Trinity Rising: Book Two of the Wild Hunt (Wild Hunt Trilogy 2) (47 page)

In this cold, there was no telling how long ago they’d died – long enough ago to be frozen solid; not long enough yet for them to to be dragged apart by the wild creatures. He searched them as best he could for anything that might help identify them, but nothing of any value or use remained. All he found was a small bead-and-bone charm stitched to missing-finger’s belt.

Carefully, Duncan slit the stitches with his knife. He turned the charm over in his hand and recognised the sigil for safe travelling carved into the bone. It hadn’t done the poor fellow much good.

Straightening up, he tucked away his knife and turned back towards the trees, slipping the charm into his pocket. Maybe someone from Sor’s ride would recognise it and give him a name, so the dead could be properly sung – and maybe, in time, vengeance properly taken.

When he reached Kael, the scar-faced seeker still had his back set resolutely towards the plain and its grim burden. Duncan couldn’t say he blamed him. From the looks of it, the two Morennadh had died hard.

‘Two Morennadh,’ he said. ‘Stripped of anything of value, right down to their boots. How did you know they were there?’

Kael spat, scowling. ‘Smelled what was done to ’em.’ He scrubbed his palm across his nose, as if the foetid stench that troubled him was something physical that could be wiped away. ‘Smells bad.’

The cold had kept the bodies from stinking; only the faintest odour of corruption on the air had betrayed that they were on their way back to the earth, but that wasn’t what Kael was referring to.

‘Do you know who did it?’ Duncan hardly needed to ask; this side of the Archen Mountains, the north side, the culprits could only be Nimrothi.

Kael shook his head. ‘No, but I can tell you where they went – towards the pass at Saardost.’ He scrubbed his nose again. ‘This place stinks.’

Saardost made sense: it was the lowest of the three passes through the an-Archen and the easiest to travel – passable with care even at this time of year, before the thaw was under way. But the tracks he’d seen indicated only a small party, nowhere near large enough to be the war band. Scouts, then, and they’d run across two of the Morennadh’s own.

A short time later, the rest of the patrol returned and made their report. As far as they’d been able to follow the tracks in the time allotted, they’d seen spoor for only a half-dozen horses at most, which confirmed Duncan’s theory of a scouting party, hugging the foothills as they headed towards the pass. Of the Nimrothi war band there was no sign. They could be further out on the plain, or nowhere within a hundred miles; it was impossible to say.

‘But now they know we’re looking for them,’ he muttered, hands on hips.

‘Also means they’re between us and the pass.’ Kael scratched at his beard, carefully avoiding the tail of the scar. ‘The scouts are, anyway. We could take the long road, and go back through King’s Gate. Only two days from here.’

Duncan was shaking his head almost before his lieutenant finished speaking. ‘It’s still too early in the year to be sure the Gate is passable – we might end up in snow to our noses. No, we follow them east, back the way we came, rejoin the rest of the ride then go through Saardost in numbers. The Nimrothi know we have scouts of our own here, but they won’t know that
we
have discovered
theirs
. As long as they think they’re undetected they won’t risk a confrontation with a larger party.’ It was what he would do in their position: stay out of sight, observe, report back. He wouldn’t risk a battle if there was a chance his men might come off worst.

Though the odds were in his favour, it was still a gamble. It was also the only option open to him. Sor was at Saardost Keep, and he needed to know what had happened to his men.

‘All right.’ He took his horse’s reins from Kael and swung up into the saddle. ‘Let’s go, whilst there’s still some light.’

A couple of the other riders exchanged looks. ‘We’re not going to honour them?’ one asked, nodding towards the fallen clansmen.

‘If we do, and more Nimrothi scouts come this way, they’ll know they’ve been discovered.’ Duncan hated himself for saying it, but it had to be so.

‘What’s the point?’ Kael snapped, jerking his horse into a tight turn. ‘Waste your
uisca
on them if you want, but what made them men is already gone. What’s left will go back to the earth either way.’

