VIII

In the Vare Waste, amongst the mule-stubborn masterless men who scraped a living from its labyrinthine canyons and gorges, feuds long-forgotten or forgiven were reborn. Along the goat trails, through the scrublands, raiding parties ran. Men sent their wives and children to hide in caves while they waged petty wars over the boulder-fields. And still they found time to prey, as well, upon the Kilkry folk who came stumbling into that wind-blasted wasteland, fleeing the slaughter wrought by the Black Road. In Dun Aygll there was no war, but minds still foundered: the people seized Rot-scarred beggars from the streets and burned them alive on pyres built amidst the ruins of ancient royal residences; a Tal Dyreen merchant, accused by rumour of using shaved weights, was dragged from his house and carried to the Old Market, and killed there, more than a hundred hands sharing in the deed. On distant Tal Dyre itself, the households of two merchant princes elevated quarrel to murder. They hunted one another with knives through the lanes of the island’s palace-encrusted slopes, until the nights grew deadly and the people fearful. A Huanin trader, arriving as he had many times before at a Snake vo’an to exchange knives for furs, offered insult with an ill-judged remark implying them to be subservient to the Taral-Haig Marchlords. Some of the older women, even the vo’an’tyr herself, counselled tolerance; it was not the first, and would not be the last, time that the ignorance and stupidity of a slow-minded Huanin had led them to abuse the clan’s hospitality. But younger, hotter hearts demurred. There was debate and then argument, and then threat and accusation. It might have gone further had the elders not stepped aside, the better to preserve the clan’s peace. The young warriors broke the trader’s wrists and ankles with stones, and set their hunting dogs on him. On the Nar Vay shore, west of Vaymouth, two brothers—long of dark inclination, guilty of innumerable small cruelties in their childhoods—went one night, without cause, from house to house in their fishing village and took blades to their friends, and their family and their lovers. They killed six, injured more, before the menfolk gathered and pursued them to the gravel beach. One died beneath the cudgels and harpoons and scaling knives of the villagers; the other waded into the sea, going on and out with the moonlimned waves breaking across his shoulders, laughing madly until he was taken under. And in Vaymouth—huge, jostling, choking, loud Vaymouth—the sickness rose, day by day, closer to the surface. The city so long accustomed to singing itself songs woven from chinking coins, hammers in workshops, the seductive cries of hawkers and pedlars, the gossip of washerwomen, found another more corrosive strand entering its harmonies. It found another voice with which to whisper its tales of itself. Anger murmured in its alleys and inns, bitter distrust and doubt sighing coldly through its marketplaces and potteries. In sleep and in waking, a dark imagination took hold of its inhabitants, and many succumbed to it. The Craft apprentices rioted, each death of one of their number inciting the survivors to greater outrage. The Captain of the Guard in the Tannery Ward was killed by his wife’s lover. His men took their vengeance upon the man, his parents, his sister, but found that bloodletting insufficient to sate their hunger and went on to the next house, and the next, and the next, looting and killing and feasting until they fell exhausted or drunk. Three women were killed in as many nights, their dismembered bodies found in dank dawns within sight of the Moon Palace’s walls. Fear stalked the city, and bred the violence that it fed upon.

