Bloodheir (38 page)

Ess’yr gazed back at him, waiting for a question. In the half-light of dusk, her face seemed to him like a soft mask; the gentle curves of her tattoos like some pattern impressed upon pale silk. It was too dark for him to see her eyes clearly. They were shadows.

“Is it true?” he asked. “Do you think they’re here, around us?”

“Always,” she replied, and he heard her voice quite clearly even though the trees all about were roaring and creaking in the wind. “We walk on their backs. When we touch a tree, we touch their arm. The roots are their bones.”

“They’re waking, though. That’s what all the
na’kyrim
say: they’re moving closer to the surface. Why?

Do you know?”

“Such a thing is not to be known. They are not like us, not like Huanin or Kyrinin. You do not ask why the river flows, or why the fire moves as it does. If the Anain rise, they rise. If they act, they act. That is all.”

“Yet your people seek their favour. Your
anhyne
, the catchers of the dead. They guard you, don’t they?”

Ess’yr regarded Orisian inexpressively. She blinked, sheathing and then unsheathing the deep, dark pools that her eyes had become.

“My thought is that the Anain favour none and nothing. Some of my people say they ended the war between Huanin and Kyrinin to end our suffering. I think not. It think they ended it because it disturbed the balance in their world. If we are beneath their gaze, if they wake, we will not choose the ending. The seal pup does not choose if the storm takes it out to sea. The storm does that.”

Later, as Orisian lay in his tent, his mind sank down into a half-sleeping fog. The rushing of the wind through the trees was transformed into the breaking of waves. He saw himself standing on the shore looking out towards Castle Kolglas. The sea was high, far higher than he had ever known it. Huge foaming breakers roared in and pounded at the isolated castle. It was breaking apart beneath the onslaught. He felt an awful dread churning in his chest.

He woke once. The gale had fallen away. Cold prickled across his cheeks. He could hear Rothe breathing. He closed his eyes and slept.

Four men died in the night. A hard frost had come, brittling the grass and casting its white sheen over everything. The ground crackled beneath Orisian’s feet. He left a trail of dark prints behind him, pressed into the cold dusting. He shivered and sniffed as he walked.

Rothe showed him the bodies. One – a guard – lay at the foot of a shallow slope, stretched out against the thick base of a tree. The other three lay where they had settled down for the night. In the evening they, like everyone else, had wandered about beneath the trees, pursing their lips and weighing up the options. They had chosen a place where the ground seemed even, the grass dry, and they had unrolled their sleeping mats, made a pillow of their jacket or shield or a rock. They had lain down and pulled their blankets tight about them. And they had died there, silently, in the darkness. Their throats had been cut.

Their blood had made puddles on the forest floor.

Orisian looked into the face of the corpse nearest him. He looked away again quickly, repelled by that too-familiar vision of death, but he had time to see the bruises on the man’s face where someone had roughly clamped a hand over his mouth.

“They killed the sentry first,” muttered Rothe. “Then these three, just because they were within reach, on the edge of the camp.”

“Kyrinin?” Orisian asked dully.

“Beyond doubt. I’ve seen this kind of thing before, in Anlane.”

“They could have killed us all.”

“There may only be a handful of them. Perhaps someone stirred while they were about their work; perhaps they thought they were about to be discovered. They’d always rather be cutting throats in the darkness than facing up to a real fight.”

“It’s a pity Varryn and Ess’yr were sleeping on the other side of the camp. They might have heard something.”

“Perhaps.”

Torcaill was going from corpse to corpse, collecting swords. He paused beside Orisian.

“We should turn back, Thane,” he said. “There’ll be more dead if we don’t. I can’t put outriders ahead of us now. They’d not survive half the day.”

Orisian took one of the sheathed blades from the warrior and turned it in his hands. There were notches and crude patterns scratched into the scabbard; the metal cap on its end had a simple design of dots punched into it. An incongruous little strand of red-dyed string was tied about the hilt.

“What’s this?” Orisian asked, running a fingertip over the string. “Do you know why he had this on his sword?”

Torcaill frowned at it. “No, sire. A token from some girl, perhaps. Or a reminder of some enemy he had killed. I don’t know.”

“What was his name?”

