IX

Ever since riding out from Highfast, the conviction had been growing in Taim Narran that he was moving towards his death. That he would never again see Jaen or his daughter. That his grandchild would be born, and would grow, without him. He did not fear death. He had seen countless others fall to it, and learned its banal and crude flavour, over the years, but that had never taught him fear. The Sleeping Dark promised only an eternity of unbeing: no pain, no grief, no suffering. Nothing to fear but a great deal to regret: the sorrow his absence would inflict upon those he left behind, the sights, the people he would never see again. The immense incompleteness of everything he would leave behind, for there would always, inevitably, be uncounted things he should have said or done, messages he should have conveyed. The trees came first in ones and twos, scattered across the long, shallow slope they were descending. Then clumps of them, more and more, until they merged into a single unbroken canopy. Anlane closed itself above and behind them. Taim felt his tension mount in response to the deepening of the shadows. This place had been a battleground for his Blood from the moment Sirian first wore the title of Thane. It had been a meagre, intermittent kind of war, the struggle against the depredations of the White Owls, but a war nonetheless, and a savage one. Merciless. Anlane could never, to someone of Taim’s upbringing and experiences, be anything other than a bad memory. The trees crowded about them, a numberless host moving imperceptibly slowly to smother them. Perhaps even absorb them. Taim was aware of a change in the air. It was as if they had entered the body of some immense sleeping creature, and burrowed now ever deeper into its living flesh. It was not warm, but the wind was gone, the sharp edge of the cold dulled. New scents drifted up from the forest floor: wet bark, rotting leaves. Soon, much sooner than he had hoped, Taim was ducking to avoid branches that reached out across the dwindling trail the Fox had found for them to follow. The path narrowed to something only deer or boar might pass along without difficulty. Twigs and outstretched tendrils of ivy brushed Taim’s legs and the flanks of his horse, to the animal’s increasing displeasure. Behind him, he could hear men cursing as boughs grazed face or scalp. And then there was a huge tree lying across the trail, coated in slick moss, a thin crust of half-melted snow lining the length of its trunk. To one side its great root plate had been torn out of the earth and stood now like the flattened, upraised hand of a giant. To the other, its branches had, in their crashing descent, crumpled a huge swathe of the woods into an impenetrable tangle of shattered timber, bent and bowed saplings. Its fall had torn a great rent in the otherwise inviolate canopy, a wound in the skin of Anlane. Taim felt the cooler breath of the sky drifting down onto his face. There was a fine drizzle on it. Rain, not snow, he thought. That at least was something to be thankful for. He sighed and twisted in his saddle. Orisian was not far behind, waiting expectantly for word. “We’re done with horses, I think,” Taim said. They walked on in silence. The land folded itself in creases, humps and hollows around which tiny brooks trickled. There were outcrops of rock with trees growing from their crannies. Again and again, the path disappeared altogether, to human eye at least. Each time it did so, Ess’yr or Varryn would be waiting some little way ahead, almost invisible amidst the undergrowth and shadows until betrayed by movement, beckoning the laggard Huanin onward. Taim sent two men forward: four more eyes, inadequate as they might be, to ward against surprises. Necessary as the abandonment of the horses had been, being on foot in such foreign terrain had darkened the already fragile mood. There was an almost palpable sense of vulnerability amongst the warriors. They had the skittishness of sheep, starting at every sound—real or imagined—and darting their eyes this way and that. Only two of the party did not seem to share this nervous trepidation, Taim saw when he glanced back over his shoulder. Yvane, who led K’rina steadily along. And Orisian. Whose calm was almost unnatural. Almost unsettling. He looked to Taim like a man whose burdens, whose fears, were becoming less rather than more. That Taim found troubling. Ess’yr and Varryn and the two scouts Taim had sent out were standing together up ahead. As he drew near, Taim was at first unsure of what he was seeing. A spindly sapling had been cut off at chest height. The break was clean and angled: the work of a blade rather than of wind or heavy snow. It had left the thin, shortened trunk with a sharp point. And onto that point, and then down like thin cuts of meat impaled on a vertical spit, five small squarish pieces of some strange material had been forced. Like a child’s pretence at flags, Taim thought vaguely as he leaned closer, puzzled. One of the crude pennants was torn and ragged where some animal seemed to have been gnawing at it. Another had some faded swirling blue insignia upon it. That shade, and those shapes, had a familiarity to them that he could not at first resolve. Orisian, kneeling and