*

Anyara found the terrace from which she and Coinach had watched the fires burgeoning across Vaymouth a convenient and quiet refuge whenever the increasingly oppressive atmosphere in the Palace of Red Stone grew intolerable, and she needed the touch of cold, cleansing air on her face or a glimpse of the sky. The denizens of the palace never seemed to use it—not in this season, at least—and though there were sometimes guards upon it at night, during the day it was empty and silent. On this particular day it was cold too. “Could you bring me a cloak from my chambers?” she asked Coinach quietly. He nodded and disappeared into the body of the palace. As soon as he was out of sight, Anyara felt guilty. It was hardly respectful, of either his standing or his capabilities, to treat a shieldman as if he were a maidservant. Yet Coinach had raised no protest. He never would, she suspected, almost irrespective of what she asked of him. She was aware that the two of them were acting less and less like a Thane’s sister and her loyal bodyguard; more and more like companions—exiles—who found in one another the only friendship and support they could rely upon. Still, there was a sharp chill on the air and she did need the cloak. And Eleth, the maid assigned to her, had been mysteriously absent for the last two days. Sick, the others had told Anyara when she asked after her, but their curt replies had an evasive impatience about them that did not inspire belief. Perhaps, she told herself, they were just unsettled by the general confusion and nervous mood that had taken hold of all Vaymouth. There had been other fires since those first bright beacons of destruction blooming in the night. More riots. Anyara had heard the crowds roaring along the streets of the city even through the thick walls of the palace. Now she could see a distant pillar of smoke climbing into the sky. Some ruin, still smouldering. She folded her arms, tucking her hands into her sleeves. She blew a long, slow breath upwards and watched the mist of it drifting and fading away. Voices reached her from somewhere below the terrace. She knew there was a long narrow walled garden down there, where nothing but a few harshly pruned and trained fruit trees grew. The voices were instantly recognisable: Tara and Mordyn. Yet both had a strident edge she had never heard in them before. “You took her riding, I hear,” the Chancellor was saying. “Well, no more. She is to be confined within these walls, on Gryvan’s command.” “As you wish, of course, but tell me why, at least. I find no harm in the girl.” “That’s not for you to judge.” “Not for me to judge? Don’t speak to me as if I were one of your lackeys. I’m your wife, or have you truly forgotten that as thoroughly as it seems?” Anyara, shrinking back from the terrace’s balustrade, winced at the anguish in Tara’s voice. There was much pain there, though it was so intimately entangled with anger that the two were hardly distinguishable. “I forget nothing,” Mordyn said, suddenly gentle. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” “Then tell me why. I’ve never pried into any of your dealings needlessly, but now you set such briars about yourself I cannot even draw near. Tell me what this child’s done. I’ve seen nothing in her save sorrow and strength, and loyalty to her family.” “Have a care you don’t align yourself with treacherous friends.” A sound behind her had Anyara spinning about, raising her hands to fend off some assault. It was only Coinach, though, stepping out onto the terrace, carrying her cloak. He wore a questioning expression, but she held a palm out to him and pressed a finger to her lips. He came carefully closer. “Treacherous friends?” Tara was crying out below. Her distress must be profound—all-consuming—to permit this kind of indiscretion, Anyara knew. There would surely be servants and guards who could hear all of this just as clearly as she could herself. “You know,” Tara went on, her tone moderating a touch, veering back towards grief and confusion, “you used to know, at least, that I would not allow so much as a feather’s width of distance to separate us, but this talk of Lannis and Kilkry treachery is absurd. Whatever their failings, they would never do anything to weaken our resistance to the Black Road. Lannis owes its very existence to the struggle against them. They’re obsessed with it. You know all this far better than I. Why can’t you explain to me what’s changed? “Please! Don’t turn away from me. Listen to me. Explain to me. I need to understand.” She was begging him now. “Surely it’s Aewult’s clumsiness, his ineptitude, that’s caused this confusion. You said from the start he should not have been sent north. You said —” “What I said does not matter.” The Shadowhand’s voice was leaden. All Tara’s desperate longing evidently moved him not at all. “What is: that’s our concern now. There is conspiracy against us, against the High Thane. That is all you need to know.” “All I need to know? How can you say such things?” “I have no time for this. There is conspiracy. I have shown Gryvan the proofs of it, and he acts upon them as he sees fit. The girl, and her Blood, stand condemned in his eyes, along with many others. Her brother killed Aewult’s messengers. He is to be outlawed.” Coinach was pulling gently at Anyara’s sleeve. She glanced at him, and his concern was clear. With good reason, Anyara knew: if they were known to have overheard this fraught exchange, troubles could flock about them as thickly as crows on a carcass. But then, as was abundantly clear, they were already beset by plentiful troubles. “Proofs?” Tara snapped. “What proofs?” “My own report of what I discovered while in the hands of the Black Road. Letters. Messages I’ve uncovered since then. Enough, woman!” “Messages? Those you wrote yourself?” Then, suddenly, the sharp sound of palm on flesh. A stinging blow. “Don’t question me,” cried Mordyn Jerain. “Never question me. And never speak such an accusation again, to me or anyone else.” Too forcefully to be resisted, Coinach drew Anyara back and led her into the shadows of the long room at the back of the terrace. As she retreated, she thought she could just hear, almost too faint for her to catch, Tara’s soft gasps of shock, and horror, and betrayal. Perhaps they were the choked remnants of sobs. “We should get back to your chambers,” Coinach whispered. “They must find us safely there, and safely ignorant, should anyone wonder where we are.” Anyara nodded. They went quickly and quietly back through the corridors.