Bloodheir (8 page)

“There’s been no shortage of dying already,” he said.

“Maybe, but it’s not gained you much, has it?” grunted Aewult. There was a blush in his cheeks, whether born of drink or heat or anger Orisian could not tell. But the Bloodheir’s speech was losing its shape a little; his eyes were gleaming. He regarded Orisian with what seemed to be naked contempt.

“Those who’ve died did so fighting,” Orisian snapped.

“Fighting and losing.” Aewult’s lips were stained red with wine. “Make no mistake, it’ll take the strength of Haig to win you back your seat, Thane.”

“At least you remember that my brother is Thane,” Anyara hissed from beyond Orisian. “The way you talk, I’d thought you had forgotten. Bloodheir.”

For once, Orisian hardly cared if Anyara wanted to pick a fight. His own jaw was tightening in anger, and a kind of furious shame burned in him: so little did Haig think of his Blood, and of him as its Thane, that he was treated as nothing more than a child. He was uncertain whether Aewult deliberately meant to goad him into some mistake or whether the Bloodheir simply did not care.

“Bloodheir to Gryvan,” Aewult said, and grinned. He turned his attention to his plate, cutting into the joint of a chicken leg on his platter. His movements were crude and imprecise. The knife glanced off bone. “I speak with my father’s authority. And I say Lannis stays behind when I march.”

“We’ll see,” Orisian said. He turned to Anyara, urging her to silence with the slightest shake of his head.

The noise was so sudden and sharp that he started, almost lifting from his chair. Aewult had punched his knife into the table top and it stood there, trembling. The Bloodheir glared at Orisian.

“We’ll see you do as the High Thane commands,” he said. “That’s what we’ll see.”

Lheanor had turned at the sound of blade splitting wood. Beyond the Thane, Orisian saw Mordyn Jerain leaning forward and looking down along the table. He thought he detected a momentary narrowing of the Shadowhand’s eyes, a pinch of displeasure on his lips.

“I can’t hear the tale with so much noise,” Lheanor said, clear and strangely solemn. “It is almost done.”

Slowly Aewult nan Haig sank back into his chair. He tugged the knife from the table and dropped it back onto his plate.

“Of course,” he said, looking pointedly at the storyteller rather than at Lheanor. “Let’s hear it.”

The storyteller struggled on to the end of his tale amidst a taut silence. Once done, he retired with a look of undisguised relief on his face. There was some thin applause. The evening rolled uncomfortably on.

Aewult nan Haig spoke not one more word to Orisian and Anyara. Before long, he abandoned the high table altogether. With a sour glance in Orisian’s direction, he went down the hall and took the seat next to Ishbel for himself, leaving its evicted occupant to go in search of space elsewhere.

“Let’s go,” Anyara whispered to Orisian. “Tell Lheanor we want to call on Yvane, to see how she is. He won’t mind that.”

Orisian doubted whether Lheanor would mind if every single guest rose as one and left him alone in his hall. Ilessa oc Kilkry-Haig had been trying hard – keeping a smile on her face, laughing at whatever nothings the Shadowhand whispered to her – but her eyes betrayed the effort it took to maintain the appearance of pleasure, of levity. Apparently, it was an effort of which her husband was incapable.

Orisian looked from the Thane and his wife out over the rest of the gathering. Aewult was laughing at his own crude stories, Ishbel listening with rapt attention. Further down the table a Kolkyre merchant was arguing with some official who had travelled up from Vaymouth with the army. One of Aewult’s warriors

– perhaps from his Palace Shield, judging by his size – spilled a beaker of ale as he rose, swaying, from his seat. He was loudly extolling the virtues of Vaymouth’s sword-makers.

“Yes,” Orisian said to his sister. “We’re not needed here.”

They climbed into the higher reaches of the Tower of Thrones, ascending a narrow spiral staircase like those of Castle Kolglas. The stones in these walls were smoother, though, and of a hard rock that glistened as if wet beneath the light of the torches. For all the many hints of similarity – the smell of those torches, and of old wood; the way footsteps and voices shivered along the stonework – this place felt stranger and more ancient, in its bones, than the castle in the sea ever had. The Tower had, after all, been here since before the Gods abandoned the world. The Kilkry Thanes had only inherited it from its unknown makers.

