Fall of Thanes

IV

The cottage smelled of abandonment. The outside, the winter, had seeped into its fabric, softened it and made it no longer habitation but incipient ruin. There were browned leaves on the floor, blown in through open windows. Dark stains tracked the invasive waters that had found their way in through an unmended roof. It was cold and empty in the way only a place that had long lacked a fire in its hearth, and voices around its table, could be. Orisian ran his fingers over the carved bowls that were still neatly stacked on a shelf and the bottles draped with cobwebs. The detritus of lives now lost or driven off. There were no bodies, at least. Orisian could remember all too clearly another woodsman’s cottage, on the slopes of the Car Criagar, where a good deal of blood had been spilled. That place had smelled much worse. Ess’yr lay on a low, hard bed. Orisian saw in her something entirely new: a fragile vulnerability. Pangs of a powerful emotion swept through him, but it was no simple thing. He felt it acutely, but could not fully understand it. Guilt, longing, fear. All those things and perhaps more. “Can I get you something?” he asked softly, not wanting to rouse K’rina from her torpor on the other side of the room. “Water? Food?” “Nothing,” Ess’yr whispered. He sat on the edge of the bed; felt the lightest of contact between the small of his back and her thigh. She appeared to be on the brink of sleep or unconsciousness. Her eyes, as she looked up into his face, would lose their focus now and again, and drift, then return to him and be sharp and clear once more. Even her intricate tattoos, the token of the lives she had taken, seemed to have lost some of their colour and faded a little into the pallor of her skin. “You would never have been here if you had not found me that night,” Orisian said. “Winterbirth.” He could see in her eyes that she heard him, and understood him, but she said nothing. If she felt pain, she did not show it. Now, as ever, she drew upon reserves of calm and composure he had seen in no one else, calm that exceeded the capacity of the world to assail it. It was, he suddenly realised, something precious beyond limit to him: that there should be someone near at hand who had within them that imperturbable strength, that resilient self-possession and balance. Someone, he thought, who had found that core of grace and peace and persistence that he had unknowingly been seeking himself since the Heart Fever stole the better part of his life away. Inurian had had it in some measure. Ess’yr had it in abundance. Orisian looked at her and saw… he saw another world, another life. In those sculpted features and their unutterable grace he saw a world that should have been. One in which there had been no deaths, no Heart Fever even; in which there was still laughter, and companionship, and a lightness of spirit. He was not sure whether he was a part of that world he glimpsed. He did not know whether, in it, he would have found her. He did not even know whether what he saw came from within her, or within him, or from somewhere else entirely. But it was, despite that, utterly beautiful to him. It was filled with light, and that light shone in her alabaster skin, and in her eyes, and in her fine, frail lips. He reached out carefully, and touched her. As he had imagined doing so often. He laid his fingertips on the curve of her chin, and felt a gossamer strand of her gleaming hair brush the back of his hand. Through his fingers he felt her warmth, and it seemed to him that that was a part of the light too. He leaned towards her, sinking as if towards a dream. And her hand was on his chest, gentle but firm. The slightest roll of her head took her skin away from his fingers. He felt the pressure of her hand on his breastbone. It was not urgent, not hard, but it was calmly insistent. She slowly pushed him back and lifted his face away from hers. “No,” she said, soft as the movement of a feather, and the light receded. What he had seen, that place, that possibility he had caught a distant sight of, faded. He felt alone and reduced. But he nodded, just once. Ess’yr let her arm fall back to her side. She closed her eyes. Orisian rose from the bed and walked away. He could remember the light, just. He could remember how it had made him feel. But not what it contained. Not precisely what it was that might have been. Outside the cottage he found a colourless world, desolate. The stumps of felled trees. The cold prickle of drizzle on the air. A muffled, sluggish silence. Yvane was sitting on a stump not far away. She was picking dried berries from a clay pot she must have found somewhere inside, placing them one by one into her mouth. She watched Orisian as he emerged and stood blinking up at the featureless clouds. He turned away from her. There was a path beaten into the grass. He followed it to the side of a tiny stream ru