“These days, much of what Tyn says is garbled,” Cerys said. “It makes little sense, though it is all shot through with fear, and with distress. Until recently, we had scribes at his bedside all the time to record whatever they could. We had to remove them. They were becoming… sick. Whatever corruption Aeglyss is spreading through the Shared is stronger here. Poor Tyn is a wick, through which it rises and leaks out.”

“What is it that you want me to hear, then?” asked Orisian. The desire to leave this small, oppressive room with its decay-tinged air was growing strong within him. Rothe was awaiting him outside; fretting, no doubt, at being refused permission to accompany his charge into this chamber.

“Amongst those fragments Tyn has spoken that make any sense, much concerns the Anain. It accords with what some of us have suspected. They are stirring, Thane. They rouse themselves, and turn their attention outward, as they have not done for centuries.”

She watched Orisian intently, searching for some reaction; all of them did. Rather than look back into those penetrating eyes, Orisian stared at Tyn’s pallid face.

“Bannain said as much,” he murmured.

“The Anain answer to no law but their own,” Cerys said. “The rest of us – Huanin, Kyrinin, Saolin, na’kyrim – we are like bubbles of air that rise out the Shared, spin about on its surface. The Anain, they are the currents that move it; they are its ebb and flow. If they wake, if they… exert themselves, we will all be as powerless as the meekest lamb.”

“I understand that. As I can do nothing to prevent it, it seems pointless to fret over it.”

“Then you do not fully understand,” Cerys said gravely. Orisian thought there was perhaps a trace of disappointment in her voice, but it was so faint that he could not be sure. “The attention of the Anain has been drawn by what happened to Aeglyss, by what he has become. We are all but certain of that. His power, his pain and anger, foul the Shared. That must be to the Anain as it would be to us if the air we breathe, the water we drink, the blood in our veins, were all corrupted. To know their intent or purposes is beyond us, but we fear they rise in order to oppose and destroy Aeglyss.”

“Fear?” Orisian echoed. “He’s as much to blame for the death of my father as anyone. He imprisoned my sister. Killed Inurian, we think. I do not fear his destruction.”

“You should fear the means of it, if that means is the Anain,” Cerys snapped. Orisian blinked in surprise at the sudden sharpness of her tone, and the way her words rang in his ears. There was a shivering down his spine, and a tingling in his scalp. For a moment, he was aware of nothing but the Elect’s cold, hard face looming large in his vision. She was not human, he reminded himself; and not all na’kyrim were as restrained and gentle in their capacities as Inurian had been. He almost took a step backwards, giving in to the thrill of fear that jolted his heart, but he held himself firm.

“Last time the Anain rose,” Cerys continued, more levelly, “they turned back armies, drowned a city beneath a sea of trees. They care nothing for our concerns, Thane, and we know next to nothing of theirs. They might raise another Deep Rove over your whole Glas valley. They might slaughter every na’kyrim in the world, all in the name of just one whose life offends them.”

Orisian drew a deep breath down into his chest. His heartbeat slowed a little.

“You’re afraid,” he said quietly, facing Cerys. “Yvane told me as much.”

He saw the Elect’s jaw tighten, and fear fluttered again in his stomach, but he pressed on. “She said you – and her, and all na’kyrim – are afraid of Aeglyss, and of what he might do. There’s more, though, isn’t there? You’re afraid of what might happen because of him, too. It might be the Anain, it might be Gryvan oc Haig, when he finds out there’s a powerful na’kyrim who has sided with the Black Road.”

No one replied for what seemed like a long time. Cerys had taken hold of the chain she wore around her neck. She stared at Orisian for a moment, then closed her eyes.

“Yvane ever thought in such ruts,” someone said – Orisian was not sure who, though the voice was male.

Cerys smiled briefly, sadly.

“Will you come with me, Thane? Being in this room gives me a cruel headache. Perhaps fresher air is what we need.”

He followed her willingly, glad to leave the tight confines of the Dreamer’s chamber. Rothe’s relief when he saw them emerge was evident. The big shieldman fell in close behind Orisian, who gave him a reassuring smile. The Elect made no protest at Rothe’s presence.

He expected that Cerys would lead them back down, through the huge keep and into the passages and chambers cut into the rock of the mountain like the tracks of maggots in an apple. Instead, they climbed. A stone spiral of steps carried them up and disgorged them, unexpectedly, onto the keep’s roof.

The wind blasted away all memory of the airless chamber where Tyn lay. It tugged at Orisian’s hair and jacket, snapped the Elect’s long, heavy dress about her legs. Orisian closed one eye and twisted his head away from the gale. Clouds were surging along overhead, layer upon layer of them flowing across the sky, a turbulent flood of vapours and mists. The convolutions and complexities of Highfast tumbled away beneath them: walls and buildings and battlements spilling down from the keep to crowd the peak.

Cerys, though, led them around the low crenellations to the keep’s eastern edge. Holding her hair back from her face, she glanced at Orisian and then gestured out into the void. He leaned cautiously out and looked down. The sheer wall towered over a deep and wild gorge. The cliff faces beneath were precipitous; impregnable. Further out, ranks of jagged, craggy summits jostled to fill the horizon. Pennants of cloud, or perhaps powdery snow, were streaming out from the highest of them: fierce winter flags. Orisian could see not a single tree, no sign of life at all, save one. A great flock of crows was jousting with the wind beneath him. The black birds flashed to and fro, spinning and sweeping in the gale that roared down the gorge. They were like dark flecks of ash flung into the air by a furious fire. Some of them appeared to be disappearing into – and others emerging from – openings in the cliff far below.

Rothe, at Orisian’s side, looked over the battlements, but shrank back almost at once. He gently pulled his Thane back, too.

“Inurian had a crow,” Orisian said – loudly, against the wind – to Cerys.

The Elect nodded. “Many of us do, here. It’s a tradition, all the way back to Lorryn.” It seemed to Orisian that she did not need to shout as he did. Her voice reached him despite the raging air all about them. She looked out, let her gaze swing over the mountains and up to the seething clouds.

“This an old place, Thane; an ancient place, ringed about by ancient fears. It’s a fitting home for na’kyrim, don’t you think?” When Orisian said nothing, she looked at him. “I think you are a little disappointed with what you have found here.”

It did not sound to Orisian like a question, so he did not reply. The Elect seemed neither angry nor offended.

“Any who choose to live in a place as hard as this must have something to fear, you might think; something driving them, nipping at their heels. And not just here. Where else can you find my kind? Dyrkyrnon, where dry land’s rarer than a wise Thane; Koldihrve, out on the edge of everything. We are afraid. Of course we are. Na’kyrim know fear as well as we know our own shadows. Come.”

She led them into the lee of a turret at the corner of the roof. It took the edge off the cold, though the wind still howled, scouring the stone of the keep.

“In Inurian,” Cerys said, “you knew the best of us. He was master of his fear. Or rather, his curiosity mastered his fear, and him. He was, in the end, more interested in what lay beyond these walls than whatever safety might be found within. We who remain sequestered here are not the same as he was. You might think that a failing, but we cannot be other than we are. Other than the world has made us.”