Bloodheir

A firm hand on his arm twisted him aside. People were scattering, opening up a space of trampled, dirty snow. He was staring at Ca

“Not now, Thane,” he said softly. “Not now. He has his White Owls, and the Battle will defend him, if Shraeve commands it. And she will.”

“Release me,” Kanin hissed. The dog growled at the threat in his voice, but he did not care.

“How many swords do you have, Thane?” Ca

Kanin stared at the Inkallim. The hard, insistent beat of anger was still there in his chest, but its mastery of him was broken for a moment. He looked down, over the heads of the crowd milling between them, and saw Aeglyss. The na’kyrim was watching him, a dead smile on his lips. Clouds of snowflakes swept between them.

“It was him,” Kanin said. “Fiallic should have won. Would have done, but for him.”

“There will be another time,” Ca

Kanin let his blade slide back into its sheath. It was heavy on his hips, its presence still urging him to release it; use it. But Ca

“The Haig army awaits us now. After that – if there is anything for us after that – we should talk, away from curious eyes and ears,” Ca

The crowd was dispersing. There was laughter, here and there; excited voices raised. The tramp of feet across the snow-clad hillside, clouds of breath pluming up. And from the Inkallim, only silence, and obedience. As the others drifted away, they closed in, like black birds thickening on carrion, around the killing pen. Shraeve, Ba

IV

Taim Narran watched Anyara’s departure from a distance, for his captors would not permit him to approach her. The sister of his own Thane, and he was denied the chance to bid her farewell, or to comfort her. She bore it well, he could see, and gave no sign of needing his comfort: straight-backed on her horse, looking about her openly and without faltering. But how could she not be feeling vulnerable, beset? She was being carried off to Vaymouth by those whose professed friendship had become the thi

Anyara left the camp of the Haig army in the midst of a long column of wagons, carrying the wounded and the sickly off towards Do

“No, Captain. I don’t want you and her hatching plots together, the way you and your Thane did. Anyway, I want you to see the end of this. I want you here with me. Your reckoning will come after I’m done with the Black Road.”

To Taim, Aewult reeked of fear. The Bloodheir might not even recognise that as what he was feeling, but Taim had no doubt. Aewult was afraid. And he was angry. Those were his reactions to defeat, and those were his reasons for his treatment of Anyara and Taim himself.

The entire army had the same stench. Like a stockman, granted by long familiarity the ability to read the mood of his animals, Taim could gather all the little signs and shape them into an instinctive understanding of the men around him. Everything – the downcast eyes, the bluff, forced laughter, the men staggering drunkenly about after dark – all of it spoke eloquently to him of trepidation. This army had the splinter of defeat lodged in its heart, and it would remain there, and fester, unless and until a cleansing victory was won. The men, the individual threads within the weave of the army, promised one another that they would be clambering over drifts of Black Road dead soon; they muttered around their campfires, painting word pictures of the terrible slaughter that they would visit upon their enemies. But it was lies; hopeful lies they told one another to stave off the doubts within.

New companies were coming up from the south. The grim mood opened its arms as they arrived and drew them in. Every man here on the plain outside Kolkyre knew that there was a terrible battle moving towards them. As surely as the turning seasons, violence was coming. It was like a dark, roiling storm approaching from the horizon. None could see beyond it. That the army of the Black Road had mysteriously slowed to a crawl, lingering in the empty lands along the north coast of Kilkry territory, only made the waiting harder and gave the foreboding more time to sink its roots deep.

Whenever Taim’s gaze fell upon Kolkyre, with its ever-present seagulls circling above, and the Tower of Thrones defiantly punctuating its skyline, he feared that the future might be even bleaker than most imagined. The gates of the city were closed. Haig warriors were posted on each of the roads outside them. Nothing, and no one, came or went from Kolkyre save by sea. So, Aewult had pledged, it would remain, until Roaric oc Kilkry-Haig recovered his proper humility and complied with the demands made of him. And so, Roaric seemed to indicate by his mute refusal, he was content for it to remain. Neither man would earn respect or credit from this, Taim thought, but while he felt contempt for Aewult, he felt only pity for Roaric. The young Kilkry Thane had come into his power in evil times, and by evil circumstance, and his nature made him unsuited to facing the challenges of this moment. Perhaps he would learn, in time; perhaps, by the time he learned, it would be too late.

Taim wandered through the outskirts of the encampment, listless and dispirited. The men Aewult had set to watch him – surly, uncommunicative swordsmen – shadowed him at a few paces’ distance. Taim paused to watch a gang of camp followers slaughtering a pair of pigs. The animals screamed and struggled. They were scrawny, and not likely to make good eating, but fresh meat was growing rare and precious. A youth held one of the pigs down while a woman cut its throat and it bled.

The morning after Anyara’s departure, Taim discovered what her presence had meant to him personally. The whole camp was submerged beneath a miasma of steam and mist and smoke, through which sunlight shone in fragmentary rays, lighting frosted grass and iced puddles in the mud. Guards came to him and unceremoniously removed him from the tent in which he slept, herding him across the crunching ground.

There was a pile of barrels, some of them broken, and behind that a lopsided wagon that had lost a wheel and rested on the stub of its axle. Scattered around the wagon were a dozen or more men, sullen and gaunt. Each one of them was seated, or curled up, on the ground, wrapped in a blanket, and with a shackle ru