She rested her head back against the tree trunk. Looking up through the naked branches, she watched the passage of heavy grey clouds across the sky. Rain was coming. The days after Winterbirth were often rain-soaked in the Glas valley. She was distracted from her thoughts by a dark flash of movement high in the tree beneath which she sat. She angled her head to try to catch its source. Almost hidden in the very crown of the tree, she saw a black bird hopping from one branch to another: a crow. She looked away, only for something to make her turn back. The crow sat there, patiently riding a branch’s movements back and forth. It came to her, with absolute certainty, that this was Idrin, Inurian’s crow. She opened her mouth, and closed it again, not knowing what to do. She looked for Inurian. He was sitting thirty or more paces away. He was watching her. She raised her eyebrows at him, wondering how to convey her news. She could not be sure, but she thought there was the faintest hint of a smile on his lips then and, so fast it could easily have been missed, a flicked wink of one eye as he turned away from her.
The hours flowed into one another. She lost her sense of direction. The stars were obscured at night and the sun hidden during the day by banks of cloud. She shivered, and ached, and slept poorly. Occasionally, Aeglyss would ride alongside her and watch her in provoking silence. She struggled to ignore him, and would not meet his strange, half-human eyes.
In those long, lonely hours on horseback, she found herself prey to bleak thoughts and imaginings that she could not fend off. Her father had laughed that night in the feasting hall, when the jugglers had played their part. He had been happy. She could see his face when she closed her eyes. She could see his slumped figure as well, propped limply against the castle wall. She had not seen Orisian’s body in the courtyard; it could have been there, nevertheless.
Inurian was somewhere behind her on the trail, and a longing to be near him filled her. Orisian had always been closer to the na’kyrim than she had. Somehow the knowledge that Inurian, perhaps alone in all the world, could see into her heart and lay bare the pain and fears she held caged there had made her keep some distance between them. For all that, he had never been anything other than kind and now he was all she had left. He alone remained of all the people who had filled spaces in her life.
In the afternoon they unbound Anyara and Inurian and at last let them sit together while the horses were watered at a stream. She pressed her face into his shoulder. Still she would not cry, but the contact met a raw need in her. Inurian was massaging and probing at his right knee. He left off to put his arm around her shoulders.
‘Be strong a while longer,’ he said.
‘Yes. I know, I know.’
‘You noticed Idrin, then.’
Anyara smiled at him. It was better not to talk about all the other things that teemed in her thoughts.
‘Has he been following us all the way?’ she asked.
‘Oh, yes. He has always been stubborn. It is a trait of crows in general which he has refined to its purest form.’
‘When we were young, we used to tell each other that the Inkallim could turn themselves into crows,’ Anyara murmured.
‘Perhaps you had heard people calling them ravens. An easy confusion for children. But no; the Whreinin and the Saolin were the only races made with the talent of shapechanging. The Anain have no true shape at all, and so cannot be counted.’
‘I half-thought the Inkallim were just a story anyway,’ Anyara said wearily.
‘A pity they are not.’
They were quiet for a little while after that. Anyara found other recollections of childhood fears drifting into her thoughts: the debris of long evenings she, Orisian and Fariel had spent trying to scare each other with whispered tales.
‘Is Aeglyss like one of the na’kyrim in olden days?’ she asked. ‘The ones that were so terrible?’
Inurian shook his head slowly.
‘No, I don’t think so. That was all a very long time ago, Anyara. There’s no need to fear something so long gone. Aeglyss is strong, certainly: the Shared seethes around him. But I don’t think he really knows how to use it. There are so few of us now, we’ve forgotten most of what the na’kyrim knew all those years ago. There’ve been no great masters of the Shared for a good three centuries, not since the years after the War of the Tainted. Anyway, the tales of them have probably been bloated by fear and by the passage of time.’
‘Well, I hope no more stories will be coming to life,’ Anyara said.
‘I hope so too,’ replied Inurian. There was a distance and seriousness in his tone that made her want to shiver. He sensed it, and gave her a broad smile.
‘Do not worry,’ he said. ‘No more stories.’
Soon after, their captors came and dragged them once more to their feet.
A steady rain had been falling for the two hours since the Inkallim made camp. They were spread along the edge of a field of rough grass, with a scrawny copse of alder trees behind them. The few Kyrinin—ten or twelve—who had stayed with the party after they left the sheltering forests of Anlane had taken cover beneath the trees. A scattering of crows was huddled in the branches above, waiting for the rain to pass.
The Inkallim had set up makeshift awnings as soon as they came to a halt, hacking down thin saplings from the copse and spreading capes and canvas sheets between them. They were clustered beneath them now, talking softly, cleaning their weapons and chewing on biscuits and dried meat. They held little pots out to collect the rain-water, and drank from them. Their horses were tethered at the edge of the copse. Inurian and Anyara had been left, their hands and feet bound, to sit without protection upon the dank grass. Their hair and clothes soaked through, they watched the few cattle that were listlessly grazing out in the centre of the field. Anduran was less than an hour’s walk away. The rain-blurred shapes of the city’s buildings were dimly visible to the north. There was no smoke there now; the fires must have been dampened down.
Aeglyss wandered across to them and squatted down, ignoring the rain. Inurian lowered his eyes and stared at the patch of ground between his feet. .
‘What’s happening?’ demanded Anyara. ‘Why have we stopped?’
‘We are to be met by Kanin nan Horin-Gyre. It is an honour,’ smiled Aeglyss.
‘The Horin-Gyre Bloodheir? They’re the ones doing this? Well, he could just as easily have met us in Anduran, beneath a roof.’
Aeglyss shrugged. ‘Who knows why the powerful do the things they do? I am told he wanted to meet us outside the town.’
‘He’ll only kill us anyway,’ muttered Anyara. ‘Probably wants to do it out of sight.’
‘Oh, not you, my lady,’ Aeglyss assured her. ‘He was content to have some of your family taken alive. He can find a use for you, I am sure, or his sister will. If you want to fear someone, I would choose her.’
He glanced at Inurian, who was pointedly ignoring the exchange.
‘Your friend here may be another story, naturally. The Bloodheir may well prefer to see him dead. Unless I can dissuade him, of course.’
With a show of boredom, Inurian looked up. ‘None of the Gyre Bloods are renowned for their clemency. I doubt such as you can sway him.’
‘Such as I? I brought the White Owl clan to his Blood’s side. If the White Owl had taken up their spears against him instead of being his guides and feeding him, how could he have brought his army through Anlane? Without me, he would not now be camped at the gates of Castle Anduran. I think you will find that the Horin-Gyre Bloodheir remembers his friends.’
‘The White Owl will not thank you for what you have done,’ Inurian said.
‘What do you care, Fox?’ snapped Aeglyss. ‘They’ll thank me well enough when the Lannis Blood is gone.’
Inurian looked over towards the dour group of warriors gathered beneath the awnings.