Orisian rapped on the door.

“I am resting,” Yvane shouted from within.

“Not true,” whispered Hammarn. “She’s not been sleeping, not restful at all. I know. She told me.”

“Let us come and talk with you,” Orisian said through the thick door. “You’d be doing us a favour. We need a hiding place to avoid a tiresome feast.”

“Who’s we?” Yvane asked, each word thick with suspicion.

“Me and Anyara. And Hammarn. Surely you don’t mean to leave him sitting outside this door all night?”

There was an extended silence. Orisian shrugged at Anyara, noting the frown of irritation that had already settled on his sister’s brow. He hoped that she and Yvane could resist the urge to set about one another, but even if they didn’t it could hardly be more unpleasant than Aewult nan Haig’s company.

“No one else, then,” Yvane called by way of grudging permission.

Hammarn clapped Orisian roughly on the shoulder.

“Very persuasive,” he grinned. “Always thought you stood most high in the lady’s affections. Mind you… not sure she has affections, in truth.”

Yvane was sitting in a broad bed, propped up against some voluminous pillows. She looked tired. Her eyes, almost as perfectly grey as a Kyrinin’s, were sluggish. Her reddish brown hair had lost some of its former sheen.

Hammarn went straight to the side of her bed and held out the piece of wood he had been carving. Yvane had to reach clumsily across her body to take it: her nearer arm was still weak, having been skewered by a crossbow bolt during their escape from Koldihrve

“Made you a woodtwine, dear lady,” said Hammarn. “Of Kulkain’s first entry into Kolkyre as Thane, you’ll see. He has Alban of Ist Norr in chains there, if you look close. Bit crude, perhaps. Not my finest.”

“It’s a welcome gift in any case, Hammarn,” Yvane said. Orisian often thought she exhibited far more patience and gentleness in her dealings with Hammarn than with anyone else. It was almost as if she expended all her limited stores of those sentiments on the old na’kyrim, leaving none for anyone else.

“How are you feeling?” Orisian asked.

“How should I be feeling? I’m stuck at the top of a tower in Kolkyre – where they burned na’kyrim, by the way, before Grey Kulkain came to power. My right arm’s all but useless because some madman, or madwoman for all I know, took it into their head to shoot me with a crossbow. And my head feels like it’s full of woodpeckers, chipping away at the inside of my skull trying to get out.”

“No better, then?” Anyara asked. Yvane scowled at her.

Orisian noted a tray of food lying apparently forgotten on a table by the shuttered window. He held a hand over the bowl of soup. It had gone cold.

“Don’t tell me you’re refusing food as well?” he said.

“I’ve no appetite,” Yvane muttered.

“Nothing’s changed?” Orisian asked, seating himself on the end of the bed. “In the Shared, I mean?”

“No.” Yvane started to fold her arms, but winced and thought better of it. “No change.”

“That’s true, that’s true,” said Hammarn. “The taint can’t enter this quiet head, can’t stir the thoughts in this bucket.” He rapped his knuckles against his forehead. “But even Hammarn can smell its stink.”

“There you are, you see,” said Yvane as if Hammarn’s words explained everything. It took a long questioning look from Orisian to induce her to say anything more. “It’s like a never-ending echo. That first night we spent in this town, the… the howl that filled the Shared, that woke me; it’s the echo of that. Anger, pain, bitterness, all mixed up, all inside my head. And none of it mine.”

“Not good, not good,” murmured Hammarn. He was pacing up and down now, his hands clasped behind his back.

“Couldn’t have put it better myself,” Yvane said.

“Not yours,” Anyara said. “His, then? Aeglyss?”

“I’ve told you: I can’t be certain.”

“But you think it’s him, don’t you?” Anyara persisted. “Anger, pain, bitterness. That’s how Inurian talked about what he saw inside Aeglyss.”

Yvane sighed and looked down at Hammarn’s woodtwine where it lay in her lap.

“I don’t know,” she said wearily. “I only glimpsed the edges of whatever it was that Inurian saw. But yes, it might be him. If it is. .. well, if he’s still in league with the Black Road I think they might be in for a nasty surprise. It’s frightening to think what it must be like inside his head now, if his is the sickness that’s afflicting the Shared.”

Hammarn had paused by the window, and pulled back one of the shutters.

“Look,” he murmured. “Little fires.”

Orisian joined him and looked down onto the dark gardens beneath them. A few torches were burning there, their bearers arrayed in a circle. In their orange light, two men, naked to the waist, were wrestling on the grass. Orisian could hear shouts of encouragement from the onlookers, made soft and faint by distance and the breeze.

It was probably Aewult’s men, absenting themselves from the feast, hot with drink and the prospect of battle. They had an angry, arrogant hunger for revelry, the thousands of warriors the Bloodheir had brought north with him. They were barred from leaving their great camps outside the city except in small groups, but Orisian had already heard, from Rothe, rumours of thievery and drunkenness within Kolkyre. They took their mood from Aewult, perhaps, and there seemed to be nothing gentle in him.

“Lovely friends we have,” Anyara said, looking over Orisian’s shoulder.

“We can only hope our enemies justify our allies,” Orisian murmured. He turned thoughtfully back towards Yvane.

“You can find out whether it’s Aeglyss, can’t you?” he asked her.

The na’kyrim winced. He could see that she knew what he meant, and that her reluctance was instinctive. Her hand rose defensively, unconsciously towards her injured shoulder.

“You’ve said that whatever’s happening in the Shared is… dangerous,” he persisted. “You’ve said it might be Aeglyss. Don’t we need to know? He hounded Inurian to his death. He helped the Inkallim take Kolglas. He’s our enemy. One of them, at least.”

“You wouldn’t ask that if you understood,” Yvane said. “No reason why you should, of course. Last time I reached out through the Shared to Aeglyss, he drove me off. It… hurt.”

“I know. But…” Orisian reached for words, finding nothing to quite express what he felt. “Something’s changed. You’ve said it yourself. We – no – you might be the only person here who can say what it is.”

“It’s like an ocean, the Shared,” Yvane said. She was unusually passive. Distant. “What’s in it now is… poison. You’re asking me to swim out into a poisoned sea; breathe its waters.”

“Only to arm ourselves against our enemies. To know what we face. Aewult and his thousands of warriors: they think they’re the answer to every question. They think nothing else matters. Maybe they’re wrong.”

“If I do it,” muttered Yvane, recovering a touch of her customary bristle, “it’ll be for me. It’ll be because Inurian was a wise man who probably didn’t deserve to die, and because he saw threat in Aeglyss. Not for Thanes or Bloodheirs or armies; not to help you Huanin kill each other in ever greater numbers.”

“You will do it, then?” Anyara said, with a soft smile.

The three of them watched in silence while Yvane willed herself into slumber: Hammarn sitting nervously on the end of the bed, Orisian and Anyara leaning against the frame of the window. There was nothing obviously amiss with the sleep into which Yvane fell. Her face slackened, her eyelids trembled minutely. She looked gentle in her repose, as she never quite did when awake.

Orisian watched intently, aware that for all the apparent mundanity of the scene he was witnessing something remarkable. Yvane was right, of course, when she said he did not understand this. No human could. The Shared was the sole preserve of na’kyrim. He did not envy them that. Few of the mighty na’kyrim of legend, who wielded great powers drawn from the Shared, had profited by it in the end. While they lived, though, they had done enough harm to make those of his own time outcasts, feared and loathed as much for the mystery they embodied as for the mixed blood that ran in their veins. If the Shared was a gift, it came at a heavy price.