A short passage led off the stairway to Yvane’s room. An odd pair awaited Orisian and Anyara outside the door. Hammarn the
na’kyrim
was seated cross-legged on the cold flagstones, scratching away at a piece of wood with a tiny blade. Woodchips and shavings lay all around him. A young Lannis warrior was standing guard opposite Hammarn. He was watching the
na’kyrim
with an air of puzzled fascination, as if he had never seen anything quite so unusual as this white-haired, half-human old man.

At Orisian’s approach, the guard straightened and stared ahead.

“Go and rest your legs,” Orisian said to him. “Sit on the stairs a while, or find a window and get some air.”

Hammarn scrambled to his feet as the guard moved away. He blew a little plume of wood dust from his carving and grinned first at Orisian, then at Anyara.

“How long have you been sitting out here?” she asked him.

Hammarn frowned. “A time, yes. Cold out, you know. All sorts of cold out there for the likes of me.

Best place to be, I think.” He jerked his head at the closed door. “Not very welcoming, though, these days. Bit cold in here, too.”

Orisian rapped on the door.

“I am resting,” Yvane shouted from within.

“Not true,” whispered Hammarn. “She’s not been sleeping, not restful at all. I know. She told me.”

“Let us come and talk with you,” Orisian said through the thick door. “You’d be doing us a favour. We need a hiding place to avoid a tiresome feast.”

“Who’s we?” Yvane asked, each word thick with suspicion.

“Me and Anyara. And Hammarn. Surely you don’t mean to leave him sitting outside this door all night?”

There was an extended silence. Orisian shrugged at Anyara, noting the frown of irritation that had already settled on his sister’s brow. He hoped that she and Yvane could resist the urge to set about one another, but even if they didn’t it could hardly be more unpleasant than Aewult nan Haig’s company.

“No one else, then,” Yvane called by way of grudging permission.

Hammarn clapped Orisian roughly on the shoulder.

“Very persuasive,” he grinned. “Always thought you stood most high in the lady’s affections. Mind you .

. . not sure she has affections, in truth.”

Yvane was sitting in a broad bed, propped up against some voluminous pillows. She looked tired. Her eyes, almost as perfectly grey as a Kyrinin’s, were sluggish. Her reddish brown hair had lost some of its former sheen.

Hammarn went straight to the side of her bed and held out the piece of wood he had been carving.

Yvane had to reach clumsily across her body to take it: her nearer arm was still weak, having been skewered by a crossbow bolt during their escape from Koldihrve

“Made you a woodtwine, dear lady,” said Hammarn. “Of Kulkain’s first entry into Kolkyre as Thane, you’ll see. He has Alban of Ist Norr in chains there, if you look close. Bit crude, perhaps. Not my finest.”

“It’s a welcome gift in any case, Hammarn,” Yvane said. Orisian often thought she exhibited far more patience and gentleness in her dealings with Hammarn than with anyone else. It was almost as if she expended all her limited stores of those sentiments on the old
na’kyrim
, leaving none for anyone else.

“How are you feeling?” Orisian asked.

“How should I be feeling? I’m stuck at the top of a tower in Kolkyre – where they burned
na’kyrim
, by the way, before Grey Kulkain came to power. My right arm’s all but useless because some madman, or madwoman for all I know, took it into their head to shoot me with a crossbow. And my head feels like it’s full of woodpeckers, chipping away at the inside of my skull trying to get out.”

“No better, then?” Anyara asked. Yvane scowled at her.

Orisian noted a tray of food lying apparently forgotten on a table by the shuttered window. He held a hand over the bowl of soup. It had gone cold.

“Don’t tell me you’re refusing food as well?” he said.

“I’ve no appetite,” Yvane muttered.

“Nothing’s changed?” Orisian asked, seating himself on the end of the bed. “In the Shared, I mean?”

“No.” Yvane started to fold her arms, but winced and thought better of it. “No change.”

“That’s true, that’s true,” said Hammarn. “The taint can’t enter this quiet head, can’t stir the thoughts in this bucket.” He rapped his knuckles against his forehead. “But even Hammarn can smell its stink.”

“There you are, you see,” said Yvane as if Hammarn’s words explained everything. It took a long questioning look from Orisian to induce her to say anything more. “It’s like a never-ending echo. That first night we spent in this town, the . . . the howl that filled the Shared, that woke me; it’s the echo of that. Anger, pain, bitterness, all mixed up, all inside my head. And none of it mine.”

“Not good, not good,” murmured Hammarn. He was pacing up and down now, his hands clasped behind his back.

