IV

“What else would you expect?” asked Yvane. “The oldest of hatreds, the oldest of fears. And they could hardly have a better excuse to surrender to it. Aeglyss reminded them of where those fears come from. And with his corruption of the Shared feeding their every doubt, every suspicion, every buried resentment… no, it’s no surprise.” “You’d forgive them?” asked Orisian, disbelieving. “You, of all people?” They were descending a long sloping corridor, just the two of them, walking slowly down into Highfast’s foundations. The passageway was dark, save for the torch Orisian carried. The flame flapped now and again, sending their shadows careening over the square-cut stone facing of the walls. Even here, close to the stronghold’s roots, the air moved. The breath of the Karkyre Peaks found its way in through the porous skin of Highfast to these deep places. “I didn’t say anything about forgiveness,” Yvane told him. “But you accept it.” “And nothing about acceptance, either,” the na’kyrim said. “You’re too young.” Orisian came to a sudden halt and turned to her, angry. “Or I’m too old, too bruised,” she said quickly. “Either way, horrors that seem fresh and new to you are stale to me. What happened here, what Herraic and his men did, that’s the stuff of every tale I heard in my childhood. It’s the commonest of currencies between Huanin and na’kyrim, at least since the War of the Tainted. I despise it. Loathe it. I’m just not surprised by it.” He glared at her, then shook his head and continued down the sinking passage. “Perhaps I’ve lived too long,” Yvane muttered as she followed him. “But it’s not just that. I fear anger, as you should. Let it in, give it nourishment and it’ll overrun you.” Orisian said nothing, marching sullenly on. His fist about the burning torch was painfully tight, he realised. It took a moment of concentration to soften the muscles and take some of the iron out of his fingers. He knew she was right, and he did fear what might happen inside him—what might already be happening—if he yielded to the torrent of emotions he could sense running there. But anger was not the strongest, the most dangerous current; the shadow he felt at his heels, its ever more familiar breath across the nape of his neck, was a desolate hopelessness. It was despair not rage that would claim him if his defences faltered. They spiralled down a rough staircase, a columnar vein bearing them ever further from the distant, forgotten sky. Of all the surviving na’kyrim, only Hammarn had remained up in the portions of Highfast that had been built atop the pinnacle rather than carved out of it. He had passed the first night of his recovered freedom in a small, high sleeping chamber with Yvane and K’rina. All the rest, with barely a word, hardly a moment spared to gather food and water, had disappeared into these ancient, chthonic depths. As if to turn their backs upon the world and separate themselves from it. As if compelled by fear, or shame, or bitterness to bury themselves. An errant shadow angling across the stonework of the stairway caught Orisian’s eye. He paused, touched fingertip to rock. He traced the carved symbols, their edges blunted and bevelled by time. “Look at that,” he muttered. “A stonemason’s mark, I think. That must be… how old?” Yvane leaned against the wall, a couple of steps above him. She was a little out of breath. “Seven hundred years or more. One of Marain’s masons, perhaps.” “So many lifetimes, and it’s lain here in the stone all that time. Kings, and wars, and Thanes, all come and gone, half-forgotten.” He let his hand fall. He felt the weight of the unknown past here. A thousand and more years, with all their suffering, all their deaths, lost to memory. None of it of consequence now, yet all of it real and heavy. “Do you want to rest?” he asked Yvane quietly. “Don’t be silly,” she muttered, a reassuring touch of the old brashness there in her voice. “It’s hardly any distance now.” Orisian nodded and resumed his descent. “Plenty of places they could have chosen to sulk in, though,” he heard Yvane saying irritably behind him. “Seems a bit overexcited of them to burrow quite so deep.” The na’kyrim had gathered in a chamber where Highfast’s hollow roots brushed the precipitous surface of the mountain. The shutters at the windows were propped narrowly open, giving a glimpse of the immense open spaces, the plummeting drop, that lay outside; admitting a dull light and cold threads of unceasing wind. Simple beds filled much of the room, and many were occupied by the sleeping or the sick or the weak. “Look at this, look at this,” Yvane murmured in distress as they walked the length of the chamber. In even the plainest, most human of na’kyrim faces Orisian had until now always seen some trace of their Kyrinin parentage: a composed serenity, an elegant balance in their features or those calm grey eyes. Now he saw only wounds, of body and spirit alike. Eyes had the nervous restlessness of the hunted and hounded. Skin was marred by sores or cuts or burns. Cheeks had sunk into hollow bowls, sucked in by hunger or misery. One woman lay unmoving save for the constant, silent working of her thin lips, a smear of burned and raw flesh disfiguring one side of her face and crusting up across part of her scalp. The wound was coated in a slick white salve, but it looked inflamed. Orisian was glad that she had her eyes closed, for he feared what he might see there had he met her gaze. He felt his anger as a pain in his chest. It knotted itself there, and because he fought to keep it locked away, it raged all the more brightly and bitterly. It clamoured for release, demanding that there must be punishment, that only the suffering of the guilty could answer this suffering of the innocent. But he refused it. He had never known its like, never known this hot, sharp conviction, like a howl inside him, that the only healing he could ever hope for was with a sword in his hand and blood upon its blade. But still he refused it. Eshenna was seated on one of the beds closest to the windows. Little gusts of wind stirred her hair. Her hands were folded in her lap like white fallen leaves. She looked up as Yvane sat beside her on the thin mattress. Orisian saw the same thing in her eyes he had seen in so many others: a defeated, drained emptiness. “This is where I belonged,” Eshenna murmured as she looked down once more to her hands. She held some tiny fragment of cloth there, twisting it around her long fingers. “These are the people I belong to. I should never have left. I should have been here.” “No,” murmured Yvane. “We couldn’t have made any difference,” Orisian said. “None of us. Not here.” “I know,” Eshenna whispered. “That’s not why I should have been here.” And Orisian understood her. He felt the same longing rising up in him: not to have been here in Highfast when Aeglyss came, but to have slipped Rothe’s grasp when his shieldman dragged him out of Castle Kolglas on the night of Winterbirth. To have plunged back into the fire and the fury and been at his father’s side. Try to save his father, try to save Inurian. And, in failing, to be released from the burden of all that had flowed from that one night. He closed his eyes. All his anger easily folded itself into a shaming despair, a profound sense that nothing was as it was meant to be. He should have paid the same price that had been demanded of Kylane and Kennet, Rothe and Inurian. And he could have wept then, thinking of his mother and brother, bound in linen winding sheets, riding the corpse-ship out to The Grave. For the first time he understood, not with his head but with his heart, what had been inside his father all those years since the Heart Fever stole away Lairis and Fariel. It was not grief; it was the desire to have gone with them. It was guilt at having let them go alone. He blinked at Eshenna. “Where’s Amonyn?” he managed to ask. “The Scribing Hall,” she told him. “I know the way,” Orisian said.