Bloodheir (31 page)

Wain hesitated. She did not know quite what held her back. It was an imprecise trepidation. She shook it off and strode out into the moon-washed field. A handful of warriors straggled after her. The White Owl camp was in tumult. Some of the Kyrinin warriors had already scattered out from amongst the crude tents and now stood some distance away, staring back, taut like dogs sensing danger but not yet understanding it. A knot of White Owls remained at the centre of the encampment, milling about in a way she had never seen amongst Kyrinin before. Some were shouting, their voices strained. None seemed even to notice Wain’s arrival.

She pushed her way through, and still none of the Kyrinin paid her any heed. Their attention was fixed upon the small patch of ground they had encircled. Aeglyss was lying there, half-curled on his side, one arm stretched out. His hand shook, jerking back and forth over the grass. His eyes were clamped shut. A low groan forced its way out between his teeth. Wain took a step forwards, intending to lift him bodily, but stopped short. Even in the flattening, colourless moonlight, and with the flickering shadows cast by small campfires, it was clear that something was wrong.

Aeglyss lay on a great disc of dead grass: a near-perfect circle much paler than the rest of the field.

Within that circle, the grass was not only dead but unnaturally long, sprawling in great matted swathes. It was as if a great clump of whip-like stalks had come surging up out of the ground, and then died back in almost the same instant. And as her eyes picked out more detail, Wain saw that there were tendrils of now-dead and brittle grass wrapped around the wrist of the
na’kyrim
’s outstretched arm; another hung about his neck like some rustic ornament, a third spiralled around his leg. There was soil smeared across his face and through his hair. A slick of blood, black by the light of the moon, had spread from the wound in his wrist. He jerked convulsively. There was a strange, warm smell on the night air that Wain could not place. It was redolent of ploughed fields, wet logs. It did not belong.

The White Owls were agitated, yapping and whining at each other. Wain saw Hothyn – the one she took to be the closest thing these savages had to a leader – standing opposite her, staring down at the
na’kyrim
. For once, his face had an almost human animation. She saw horrified fascination. Whatever had happened here, it had produced something more complicated than simple fear amongst those who witnessed it. The Kyrinin seemed paralysed by bewilderment.

“The
na’kyrim
’s sick. Get him indoors,” Wain said to her own warriors as they pushed up behind her.

They did as she commanded. The Kyrinin raised no objection, as she had half-expected they might.

They watched as a couple of Wain’s Shield lifted Aeglyss between them. Strands of grass came with him, reluctant to release their grip. The warriors carried him back towards the inn. Wain followed, and a few paces behind her Hothyn came like an attentive, watchful hound.

“I can find no wound, other than scratches, save those he already bore,” the healer sighed as she washed the
na’kyrim
’s blood from her hands. “Those holes in his wrists have opened up again. I have given him fresh bandages. That’s all I can do for him.”

The young woman shrugged. She seemed to Wain to be inexperienced, unsure of her knowledge and skills, but she was the best they had been able to find amongst the companies in Sirian’s Dyke. It took no great talent, in any case, to see that what afflicted Aeglyss was not merely to do with his body.

He was calmer now, but occasional tremors still shook his arms. His lips trembled. Sometimes he groaned or muttered barely audible nonsense. He had twice slipped into fraught laughter: a harsh, angry kind of cackle. Wain wondered if his mind had finally broken. The thought that, after all that had happened, this man might now betray her hopes by succumbing to madness made her angry.

The healer glanced nervously at Hothyn. The Kyrinin stood silently in the corner, as he had done throughout her examination of Aeglyss. His inhuman eyes never left the
na’kyrim
, never acknowledged the existence of anything save that gaunt form prostrate on the bed.

“Get out,” Wain said irritably to the younger woman. She bowed her head and left.

Aeglyss was murmuring again. Wain leaned over, straining to catch some of the words, but it was not even a human tongue he spoke in. Some woodwight cant, perhaps. His breath stank, an exhalation of decay, as if his flesh was rotting somewhere on the inside. Wain grimaced, and saw then that his eyes, so close to her own, were open: chips of grey stone, now shot with a net of red lines, like a myriad of tiny fissures exposing the meat that lay beneath their surface. She jerked her head away, repelled by such proximity.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

Aeglyss smiled feebly. “Nothing. I thrive.”

