Winterbirth (27 page)

For the first time, the faintest hint of doubt seemed to touch the corner of Mordyn's eyes. It was there for a heartbeat before being extinguished.

'There was mention of Kyrinin,' he said. 'It is... well, it seems absurd, but it may be that woodwights had a hand in the assault. You know how confusion thrives at such times, so I would not place much faith in the report. Still, if the White Owls have aided the Black Road it might explain the inexplicable.'

Taim could find no words. He shook his head.

'I fear this may be the herald of worse news to come,' Mordyn said. 'It seems unlikely that the Gyre Bloods would commit the Inkallim so far beyond their borders, in numbers large enough to take the castle, if it was not part of a grander scheme. The whole valley may be beset. Soon, if not already.'

Taim glared at the Chancellor. Mordyn was unperturbed. 'I speak the truth, Taim. You must know it.

The Inkallim do not make empty gestures.'

'What...' Taim fought to master himself, wrestling with a tide of emotion that threatened to blind him.

'What will you do?'

Mordyn arched his eyebrows. 'I? Await the High Thane's return. I sent messengers south as soon as I had the news. You no doubt passed them on your way here.'

'Wait?' snapped Taim.

'And gather our forces as quickly as we can. Even if there was an army provisioned and ready here now, it would still be three weeks or more before it reached Anduran. That means fighting in winter, and if we are to do that it must be with the strength to be certain of swift victory.'

'Lheanor will not wait,' said Taim darkly.

'The Thane of Kilkry-Haig will do as his master commands, I imagine.'

'He will not wait,' Taim repeated. 'He is a true friend to my Blood.'

'Taim, Taim,' the Chancellor said, 'your Blood's truest friend now is Gryvan oc Haig. He can bring twenty, thirty thousand men to Croesan's aid. Yes, it will take time, but Gyre will regret its ambition.'

'I do not care about Gyre,' muttered Taim. 'Only Lannis... Lannis-Haig... and my Thane.'

'Of course,' said the Chancellor. 'I understand that, and I counsel you not to let your fears run too far ahead of our knowledge. This may yet prove to be nothing but a raid. And your Blood has, after all, won great victories over the Black Road before. The High Thane's support, or that of Lheanor, may not even be required.'

'Perhaps not. It may well have been so, had I and my two thousand men not been summoned south.'

Mordyn Jerain smiled tolerantly.

'We can all share in that regret. You know it was necessary, though. Igryn's open defiance of the High Thane could not stand. The True Bloods are nothing if they cannot hold together in the face of rebellion by one of their own. It was fitting that every Blood should play its part in Igryn's defeat. No, more than fitting: essential. We live in dangerous times. If our enemies saw divisions between us, they would not be slow to act.'

'The Black Road is our greatest enemy,' murmured Taim. 'It always has been. My Blood has not forgotten that. Nor has Kilkry-Haig. The True Bloods might hold together more easily if others shared that view, rather than spending all their time dreaming of the riches that could be theirs if only the Free Coast, or Tal Dyre, or even Dornach, would fall to them.'

A decorous cough drew the two men's attention to the doorway. The woman standing there was of a beauty that caught Taim's breath in his throat for an instant. Thick, glossy black hair fell across her shoulders and she wore a silken dress that could not be imagined upon another, so perfectly did it fit and become her. Gold dripped from her ears, her neck and her wrists; a glut of the metal that would have hypnotised a greedier soul than Taim's. It seemed to him that the rich scent pervading the palace clung, as well, to her, so that as she entered she brought it into the room with her.

He recognised her at once: Tara Jerain, the Chancellor's wife. He had seen her riding at Mordyn's side during the ceremonial review of the High Thane's army before they had marched south. Such a presence once experienced was not forgotten.

'Ah,' said Mordyn, springing to his feet. 'Taim, this is my wife, Tara.'

Taim rose and inclined his head as graciously as he could manage. 'I am honoured to meet you, my lady.'

'And I you,' replied the woman in a voice as luxuriant as her jewellery. 'I am sorry not to make your acquaintance on a happier day.'