“Couldn’t have put it better myself,” Yvane said.

“Not yours,” Anyara said. “His, then? Aeglyss?”

“I’ve told you: I can’t be certain.”

“But you think it’s him, don’t you?” Anyara persisted. “Anger, pain, bitterness. That’s how Inurian talked about what he saw inside Aeglyss.”

Yvane sighed and looked down at Hammarn’s woodtwine where it lay in her lap.

“I don’t know,” she said wearily. “I only glimpsed the edges of whatever it was that Inurian saw. But yes, it might be him. If it is . . . well, if he’s still in league with the Black Road I think they might be in for a nasty surprise. It’s frightening to think what it must be like inside his head now, if his is the sickness that’s afflicting the Shared.”

Hammarn had paused by the window, and pulled back one of the shutters.

“Look,” he murmured. “Little fires.”

Orisian joined him and looked down onto the dark gardens beneath them. A few torches were burning there, their bearers arrayed in a circle. In their orange light, two men, naked to the waist, were wrestling on the grass. Orisian could hear shouts of encouragement from the onlookers, made soft and faint by distance and the breeze.

It was probably Aewult’s men, absenting themselves from the feast, hot with drink and the prospect of battle. They had an angry, arrogant hunger for revelry, the thousands of warriors the Bloodheir had brought north with him. They were barred from leaving their great camps outside the city except in small groups, but Orisian had already heard, from Rothe, rumours of thievery and drunkenness within Kolkyre.

They took their mood from Aewult, perhaps, and there seemed to be nothing gentle in him.

“Lovely friends we have,” Anyara said, looking over Orisian’s shoulder.

“We can only hope our enemies justify our allies,” Orisian murmured. He turned thoughtfully back towards Yvane.

“You can find out whether it’s Aeglyss, can’t you?” he asked her.

The
na’kyrim
winced. He could see that she knew what he meant, and that her reluctance was instinctive. Her hand rose defensively, unconsciously towards her injured shoulder.

“You’ve said that whatever’s happening in the Shared is . . . dangerous,” he persisted. “You’ve said it might be Aeglyss. Don’t we need to know? He hounded Inurian to his death. He helped the Inkallim take Kolglas. He’s our enemy. One of them, at least.”

“You wouldn’t ask that if you understood,” Yvane said. “No reason why you should, of course. Last time I reached out through the Shared to Aeglyss, he drove me off. It . . . hurt.”

“I know. But . . .” Orisian reached for words, finding nothing to quite express what he felt. “Something’s changed. You’ve said it yourself. We – no – you might be the only person here who can say what it is.”

“It’s like an ocean, the Shared,” Yvane said. She was unusually passive. Distant. “What’s in it now is . .

. poison. You’re asking me to swim out into a poisoned sea; breathe its waters.”

“Only to arm ourselves against our enemies. To know what we face. Aewult and his thousands of warriors: they think they’re the answer to every question. They think nothing else matters. Maybe they’re wrong.”

“If I do it,” muttered Yvane, recovering a touch of her customary bristle, “it’ll be for me. It’ll be because Inurian was a wise man who probably didn’t deserve to die, and because he saw threat in Aeglyss. Not for Thanes or Bloodheirs or armies; not to help you Huanin kill each other in ever greater numbers.”

“You will do it, then?” Anyara said, with a soft smile.

The three of them watched in silence while Yvane willed herself into slumber: Hammarn sitting nervously on the end of the bed, Orisian and Anyara leaning against the frame of the window. There was nothing obviously amiss with the sleep into which Yvane fell. Her face slackened, her eyelids trembled minutely.

She looked gentle in her repose, as she never quite did when awake.

Orisian watched intently, aware that for all the apparent mundanity of the scene he was witnessing something remarkable. Yvane was right, of course, when she said he did not understand this. No human could. The Shared was the sole preserve of
na’kyrim
. He did not envy them that. Few of the mighty
na’kyrim
of legend, who wielded great powers drawn from the Shared, had profited by it in the end.

While they lived, though, they had done enough harm to make those of his own time outcasts, feared and loathed as much for the mystery they embodied as for the mixed blood that ran in their veins. If the Shared was a gift, it came at a heavy price.

Yvane made soft sounds. Hammarn was growing nervous, fidgeting. The muffled noise of laughter and cheering rose up from outside. Neither Orisian nor Anyara looked round. Yvane held their attention.