Winterbirth (29 page)

Unto death.'

Athol leaned forwards and laid the stained knife on the baby's naked chest.

'Unto death,' he said, and turned away.

Naradin lifted his son in his arms. The baby was crying now. Eilan came and bound his wounded arm.

There were tears on her cheeks as she kissed his soft forehead. Croesan the Thane took his grandson.

He cupped the baby's head in his great hand and gazed down into a face contorted by mounting unhappiness.

'Hush, hush,' whispered the Thane. 'The Blood shall sustain you, little Croesan. The Blood shall sustain you.'

He put all his belief into the words. He meant them with all his heart, yet knew they were only a part of the bargain. The Blood would not sustain his brother's daughter, imprisoned somewhere in this very city that Sirian had built. Croesan himself had held the crumpled message from his besiegers over the flame of a lamp and watched Anyara's life burn away in his hand. He had no choice, just as there had been no choice but to bar the gates of the castle against his own townsfolk when the enemy drew too near. Yes, the Blood sustained its people. Sometimes too it made demands of them that would break the hardest heart, and Croesan's heart had never been of the very hardest stuff.

* * *

Anyara found marks scratched on the wall of her cell. As far as she could tell, running her fingertips over them, they were nothing more than a counting of days: a dozen short, shallow lines gouged out of the stone by some previous inhabitant of the gaol.

Her own days passed with grinding slowness, every minute extending itself as if to savour her impotence.

Even so, she found herself wishing it would slow still further, so that the moment when hope died would be delayed. Every morning she woke half-expecting that they would come and take her to be killed.

She leapt up and grabbed at the bars of the tiny window to test their strength, and found they were immovable. She tried to strike up conversation with one of the guards, choosing a man who seemed a fraction less implacable than the others. He did not respond to her approaches and gave no sign of even noticing when she smiled her finest smile and fingered the hem of her ragged skirt for him. For half a day she feigned illness in the hope that they might move her to a less secure place. She writhed upon her mattress, clasping her stomach and copying the sounds she had heard serving women in Kolglas make when they were giving birth. When a guard came in and asked her what was wrong she pretended she could not reply. The woman seized her hair and turned her face upwards, holding her like that for a few seconds before snorting and leaving. After a few hours had passed and no one else came she abandoned the pretence.

So much time passed that she almost started to believe they were not going to kill her after all. She resisted that thought. The hope she needed to find was a strong one, not one based on an illusion that the world was going to change its nature and become kind and merciful. She had to look after herself. It was what she had always done.

A FAMILY - MOTHER, father and two young boys - was being executed in Anduran's main square.

Kanin nan Horin-Gyre was there to witness it. They had tried to hide food from one of the Bloodheir's foraging parties. A poorly relaid section of boarding in the floor of their house betrayed a few bags of flour and dried meats, and condemned them all to death. None disputed the order that the children must die as well as their parents. The reasoning was common currency amongst the northern Bloods: if a life must to be taken, take those of any who might avenge it at the same time. Still, Kanin had commanded that the family should have quick deaths, their throats cut with sharp knives as they knelt blindfolded upon the cobbles of the square. Cruelty would not have added to the message their deaths were meant to send.

It was not the sullen resistance of these common folk that had brought a black mood down upon the Horin-Gyre Bloodheir. He expected little else; had expected more of it than he had found, in fact. Rather, it was the mere fact that he was standing here in the miserable drizzle watching them die while his true foes were ensconced behind unyielding walls. He had dared to imagine, as he struggled through the seemingly unending wilderness of Anlane with his army, that fate would be kind to them. He had hoped that the head of the Lannis Thane might be on a spike over the castle gatehouse by now. Instead he faced the prospect of a wearing siege, with time as great an enemy as the warriors on Castle Anduran's walls.

He strove for the humble acceptance of fate's course his faith demanded, but it was hard.