Taim was a touch surprised that the Chancellor's wife should refer so directly to the source of his distress, then he recalled the rumours that surrounded this woman. There was no shortage of them, and all suggested that she wielded almost as much influence, in her own way, as her husband. She was a worthy wife to the Shadowhand and would, Taim supposed, know all that Mordyn did about events in the north.

'I asked Tara to join us,' the Chancellor was saying, 'in case there was anything she could do to make your men more comfortable here in the city. She can find them anything they need.'

'Indeed,'Tara confirmed. 'Food, drink, the care of healers. Tell me what your men require, and it is theirs, Captain Narran.'

'Their needs will be well seen to,' Taim said, unable to keep an edge from his voice. He felt as if he had been waylaid. He was being dismissed; delicately, sympathetically, but quite deliberately.

The Chancellor's wife gave a subtle nod, her eyes fluttering shut for the briefest of instants as if a breeze had touched them. 'As you wish,' she said.

'You, at least, will rest here for a time,' suggested Mordyn. 'I will have a room prepared.'

Taim turned to the Chancellor. He caught himself before he gave full vent to his feelings.

'Thank you, but my tastes are simple. I will rest with my men, and prepare for the journey on to Kolkyre. And to Anduran.'

'You will not wait, then, for the High Thane to return?' asked Tara , her voice all innocent inquiry. 'Surely he can only be two or three days behind you on the road?'

Taim smiled at her. It was required of him, even though he felt that what mattered now, all that mattered, was waiting for him somewhere in the north.

'I must go, my lady,' he said. 'My place is at my own Thane's side. And I have a wife of my own, one I wish more than ever to see again.'

Anduran and Glasbridge, the greatest settlements of Taim's Blood, were as villages compared to the enormity of Vaymouth and the masses of its population. People churned up and down the streets as thickly as fish in a drawn net. Taim had refused the Chancellor's offer of an escort and a mount. He knew the way to the barracks well enough, and he craved release from the oppressive solicitude of Mordyn Jerain and his household. Now, struggling through the crowds, he was less certain. Although he had been in the capital of the Bloods twice before, its rough exuberance and scale still wrought a disorientating effect.

Strange smells and sounds assaulted his senses: spices and herbs he did not recognise; music made upon instruments unknown in the north; now and again the cadences of languages foreign to him, the odd native argot of Tal Dyre traders or the coarse-sounding olden form of his own tongue that was still spoken in distant parts of the Ayth-Haig Blood. He was jostled this way and that but knew there was no point in complaining.

Taim wondered at the way life continued in all its chaotic vigour. His own world was shaking, its foundations cracked by Mordyn Jerain's news, yet it was a day like any other in these streets. Far away on the northern border of his homeland, men might be dying; men he knew well from his own time in the garrison at Tanwrye. Here, the traders hawked their wares and the townsfolk went about their business.

He felt a kind of loathing for the people all around him.

The barracks themselves lay in the centre of the city. It was a long walk. In time the turreted and balconied spires of the Moon Palace , where Gryvan oc Haig's family lived and ruled, came into view above distant rooftops. Around one last corner the press of the crowds thinned as the street gave out on to a wide square. The city's barracks stood austere and massive on its far side. There were performers dotted across the open space, juggling or working sleight-of-hand tricks for appreciative knots of spectators. One was a firewalker whose olive skin and coloured tunic and pantaloons said he was a wanderer from the Bone Isles of Dornach. Amongst his audience a small, lean man darted this way and that, the rags he wore shaking as he bounced from foot to foot.

'They are not gone,' he cried to the sky. 'It is not true. I have seen them, they watch over us still. I met the Gatekeeper on a street in Drandar. The maker! I walked in the Veiled Woods, and saw the Wildling there, feasting on a deer he had killed.'

A madman, Taim thought. The executioner's axe would have been over his neck for such words once.

Monach oc Kilkry had been merciless when the fisherwoman of Kilvale gave birth to the Black Road .

Convinced that such heresies could bring only misery and chaos, he did not flinch even when the strife turned into civil war. Now no one even listens. No one cares about such things, not here where Gryvan rules. Once, stability and order had been the whole purpose of the Bloods. They had, after all, arisen as an answer to the tumult of the Storm Years after the Aygll Kingship fell. Now, it seemed to Taim, they served a different purpose: that of supporting the ambitions of the Haig Blood.

