Brian Ruckley - Winterbirth

‘We’re not what we were, are we?’ he whispered to it.

Igris eased his own mount up alongside the Thane.

‘The others are here, lord,’ the shieldman said.

Kanin glanced around. The remaining forty or so of his warriors were indeed arriving, one by one. They came in an extended line, all looking drained and damp. Their horses were exhausted.

‘No sign of that messenger we sent ahead?’ Kanin asked.

‘Not yet. But he cannot be more than an hour or two ahead of us.’

‘Very well. We’ll pause here, but only long enough to feed and water the horses. We can rest once we’ve got what we came here for.’

Igris nodded curtly.

Kanin dismounted and led his horse gently to a patch of lush grass. They had run out of the oats they had brought as feed the day before, just as they had almost exhausted their own food supplies. Whatever happened in the day now begun, Koldihrve was going to have to provide everything they needed to return over the Car Criagar. And what would they find when they got back to Anduran, Kanin wondered. He spared himself only that one moment to think of Wain. He would see her soon enough.

His horse tore at the grass. The rain was getting heavier; great fat drops pattered down upon them. Kanin shivered. He preferred the clean, dry snow of his homeland to this dank kind of winter.

‘Lord,’ someone shouted. ‘Wights.’

Kanin ducked around behind his horse and followed the pointing arm of the warrior.

There were Kyrinin moving, rushing out from a woodland and on to the flat fields and bogs of the valley. Dozens, then scores. They spilled out in a great wave that flowed over the rushes and through the scrub towards the great River Dihrve. Towards its mouth, and Koldihrve.

‘Is it White Owls, or Fox?’ Kanin demanded.

No one replied. At this distance, they could not tell.

‘Woodwights!’ cried Kanin in frustration. Even now, when he had thought himself rid of them, the petty games that Aeglyss and his savages had set in motion were plaguing him.

‘It must be the White Owls,’ suggested Igris, peering through the sheets of rain now crashing down. ‘They’re making for that Fox camp by the river mouth.’

Kanin swung up into the saddle. Rain pelted his head and back. Everyone was rushing, filling the air with cries and the clatter of weapons. He did not hear it. He turned his horse in the direction of Koldihrve. The future was there, waiting for him, and he could only advance into it. His sword was naked in his hand.

‘The slaughterhouse calls us,’ he shouted. ‘We ride!’

Behind the tent where the Voice of the White Owls dwelled, in a stone-lined pit beneath a roof of oak beams that had been turned hard as rock by time and smoke and heat, the torkyr burned. Through day and night, snow and wind, the clan fire would burn all winter long, tended by the chosen guardians who fed it and watched over it. When spring came, and the Voice had chanted over the flames, and the people began to disperse, each a’an would take away a single burning brand, so that in all the campfires of their summer wanderings through the furthest reaches of Anlane they carried with them a fraction of the clan’s bright soul.

It was to the Voice’s tent that the band of warriors brought Aeglyss the na’kyrim , bound and gagged by thongs of leather. They tied him to a song staff rising from the ground outside the Voice’s tent, and sat cross-legged to wait. They waited for many hours. The sun walked across the sky. Clouds, the scattered raiment of the Walking God, came and went. The na’kyrim moaned and bled from his wrists and from the corners of his mouth where the gag had cut his skin. At length a small child, her hair dyed berry-red and holes pierced in her cheeks, came out from the tent and beckoned one of the warriors to come inside. After an hour he re-emerged and gave a slow nod. The na’kyrim was untied and ungagged and brought into the presence of the Voice.

She was an ageing woman, with skin creased and folded by the years and hair the colour of the moon on water. There were others within—the wise, the a’an chiefs of last summer, the singers and chanters and buriers of the dead and the kakyrin with their necklaces of bone—but it was the Voice alone who spoke with the na’kyrim .

They talked for a long time, the old woman and the halfbreed, and of many things. They talked of the clan’s history and of its struggles against the Huanin in the War of the Tainted and the centuries since. They talked of the evil done by those who ruled in the city in the valley, their axes and fire that cleared the trees from White Owl lands, and their herds of cattle that reached ever further into Anlane; of the na’kyrim ’ s life, his flight from the White Owl as a child and eventual return, bearing gifts and promises from the cold men of the north. Through it all, the judgement was being formed, built out of the threads of the past that led to the present. Only at the end did they talk of alliances forged in necessity, and of hopes and expectations betrayed.

The Voice asked him, softly, why the lord whose army had passed through the White Owl’s forest now turned away his friends and forgot them. Why the promises of friendship the na’kyrim had made on that lord’s behalf were now so much dust. The na’kyrim had no answer to that, but spoke instead in the evil way he had. He spoke, as the White Owls now understood that he had so often before, with a tongue that made truth out of lies, that corrupted the mind’s strength and turned judgements inside out.

Had there not been so many of them there in the Voice’s tent, they might have been deceived, but they had prepared themselves for the dangers of this na’kyrim . Some cried out and sang to drown his poisonous words; others belaboured him with sticks.

He begged and pleaded but there had, in the end, to be a reckoning. However long his absence, he had been one of the people once, and he was theirs to do with as they would. The Voice gave her judgement and he was dragged out of her presence.

The na’kyrim struggled and shouted as they bore him away from the vo’an , and spoke in a way that threatened to lay wreaths of mist around the thoughts of the warriors. They beat him with the hafts of spears until he was still and silent. Then they carried him up above the valley. Up and up they climbed, until the trees grew wind-bent and the grass beneath their feet became coarse and rough. They climbed into the afternoon, until they pierced the roof of Anlane and came out upon the moors that formed a borderland between forest and sky. And still they went on amongst the rocky ridges and ravines. In time they began to descend again, and at last, upon a promontory of rock that was closely fringed by trees, they came to the Breaking Stone.

The great boulder—the height of two men—stood alone, resting where the Walking God had left it. The Breaking Stone was patterned by lichens older than the clan, older than the Kyrinin. Over and amongst their innumerable pale green and grey shades lay darker stains. Black streaks that would never now be washed away, they scarred the great rock, running down like the tracks of mid-night tears from two neat, smooth-sided sockets high upon its face.

The warriors laid the na’kyrim on the ground and stripped his clothes from his body. In that muted evening light his skin looked fragile, ashen. He stirred, but they held him firm. They gagged him with a stone wrapped in a strip of cloth. One of them brought out two sharpened, hardened shafts of willow, each the length of an arm and thicker than a man’s thumb. The na’kyrim writhed. The Kyrinin worked quickly lest he should attempt some trick upon them using his secret skills. They raised his arms and held them tightly as the shafts, twisted and turned to force their way, were driven through his wrists. The na’kyrim screamed around his gag and fell into unconsciousness.