This war had been a desperate enterprise from the start, conceived in the hope that fate would favour the bold. The border stronghold of Tanwrye was too stern an obstacle to be easily over-come, as the Horin-Gyre Blood had learned to its cost in the past, but when the halfbreed Aeglyss had appeared at the Horin-Gyre fortress of Hakkan, promising that he could deliver the aid of the White Owl Kyrinin,

Kanin's father Angain had glimpsed opportunity. Although Kanin felt nothing but contempt for the progeny of such obscene interbreeding — and Aeglyss had struck him from the start as a particularly distasteful and self-serving example of his kind - even he had been exhilarated by the possibility the
na'kyrim
offered up: an entire Horin-Gyre army smuggled through Anlane deep into enemy lands, reducing Tanwrye to an irrelevance. Before Kanin was born, when Angain himself was Bloodheir, the finest of the Horin-Gyre Blood had been slaughtered at Tanwrye by the army of Lannis-Haig. Angain's younger brother had died there while Angain lay in his sickbed, prostrated by a wound taken in a bear hunt. Aeglyss offered the Thane not just vengeance but a kind of healing when he promised that he could open a path to the heart of Lannis-Haig.

Out in the centre of the square one of Kanin's shieldmen was reading aloud the sentence. There was not much of an audience. Aside from the Bloodheir and some of his Shield, the only onlookers were a few groups of warriors huddled in their cloaks and a dozen or so residents of the city who had been dragged out to watch. They were poor folk, clad in ragged clothes and keeping their eyes down. They gave every sign of indifference to what was happening in front of them. Kanin knew, though, that they would spread word of Horin-Gyre justice through the small population left in Anduran.

The other Bloods of the Black Road had mocked Angain's proposal at first, not least because the very idea of alliance with a Kyrinin clan was repellent to them. Even when grudging assent was granted, no more than a thousand Gyre swords had been lent, and those only in support of the feint against Tanwrye.

More would come, the High Thane pledged, if fortune showed the way; it was obvious what he thought the likelihood of that was. And a hundred or so warriors of the Battle Inkall had come forward, of course, with Shraeve at their head. The thought still twisted a barb in Kanin's guts. The Inkallim had betrayed his family all those years ago at Tanwrye, watching from a knoll while the Horin-Gyre warriors were overwhelmed, and he did not trust them now. Shraeve, though, had been the one who suggested that not just the Thane but all the ruling line of Lannis-Haig should die, and volunteered some of her warriors for an assault on Kolglas. Aeglyss had again delivered White Owl aid for that attack. However much Kanin despised the
na'kyrim,
his value was beyond dispute. Without the food and guides provided by the woodwights, he might have lost half his warriors on the march through Anlane; the other half would probably have been killed in skirmishing if the White Owls had been actively hostile.

Fate had played a cruel trick in the last days before the army was to march. Life began to loosen its grip upon Angain oc Horin-Gyre. His strength slipped away and all his desire was not enough to let him take the field. So when the time had come, Kanin and his sister Wain had knelt at the side of their father's bed, the scent of his sickness filling their nostrils, and promised to put an end to Lannis-Haig for him.

The executioners were tying back their victims' hair. One of the boys — the younger one to judge by his size — was struggling against fear. His lips were shaking, convulsed by the half-strangled sobs that filled his throat. Kanin saw but did not note it. His thoughts had strayed far from what his eyes observed.

They had come so close to success. The attack across the Vale of Stones had trapped most of Lannis-Haig's strength to the north; the castle at Kolglas was fired and the Thane's brother killed; the town of Anduran itself had fallen pitifully easily. Yet it had not been quite enough. The castle held, and the Thane within waited for his allies to come to him. If Tanwrye had been assaulted a few hours earlier, or Kanin himself been a single day later in emerging from Anlane, there might have been hardly a warrior left in Anduran to man the castle. Croesan might have been caught exposed upon the road between his capital and Tanwrye. That had been the intention; the hope. On such fine margins did fate work its will.

Out on the square, blades cut through flesh. Four bodies toppled forward. Legs kicked; heads jerked in time to a slowing beat. Blood poured over the ground, running in intricate patterns along the countless channels between the cobblestones. Kanin wheeled his horse about and nudged it towards the merchant's house he and Wain had made their own.