He dug in his heels and his horse leapt forward, recklessly fast for the conditions. The other scouts shared another dubious look then filed after him at a more sensible pace. Duncan brought up the rear, chafing at having to leave kin unburied and chewing over how he would break the news to Sor. His brother took his responsibilities as a war captain no less seriously for being the chief. If anything, he was happier being just a war captain, though his wife fretted constantly that their children would grow up fatherless – and if that came to pass, Duncan would find the Morennadh clan torc around his own neck. He shuddered at the thought. He was barely ready for a wife yet, much less that responsibility.

As his horse plodded through the snow, the travelling charm in his pocket pressed against his thigh. He glanced back in the direction of his dead kinsmen, now out of sight behind a thick screen of alders and scrubby winter-bare bushes. Some ill luck had been at work there, to bring them into conflict with the Nimrothi. Neither side would have wanted to betray their presence to the other, but the results had been deadly.

Sor would not be best pleased, but they had a direction of travel for the Nimrothi scouts, and by implication for the war band following along behind: east, to Saardost Keep. He hoped the restored defences of the ancient fortress would be ready in time.

Teia left the Maenardh at the last good ford along the river. It ran wide and fast over a bed of gravel, bone-achingly cold but shallow enough that Finn could cross it without chilling too badly.

The farewells were stiff. Neve hovered at Baer’s shoulder and fretted her bottom lip with her teeth; Baer himself simply cautioned her to have a care for rock-wolves in the hills, then turned east along the river, the rest of his little band straggling behind him. Lenna and her man were the only others who could or would meet her eye, and they did so with a fear and hostility that did not abate even when she raised her mittened hand and waved them out of sight.

Alone again. As I always seem to be
.

She swung Finn southwards. Up into the hills first, then she would pick her way from there. According to the stories there was a good pass below the Haunted Mountain, but it was high, perhaps too high to have thawed by the time she reached it. She looked up, shading her eyes against the brightness of the peaks rising into the mussel-shell sky. In the centre, Tir Malroth brandished its tusks. Unreachable, implacable, forbidding.

All her life she had lived in the shadow of the Archen Mountains. Sometimes close, when wintering in their foothills, sometimes distant, when the clan followed the plodding elk across the plains. They spanned the horizon from sunrise to sunset, the southern limit of her world. The rest, the Empire and its lands, were only tales to her, dangerous voices on the wind.

The enormity of the task she had set herself sank like a stone in her chest.
Macha watch over me. Lord Aedon protect me. I don’t know what else to do
.

Even the longest journey had to begin with a step, and every step she took would make her journey shorter. She couldn’t go back, nor could she stay where she was. Clicking her tongue, she urged Finn further into the hills.

28

DAUGHTER OF THE WHITE COURT

The Ten hadn’t listened, as she’d known they wouldn’t.

Oh, they’d heard her well enough, but when Berec and Denellin spoke the Court listened to them instead of the newly presented High Seat of House Elindorien who had spent so long with the humans that she had come to think like them, share their fears. They hadn’t said it in so many words, but the implication had been clear. The Ten thought she cared more about humans than her own people.

Tanith gripped the arms of her chair tightly, the pale wood cool against her sweat-slick palms. Didn’t they see that the danger was real? Didn’t they realise that if the Veil fell, Astolar would no longer be safe – nowhere would be safe?

Across the high-domed chamber with its intricately tessellated floor, Denellin was still arguing for reclusion and the number of heads nodding agreement with the points he made dismayed her. Four voting for the realm to isolate itself, her father had said. Now it looked as if there might be six.

‘In conclusion, it seems only prudent that we should close our borders and insulate ourselves from the civil unrest so prevalent across the human Empire. Rioting in Yelda last year, clashes of faith again in the desert this. These are troubled times, Majesty, and we would do well to distance ourselves from them.’

