Brian Ruckley - Bloodheir

The ringing of blades snapped his attention back to the sheep pen. Fiallic was rushing Shraeve, driving her backwards in a blindingly fast flurry of blows and blocks and feints. He forced her to the wall of their arena, pinning her against its rough stone surface. His shield pushed back one sword, he parried her second with his own blade, and butted her across the bridge of her nose. Kanin saw the blood bloom, and smear down her face, and once again he thought she must be finished now. But Shraeve ducked down, put her shoulder into Fiallic’s armpit and heaved him, by sheer strength, backwards and away from her. Blood dripped from her chin.

Kanin glanced back towards Aeglyss, wondering whether he would see fear there; whether the halfbreed could see his own death, coming down the track towards him. Instead, what he saw was Aeglyss swaying, his head twitching as if fending off flies. Even at this distance, Kanin could see a sheen of sweat on the halfbreed’s forehead. There was a faint ringing in Kanin’s ears, so faint he could not be sure he heard it.

He saw Fiallic falter, taking a hesitant half-step and giving his head a sharp shake. Shraeve closed on him. Kanin stared at Aeglyss, fury rising in him. The na’kyrim ’s lips were drawn back from his teeth in a coarse grin of pain or pleasure. His mouth slowly opened. His inhuman eyes were following Fiallic’s every movement. No, Kanin thought. No. His skin was tingling.

Fiallic blocked an attack, but he was slow. Shraeve got a cut in at his shoulder, putting a deep wound there. She had blood across her eyes. She should have been barely able to see. Fiallic staggered. He was blinking furiously. There was a look of strained surprise on his face. Inexplicably, he made no attempt to put his shield between himself and Shraeve. She squatted, bringing both blades flashing round in a flat sweep, one above the other, and a fraction behind. The first took Fiallic in the back of the knee, cutting one leg from under him. The second opened his hamstring.

He fell in the snow. Shraeve straightened, slow and considered now. She wiped one sleeve across her eyes, smudging a track through the blood. She walked towards Fiallic. He was rising unsteadily to his feet. Neither leg could take his full weight. He levered himself up with his sword, its point driven into the ground. Shraeve steadied both her blades, one low, one high, and ran at him.

Kanin was moving before Fiallic hit the ground. Intent and purpose had hold of him, and he was pushing his way through the crowd, elbowing people aside blindly. He could see Aeglyss, amongst his wight guards, could see his satisfaction. Kanin had his sword halfway from its scabbard. He heard Igris coming behind, shouting at people to move aside. They could reach the halfbreed, Kanin thought, surprised at the detached clarity of his mind. With his Shield at his side, he could cut through to Aeglyss. Kill him.

A firm hand on his arm twisted him aside. People were scattering, opening up a space of trampled, dirty snow. He was staring at Cannek, hearing the heavy breathing of one of the Inkallim’s great dogs. Kanin pulled his arm free, but Cannek reached out and seized it again.

“Not now, Thane,” he said softly. “Not now. He has his White Owls, and the Battle will defend him, if Shraeve commands it. And she will.”

“Release me,” Kanin hissed. The dog growled at the threat in his voice, but he did not care.

“How many swords do you have, Thane?” Cannek asked. He took his hand from Kanin’s arm, but did not release his eyes. “Not enough. Not today.”

Kanin stared at the Inkallim. The hard, insistent beat of anger was still there in his chest, but its mastery of him was broken for a moment. He looked down, over the heads of the crowd milling between them, and saw Aeglyss. The na’kyrim was watching him, a dead smile on his lips. Clouds of snowflakes swept between them.

“It was him,” Kanin said. “Fiallic should have won. Would have done, but for him.”

“There will be another time,” Cannek whispered. “He has mastered the Battle today, but not the Lore. Not the Hunt. Do you hear me? You are Thane of your Blood. If you die today there is none to follow you.”

Kanin let his blade slide back into its sheath. It was heavy on his hips, its presence still urging him to release it; use it. But Cannek was right. Fate favoured courage, but not always stupidity. He would die, with all his Shield, if he set himself against the White Owls and the Battle here and now. That did not matter in itself. What mattered was whether he could achieve the halfbreed’s death before his own. There would surely be another time, soon, when he could be more certain of that.

“The Haig army awaits us now. After that — if there is anything for us after that — we should talk, away from curious eyes and ears,” Cannek said. Kanin was no longer listening to him, though.

The crowd was dispersing. There was laughter, here and there; excited voices raised. The tramp of feet across the snow-clad hillside, clouds of breath pluming up. And from the Inkallim, only silence, and obedience. As the others drifted away, they closed in, like black birds thickening on carrion, around the killing pen. Shraeve, Banner-captain of the Battle, climbed out and limped towards Aeglyss. Two of the Inkallim who had ringed the stone enclosure vaulted in and moved towards Fiallic’s corpse. This was not how it was meant to be, Kanin was thinking. None of it. This is not fate, but ruin. The corruption of everything we desired. All our hopes. All shaking themselves to dust.

Taim Narran watched Anyara’s departure from a distance, for his captors would not permit him to approach her. The sister of his own Thane, and he was denied the chance to bid her farewell, or to comfort her. She bore it well, he could see, and gave no sign of needing his comfort: straight-backed on her horse, looking about her openly and without faltering. But how could she not be feeling vulnerable, beset? She was being carried off to Vaymouth by those whose professed friendship had become the thinnest of skins across the meat of their contempt. They did not call her a prisoner, and she did not comport herself as one, but the distinction between that and hostage was slender; and hostage she surely was. Hostage and shield, for Aewult clearly meant to use her — and Taim himself, and Orisian even — to deflect, or to absorb, his father’s anger. Anger that might be savage, now that a battle had been lost, an army battered, a Chancellor mislaid.

Anyara left the camp of the Haig army in the midst of a long column of wagons, carrying the wounded and the sickly off towards Donnish. Taim stood and watched her go until the haze that lay along the coast swallowed her up. He had demanded of Aewult that he be allowed to accompany her, and the Bloodheir had smirked.

“No, Captain. I don’t want you and her hatching plots together, the way you and your Thane did. Anyway, I want you to see the end of this. I want you here with me. Your reckoning will come after I’m done with the Black Road.”

To Taim, Aewult reeked of fear. The Bloodheir might not even recognise that as what he was feeling, but Taim had no doubt. Aewult was afraid. And he was angry. Those were his reactions to defeat, and those were his reasons for his treatment of Anyara and Taim himself.

The entire army had the same stench. Like a stockman, granted by long familiarity the ability to read the mood of his animals, Taim could gather all the little signs and shape them into an instinctive understanding of the men around him. Everything — the downcast eyes, the bluff, forced laughter, the men staggering drunkenly about after dark — all of it spoke eloquently to him of trepidation. This army had the splinter of defeat lodged in its heart, and it would remain there, and fester, unless and until a cleansing victory was won. The men, the individual threads within the weave of the army, promised one another that they would be clambering over drifts of Black Road dead soon; they muttered around their campfires, painting word pictures of the terrible slaughter that they would visit upon their enemies. But it was lies; hopeful lies they told one another to stave off the doubts within.