Brian Ruckley - Winterbirth

The horsemen of Kilkry were the best mounted warriors to be found in all the Bloods, but their prowess would count for little where Tegric had chosen to make his stand. A titanic fall of rocks from the cliffs above had almost choked the Stone Vale with rubble. The riders would be greatly hampered, perhaps even forced to dismount. Tegric’s swordsmen and archers would have the advantage here. Later, when the main body of the pursuing army came up, they would be overwhelmed, but that did not matter.

He glanced at the sun, a searingly bright orb in the perfectly blue sky. He could hear the buzzards and the ravens, could glimpse their dark forms gliding in effortless spirals. It did not seem a bad place, a bad day, to die. If, when he woke in the new world the Black Road promised him, this was his last memory of his first life, of this failed world, it would not displease him.

Tegric Wyn dar Gyre rose and buckled on his sword belt.

Mist had draped itself across the village, so that water, land and air had all run together. The domed huts were indistinct shapes, bulging out of the morning vapours here and there like burial mounds. Dew lay heavy on the cut slabs of turf that covered them. A lone fisherman was easing his flatboat out into one of the channels that meandered through the reedbeds around the village. There was no other sign of life save the wispy threads rising from the smokeholes of one or two of the huts. Not a breath of wind disturbed their ascent as the trails of smoke climbed high into the air before losing themselves in the greyness.

One larger hut stood apart from the others on raised ground. A figure emerged out of the mist, walking towards it: a youth, no more than fifteen or sixteen. His tread left deep prints in the mossy grass. Outside the hut he stopped and gathered himself. He stood straight and looked around for a moment. He breathed the damp air in and out, as if cleansing himself.

As the deerskin that hung across the opening fell back into place behind him, the interior was cast into a deep gloom. Only the faintest light oozed in through the small hole in the centre of the roof; the peat fire had been dampened down to embers. The youth could make out the indistinct forms of a dozen or more people sitting motionless in a semi-circle. Some of their faces were touched by the glow of the embers, lighting their cheeks a little. He knew them, but it was an irrelevance here and now. On this morning they were one; they were the will of the place, of Dyrkyrnon. In the background, all but beneath the reach of even his acute hearing, a dolorous rhythm was being chanted. He had never heard the sound before, yet knew what it was: a truth chant, a habit borrowed from the Heron Kyrinin. They were seeking wisdom.

‘Sit,’ someone said.

He lowered himself to the ground and crossed his legs. He fixed his eyes on the firepit.

‘We have sat through the night,’ said someone else, ‘to give thought to this matter.’

The youth nodded and pressed his thin lips tight together.

‘It is a heavy duty,’ continued the second speaker, ‘and a sad burden that we should be called upon to make such judgements. Dyrkyrnon is a place of sanctuary, open to all those of our kind who can find no peace or safety in the outer world. Yet we came together to determine whether you should be turned out, Aeglyss, and sent away from here.’

Aeglyss said nothing. His face remained impassive, his gaze unwavering.

‘You were taken in, and given comfort. You would have died at your mother’s side if you had not been found and brought here. Yet you have sown discord. The friendship and trust you were offered have been repaid with cruelty. Dyrkyrnon suffers now by your presence. Aeglyss, you shall leave this place, and have no discourse with any who make their homes here. We cast you out.’

There was a flicker of response in the youth’s face then: a trembling in the tight-clenched jaw, a shiver at the corner of his mouth. He closed his eyes. The peaty smoke was thickening the air. It touched the back of his throat and nose.

‘You are young, Aeglyss,’ the voice from beyond the smouldering fire said, a little softer now. ‘It may be that age will teach you where we have failed. If that should be the case, you will be welcome here once more.’

He stared at the half-lit faces opposite him, a cold anger in his look.

‘You came to us out of a storm,’ said a woman, ‘and you carry the storm within you. It is beyond us to tame it. It is too deep-rooted. When it is gone, or mastered, return to us. The judgement can be rescinded. You belong here.’

He laughed at that, the sound harsh and sudden in the still atmosphere. There were tears welling up in his eyes. They ran down his cheeks but did not reach his voice.

‘I belong nowhere,’ he said, and rose to his feet. ‘Not here, and therefore nowhere. You are afraid of me, you who more than any should understand. You talk of comfort and trust, yet all I see in the faces around me is doubt and fear. The stench of your fear sickens me.’ He spat into the embers. A puff of ashes hissed into the air.

Aeglyss cast about, trying to find someone in the enveloping darkness of the hut. ‘K’rina. You are here. I can feel you. Will you deny me too?’

‘Be still, K’rina,’ said someone.

‘Yes, be still,’ Aeglyss snarled. ‘Do as they tell you. That is the way of it here: tread softly, always softly. Disturb nothing. You promised to love me, K’rina, in my dead mother’s place. Is this your love?’

Nobody answered him.

‘I loved you, K’rina. Loved!’ He spat the word as if it was poison on his tongue. He could not see through his tears.

‘I only wanted . . .’ The words died in his throat. He sucked a breath in. ‘This is not fair. What have I done? Nothing that another might not do. Nothing.’

The shadowed figures made no reply. Their obdurate will lay between him and them like a wall. With a curse that almost choked him, Aeglyss turned and strode out.

After he had gone, there was a long stretch of quiet. Almost imperceptibly at first, then louder, there came the sound of stifled sobs from somewhere in the shadows.

‘Save your sorrow, K’rina. He is unworthy of it.’

‘He is my ward,’ stammered the woman.

‘No longer. It is for the best. He has too much in him that is wild and cruel. We cannot free him of it, for all that we have tried.’

K’rina subsided into silence, muffling her grief.

‘He’s right in one thing,’ someone else said. ‘We are afraid of him.’

‘There is no shame in that. He is stronger in the Shared than anyone we have seen in years, even if he lacks the knowledge to use that strength as he might. When he was only playing cruel games, whispering in ears and working a child’s tricks, we might overlook it. But now . . . the girl still cries in the night. If he remained amongst us there would be greater sorrow in the end.’

‘Wherever he goes in the world, there will be greater sorrow,’ said a man with wild, dark spirals etched upon his face. ‘It would have been better to put an end to him. Blood will fill that one’s footprints. Wherever he goes.’

There are rites and rituals sunk so deeply into the fabric of a race that their roots are long forgotten. In the northern lands, where the fierce cycle of the seasons rules life with a snow-bound fist, the Huanin have marked the arrival of winter since before there was a written medium to record the means of that marking. Across countless centuries the ceremonies have changed, remaking themselves according to the temper of the peoples who performed them, and the thread linking each to its predecessors has been forgotten. But the ancient theme lives on.