IV

Four men died in the night. A hard frost had come, brittling the grass and casting its white sheen over everything. The ground crackled beneath Orisian’s feet. He left a trail of dark prints behind him, pressed into the cold dusting. He shivered and sniffed as he walked.

Rothe showed him the bodies. One – a guard – lay at the foot of a shallow slope, stretched out against the thick base of a tree. The other three lay where they had settled down for the night. In the evening they, like everyone else, had wandered about beneath the trees, pursing their lips and weighing up the options. They had chosen a place where the ground seemed even, the grass dry, and they had unrolled their sleeping mats, made a pillow of their jacket or shield or a rock. They had lain down and pulled their blankets tight about them. And they had died there, silently, in the darkness. Their throats had been cut. Their blood had made puddles on the forest floor.

Orisian looked into the face of the corpse nearest him. He looked away again quickly, repelled by that too-familiar vision of death, but he had time to see the bruises on the man’s face where someone had roughly clamped a hand over his mouth.

“They killed the sentry first,” muttered Rothe. “Then these three, just because they were within reach, on the edge of the camp.”

“Kyrinin?” Orisian asked dully.

“Beyond doubt. I’ve seen this kind of thing before, in Anlane.”

“They could have killed us all.”

“There may only be a handful of them. Perhaps someone stirred while they were about their work; perhaps they thought they were about to be discovered. They’d always rather be cutting throats in the darkness than facing up to a real fight.”

“It’s a pity Varryn and Ess’yr were sleeping on the other side of the camp. They might have heard something.”

“Perhaps.”

Torcaill was going from corpse to corpse, collecting swords. He paused beside Orisian.

“We should turn back, Thane,” he said. “There’ll be more dead if we don’t. I can’t put outriders ahead of us now. They’d not survive half the day.”

Orisian took one of the sheathed blades from the warrior and turned it in his hands. There were notches and crude patterns scratched into the scabbard; the metal cap on its end had a simple design of dots punched into it. An incongruous little strand of red-dyed string was tied about the hilt.

“What’s this?” Orisian asked, running a fingertip over the string. “Do you know why he had this on his sword?”

Torcaill frowned at it. “No, sire. A token from some girl, perhaps. Or a reminder of some enemy he had killed. I don’t know.”

“What was his name?”

“Dorvadain. Dorvadain Emmen.”

Orisian glanced over his shoulder. Varryn and Ess’yr were there. They had come silently across the frosted grass and now stared at the dead men. Orisian looked back to the sword in his hands for a moment, then returned it to Torcaill.

“Will you do something for me?” he asked Varryn quietly.

The Kyrinin waited.

“I want to know how many White Owls there are. Where they are, where they are going. I don’t want to be surprised by them again. You can move faster than we can; see things we cannot. And you know them better than we do.”

Varryn regarded him with the usual still, unreadable eyes. Yvane walked up behind the two Kyrinin, peering over their shoulders and wincing a little when she saw the bodies.

“Of course he’ll go,” the na’kyrim said. “Never known a Fox that’d pass up the chance to stick a spear into a White Owl.”

That brought no more response from Varryn than Orisian’s question had, but the Kyrinin warrior did turn to Ess’yr and murmur a few fluid words in the Fox tongue. Yvane brushed past him and pointed at the frost-blighted ground around the corpse of the guard.

“They left enough of a trail for even a human to follow, I should think,” she said to Orisian.

Orisian noticed Torcaill’s scowl at that, but ignored it.

“If we all go running off into the forest after them, we’ll end up dead,” he said to Yvane. “You know that as well as I do. They might not even know Varryn is on their trail.”

She shrugged, and blew out a breath that steamed into the chill air. “Probably true. I’m not so sure we won’t end up dead anyway, mind you.”

“Did you sleep badly?” Rothe muttered. “You’re in a foul mood this morning.”

Yvane glared at the shieldman, who smiled as innocently as Orisian had ever seen him manage. The na’kyrim stalked away. Orisian gave Rothe a prod on the shoulder as they watched her receding back.

“You wouldn’t be trying to pick a fight, would you?” he asked. “Quality of sleep’s not the best subject to discuss, these days.”

Rothe muttered a half-hearted apology, and went to help Torcaill move the bodies.

Orisian found Eshenna rolling up her thin sleeping mat. The skin beneath her eyes had a dark, almost bruised tinge to it. Little sleep, and less rest, he assumed. He squatted down beside her. She did not look up, concentrating on tying up the mat with a loop of cord. There was the very slightest tremor in her hands as she worked, he thought. It might have always been there, but if so he had never noticed it before.

“I cannot go on much further,” he said quietly to her. “I have to turn back, head for Kolglas soon. Perhaps I’ve already come too far. Everyone else seems to think so.”

“I don’t. Nor does Yvane.”

“No. But you are only two. Men are dying now, Eshenna.”

“We are the only two who understand even a little of what is happening.” She looked him in the eyes then, and her gaze was strong and firm. “You know that. It makes a difference.”

“It makes some difference,” he murmured. “But you have to tell me she’s close, Eshenna. I can’t just keep marching deeper into the forest.”

The na’kyrim returned her attention to her rolled mat, slinging it across her shoulder.

“She is close. Today, we’ll have her. Tomorrow, perhaps.”

Varryn and Ess’yr trotted past, spears in hand. They wove their way between the trees and disappeared, vanishing in an instant into the forest as if they had stepped across some intangible, impenetrable barrier. Orisian stared after them briefly, then rose and went to tell Torcaill to prepare his men for the march.

They went quickly now. Anxiety gnawed at Orisian, fraying the edges of his temper and patience. An emptiness, almost a hunger, had settled into the pit of his stomach that he somehow knew could only be relieved by finishing this; by finding K’rina, or finding White Owls, or death, even. What form the culmination took mattered less to him than that it came soon. He disliked that feeling, and mistrusted its origins. There was something in its texture that felt not wholly his own.

The ancient road that had brought them this far had lost its struggle against the suffocating forest. It was gone, buried beneath layers of leaf, moss, root and soil. Nothing was left to mark its course save the occasional worked stone poking up through the green and brown sward, and once a cluster of low ruins of to one side, draped in ivy, crowded with saplings.

Yvane was persuaded to share Rothe’s horse for a time. The na’kyrim glowered, and every now and again shot dark looks in Orisian’s direction, as if accusing him of some kind of betrayal, but she made less protest than he had expected. Eshenna rode near the front. Her head hung low, and bobbed in time with her mount’s tread. She did not sleep, though; merely suffered. Whenever Orisian glimpsed her face, it was crunched up in a shifting mix of pain and concentration. Now and again she would grunt, sometimes wince. Late in the morning, she grew still. Her horse drifted to one side of the column and dropped its head to tug at a clump of long grasses.

“That way,” she murmured, when Orisian and Torcaill flanked her in consternation. She waved an arm imprecisely. What remained of the road they had been following curved away; Eshenna was pointing into deep forest.