Murmurs of assent followed him back to his seat from the speaker’s circle in the centre of the floor. Berec being one of those to agree was only to be expected. Time had gouged deep lines into his face and the hair spilling around the shoulders of his garnet robes had the translucence of spider-silk. But Taren Odessil too? And House Vairene?

This was her one chance to urge them towards unity instead of division; stalwart defence instead of self-interest. Heart pounding, Tanith stood up.

The Chancellor, in the twelfth seat, directly opposite the Queen, nodded to her. ‘The Court recognises the Seat of House Elindorien.’

She walked to the circle, keeping her hands busy holding up her skirts so that they would not be seen to be trembling. As a Daughter of the White Court it was her duty to speak out for the best interests of the realm, as she had done that morning, and they hadn’t listened. If she didn’t say something now, it would be too late: they would vote for reclusion and hide in their marble halls as the world fell apart around them. Then when their own walls crumbled, they would look around and find no one left to help them.

‘Majesty, if I may be so bold, Lord Denellin overlooks a crucial fact. The human Empire to which he refers is also our Empire. We are a part of it, by solemn treaty and the custom of ages. We trade in its markets, teach in its universities; its troubles are our troubles. We cannot isolate ourselves as he suggests without severing our ties with the Empire altogether.’

Tanith looked around the chamber, at the men and women of the Ten in their House colours beneath their velvet banners. Gold and silver thread winked in the sunshine filtering down through the filigreed dome.

‘As my father likes to remind me, we are not a warlike people. We are a people of alliance, of negotiated peace, the kind of peace to which we swore ourselves in this very chamber centuries ago. Would you have Astolar secede from the Empire and break those oaths?’

Grey heads shook gravely and leaned towards their neighbours’, the susurrus of whispered words too soft for her to hear. She was the youngest in the chamber by thirty or more years; many of the Ten had been ageing when her mother had ascended to the High Seat – Berec had made toys for her when she was a child! How many members of the Court still saw her as that child, playing at being Queen in the empty chamber, marching her wooden horse across the speaker’s circle? Perhaps her father had been right and Ailric’s presence at her side would have lent her some gravitas. Too late to worry about that now.

‘But more importantly, we must face the fact that the Veil which protects our world is failing. Worse, there is a reiver loose who has the power to tear a hole in it, and if he is not stopped, he could rend the whole Veil. Without it there will be nothing to secure us from the dark realms. The Hidden Kingdom will be exposed and its denizens given free rein to invade the daylight world. We must stand against this reiver, or deal with worse than rioting apprentices.’

Hisses of distaste. The Queen turned her head aside, lips pressed into a thin line.

‘You are certain of this? You have seen this reiver?’ asked Taren, the next youngest after Tanith. He was slender and dark enough to belie his years, if one did not look closely enough to see the crow’s feet, the silver-brushed temples.

‘I have seen his handiwork and that was enough.’ Despite her best efforts, Tanith’s trembling had reached her voice, and the more she tried to suppress it, the sharper her tone became. ‘A young man was attacked, his body so torn he almost bled to death as I fought to Heal him. His mind, his memories, utterly violated.’ A single hot tear spilled over her lashes and coursed down her cheek at the pain of the memory. ‘I had to shield him from the Song itself to give him peace.’

‘Does he live, this young man?’ asked Denellin.

‘He lives. More by luck than any skill of mine, but he lives.’ Tanith fumbled open the tiny pearl buttons on her left sleeve, one by one.

‘Who is he? Can he be brought before us, that we might question him?’

‘He’s no one important, no scion of a noble house. Just a human.’ She wrenched her sleeve back. Two or three pearls burst their stitching and rattled across the tiled floor. ‘The reiver’s creatures did this to me.’ She brandished her scarred forearm before their shocked faces. ‘Does this make it real for you? Is this evidence enough that the threat to the Veil, and to us, is real?’