Wain. His other half; his stronger half, he sometimes thought. He knew very well that the majority of warriors they commanded feared her far more than they did him. The fervour of Wain's belief in the Black Road , and in the Blood, was a beacon for all of them. Those things burned in Kanin's breast too, but in Wain they were informed by a passion so ferocious its light could blind.

Angain had often tried to make his son marry. None of the brides Kanin had been offered - the fawning daughters of great landowners, even the mesmerisingly beautiful niece of Orinn oc Wyn-Gyre - had been a match for his sister. Kanin could not imagine himself marrying until he found a woman who could be measured against Wain and withstand the comparison.

He found her upstairs in what had once been quite a grand bedroom. The merchant whose family had lived here must have been a gifted trader, for the house was as finely fitted out as any Kanin had seen in his homeland save the homes of Thanes and their kin. Wooden panels carved with hunting scenes covered the walls. Ornate iron stands held flickering candles. There were wolf and bear skins laid out on the floor. They had been found in the loft, with dozens of others forgotten or abandoned by the fleeing family.

Wain was seated before a long, narrow table. She had set a burnished shield up on it and was grimacing at her distorted reflection as she ran an antler comb through her hair.

'Done?' she asked, without looking round.

'It is done. I would rather have had them working on the walls.'

'Four more pairs of hands will not make the city any more fit to meet an assault,' said Wain. 'Four cut throats may yield a good deal more food.'

'Indeed.' Wearily, Kanin unbuckled his leather tunic and cast it to the floor. The light shirt he wore beneath was soaked through.

'I'll have someone light a fire,' his sister said.

He crossed the room and took the comb from her hands. 'In a while. Let me do that. You'll pull your hair out before you straighten it.'

He stood in silence for a few minutes, unteasing her hair with methodical persistence. Concentrating upon the task distracted him from his troubled thoughts. Her locks were beautiful, even dirty and knotted as they were. He could smell smoke and grime and sweat on her.

'You've been labouring?' he asked.

'With the machine-makers. There's enough timber and rope here to make a hundred war engines. It's the hands skilled in the making that we lack; we lost some of our best back in the forest. Still, another few days and we'll be throwing the ruins of their precious city down their throats.'

'Another few days. And a week after that to break down the walls or the gate. Or two weeks? Or six?

Have we got that long, Wain?'

She shrugged. Looking down at her hands resting in her lap, Kanin could see that she was toying with her rings. It made him smile. The habit had been with her as long as he could remember, and he could summon with perfect clarity the sight of her, an ungovernable, independent child sitting in her night robes and doing the same thing: turning, always turning, the ring on her finger. It happened when her mind was working, as if her thoughts moved with such force that they had to have some external echo. She had long since stopped noticing when she did it, and if ever Kanin pointed it out - which he sometimes did, with a studied air of innocence - she would glare at him with such annoyance that he laughed. That too reminded him of when she was young, of her severe expression whenever she had observed something that offended her child's sense of what was right.

'The guards told me you went to see our prisoners the other day,' he said to diffuse the temptation of teasing her.

'I did.'

'And?'

'The girl has more strength than I expected. Not as feeble as most of them seem. She is afraid, though, like all of them. They live in fear.'

'What about the halfbreed?'

Wain's reflection showed her lack of interest. 'I don't think he's said a word since he was locked up. The guards stay out of his way. We should kill him and have done with it.'

Patience had never been a part of Wain's armoury. When they had been children she had always been the one to court a scolding by loosing her dogs too soon on a hunt or venturing out on the ice too early in the season, before the adults judged it thick enough. Kanin knew it was hard for her, this inactivity. That was why she had gone to bait the Lannis-Haig girl. It was why she drove the workers making the siege engines so hard.

'You never know when even a rat is going to have its use,' Kanin said. 'Look at Aeglyss. He's served a purpose. Still, we'll see. After they've stewed a little longer in the castle we can let them watch while we finish the girl. Maybe we should kill the halfbreed at the same time.'