Kanin could not move. His limbs were stone. He stared into those frantic eyes and did not understand what he saw there, or what he heard.

“Sire…” someone – Igris? – said.

The sound freed Kanin. He turned and took one pace, carrying the woman by her shoulders. She hung slack. A slab of meat in his iron grip. But she was light, lighter than flesh; just skin. He threw her. She tumbled, screaming, out and away, down to crash into the thick, dark water. The sea parted and vomited up a plume of spray and closed, rocking, over her.

“Find out if it’s true,” Kanin said to Igris as he watched the pale form struggling to regain the surface. He could see her mouth opening and closing, her frail hands clawing at the water.

“It may be,” the shieldman murmured. “Others came with her. They told the same tale.”

“Find out,” Kanin repeated, the words dead on the air as they fell from his lips.

Igris turned and went, crunching up the snowy track. The woman’s head broke the surface. She gasped and flailed about. Her face was white now, corpse-pale. Kanin looked along the shore. The fisherfolk were standing still, watching, their nets in their hands. When his gaze touched them, they shook themselves and turned away and cast their nets once more. Down below the quay, the woman was crying for help. He could hear her fingernails on one of the stanchions.

“Aeglyss,” Kanin whispered.

CHAPTER 5

Thane

What, then, is a Thane? Some will tell you that a Thane is a proud or greedy man who makes himself a lord over others the better to satisfy his basest hungers. I tell you, my beloved son, that this is not so. Rather, a Thane is a servant. He serves his people, and all people, by standing between them and the darkness.

There is an impulse in this world, and in we its peoples, towards destruction and decay. Ungoverned, we will always, sooner or later, tear down whatever we have built, unlearn whatever we have learned. If there are to be no Gods to give us order, we must impose order upon ourselves lest we sink for ever into a chaos of cruelty and suffering. Such was the darkness we fell into at the departure of the Gods. The Three Kingships lit our way out of that shadow, but only for a time. The War of the Tainted, the Storm Years that came after it: the ruin of that thin pretence that we were anything more than the corrupt inhabitants of a failed world.

Now we have made the Bloods, and we have made Thanes, and we do not yet know whether this will be more than another thin pretence. You will be Thane after me, dear son. You will be heir to whatever I build. For good or ill, you must take what I pass on and shape it and hand it on yourself to those who come after. Such is the burden of Thanes: to take what is bequeathed to them by the past and make of it the present; to hold the present in their hands and shape from it a future for their heirs.

Some may love you, but others will curse you and defame you and be jealous of you. Pay no heed to those who berate you. Pity them, rather, for the failure of their memories, their wilful ignorance of the fallibilities, the vast imperfections, at the root of our kind. Take comfort that you fulfil a noble duty. There must be laws, and Thanes, and order. They are our only armour against our own malignant instincts. from To My Son and His Sons Thereafter by Kulkain oc Kilkry

I

Orisian left a trail of dead men behind him on the journey out of the Veiled Woods. One of those corpses weighed more heavily upon him than all the others combined, but each added its small burden. The White Owls harried them, like wolves at the heels of a dying stag, coming close enough to snap and wound, but never committing to a final, fatal struggle. Men died with arrows in their back, or with their throats cut while they stood watch in darkness.

Torcaill did his best to keep the battered company moving, resting only briefly, never straying out of one another’s sight. Orisian’s respect for the man grew. He was tireless, resolute. But for all his efforts, everyone knew that it was upon Ess’yr and Varryn that their best hopes of survival rested. The two Kyrinin ranged through the Veiled Woods without pause, ahead and behind, day and night. They moved soundlessly through the misty forest, quartering the ground in search of scents and sign. No one – Orisian least of all – tried to give them any commands. They were fighting their own war, generations old, against their clan’s enemy, and they knew its methods and necessities better than anyone. This was, in a way, what they had been seeking ever since Koldihrve, and now that it had come they went about their work with silent, bloody intensity.

The horses, that Torcaill had so wanted to keep, were long gone, abandoned to the wilderness. They could only have slowed, rather than aided, their flight through the tangled forest. The Veiled Woods seemed almost to be folded in upon themselves, trees and brambles and rocks and moss all bent inwards and intertwined in vast confusion. And all dripping wet, suffused with cloud, green and loamy. Not a place for humankind. Perhaps not even a place for Kyrinin, for whenever Orisian caught a glimpse of Ess’yr and Varryn their manner suggested a caution and unease that he did not think even their struggles with the White Owls could fully explain.

The oppressive otherness of the place ate away at his own spirit. Constantly, out of the corner of his eye, he thought he caught some fleeting movement. Whenever he followed such a hint with his gaze, he found nothing; just the mute vegetation, the still, convoluted trees. But there was something here, something more than human or Kyrinin, of that he became certain. The grass on which they walked was that of autumn, not winter. The leaves on the bushy undergrowth were still a patchwork of reds and browns and mottled greens. The tiny streams that gurgled their rocky way across the forest floor seemed to be giving a voice to a saturating presence that hung, untouchable, in the air and the soil. Sometimes, Orisian was almost certain the treetops stirred when there was no breeze to move them, and at night there would be sudden creakings and crackings as if the oaks and willows were twisting themselves into new shapes. He thought constantly, and fearfully, of the Anain.

Much of the time, they had to carry K’rina. The thin na’kyrim was often too feeble to walk, though whether it was feebleness of mind or body none could be certain. The raw scratches that had covered her when Orisian first saw her quickly faded into a dull net of scars, flat across her skin. Her distress came and went, with tears and with kneaded hands and trembling brow. Her eyes darted this way and that, or lay dead and sightless in their sockets; her lips shivered and worked in silent flurries, or locked themselves into taut closure. But never did she utter a word. Never did she give any sign of knowing where, or who, she was.

Neither Eshenna nor Yvane could tell Orisian what had happened – or was still happening – to K’rina.

“Will she recover?” Orisian asked Eshenna when they paused, sitting for a time on boulders cloaked in lichens. “Can you not even tell me that?”

“There’s nothing there,” Eshenna said. “She’s gone. Empty.”

Yvane shook her head slowly. “Not empty, I think. A dead space in the Shared, but it’s concealment, not emptiness. There’s something there.”

“So that’s what all this has been for?” Orisian asked. “You cannot even tell me what prize it is we’ve won with all these deaths.” He spoke carefully, wary of his battered mouth. It hurt less now, though there was sometimes still a dull throbbing in his jaw. The stitched wound in his cheek itched, and stung when he stretched it. His tongue was tender, and constantly stumbling over the unexpected gaps amongst his teeth.