lightly touching one of the scraps between thumb and forefinger, spoke the conclusion Taim’s own mind belatedly approached. “Skin.” Orisian withdrew his hand without haste. “Huanin and Kyrinin,” Ess’yr confirmed. Her distaste, disgust even, was evident. Yvane brushed past Taim’s shoulder and squinted at the gruesome array of flayed squares. “Ettanaryn,” the na’kyrim grunted. “Not of the usual sort, though.” “What are they?” Orisian asked. “When the a’ans roam far in the warm season, they mark the edge,” Ess’yr told him. “The furthest reach.” “It’s an old way of marking the limits of hunting grounds,” Yvane grunted. “Clan territory, for those clans that still live by the oldest traditions. Not like this, though. Not with skin.” “Huanin and Kyrinin,” Ess’yr observed quietly. “All fresh cut. No more than two, three days.” She flicked a fingertip at the palest fragment of skin, with its dull blue patterns. “White Owl kin’thyn. They cut the face from one of their own.” Varryn was already moving away, drifting silently ahead, deeper into the forest. Taim watched him go. It was a grim border they were crossing now. Whatever lay beyond it could only be horrific, if its limits were circumscribed by such tokens of mutilation. It was not, Taim expected, going to be a place welcoming of humankind. “Eyes open,” he murmured to the men nervously gathered around. They were, all of them, staring fixedly at the limp squares of skin. “Eyes open, hands ready,” Taim said more sharply, gesturing them onwards with a sweep of his arm. They bedded down that night on a gentle slope amidst a stand of uniform, straight ash trees. There was to be no fire, of course. The only shelter from the persistent but thin mist of drizzle was the thick canopy of intermingled branches and a few holly trees clustered along one side of their campsite. It would be a hard, miserable night, Taim knew, but he doubted anyone had been expecting much sleep. Taim unrolled the blanket that he would fold about himself to fend off the worst of the night’s chill. The ground was at least softened a touch by a thick layer of dead leaves. A strange mumbling distracted Taim from this unappealing prospect. Coming out of the darkness like the muted babble of a tiny brook: a faint and frail voice. Taim followed the sound. It took no more than half a dozen paces to reveal its source. Sitting there, arms folded, legs crossed, his head sunken, was one of the warriors. Eagan. A young man—barely twenty—born in Grive. Son of a beekeeper, Taim remembered. He had fought well at Ive Bridge. Now he was lost in some waking dream. His senseless whispering was relentless, and strained despite its quietness. His head dipped and rose in shallow nods, as if keeping time with some beat in his ramblings that no one else could detect. “Eagan,” Taim said softly, standing over the warrior. There was no response, only that wordless rambling, rushing on and on. Taim bent and put a hand on the man’s shoulder. Eagan looked up. His lips still moved, still danced, but there was suddenly no sound at all. In the deep gloom of the forest floor Taim could not see his eyes clearly but was almost certain he would have found no recognition there. He squeezed the shoulder more tightly. “Eagan,” he said again. And the man snorted. Shook his head once, sharply. Unfolded his arms. “Sir?” Eagan asked. “Stretch yourself out. Try to get some rest.” Taim returned, thoughtful, to his own blanket. A little further down the slope, he could see the figures of Ess’yr and Orisian kneeling together in the leaf litter. The Kyrinin brushed dead leaves from the surface of a flat stone. She began to break apart one of the flat, round oatcakes they had brought as rations from Highfast, and spread the crumbs out on the stone. Orisian did the same, copying her every action with an eerie precision. Taim knew what it was. He had seen the Kyrinin perform this same small ritual before, making offerings to ward off the attentions of the dead. It was a part of their strange beliefs, and the amounts of food thus wasted were of no consequence, so Taim had never raised any protest. But for a Thane of a True Blood to share in the act? Watching them now, with their careful, measured movements and almost reverential manner, half lost in the shadow and darkness, it would have been possible to mistake them for two Kyrinin. Taim lay down, flat on his back. He was glad that he was—he hoped—the only one to have seen Orisian in such close communion with the Kyrinin woman. It was unsettling enough for some of the men to note how clearly comforting and easy their Thane found Ess’yr’s presence, how attentively he sometimes watched her. For all the disarray and riot the world had fallen into, there remained boundaries that many would not willingly see crossed. Taim closed his eyes, not in hope of sleep but in search of distracting, warming memories that might take him away, however briefly, from this cold forest. The wound in his leg, taken at Ive, ached dully. The muscle was stiff and sore. He reached for the image of Jaen’s face, the texture of her skin beneath his fingers, the knowing affection of her smile. And he reached too, with hand rather than mind, for his sheathed sword. He held it to his chest, and clasped it tight.