“You are my mother’s people,” cried Aeglyss, and the warrior shrank from the cry. “You are my people. My heart beats in time with yours, and whatever mistakes there have been in the past are done with now. Forgiven, forgotten. I am not as I was, and the White Owls shall not be as they were. Together we shall make such a beginning as the world has never seen. All things can change. If I will it.”

Children wailed in distant huts. The bravest of warriors felt tremors in their hands; the wisest of heads spun; the keenest of ears rang with endless echoes of anger and hunger.

“Have I not already given you the blood of the Fox to bathe your spears in? Has this not already been a bitter season for your enemies? More warriors now wear the kin’thyn than the clan has seen in a lifetime.”

There were cries of assent, some dazed, some eager. There was weeping too, in the great crowd.

“If I will it,” Aeglyss repeated, “all things can change. Let your will run with mine. I shall be the strength in your arms, the swiftness in your legs. You shall be the spear in my hands. I will bind the Huanin of the Road to us with bonds they cannot break; I will bend them until their arms serve our purposes. Long enough we have suffered. Long enough we have been less than we once were. Now all the world will be set into two camps: those who are friends to the White Owl and those who are enemies. And our enemies shall fall. They shall crumble. It is…”

He faltered, cast his stare up towards the flat sea of cloud. A thin, icy snow was beginning to fall. The na’kyrim sighed and fell to his knees. His head tipped back and he stared into the bleak, unbounded expanse of the sky.

“I shall be servant to all your hopes and dreams,” he said quietly. “I shall make them real.”

Though he spoke softly, all heard. And many felt belief unfolding itself in their hearts like a dark flower.

VI

The woman was holding something up to Orisian, but he could not quite see what it was. There were scabs on her face, whether from injury or disease he could not tell.

“Please take it, sire,” the woman said. “It was my husband’s. He died well, at Grive.”

She was seated, with dozens of others, at the side of the road. It was a short street, in Kolkyre’s northern quarter, lined with shacks and crude shelters. It had been largely uninhabited until recently, the refuge of just a few impoverished or sickly souls. Now new huts were springing up, made out of scavenged wood. Old, abandoned hovels were once again occupied. The recent arrivals had come out of the Glas valley. They were Orisian’s people, fleeing all the way here to Kolkyre after the fall of Anduran and Glasbridge. Only those without friends or family, without the coin to buy better shelter, without a strong will or resilient hope, ended here on this squalid street.

Orisian took what the woman offered him. It was a simple leather skullcap. He pressed it back into her hands.

“Keep it. Please. I’m sure your husband would rather you kept it.”

He walked on, with Taim and Rothe on either side of him.

“How many are there?” he asked Taim quietly.

“A hundred or so here. There’re others who have found themselves a better place in the city. These are the lost, the ones who escaped with nothing but the clothes on their backs.”

A grubby little boy ran up and touched Orisian’s leg before retreating back to his young mother’s side.

“They’ve come a long way,” Orisian murmured.

Taim nodded. “There’s hundreds more at Kolglas, by all accounts, but there’s not enough food there. And people are afraid the Black Road will take it, of course, so some have moved on to Stryne, to Hommen, even as far as here.”

“They’re getting food, aren’t they?”

“Oh, yes. Lheanor’s paid for some of it. He even sent woodworkers down here to help with the huts. The Woollers have been sending sacks of bread. They won’t starve, Orisian.”

“The only thing they need is their homes back,” Rothe said. His anger was taut, a muscle beneath the skin of his words.

Up ahead, an old man was brandishing a stick at an overeager stray dog that nosed the sack beside him. The dog shrank back, baring its teeth. A younger man nearby threw a stone at it.

“Let’s get back,” Orisian said. “We’re doing no good marching up and down in front of these people.”

Rothe grunted. “I’d not be so sure about that. It won’t feed them, but the sight of you might warm their hearts a little.”

They walked back through busy, noisy streets, heading for the Tower of Thrones. Kolkyre’s northern parts were where most of the artisans lived and their houses, workshops and stalls were everywhere. Little wagons full of timber blocked the narrow roads; beggars and hawkers harassed every passer-by.

Anger was seldom far away for Orisian, these last few days. Everything he saw, everything he heard, was a little coloured by it. He struggled to distinguish between the anger born of what the Horin-Gyre Blood had done to his people and that summoned up by the hostile, patronising games he feared Aewult and the Shadowhand were playing with him. He vaguely sensed, but could not disentangle, another strand that was turned inward: anger at what he feared might prove to be his own shortcomings and inadequacies; his inability to live up to the demands placed upon him.

“We serve no purpose, lingering here while half our Blood is unhomed and the other half is starving,” he muttered.

A man pushing a barrow of charcoal came up behind them, shouting that they should move aside and let him pass. Rothe stopped and turned, glowering. The man almost slipped, hauling his barrow to a halt before it ran into the shieldman’s shins. He spat out some harsh words, but bit his lip when Rothe took a step nearer to him.

Orisian pulled Rothe aside. “Let him pass. It’s his street more than it’s ours.”

The man ran by them, weaving his way on through the crowds. There was an angry cry of pain as he scraped the barrow along someone’s calf.

As they stood there for that moment, withdrawn to the edge of the street, Taim Narran surreptitiously touched Orisian’s arm.

“There are two men, sire, some way behind us. Big. Leather jerkins. Do you see them?”

Orisian looked back the way they had come. He saw those that Taim meant easily enough: two burly men engaged in earnest conversation with a woman selling tallow candles through a window in the front of her house. He nodded.

“I saw at least one of them earlier, when we left the Tower,” Taim said quietly. “Come, let’s walk on.”

He guided Orisian back into the flow of townsfolk. Rothe fell a few paces behind, shadowing the Thane and his Captain. Orisian noticed the shieldman carefully freeing his injured arm from its sling.

“They’ve followed us all the way up this street,” Taim said. “Paused when we paused.” He flicked a glance sideways, at a stall festooned with simple pots and jugs and beakers. “Moving again, now that we are.”

“What do you suggest?” Orisian asked.

“Well, I may be seeing something that’s not there. Even if I’m right, chances are they mean no immediate harm. In either case, we could ignore them for now; worry about it once you’re safely back in the Tower.”

Orisian sidestepped a little pile of horse dung. A mob of seagulls swept screaming low over the street in pursuit of one of their number that had snatched up some scrap of food. In the Car Criagar, and in distant Koldihrve, Orisian had thought that some kind of safety awaited them if only they could take to the sea and slip away to the south. Now, at the end of that journey, he found only more struggles, more uncertainties. Instead of becoming clearer, answers receded from him. And they would keep receding, he suspected, unless and until he found a way to chart his own course.