The Shadowhand briefly imagined himself embracing Tara, his precious wife; smelling her hair, feeling her cheek against his. He managed, just for a few transitory instants, to hold her, and feel again the wonderful lightness of love. Then he was pulling away even from her. He reached out as he fell, but she was gone. He was gone.
The shutters were closed in the Palace of Red Stone. The fires and the braziers were stoked up, curtains drawn across every door. But still Tara Jerain felt cold. Ever since the Crossing, Vaymouth had been in the grip of chill winds coming down all the way from the Karkyre Peaks, perhaps from the Tan Dihrin itself. They laid frosts across the gardens and the rooftops, had even once, briefly, locked every drinking trough and washerwoman’s tub in ice.
The Shadowhand’s wife walked alone through the echoing corridors of the Palace at dusk. She carried a candle, cupping its flame with her hand, following its shimmering light down the marble ways. She had nowhere to go, and nothing to do, this night. Her maids were drawing her a bath, and spreading fresh silks across her bed, but she was restless and not yet ready to sink back into the warm waters or into sleep.
Each of the last half-dozen evenings had been the same. With the onset of dusk, Tara found her mood darkening in turn. An imprecise, indefinable anxiety began to seep into her thoughts. She could settle to no task, and find no distraction. This fretful stirring of her mind forced her body into motion. It brought no great easing of her worries, but the act of pacing through the halls and passages kept them in the background.
And what was it that so undermined her ease? She could not say, though of course her persistent fear for her husband’s safety was a part of it. Word had come to Vaymouth of Aewult’s defeat – humiliation, some murmured when they thought themselves safe from prying ears – outside Glasbridge, but her unease had already taken root before that grim news. Perhaps it was only weariness, for her sleep had been a poor and wretched thing for some time now. She woke in the morning with heavy eyes, and a heavy heart, and fading memories of distressing dreams. She was not alone in suffering thus, she had gathered. There was something in the season, or in the air coming down out of the north, inimical to restful sleep, it seemed.
A movement of the chilly air shook the flame of the candle, and she paused for a moment to ensure it did not falter. A chink, somewhere, in the palace’s defences. She would have one of the maids go in search of a shutter left open, or a door ajar. Tara wanted the palace sealed, impenetrable to the winter.
She walked on. There was no sound save the soft tread of her slippers. The silence was not peaceful, though. It was, she now thought, oppressive as never before. She would like it to be broken, and with one sound above all others: Mordyn’s voice, ringing from the stone and marble walls, echoing through the chambers. Nobody seemed to be able to tell her where her husband was, or why she had received no word from him. He had marched with Aewult, someone told her, and returned with him to Kolkyre; he was in the Tower of Thrones, locking horns with Roaric oc Kilkry-Haig, another said. Or, inexplicably, had he gone to Highfast, as one rumour had it? She did not know. But she did know that she wanted him back, warming her bed and her heart and armouring her against the chills of winter. Perhaps only then would she sleep deeply again, and only then would the mist of unease be lifted.
Tara’s maids had put scented oils in the bath. She smelled them before she entered the room and felt the hot steam. Braziers were burning here, and oil lamps. She pinched the candle out and handed it to one of the girls. Another took her velvet robe from her shoulders as she shrugged it off, and gathered her clothes as she shed them. She stepped into the bath. They left her alone then, and she closed her eyes, and felt the tingle of her immersed skin, breathed in the perfumes and the heat. She closed her eyes, and tried not to think of Mordyn, and of his absence.
VIII
Anyara refused to think of herself as a prisoner. She stubbornly behaved as if she were an honoured guest, and Aewult nan Haig and his followers conspired in that pretence sufficiently to give it a semblance of credibility. The tent she was housed in was enormous, with heavy canvas walls that were hung, inside, with fine rugs. Wooden planks had been laid for flooring, and a partition raised to give her an almost private bedchamber. She could come and go as she pleased, though the world of a huge and, she could not help but feel, hostile army camp was not appealing. The limits were unspoken, and she chose not to test them. She knew well enough that if she tried to enter Kolkyre, or to stray far beyond the bounds of the encampment in any direction, she would find her way obstructed. The obstruction might be polite, even deferential, but she did not doubt it would be firm.
Coinach took this gentle imprisonment far worse than she did. She remembered a gaol cell in Anduran, when her captors, the Horin-Gyre Blood, had been much less soft-spoken; he saw only insult and humiliation and his own failure to discharge his duty as her shieldman.
“Don’t be so miserable,” she said to him one day. “I don’t care what you think, I say it’s no part of your task to go picking fights with the High Thane’s entire army.”
Coinach sat on the edge of the cot where he snatched brief spells of sleep – though only during the day, when Anyara was awake; he insisted on keeping solitary, wakeful watch all through the night – and glowered at her in a way that she was not sure was entirely fitting for a shieldman.
“You can’t cut me a path out of this with your sword,” Anyara insisted, “so stop daydreaming about it. It’s no help to me to have you moping around.”
“It is unforgivable that they should make a hostage of a Thane’s sister.”
“Maybe it is. But listen to me. What matters here is that we try to make sure Orisian still has a Blood to be Thane of, when he gets back from wherever it is he’s gone. If staying here, or going to Vaymouth even, is what’s needed to keep Aewult from losing his mind completely, I’ll do it.”
It was easy to summon up such words when talking to Coinach, but Anyara was a less compliant audience for herself. At every mention of her brother’s name, she had to crush the doubts and fears that swirled up within her. Only by denying them her attention could she keep the tears from her eyes, and keep putting one foot in front of the other. Wherever he was, whatever had happened to him, there was nothing she could do about it now. There was little she could do about her own situation, either, and though she secretly dreaded the prospect of being carried off to Vaymouth, that sentiment too she chose to ignore.
One morning, the sides of the tent were stiff and creaking with a hard frost. The water in the bowl by Anyara’s bed was frozen. Lying there, bleary-eyed and with a neck aching from the overly soft pillow, she could hear Coinach moving about in the outer part of the tent. Perhaps he thought he was being quiet, trying not to disturb her, but she could hear him pulling back the flap of the tent, gasping softly at the cruelly cold air that must be greeting him. She smiled a little to herself at that. She heard muffled voices, and a rattle of pots. One of Aewult’s cooks was bringing food – usually a thick oat porridge with bread and honey – and handing it over to Coinach. The shieldman insisted on tasting everything that was provided for Anyara to eat before it got anywhere near her. She had told him she thought it more than a little unlikely that Aewult meant to poison her, but in this at least he was immovable.
His expression was grim when she finally emerged to break her fast.