“Dorvadain. Dorvadain Emmen.”

Orisian glanced over his shoulder. Varryn and Ess’yr were there. They had come silently across the frosted grass and now stared at the dead men. Orisian looked back to the sword in his hands for a moment, then returned it to Torcaill.

“Will you do something for me?” he asked Varryn quietly.

The Kyrinin waited.

“I want to know how many White Owls there are. Where they are, where they are going. I don’t want to be surprised by them again. You can move faster than we can; see things we cannot. And you know them better than we do.”

Varryn regarded him with the usual still, unreadable eyes. Yvane walked up behind the two Kyrinin, peering over their shoulders and wincing a little when she saw the bodies.

“Of course he’ll go,” the
na’kyrim
said. “Never known a Fox that’d pass up the chance to stick a spear into a White Owl.”

That brought no more response from Varryn than Orisian’s question had, but the Kyrinin warrior did turn to Ess’yr and murmur a few fluid words in the Fox tongue. Yvane brushed past him and pointed at the frost-blighted ground around the corpse of the guard.

“They left enough of a trail for even a human to follow, I should think,” she said to Orisian.

Orisian noticed Torcaill’s scowl at that, but ignored it.

“If we all go running off into the forest after them, we’ll end up dead,” he said to Yvane. “You know that as well as I do. They might not even know Varryn is on their trail.”

She shrugged, and blew out a breath that steamed into the chill air. “Probably true. I’m not so sure we won’t end up dead anyway, mind you.”

“Did you sleep badly?” Rothe muttered. “You’re in a foul mood this morning.”

Yvane glared at the shieldman, who smiled as innocently as Orisian had ever seen him manage. The
na’kyrim
stalked away. Orisian gave Rothe a prod on the shoulder as they watched her receding back.

“You wouldn’t be trying to pick a fight, would you?” he asked. “Quality of sleep’s not the best subject to discuss, these days.”

Rothe muttered a half-hearted apology, and went to help Torcaill move the bodies.

Orisian found Eshenna rolling up her thin sleeping mat. The skin beneath her eyes had a dark, almost bruised tinge to it. Little sleep, and less rest, he assumed. He squatted down beside her. She did not look up, concentrating on tying up the mat with a loop of cord. There was the very slightest tremor in her hands as she worked, he thought. It might have always been there, but if so he had never noticed it before.

“I cannot go on much further,” he said quietly to her. “I have to turn back, head for Kolglas soon.

Perhaps I’ve already come too far. Everyone else seems to think so.”

“I don’t. Nor does Yvane.”

“No. But you are only two. Men are dying now, Eshenna.”

“We are the only two who understand even a little of what is happening.” She looked him in the eyes then, and her gaze was strong and firm. “You know that. It makes a difference.”

“It makes some difference,” he murmured. “But you have to tell me she’s close, Eshenna. I can’t just keep marching deeper into the forest.”

The
na’kyrim
returned her attention to her rolled mat, slinging it across her shoulder.

“She is close. Today, we’ll have her. Tomorrow, perhaps.”

Varryn and Ess’yr trotted past, spears in hand. They wove their way between the trees and disappeared, vanishing in an instant into the forest as if they had stepped across some intangible, impenetrable barrier. Orisian stared after them briefly, then rose and went to tell Torcaill to prepare his men for the march.

They went quickly now. Anxiety gnawed at Orisian, fraying the edges of his temper and patience. An emptiness, almost a hunger, had settled into the pit of his stomach that he somehow knew could only be relieved by finishing this; by finding K’rina, or finding White Owls, or death, even. What form the culmination took mattered less to him than that it came soon. He disliked that feeling, and mistrusted its origins. There was something in its texture that felt not wholly his own.

The ancient road that had brought them this far had lost its struggle against the suffocating forest. It was gone, buried beneath layers of leaf, moss, root and soil. Nothing was left to mark its course save the occasional worked stone poking up through the green and brown sward, and once a cluster of low ruins of to one side, draped in ivy, crowded with saplings.

