Janny Wurts - The Curse of the Mistwraith

Each call for the knife underscored the sorrow that clan numbers had been almost decimated.

Quiet as any man born to the wood could cover deep brush, warily as he tried to guard his back, he sometimes flushed living enemies who for hours had blundered through ravine and thorn thicket, lost, frightened and alone. Townsmen caught out of their element who were jumpy and keyed to seize retribution for their plight.

With one valley quartered, the acres still left to patrol seemed a punishment reserved for the damned.

Sticky clothes, and dulled blades, and hands that twinged from pulled tendons did nothing for Caolle’s foul mood. His years numbered more than fifty, and this had been a battle to break the stamina of the resilient young. As he crouched over yet another corpse, a young boy in chainmail so new it looked silver, he cursed the caprice of fate that he should be alive instead of Steiven. The losses of friends that had passed beneath the Wheel had yet to be tallied. Nobody wanted to number the kinsmen their own knives had needfully dispatched.

Ahead, jumbled and jagged against a sky like tinselled silk, the rock-cliffs in their seams and webbed shadows narrowed toward the mouth of the grottos. No wounded waited in the charred glen beyond, only dead that rustled in the winds like dry paper. To Halliron, who walked at his shoulder, Caolle said, ‘You might just want to turn back.’

As begrimed as any clansman, though his shirt was embroidered and cuffed in fine silk and his lyranthe stayed strapped on his shoulder, the Masterbard calmly gave answer. ‘I’ll not leave.’ He pushed on through a stand of low maples. ‘Don’t punish yourself over hindsight.’

Caolle sucked an offended breath. ‘I should have listened. We could’ve scattered and separated the women.’

‘The men would still be as dead. The divided families could not survive.’ Halliron finished in quiet certainty, ‘Your children would have died in Etarra. Arithon told me. He saw their executions in the course of his tienelle scrying.’

Loath to be reminded, Caolle pushed past. ‘Ath. If you have to tag after me, the least you can do is to stop talking.’ But the bard’s tenacity impressed him. Though no fighter, Halliron tended to show up where he was useful. If in this fire-seared abattoir his touch with the wounded and dying was unlikely to offer any benefit, his unstinting service had earned him the right to go on.

The pair moved ahead, oddly matched; the stocky, grizzled warrior in simmering, sceptical bitterness; and the lean musician whose flared boots and court clothing were unsuited for rugged terrain, but whose grace stayed unmarred by the setting.

They came across a slain Etarran pikeman. The man did not lie as he had fallen. Someone had laid his fouled weapon aside, removed his helm, and turned his young face to the sky. Eyes closed, he now rested straight with his hands gently crossed on his breast.

‘Odd.’ Caolle coughed out the stench of ash. ‘One of ours wouldn’t bother. Fellow must’ve had a companion.’

Halliron said nothing, but raised his head and peered into the murk of the grotto.

‘You know something,’ Caolle accused.

‘Maybe.’ Halliron pressed on.

After the fifth such corpse, this one a clansman’s, the discrepancy became irksome. Caolle stopped square in the moss where a dead scout had been as tenderly arranged.

‘You never heard the ballad of Falmuir?’ Halliron asked softly. ‘I think we are seeing its like.’

‘Ballad?’ Caolle straightened. He scrubbed his face with his knuckles, as if tiredness could be scraped from his flesh. ‘You pick a damned odd time to speak of singing.’

Halliron stood also. A warm glint of challenge lit his eyes. ‘And you don’t out of reflex view every man you meet, and measure his potential as a fighter?’

‘That’s different.’ Caolle sighed. ‘Maybe not.’ He rechecked the hang of his sword and his knives, and stalked from the riverbed into shadow. ‘Then what should I know about Falmuir?’

‘That two cities took arms over marriage rights to an heiress.’ Halliron slowed to negotiate a wash of dry river pebbles where a misstep could easily turn an ankle. ‘The girl,’ he resumed, ‘had a seer’s gift. She begged her guardian to allow her to wed an uninvolved suitor as compromise, and to forfeit her rights of inheritance. For greed and for power her wishes were refused. A war resulted, with losses very like this one.’

Caolle led deeper into the defile, his disgust rendered bodiless in full gloom. ‘These Etarrans had only to mind their manners and stay home. Their city was never assaulted.’

Which truth could be argued, from the viewpoint of townsmen terrorized by shadows they could hardly be expected to know were harmless. Cut off ahead of his conclusion, Halliron pondered the clan captain’s impatience. ‘You suspect another treachery lies ahead?’

‘What else?’ The defile narrowed. Sturdy, as silent in motion as a predator, Caolle drew his knife. With the river fallen behind, the thrash of white waters diminished. In darkness now humid with dew the casualties lay thick on the earth. Clansman and foe alike were arrayed in still rows, head to feet aligned north to south and weapons pulled clear of folded hands.

Caolle checked each one anyway to ascertain no body still breathed.

Above the soft scrape of his bootsoles, Halliron said, ‘You won’t find what you think.’

‘So we’ll see.’ Nettled as a wolf over a disturbed cache, Caolle adhered to his wariness.

Cautioned by the angle of the captain’s shoulders, Halliron let ballads and conversation both lapse. The ravine they trod held an unsettled feel. Where deer should have bounded from their watering, the song of the crickets rang unpartnered. Here only bats flitted and swooped erratic circles between the scarred walls of the rimrocks.

And then between steps the mosses that cushioned the trailbed were seared to papery dryness. Trees became fire-stripped skeletons, while ahead the grotto lay ravaged and razed to split stone filmed over with carbon.

The air hung poisoned with taint.

Inside the ruin where the tents had stood, limned like a ghost in soft starlight, knelt a man.

Breath hissed through Caolle’s clenched teeth. His knife hand lifted, caught back from a throw by Halliron.

His urgency queerly muffled, the bard said, ‘Don’t. That’s no enemy.’

‘His Grace of Rathain. I can see.’ Tension did not leave Caolle’s arm. ‘By Ath, I could thrash him! Why in Sithaer should he bother with corpses while our wounded lie unfound and suffering!’

‘You misunderstand him, you always have.’ The Masterbard released his restraint, and jumped back at the speed with which the clan captain turned on him.

‘And you don’t?’ Caolle enforced incredulity with a whistling gesture of his knife.

Recovered, Halliron stood his ground. The night breeze stirred his white hair, and his face, deeply shadowed, stayed serene. ‘This moment, no. I think it best you don’t disturb your liege.’ Then, his tone changed to awe, he added, ‘It is like Falmuir. “ To free the dazed spirits, and reclothe cold flesh in fair flowers.”’ At Caolle’s look of baffled anger, the Masterbard said, ‘Prince Arithon’s mage-trained. You don’t know what that means?’

‘I’d be hardly likely to, should I?’ Caolle presented his shoulder, his profile like a hatchet cut against the soot-stained dark of the grotto. ‘Killing’s my trade, not fey tricks with poisons and shadows.’

And behind the captain’s harshness, in a knifeblade demarked by a trembling thread of reflection, Halliron perceived the grief of crushing losses: a clanlord gone, and Dania and four daughters cherished as if they had been Caolle’s own. The present was robbed and the future stretched friendlessly bleak. A difficult task must for love be repeated all over again; another young boy to be raised for the burden of leading the northland clans: first Steiven and now, when a man was ageing and weary of adversity, Steiven’s orphaned son.