floor.

Anduran was seething, boiling with the masses of the Black Road. They had filled the half-ruined city, spilled out over the walls and sprawled across the surrounding fields. In their thousands, they swarmed like flies drawn to the remains of a great dead beast. Half the city had been burned, but even the gutted shells of buildings had been occupied if they offered so much as a fragment of shelter. Hundreds of tents had sprung up in the fields outside the walls. Every farmhouse within sight of the city had become the heart of a new canvas settlement; every barn held more men and women than horses.

Coming up towards the city from the direction of Grive, Wain nan Horin-Gyre was struck by the impression of disorder. She saw little sign of discipline or organisation. Most of the camps she passed had no banners to proclaim their Blood, no real warriors at all. The tents had been pitched apparently at random. She saw several that would be thrown down by the first severe wind; others that would soak their occupants in a finger’s depth of water as soon as any heavy rains came. Dozens of campfires were burning, but there was no evidence that there had been much collection of firewood. People had gathered what they could from abandoned houses or the little clumps of trees and now preferred to savour the warmth rather than lay in the stocks to last them all through the night.

There were exceptions to the general air of carelessness. Wain led her warriors past one squat grey farmhouse that had been taken over by the Children of the Hundred. A raven-feathered banner was planted outside it. Smoke was rising from the chimney, and horses were being watered at a trough. A pair of Inkallim were standing outside sheds, guarding precious cattle to judge by the lowing that emanated from within. Their expressions blank, they watched Wain and her company pass.

She knew how strange – alarming even – her companions would appear to these observers. Aeglyss and his White Owls walked behind her own Horin-Gyre warriors. It was those Kyrinin that drew every eye as they came closer to Anduran itself, and Wain could see the hostility in every face. People came to the side of the road, scowling. She heard mutterings of contempt, anger. These were the ordinary folk of the creed, she reminded herself, drawn from all the Bloods of the Black Road: farmers, fishermen, hunters and craftsmen. Their faith was burning hot, or they would never have left their distant homes to come and fight here. And their hatred of woodwights was ingrained, unquestioning.

Wain turned her horse, ready to tell Aeglyss that his inhuman companions should wait out of sight. Even as she did so, someone threw a stone. It fell amongst the White Owl warriors. Another followed almost at once, and then a third. A thick crowd jostled itself closer on either side of the road, pressing up towards the fifty or so Kyrinin. There were angry shouts. The White Owls reacted quickly, silently. They backed into a tight clump, facing outwards, Aeglyss safe in its heart. Spearpoints bristled like the quills of a porcupine.

“Get back!” Wain cried as she urged her horse on, but the noise from the mob perhaps drowned her voice out.

A stout, pale man of middle years hacked at one of the Kyrinin spears with a little axe. The shaft of the spear dipped, swung and jabbed out in a single fluid movement. The point punched into the man’s shoulder. He howled and stumbled back into the press of bodies.

“Scatter them,” Wain shouted to her Shield, and drove her own horse into the midst of the crowd. She slipped one foot from a stirrup and kicked out. The warriors of her Shield, ploughing through the throng, were less restrained. She glimpsed swords rising and falling.

“They are under our protection,” she cried at the backs of the fleeing figures that were suddenly all around.

She set her own warriors around the knot of Kyrinin: a wall of horseflesh and iron. Aeglyss looked up at her and smiled.

“A warm welcome,” he murmured.

There was something so profoundly arrogant in the casual smile, the almost dismissive tone, that Wain’s hand tightened on the reins. Even now, after hours of turning the question over in her mind, she did not understand what held her back. Why not reach down and strike this halfbreed creature? Why not just kill him and all his woodwights? And yet, and yet . . . There was a bright, fierce intensity in his half-human eyes. His air of powerful intent, firm will, was like a protective cloak thrown over his shoulders. When he made her the object of his full attention, when he held his penetrating gaze fast upon her, she could feel it on her, inside her. Sometimes, vanishingly faint, she thought she could hear, within her mind, the sound of what raged in him: a muted roar, as of an immense cataract muffled by distance. However nagging her misgivings, however persistent the undercurrent of fear, when she looked at him she saw opportunity; possibility. He had served a purpose before, when he had opened the way through White Owl lands for the Horin-Gyre army. Now, clearly, he had changed. He had become . . . more. Therefore what greater purpose might he now serve, in the remorseless unveiling of fate’s course?

“Wain?” Aeglyss said. “Are you all right?”

She shook herself, uncertain how much time she had lost to thought. Uncertain, for a moment, whether all of the thoughts that ran through her head were wholly her own. Was it her imagination, or did confusion, distraction, surround Aeglyss like a miasma of the mind?

“Your White Owls are liable to be cut to pieces before we reach the city,” she said. “Send them away.

They can surely find some woods to hide in until you return.”

Aeglyss raised an eyebrow and looked at the Kyrinin warriors gathered around him.

“But this is my spear
a’an
, commanded by their Voice to remain at my side. It is no light duty. They take it most seriously.”

“You’re the one who claims to wield such great power,” Wain muttered, hauling her horse around and away. “Persuade them to accept the parting. I can’t protect them, or you, if they come further with us.”