Taim passed in through the barrack gates, ignoring the stern gazes of the guards. He found his men in a hall at the furthest corner of the sprawling maze of buildings, yards and armouries. It was then that the burden of his position, and of his news, grew so heavy as to be almost unbearable. He saw exhaustion in the bodies and eyes of his men. They were grimed by the dirt of travel and their clothes were worn. At the far end of the hall the injured and sick lay upon pallets. He could offer none of the rest and comfort they all so deserved, and must raise them up for the long journey to home and, perhaps, a greater battle than the one they had left behind.

It was not so very difficult in the end. Taim took pride in their weary resolution, but for all his tiredness he did not sleep well that night.

ANYARA'S CELL IN Anduran was cold and comfortless. All they gave her to eat was a thin gruel with a few chunks of dispirited grey bread floating in it. It was brought to her by guards, some of them women, who never spoke. They stood and watched her as she ate. She sensed their contempt for her, and sometimes something stronger: hatred almost. It made her angry. She was the Thane's niece, incarcerated in her own homeland by intruders. It was she who had the right to hatred, not her gaolers.

Her anger boiled over just once. She flung her bowl at the feet of a guard and spat curses at him. He regarded the gruel sprayed across his boots, and then struck her with the back of his hand. She yelped and clutched her nose in a vain attempt to stem the blood that sprang from it. He hit her again, on the side of her head, and knocked her down. He picked up the empty bowl and carried it away, slamming the bar across the cell door in his wake. After that, Anyara kept her feelings on a tighter leash.

In the nights she craved sleep as a kind of escape. It came only grudgingly. She lay on the battered mattress they had given her, curled like a worm in the stone gut of some great animal that had swallowed her. The Black Road haunted her exhaustion. To her it was a desolate creed. The whole idea that your life, and the death that would end it, was fixed from the moment of your birth was loathsome to her, yet her own impotence now seemed a bitter echo of it. All the strength she had cultivated over the last five years counted for nothing. Others had decided upon a cruel death for her, and there was not a thing she could do.

She could remember, long ago in a world now as tenuous as a dream to her, sitting upon her father's knee in the hall of Kolglas, listening to his tales of old battles. As a young man Kennet had fought alongside his father and his brother against the warriors of the Black Road at Tanwrye. In his soft voice, as he whispered stories of that day in her ear, she heard a bitter respect for his enemy. A company of Inkallim had stood aside and watched as a Horin-Gyre army was surrounded and destroyed before the walls of Tanwrye. Some said it was because the ravens wished to curb the Blood's arrogance, some that the High Thane of Gyre had forbidden the invasion and Horin-Gyre was thus punished for its disobedience. Yet, Kennet murmured, there had been no fear amongst the slaughtered. They had fought on, and died, for hour after hour.

Lairis had scolded Kennet for telling such tales to a little girl in the midst of a meal, but he had reprimanded his beloved wife. 'She must know the nature of her enemy,' he said.

Though the knowledge did her little good, Anyara thought, she did know her enemy, and how remorseless and resilient their hatred was.

All she could see through the high, narrow window of her cell was a patch of sky. It offered little cheer, wearing its clouds with sombre gravity. Sometimes she heard rain on the roof and thought that even those drops would be a comforting touch upon her head if she could just walk for a few moments beneath them. The hours were long. Over many years she had fashioned strong defences against her fears and pain, against the Fever, death, her father's suffering. Now those defences were sorely tested.

Most of the guards had heavy footsteps that she could recognise before they reached the door of her cell. When, after three or four days of imprisonment, she heard a lighter step approaching, her spirit lifted at the mere thought of some change in the crushing routine. Her heart fell once more when the visitor stepped through the doorway. It was Wain, sister to the Horin-Gyre Bloodheir. Her long hair was a little less lustrous than the last time Anyara had seen her, her clothes a little more soiled by smoke and dirt, but her gaze was no less hard; no less contemptuous.

She smirked at the sight of Anyara, who managed to stay an impulse to smooth her own hair and clothes. The time had passed when she could pretend to be anything other than cold and hungry and dishevelled.

'These walls must never have seen such a distinguished guest,' said Wain.