‘Sire, you never shout.’
He waved a hand. ‘You know me as a humourless man, and yet you persist. Why dog a beast that never lived?’
The woman – a soldier, not a queen – was silent for a time, and then she said, ‘I took upon myself a family I never had. A daughter. A son, or was it two? I gave them the delusion they desired. They called me Mother. Until their moments of death, I held to the lie. What compelled me to do such a thing? Even now, while my corpse lies rotting beneath the stones the Andii raised about us, the question haunts me like my own ghost. ‘What compels us, Yedan, to so plunder the truth?’
He shook his head. ‘Nothing less or more than love, I think. Not for the ones you know and have always held close, but for the ones you may never meet. Or for those who, bearing the face of a stranger, stumble into your arms. In that instant, friend, you draw upon the deepest taproot within you. It has no name. It needs no name.’
‘Then, what do you call it?’
He pondered the question for a moment, wondering at her insistence that some things need be named. Then he said, ‘Why, call it glory.’
He opened his eyes and the scene vanished. Once again, before him was the stark contrast of snow and trees, white and black, raised up in front of a fissured sky.
The man he was, in his dreams – the man who was a lover of men – was far wiser than Narad. He spoke with knowledge and forbearance. He spoke like a man at peace with who he was, with who he would ever be. He spoke, too, like a man about to die.
Oh, my queen, see how I will fail you? He and I, we are brothers in failure, bound as lovers to a singular flaw. And when your day comes, Glyph, your final day of the war, he will lead you, not I. Or so I will pray. Better him than Narad, who will, I fear, take the coward’s path.
In this winter, all thoughts of redemption seemed as frozen and hidden as the ground beneath its mantle of snow.
* * *
Glyph watched the other packs slipping away from the camp, and then turned to the four hunters gathered behind him. ‘We must clear the forest of these invaders. Iron not flint for your arrows. Today, I am not interested in seeing them suffer. Quickly done, a return to winter’s silence.’
Lahanis stood among the small group. She alone carried no bow, no quiver of arrows. He would rather she stayed behind, as he had little faith in her woodlore. Borderswords were not trained in forests. Their world had been open land and denuded hills, the tundra of the north. They had often fought from horseback.
But now the Borderswords were no more. Slaughtered in a battle with Houseblades. Lahanis was the only survivor to have joined his people. He would rather she hadn’t. The smooth, round face before him was too young for the ferocity in her eyes. Her weapons invited the kind of death that was delivered with an embrace. Not for her the distance of an arrow or a lance. She would fight and don the blood of those she killed, and this red dress was one she yearned to wear.
She frightened him.
But then, so too did Narad, his first brother since his rebirth. The visions plaguing the Watch, as much as Narad had told him, seemed to promise conflagration and endless slaughter. It was as if Glyph had somehow stumbled into an unexpected destiny, making for his people a role none sought, and it was the Watch who would guide them into it.
But I cannot know. Does he share my love for my people? He would see us used by the First Son. But we owe nothing to the black-skinned Andii, and less to the Liosan, who now wear the guise of bloodless corpses.
A hunter spoke, ‘We are ready, lord.’
And this! Lord! They had given him a title, Lord of the False Dawn. Glyph did not understand it. He saw no significance in any dawn, false or otherwise. Nor could he determine who had first fashioned for him that honorific. It seemed to have sprung up from the frozen ground, or perhaps drifted down with the flakes of snow. He did not like it, but as with Narad, the Watch, there was no fighting this tide. Something now grasped them both, and its hands were cold and unyielding. ‘Very we
ll. Lahanis, we must travel in silence, with not a single misstep. These Legion soldiers are their scouts, their trackers.’
‘I know,’ she replied. ‘We must be as shadows.’
‘You have stained your skin. That is good.’
She frowned. ‘I have done nothing.’ She raised a hand, squinting at it. Her skin was the hue of ash. Blinking, she looked across to Glyph. ‘You are the same. But I saw you smearing ash upon your faces when first I came among you. I considered doing the same, but then forgot. We are stained, but not by our doing.’
Shaken, Glyph glanced over to where Narad stood, still facing out into the forest. ‘I thought him made ill by his visions.’
‘We are Deniers.’ Lahanis claimed the title as if she had been born to it.
The other hunters were muttering, their expressions troubled.
It was startling that no one else had even taken notice. Glyph could think of nothing to say, no answer to give them, or Lahanis.
‘It was on this day,’ said Neerak, the first hunter to have spoken to him. His eyes were wide. ‘By the spring, lord, yesterday, I saw my own reflection, where we keep the ice clear. Pale, but not as pale as the Liosan. Pale, in the way that I have always been. But see my hands now, my forearms – has a plague come among us?’
A plague.
‘We chose neither,’ Lahanis said. ‘We defy the Andii. We defy the Liosan. We have made ourselves apart.’