“If you won’t go by boat, there’s not much I can do yet,” he said to Ess’yr. “You’ve refused Lheanor’s offer of an escort to Kolglas. And even if you reached there, you’d still have to get through the Black Road army.”
“We are Kyrinin,” Ess’yr said quietly. “Huanin we do not know are not trusted.”
“I know,” Orisian sighed.
“We trust you. When will you go north?”
“Soon,” said Orisian, and hoped it was true. “There is a great army here now. The Black Road will be defeated, and your way home will be opened. I will take you to Glasbridge myself. Soon.”
“It must be soon. The enemy is on Fox land. Our spears are needed.”
“We didn’t want to come here any more than you did,” Anyara muttered, ignoring Orisian’s warning glare. “We’d be back in Kolglas now if that Tal Dyreen hadn’t taken fright and shipped us down here instead.”
Edryn Delyne, the captain who had given them passage away from Koldihrve, was long gone now, running across the west winds back towards the comforts of Tal Dyre. Their parting had not been on the best of terms. In the first day or two of the voyage he had exuded charm and solicitude. Everything changed once they encountered a boatload of fearful fishermen, who told Delyne that the Black Road had reached the sea and burned Glasbridge. He turned the ship towards Kolkyre and was deaf to all argument against his chosen course. Nothing, clearly, mattered to him save the safety of his precious ship and cargo. After that, Anyara had plagued him with accusations and invective, until Orisian had begun to worry for their safety.
“It doesn’t matter how we ended up here,” Orisian said firmly. “We’re here now, and that’s the end of it. It won’t be for much longer. Ess’yr, tell me if you want anything. I’ll get it for you if I can.”
She regarded him for a few moments, and he felt a familiar surge of pleasure and nervousness at being the object of that intense gaze.
“Water,” she said at length. “Clean and fresh. They bring us wine. What good is wine?”
“Somebody’ll have to find the cleanest of clean wells, if we’re to get them the kind of water they’re used to,” Orisian mused as he made his way downstairs with Anyara and Rothe.
“Maybe so,” said Rothe. “I’ll sort out some proper food for them, though. I know what it is they’re wanting: roast meat, nuts, dried fish, that kind of thing. I’ll get the kitchen folk thinking straight about it.”
Orisian smiled. His shieldman, once as suspicious and hostile towards Kyrinin as anyone else, had undergone a surprising transformation. He had fought alongside Varryn, and for a warrior that perhaps made all the difference.
“What about Yvane?” Anyara asked. “Is she any happier than they are?”
They stepped out onto the street, into the sharp, blustering breeze.
“Not that I’ve noticed,” Orisian admitted. “She still hasn’t come out of her room in the Tower, as far as I know. Now there’s someone who really is sulking, I think.”
As it sometimes did once Winterbirth was past, Kolkyre’s air in the next dawn had the tang of the sea on it. A salty mist settled over the roofs and alleyways; all the timbers and the stones of the town were damp with it. The sailors and fishermen called it the moir cest, this breath of the sea that drifted in off Anaron’s Bay, its name in the ancient language from which that of the Aygll Kingship, and later the Bloods, had grown. Its arrival in Kolkyre was held to be an ill omen for any undertaking. The longer the leaden fog persisted, the more downcast and querulous would the superstitious seamen who filled the dockside taverns become.
Such concerns did not deter Old Cailla as she made her careful way down towards the quayside, a long yoke across her shoulders. She knew without doubt that a body’s fortune, whether good or ill, depended upon things other than the weather. She had lived more than three score years in Kolkyre, and seen the moir cest come and go hundreds of times. For the last thirty of those years, she had made this same journey every week, in rain and shine and storm alike: out from the servant’s quarters in the grounds of the Tower of Thrones, around the edge of the garrison’s barracks, then down the long straight slope of Sea Street towards the harbour. She had walked this way so often that she could have done it blind, let alone in a heavy mist.
At the foot of Sea Street she turned left and made her way along the row of inns, warehouses and workshops that lined the waterfront. The mist made everyone who was out and about keep their heads down and their voices low. There were oars rattling in a boat, invisible out on the water somewhere, and a few half-hearted shouts rang out. A handful of stallholders were setting out their wares on the quayside, but they did so in a subdued manner, as if they did not wish to disturb the melancholic fogs.
“It’s a bad moir cest, eh, Cailla?” Merric called to her as she entered his shop.
The old woman swung her yoke off her shoulders and rested it against the doorpost. “I’ve seen worse and better.”
“Well, so’ve I. I’ve seen more better than worse is all I’m saying.”
“Fair enough. Perhaps you’re right.”
“Perhaps I am,” Merric said, sounding pleased to have wrung this concession from her. “Look here, you’ll have your pick of a good haul this morning.”
He gestured at a row of pots set along a table. Every one of them was filled with shellfish, bathed in sea water. Cailla peered into each of the pots in turn.
“You’ve many guests up at the Tower now, eh?” Merric said. “They’ll not have tasted the like of our Kolkyre shells down where they’re from.”
“That I wouldn’t know,” Old Cailla said. “All fresh, Merric?”
“I’d not try to pass anything but the freshest on you, you know that. You were buying from my father when I was still at my mother’s breast. You’d sniff out a stale shell faster than I could myself, wouldn’t you?”
Cailla grimaced at him: an indeterminate, gap-toothed expression that might have signified anything from disgust to amusement.
When she emerged a short while later, Cailla bore two lidded pots strung from her yoke. They swung heavily in time with her stride. A few steps from Merric’s door, having felt the balance and sway of the pots, she paused. She knelt, lowering her burden to the ground, and made a few swift adjustments to the knots. Satisfied, she made to rise, one hand pushing against the cobbled surface of the path.
No one paid any great attention to Cailla on her weekly journey from the Tower to Merric’s shop and back again. Had someone watched the old kitchen maid, they might have noted that every time, week after week and year upon year, she paused thus to adjust the balance of her yoke. Every time, she knelt in exactly the same place on the roadway, and rose with exactly the same touch of one hand to the cobblestones. They might note it, but would still have thought it nothing but the habit of a woman old enough that to change anything in her routine would be beyond her.
This time, there was a difference. No observer, however keen-eyed, could have caught it. Nevertheless, it was a difference profound enough to set Cailla’s heart pounding in her chest as she made her slow way back up Sea Street. For the first time in several years, her finger had caught the edge of something nestled in the seam between two of the cobbles. A subtle flick had freed it and folded it up into the palm of her hand: a thin piece of wood into which was cut a single short line of script. Cailla had not looked at it. She did not need to. A brief examination with practised fingertips told her what the message was, and it bestowed upon her a great task in a worthy cause; the final shedding of the lie she had worn for a life all these years.
It was all the old woman could do not to laugh exultantly as she trudged on towards the mist-wrapped Tower of Thrones with her two heavy pots of shellfish.