“This cannot be,” he said.

“Look to your charge, shieldman,” Taim snapped at him. “That is where your duty lies. Do not fail in it.”

Aewult’s huge shieldman put a rough hand on Taim’s shoulder and hurried him out of the tent. Anyara followed and faced the armoured giant.

“Listen to me,” she said as calmly and clearly as her ire would allow. “This man is an honoured warrior of my Blood, and valued by his Thane. You will treat him with respect and leave him his dignity. If not, I’ll make such trouble and noise that you will have to bind me, and put me in shackles at his side. Tell your Bloodheir that.”

Hommen was a strange place: two distinct settlements, living uncomfortably side by side. Down on the sea’s edge, a fishing village, with a harbour wall of boulders and a short wooden quay that stood on pole-legs crusted with barnacles and weed. Up on the hillock to the south, an abandoned stone watchtower with a slate roof, and a flock of two dozen cottages clustered around it in memory of the protection it must once have offered. Linking the two, a short, straight track flanked by drystone walls. Where that track crossed the main coast road, there were gates and a toll-house for tithe-collectors, a little barracks and a hall, hay barns and a wayfarers’ inn.

A few days ago, Kanin oc Horin-Gyre guessed, there were probably a good three hundred people who called Hommen home. Now, none. Most had already fled by the time the Black Road arrived. Those who had remained, out of sickness, or despair, or determination to defend their homes, were dead. No one had been spared this time, no prisoners taken. The army that had descended upon Hommen was a more furious beast than that which had taken Anduran or Glasbridge.

Kanin had been at the forefront of the slaughter, cutting his way up to the base of the leaning watchtower, with his Shield about him and a hundred or more Tarbains howling up behind. It had been unwise, perhaps, with his knee still unreliable and sore, but he had needed that violence and danger. Several of the enemy had taken refuge in the little tower, and barricaded it against him. He burned them out, and those that did not emerge to die on the waiting blades and spears were choked by the smoke or consumed by the flames. The charred tower now had a drunken angle that suggested its life was almost done.

Much of the army had pressed on, and was further along the coast pursuing, or destroying, the scattered warriors of the True Bloods who made repeated, if half-hearted, attempts to block the road. Kanin, spent and tired, had let it rush on without him. He and his weary company remained in Hommen, stripping it of every supply it could offer. The forces under his command were larger now than they had been before the battle. Many commonfolk of his Blood had emerged from the ranks of the greater host, especially after his reckless display during the fighting. He had armed them as best he could; given them captains and at least a semblance of discipline.

Kanin could not fully explain, even to himself, his reluctance to follow the main body of the army in its rush onwards. When asked, he pointed at his knee and said it needed time to heal, which was at least partly true. It would have been more wholly true to admit that there was something he found untrustworthy in the mad fervour that had taken hold of almost everyone. It was not just a result of the domination that the Inkallim had achieved over the multitude; there was a kind of frenzy that seemed to him to have taken root of its own accord, and was now feeding on itself. He could catch hints of it in his own black moods and his hunger – sated, for now at least – for bloodshed.

There was another strand to Kanin’s reluctance that he shied away from examining too closely. Each stride he made down this long road – so long that he knew if he followed it far enough it could carry him to the gates of Vaymouth, and beyond – each stride took him further from Wain, and that felt, at some basic, instinctive level, wrong. Whatever delusion she had slipped into, whatever strange hold she had granted the na’kyrim over her, she remained the most important thing in Kanin’s life. They had begun this war together, and no matter what triumphs might lie ahead down the coast road, he became more certain with every passing day that they could only be hollow and meaningless for him without Wain at his side.

So Kanin lingered, and slept in a fisherman’s house on the quayside, where he could breathe the cold sea air. Snows fell. Hoar frosts cloaked the quay. Ice lay in sheets on the paths. In the north, he realised, up on the furthest coasts, in the inlets and bays, the sea would be frozen now: great flat plains of ice over which snow like dust would spin and twirl in the biting wind. The thought made him long, for the first time since he had left Castle Hakkan, to be marching home. There were others who could fight this war that his father had sired, through him and Wain. He was Thane now. He had a Blood to lead, lands to secure. A widowed mother to greet.

They were thoughts ill-suited to one supposedly faithful, above all things, to the creed. The Black Road was on the brink of its greatest victories in centuries. It was a time when the faithful should be exultant, eager for further glories, determined to test fate’s sympathies to their utmost limits. But Kanin did not feel these things. Not any more. It was failure – cowardice, perhaps – but all he truly wanted was to turn back, gather his sister into his company once more, and march away over the Vale of Stones and back to Castle Hakkan. He hung there, in Hommen, suspended; unable to bring himself to march on, unable to commit himself to retreat.

Bands of warriors and stragglers, and beggars and the wounded, moved back and forth up the road like shoals of fish caught in powerful tides. Much of the movement seemed aimless. There were occasional bursts of violence: small slaughters, petty murders. One day, Temegrin the Eagle came pounding up the coast at the head of a column, thundering through the snowbound village in a cloud of steaming breath. Kanin watched him pass with little interest.

Kanin gathered about himself a makeshift household of cooks and servants, grooms and messengers. He had thirty or more women and old men brought down from Glasbridge – slaves – and set them to work gathering food, filling Hommen’s barns with stores against the deepening winter. He was standing on the wooden quay, watching some of those sullen Lannis labourers casting weighted nets out along the shore when Igris brought a filthy, sickly-looking woman before him.

The shieldman had a firm grip on the collar of the woman’s worn hide jacket, holding her up so that she had to walk on the balls of her feet. She appeared to be terrified. As Kanin regarded her, her eyes widened and she struggled half-heartedly.

“Tell him,” Igris hissed. “Repeat what you said to me.”

Kanin raised his eyebrows expectantly.

The woman groaned and tried to look away. Igris shook her, like a huge doll. She was limp and defeated.

“Tell him!” the shieldman shouted.

“What is it?” Kanin asked quietly.

“I heard – I heard,” the woman stammered. She was Wyn-Gyre, Kanin thought, by her accent. She hesitated, and he saw that she was weeping. Then it came out in a torrent: “Dead, sire. Dead in Kan Avor. Temegrin the Eagle and… and your sister. Both dead. It’s become a mad place. But they’re dead…”

Kanin had hold of her shoulders then, and she wailed at his crushing hands. He took her from Igris, lifted her bodily from the quay and held her there in front of him. He could see, in inexplicable detail, every stain and smear of grime on her face, every lash aound her eyes, every crease in her trembling lips.

“Wain?” he asked.

“Dead,” cried the woman, flinging the word out as if to rid herself of it.