Yvane was persuaded to share Rothe’s horse for a time. The
na’kyrim
glowered, and every now and again shot dark looks in Orisian’s direction, as if accusing him of some kind of betrayal, but she made less protest than he had expected. Eshenna rode near the front. Her head hung low, and bobbed in time with her mount’s tread. She did not sleep, though; merely suffered. Whenever Orisian glimpsed her face, it was crunched up in a shifting mix of pain and concentration. Now and again she would grunt, sometimes wince. Late in the morning, she grew still. Her horse drifted to one side of the column and dropped its head to tug at a clump of long grasses.

“That way,” she murmured, when Orisian and Torcaill flanked her in consternation. She waved an arm imprecisely. What remained of the road they had been following curved away; Eshenna was pointing into deep forest.

Torcaill looked doubtful, at best.

“You’re sure?” Orisian asked quietly. It was too late to refuse this woman’s guidance now, after they had come so far.

“She’s that way,” Eshenna insisted dully.

So they drove into the wild wood. Branches scratched at their faces, fallen timber blocked their way.

Tangled, leafless bushes caught in their stirrups and snagged their horses’ tails. Birds scattered from their path, chattering alarm calls into the stillness of the forest. Their pace slowed, even as the oppressive sense of fear and foreboding grew.

They found another trail, and followed it. It was wide enough for two or three to ride abreast, but no more. They ate in the saddle, passing biscuits and waterskins from one to another. It left Orisian still hungry. His eyelids grew heavy as the day turned past its midpoint. His thoughts wandered, shapeless.

He recognised the sudden sound as soon as he heard it, but could not name it: that snapping, hissing flutter like a score of breaths abruptly expelled. He turned in time to see a flock of arrows darting out from the forest along the track. They rattled in on the column of men and horses. Someone cried out. A horse reared. He looked for their attackers, but there was nothing save the dark thicket of tree trunks.

And now another scattered flight of arrows flashing through the crowd of his men. One rider slumped out of his saddle.

“Go!” Torcaill was shouting close by. “Ride on, ride on!”

Orisian’s horse sprang into a gallop. He was not certain whether he had kicked it into motion or whether it was just carried along by the sudden rush of all the other riders. They surged down the track. Orisian felt and heard an arrow smacking into the shield slung across his back. The horse ahead of him veered to one side, stumbling and faltering on suddenly flimsy legs. Orisian glimpsed the fletching of an arrow protruding from its neck. Thundering on by, he turned his head to see the animal crashing through a bush and falling, spilling its rider. He lost sight of both the man and his mount.

The forest seemed to press ever more closely along the path. Orisian expected the lithe figures of Kyrinin to emerge at any moment. The horses stretched their legs, though, and hammered on and on, until the forest thinned a little and the trail opened out.

Rothe reined in his mount next to Orisian and reached across to pull at the arrow embedded in his shield.

Yvane, clinging to the burly warrior like a limpet, looked queasy.

“Are you wounded?” Rothe demanded. “Were you hit?”

Orisian shook his head. “You?”

“No.” Rothe grunted as he finally freed the arrow. He snapped its shaft and threw the two pieces to the ground.

Orisian looked around for Torcaill. It was hard to tell, amidst the throng of riders milling about, how many might have fallen. He glimpsed the young man at the rear of the company, sword in hand, expression grim and angry.

“Torcaill,” Orisian shouted. “Are they coming after us?”

“I can’t tell. We should put more ground between us and them, anyway.”

Orisian hauled his horse’s head around. The animal resisted, almost as if it too dreaded what lay behind them, and he had to dig his heels into its flanks to move it. He worked his way to Torcaill’s side. The two of them stared back down the path. It looked like any other woodland trail: a muddy stretch of wiry grass, bare overhanging branches and twigs bobbing in the faintest of breezes. There was no sign of life.

“How many men did we lose?” Orisian asked.

“I’m not sure. Two, I think. We’ve others injured, though, and some of the horses. Still, we were lucky.”

“They’re only playing with us,” rumbled Rothe, coming up behind them. “Chipping away. Come, Orisian. You shouldn’t linger in the open like this. There must be bodies between you and any arrow’s flight.”

“He’s right, sire,” Torcaill said, sheathing his sword. “You should stay in the midst of us. We won’t see them coming next time, either, unless we’re luckier than we’ve any right to expect.”

Orisian allowed himself to be shepherded into the centre of the column, like some prized lamb kept in the heart of the herd.