Yvane scowled at him. “Her name’s K’rina, if you remember. And whatever has happened to her, I doubt she chose it. Look at her. Do you suppose she’s happy with the way things have turned out?”
Orisian sighed, and tugged at the grass. He was angry; at himself, the White Owls, Eshenna, the world. Even through that obscuring anger, though, he knew that however desperate was his desire to assign blame, K’rina deserved none of it.
“No,” he muttered. “How did she come to this state, though?”
“The Anain,” Yvane said. Eshenna winced at even the word, and the older woman shot her an irritated glance. “We’re amongst them here. I can feel them, hear their movement. And K’rina is a part of it, somehow.”
“And Aeglyss?”
“He has receded, a little. Sunk back into whatever hole his skull has become, since…” Yvane faltered. She did that more often now, running aground on her own feelings, or fears.
“Since Highfast,” Orisian finished for her, and she nodded.
It had come late one morning, perhaps the first after Rothe’s death, though Orisian could not be sure, for the passage of time had become an indistinct thing to him for a while. Eshenna had been suddenly on her knees, fists balled and pressing down into the mossy grass. She wailed, and the sound was so piercing and anguished that it turned every head, arrested every stride. Yvane had gone to help her, but she too was shaken by something, sent staggering. Orisian held her up, trying at the same time to reach out a hand to touch Eshenna’s back.
“What is it?” he had asked them.
“They’re dying,” cried Eshenna. “Disappearing.”
“Who?” He looked from Eshenna to Yvane, frightened by the extremity of whatever had taken hold of them.
“Highfast,” Yvane stammered. Her arm was shaking in his grasp. “Cerys is gone. Oh, he’s too bright, too dark… he’s burning them away. He’s a beast, a great beast gone mad.”
“Save us,” Eshenna had said then, and Orisian heard a terrible, hopeless pleading in her voice.
“There’s nothing but death,” Yvane said, more controlled but still unsteady and bleak-faced. “ Na’kyrim are dying, in Highfast. Aeglyss is there. For a moment… for a moment, there was no difference. He was the Shared, and it was him.”
Ever since that morning, Eshenna had been withdrawn. Haunted. She had been, when Orisian first met her in Highfast, urgent and eager; hungry, almost, to leave it behind and step out into the world. What had happened since then, Orisian thought, had been too much for her. Just a few days. That was all it took. That part of him still capable of sympathy regretted the savagery of the lessons the world had seen fit to teach her. But such sympathy as he could summon up was tinged by a cold recognition that such was the nature of the times in which they lived. If Eshenna was paying a price for her curiosity, it was less than others had paid for the recent twists and turns in the path of the world. He disliked the ease with which such thoughts occurred to him now, but he could not deny them.
They exerted little control over the route they followed. They went where ground and thicket and pursuit permitted, and that meant south and west, towards the towering Karkyre Peaks that they could sometimes glimpse through gaps in the branch-woven roof of the forest. However much Orisian wanted to retrace their steps to Highfast, Ess’yr told him with casual certainty that to attempt it would mean death on White Owl arrows or spear points.
“We’ll be out of here soon,” Yvane said to Orisian, as they sat sharing some of the last hard oaten biscuits.
Orisian looked around, aware that his sight and his thoughts alike were blurred and clumsy. They had been on the move since long before dawn, blundering their way through wooded gullies and rocky thickets. It was miserable, and punishing, but preferable to the alternative of waiting, motionless in the darkness, for Kyrinin to creep out of the moonshadows with murderous intent.
“Out of where?” he asked. “The Veiled Woods, you mean?”
Yvane nodded, trying to break a piece off a biscuit with her teeth, failing, and staring doubtfully at it. “The ground’s been rising under us since daybreak. Haven’t you noticed that the mountains are near?”
Orisian peered up through the latticework of branches over their heads. His eyes had, this morning, been fixed on the ground beneath his feet. He saw now that Yvane was right. The Karkyre Peaks were close. He could see the texture of their sunlit eastern slopes, and of the clouds around their summits. The snow, white strands laid down in the crannies and crevices of the high rock faces.
“No choice but to press on, unless you mean to stand and fight,” Yvane muttered.
Orisian said nothing. He gazed up at those lofty slopes. He could almost imagine what it would be like to be up there – high and fresh, washed by the cold winds, with wide-open views – instead of here, trapped in the suffocating woodland.
“I doubt if the White Owls will keep chasing us all the way across the Peaks,” Yvane said. “Not really their sort of hunt, out in the open like that. Mind you, I’d never have believed they’d come all the way through the Hymyr Ot’tryn. Kyrinin’d usually rather lose a finger off their bowstring hand than risk disturbing the Anain. Whatever – whoever – is driving them, it must be strong. Hard.” She paused. “Where do you mean to go, then?”
Orisian lowered his eyes. “Once we’ve shaken off the White Owls, then we’ll see. Kolkyre, at first, I should think.”
He glanced across at K’rina. The mute na’kyrim was sitting with her back against a grassy bank, turning her head this way and that in an effort to avoid the waterskin that Eshenna insisted upon holding to her lips.
“I’ll have to find Taim,” he said. “I’ve let him down.”
“You think so?”
“I should have gone to Kolglas. We gained nothing at Highfast, and nothing out here.” Again, that quick, surreptitious flick of the eyes towards K’rina. “Rothe’s died, and the others, for nothing.”
Yvane sniffed. She gave up gnawing at the biscuit and put it back into the folded square of burlap from which it had come. “I don’t think so. Not at all. Whatever’s happening here, it matters. The Anain have put their mark on this woman. I can’t tell you what it means, but I can tell you it matters.”
“Enough for Rothe to pay for it with his life?”
“He chose how he died. That’s the best any of us can ever hope for, that choice.”
“You think he chose that?”
“Maybe he chose it the day he took whatever oath it is you make them take. Your shieldmen. He took that oath willingly, I imagine? You didn’t have to force him?”
“Of course not.”
“Then he chose the possibility, at least. Accepted it.”
Orisian almost hated Yvane in that moment; hated the ease with which she talked of such things. But he lacked the will to take issue with her.
“Don’t let it harden your heart too much,” Yvane murmured. “Don’t let it cloud your vision. Hatred, anger: those are the commonest offspring of loss. Doesn’t mean they’re the best. You Huanin are always making the past master of the present. You make yourselves willing heirs to every grievance of your forefathers; let the burden of every loss or sorrow bend your back. It’s the choices you make for yourself in the future that matter, not those you inherit from the past. That’s all I’m saying.”
“My vision’s not clouded,” Orisian muttered, wincing and sighing in pain as his tongue faltered over the ruin of his jaw. He put a hand to his cheek, feeling the stitches there and the angry, swollen crust of the wound.
“You think not. But you should be careful of your feelings. We all should be. The Shared is untrustworthy now. It’s thick with rage, bitterness. Give it space, and it’ll take root in your head, feed off your own feelings. Twist them. None of us is beyond its reach.”
Orisian let his hand fall back into his lap. He was so tired, in heart as well as body. He could not see how any of this could come to any good, how there could be healing at the end of this. Too many people had died, now, and too many wounds had been inflicted for there to be any dawn at the end of this night. He had never understood, while his father lived, quite what afflicted Kennet after Lairis and Fariel died. Now, he thought he could glimpse a little of it. It had been absences. The absence of hope, the absence of meaning and sense from the world around him.