Wain snorted.

“You shouldn’t mock,” Aeglyss rasped. “It reveals the depths of your ignorance. I grow stronger.”

He laughed, but it was too much for him. The sound contorted itself into a wheezing cough that rocked his shoulders. Spittle flecked his chin. Wain turned away in disgust. Hothyn, she saw, remained fixated upon Aeglyss. The Kyrinin stood quite still, wide-eyed.

“I still live,” Aeglyss snapped. “They came for me, in their fear. They meant to quiet me, and silence me, and break me. Ha! They did not know! I still live, and they fled away, through the . . .”

His words collapsed into another fit of coughing. Wain looked back to him.

“You’re ranting,” she muttered. “Are you mad, then?”

“No. Not mad.” He sounded angry. “This isn’t madness, you stupid . . . Not madness. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know.” And as quickly as that, the anger was gone and what she saw in his face, and heard in his voice, was fear, confusion. Almost childlike; a sickening feebleness.

“I don’t understand,” he murmured. “What do the Anain care for me? What offence have I given to them? I’ve done nothing . . . yet they come and tear at my mind, try to snuff me out. They think they are the masters of everything. Or perhaps they don’t think at all. Perhaps . . . ah, what does it matter? I am beyond them. Even them.”

Wain had the impression that he had lapsed into some inward-looking reverie, but then his head lolled to one side and he stared straight at her.

“Do you hear me, Thane’s sister? I am beyond even them, the awful Anain. They cannot conquer me.

What wondrous monster must I be, then?”

“I do not know,” Wain said. Pressure was building at her temples, a hot, hurtful beat in the bone of her skull. Somehow, she could still smell Aeglyss’s foul breath. It crowded her nostrils and writhed at the back of her mouth, down her throat. It was vile, but seemed no more terrible than the dead touch of his eyes on her skin. The room had become terribly oppressive. The air gave her no nourishment.

“You should rest,” she said, and left. She could hear Aeglyss laughing as she descended, and just as the sickly sound followed her, so she carried the stench of him with her, and the echo of his ferocity in her mind.

She demanded wine, and drank it thirstily. She had one of her Shield stoke up the fire and pile logs onto it until the flames leaped. Still she felt cold, beyond the reach of warmth.

The sound of horses outside stirred her out of her distraction. Shod hoofs were ringing on the cobbles of the yard. Voices were raised. She threw open the door of the inn and glared out, ready to vent her unease upon any convenient victim. The light that flooded out around her as she stood in the doorway illuminated thirty or more mounted figures, but Wain held her tongue. They were Inkallim, stern and haughty. Shraeve was at their head, and she stared down from her lofty position with an expression of arrogant amusement.

“I thought you would be back in Glasbridge by now,” the Inkallim said.

“And I thought you’d be riding with Fiallic and his host. He’s your master, isn’t he?”

“Fate’s my master, as it is yours. The approaches to Glasbridge must be held, if that host is to find its way to our enemy’s flank. That’s where the matter will be most bloodily decided, so that’s where we will stand.” Shraeve swung out of the saddle and dropped to the ground. “And, anyway, I was curious. I heard much that was interesting regarding your tame halfbreed, while I was in Anduran. It seems a good deal has changed since you and I were last in this dismal little village.”

“It’s none of your concern,” Wain snapped. “Those who bear more authority than you amongst the Children have spoken with me about Aeglyss. You’ll find quarters for your people amongst the cottages, if that’s what you seek. There’s no other room to spare.”

“You should learn to distinguish more precisely between your friends and your enemies, my lady,”

Shraeve said with a contemptuous smile. “We ravens are your Blood’s closest allies now, whether you like it or not.” She led her horse away along the track towards the dark rows of hovels that ran down to the river. As one, the rest of the Inkallim silently dismounted and followed. Wain watched them go, wrestling to contain her shapeless, saturating anger, and then turned back into the inn and shut the door behind her.

The night sank to its coldest depths. Wain lay unsleeping in her chamber. A square of moonlight fell through the window and onto the bed sheets, like a gossamer-thin silvered scarf laid out there. She stared up at the rough wooden beams of the ceiling. Sleep had always been a problem for her when her mind was active. This was different, though. Whenever she tried to constrain her thoughts, they bounded away from her as if stung by the smack of a carter’s whip. And always they turned and turned about the subject of Aeglyss.

