“What of the White Owls?” Wain asked. “Cannek claims his Hunt Inkallim have seen bands of them coming back out of the Car Criagar these last few nights, crossing the valley.”
Kanin shrugged. “I stayed clear of the wights as much as I could. They fought the Fox at Koldihrve. Won, I think, but I didn’t linger. How do things stand here?”
“At our high tide. We’ve reached the outermost limit of what is possible. I’ve less than a thousand swords left.”
Kanin rubbed his eyes. It had been far too long since he had slept properly. Even now, beside a vigorous fire, he could still feel the cold and damp of the Dihrve valley and the high Car Criagar in his limbs; in his heart, almost.
“No word from Tanwrye?”
“It is held against us still.”
“And Ragnor oc Gyre has not seen fit to march to our aid?”
“There has been no reply to our messages.”
“We’re spent, then.” Kanin set aside his bowl and stared at the dancing flames. “As you say, it’s the high tide of our good fortune.”
“Shraeve has set the townsfolk to building a ditch and dyke across the road from Kolglas.”
Kanin grunted. “She thinks we can hold the road against all the armies of Kilkry-Haig? With a thousand swords?”
“Who knows what she thinks? She tells me nothing any more. It hardly matters. Fate has given us this much; no more or less.” Wain’s eyes, as she regarded her brother, were clear, placid. “It would not break my heart to come to the end of my Road here, like this. The Book of Lives has been as kind to us as we could have hoped, has it not? And we have followed the course it laid out for us willingly. Nothing more could be asked of us.”
Kanin had wanted more. He had wanted their victories to be only the first, opening the way for all the armies of the other Bloods; he had wanted the Lannis line extinguished, in the name of his father. He had wanted to be able to die without regrets. Was that desire truly such a failing?
Wain put more wood on the fire: the spokes of a cartwheel that would never be made.
“I am minded to wait here,” she said quietly. “Wait for our enemies to come and face us. I do not think we are fated, you and I, to limp back to Hakkan and die in our beds. If I’m right in that, I will die content.”
Kanin stared at the orange heart of the fire. He had no great longing to see Hakkan again. It would be a poor kind of ending to struggle back across the Vale of Stones, defeated. More life would be no great boon after that.
“Yes,” he murmured. “Content.”
He wanted it to be true, but his heart remained uneasy.
The next morning was overcast. The snow had stopped in the night, and soon after dawn a thaw of sorts had begun. Kanin and Wain went out on the road south along the coast, at the head of thirty riders. Puddles lay all along the track. The sea lapped against the rocks and stony strands that lined the shore. Streams ran gurgling through culverts under the road, hastened by melt water.
They found Shraeve a little way outside Glasbridge. She and two dozen of her Inkallim were watching while enslaved townsfolk laboured. A ditch had been cut from the top of a shingle beach, across the road and on for two hundred or more paces inland to a rocky, wooded spur.
Running his eyes over the crowds of sullen labourers, and the low bund they were piling up with spoil from the ditch, Kanin recognised that Shraeve had chosen a good place for her works. Inland, low wooded hills and hummocks – outliers of the great mass of Anlane, further to the south – would hamper any marching army and provide ample opportunities for ambush. Anyone seeking to enter the Glas valley would have no choice but to attempt that rough ground or fight their way over Shraeve’s barrier.
“It’s as good a place as any to make a stand,” Igris, leader of Kanin’s Shield, muttered.
“It would be, if we had the strength to hold it,” Kanin said, and nudged his horse on.
Shraeve herself was standing atop the rampart of sodden earth. She had her back to them as Kanin and his company drew near, her two sheathed swords crossed over her spine. He noticed that Wain drifted away, allowing her horse to slow and veer down onto the shore. Another sign, he assumed, that her patience with the ravens of the Battle was exhausted.
Shraeve turned. She looked down on Kanin with unreadable eyes.
“Welcome back, Thane.”
“You have been busy,” he said, encompassing the length of the embankment with a sweep of his arm.
She nodded. “We have many hands to put to the task, unwilling as they are.”
“What will prevent them riding around your little wall, when they come?” he asked, indicating the wooded rising ground to the left. “It may be difficult for them, but we haven’t the numbers to stop them.”
“I will settle for making it difficult,” Shraeve said, with a hint of contempt. “I expect nothing more than to make the attempt, and let fate decide. Have you come to tell me that is not enough for you? Do you mean to crawl back into the north?”
There was nothing new in her arrogance, Kanin thought – that was, after all, an attribute shared by every one of the Inkallim – but she had acquired a brazen, confrontational energy. Wain had warned him that since Anduran, Shraeve had been growing ever more assertive, more willing to challenge any authority that was not her own.
“No,” he said, “that is not what I came to tell you, Shraeve.”
He pointed at a nearby woman, struggling to carry a small collection of rocks cradled in her arms, slipping on the mud facing of the bank.
“These people are mine. Glasbridge is mine. These are Horin-Gyre lands, and this is a Horin-Gyre war, unless and until Ragnor oc Gyre claims it for his own. So, I thank you for your efforts in breaking this ground and raising this wall, but you may leave the task to us now. We will finish it. We will hold it.”
Shraeve glared at him. She was fierce, this raven, but Kanin was resolute. If there was to be no glorious and lasting triumph in all of this, he could at least ensure that the glory of honest, faithful defeat belonged to Horin-Gyre. His Blood had earned that much.
The Inkallim sprang nimbly down from the bund and stood beside Kanin’s horse. She clapped her hands together, shaking dirt from them; she must have been digging and building herself.
“As you wish. From the Children of the Hundred to the Horin-Gyre Blood, this ditch, this bank: a gift. Finish it quickly, Thane. The Hunt killed scouts creeping up from Kolglas in the night.”
She waved an arm above her head and began walking back up the road towards Glasbridge. From all along the length of the embankment, the other Inkallim silently left their posts and began to follow her.
“At least you will not have to hold it for long,” Shraeve called over her shoulder.
“What does that mean?” Kanin shouted after her as Wain rode up from the beach to his side.
“Have you not heard? Your messengers must be slow. The Battle is marching, coming to join you. The air about your head will be thick with ravens soon. We will see then, Kanin oc Horin-Gyre, whose war this is.”
Stone walls ringed Tanwrye, and from them ramparts curved out across the southern entrance to the Stone Vale like the outstretched fingers of a monitory hand. Their turrets, battlements and ditches blocked almost all the width of the pass. Tiny outlying forts studded the hillsides around, sentinels to watch over the track and the turbulent river that ran side by side out of the north. It was a formidable defence, and more than once it had proved itself against the Black Road. This time it was being tested to its limits. Most of the outer ramparts, and all of the isolated fortlets, had already fallen.
Iavin Helt dar Lannis-Haig was cold, down to the marrow of his bones. He had been at his post on the north tower of Tanwrye’s wall since not long after nightfall. It had been snowing for most of that time. Winterbirth was long gone, and the peaks within sight of Tanwrye had been cloaked in their white winter vestments for days. Iavin hunched his shoulders, pushing the fur collar of his cape up around his ears. His hunger made it all worse. Staring out at the fires of the Black Road army, he could not help but wonder whether the besiegers fared as poorly as Tanwrye’s defenders. By rights they should be even hungrier, colder and wearier than Iavin and his comrades, but in all the weeks of the siege there had been no sign of a weakening in the will of their enemy. Rather, it was Lannis-Haig hearts that were flagging.