For a time she wished Kanin was there, then thought better of it. Her brother loathed the
na’kyrim
too much to see clearly. He was limited by that. His convictions had always been flawed by a seam of restraint. Kanin’s passion, his faith, could only carry him so far; it was never unconditional. She loved her brother for that failing, the sliver of difference between them that made him who he was. But still it was a difference; it meant there was a part of her he would never quite comprehend.

Wain had never yet found a boundary she would hesitate to cross if the Black Road led her that way.

Was that why she felt this aching hunger in her chest? Something in her had stirred and glimpsed a far horizon that promised much. Whatever it was, Aeglyss had woken it. Yet he had woken revulsion in her too.

The shadows shifted. The dark pools in the room flowed and parted and Aeglyss was standing by her bed. He was reaching out a single thin hand towards her. She opened her mouth to cry out, commanded her body to strike out at him, yet she made no sound or movement. Fear rattled in her head, but it was short-lived. Something else displaced it; something still and soft that settled over her. Aeglyss took a step closer. He leaned into the shaft of moonlight. It put a bar of light along his cheekbone. Wain lay quite still, yet she felt as if every muscle in her body was quivering in urgent terror. New thoughts were laying themselves down in her mind, crossing the gap between Aeglyss and her like silent whispers. They were not hers, yet alike enough to her own that she could not turn them away.

“Have you ever been refused, Thane’s sister?” he was asking her. “In anything?”

His voice was a living thing that eased itself up against her skin, curled around her shoulders and throat and touched itself against her lips.

“I have grown so weary of it, you see,” Aeglyss murmured, and he was close to her. She felt his hand on her breast, gentle. She felt him in her head, and she could not tell what was him and what her.

“All my life I have been denied by those who thought themselves my betters,” he whispered. “Not any more. Not in anything. I am learning, slowly. Each day I see afresh what is possible, each day I grow. I can turn back the Anain themselves; I can taste thoughts in minds half a world away; I can hear my mother, can call her . . . no, no. Not my mother.”

He blinked and shook his head, wincing. For a moment, Wain recovered herself and drew breath to cry out. Then the
na’kyrim
’s eyes were on her once again and his hand was clamped over her mouth. Her sense of herself flickered and receded as smoothly and steadily as a soft tide.

“Hush, hush. This isn’t for anyone but you and I. This is to be love. Only that, for ever. It’s what you want, if you’ll but listen to your own desires. I’ll show you the way. We’ll go together.”

As he lifted the sheets away, some silent part of Wain cried out one last time in horror and fear. It was a vanishing, vanquished part, and soon it was gone altogether.

Aeglyss stood in the milky early-morning light, talking intently with Hothyn and half a dozen more White Owls. Wain looked down upon him from the window of her room in the inn. She could see him clearly, below in the yard, yet he was there in the window with her too. He was entwined about her thoughts like ivy on a tree. She would never be without him now.

She was aware that the sensations coursing through her, the certainties fortifying themselves within her head, were not her own. It seemed unimportant; just as unimportant as the faint, faint voice of guilt that survived somewhere inside her. That voice murmured of betrayal. She had betrayed her brother. How, she could not understand. The accusatory voice spoke in a language that she did not comprehend, though she knew that once – before last night – it had been the tongue of her own thoughts. She found it easy to disregard even that strangeness. The Black Road followed whatever course it must, and never had she felt her feet, and all the world’s, to be more firmly upon it.

She had been awake, in the small hours of the night, when Aeglyss was restlessly turning in his sleep.

Moonlight lit the trails of tears on his face. He had wept and cursed without waking and she had heard the torment in his voice.

In the dawn, while he still slept, she had lain beside him and watched him. His face was at peace, by then. His eyes were moving beneath their lids, his breathing was heavy and slow. There was nothing left of the repulsion she had once felt at his inhuman features. It was a distant memory, the legacy of a different person. Instead, she saw a rigorous beauty in the way his bones shaped his skin and in the graceful white-nailed fingers lying upon the sheet.