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‘I grieve estrangement, Erekol.’
‘I am more than just a mother. I am the chosen huntress of my tribe. And so I am here, hunting.’
‘The pack fears you and will never give you the chance to kill its members one by one.’
‘They will make a mistake. I goad them.’
‘They are more likely to come at you in their pack, and so bring you down that way. And accusations of cowardice rarely sting the victors.’
‘What do you suggest?’
‘Go to the Azath House. That will be a mess, I’m sure. Some Seregahl will be taken. The yard needs them. The house needs their blood, their power.’
‘Who resides within?’
‘There is no one,’ Hood answered. ‘None for five hundred years.’
‘What fate befell the guardian?’
‘We killed him. Yes, a mistake. Precipitous. Regrettable. Should I meet him beyond the Veil of Death, I will apologize.’
‘By your hand, then?’
‘No. But that is of no matter. The Jaghut may be singular, but we can never deny that we are also one, and responsibility must be shared in all things. As Gothos would tell you, civilization plays its game of convenient evasion. Us. Them. Meaningless borders, arbitrary distinctions. We Jaghut are a people. As a people we must share the full host of our collective crimes. Anything else is a conceit, and a lie.’
Erekol shook her head, even as she straightened. ‘I will accept your offer, and make my own ambush, when they least desire it.’
‘I wish you luck, Erekol.’
She moved away a step, and then paused and glanced back. ‘What vision has found you, and what has it to do with my son?’
‘I see him in the High King’s shadow. That is not a good place to be.’
‘Whence this new gift of prophecy, Hood?’
‘I am not certain,’ Hood confessed. ‘But it may be this. I draw ever closer to death’s veil, and its flavour is, I think, timeless. Past, present, future, all one.’
‘Death,’ she muttered, ‘like a people.’
Hood tilted his head, startled by her words, but said nothing as she walked away.
The fire flickered on, colder now, duller, a thing leached of all life. Regarding it, the Jaghut nodded – mostly to himself. Things were coming along nicely, he concluded. He reached out with his hands once more, to steal more of what remained of the fire’s heat.
* * *
‘Unlocked door or not, Korya, there’s no one here.’
They stood in a sitting room made cosy by thick rugs, a settee and two chairs that flanked a stone fireplace where embers ebbed like dimming eyes. The air was warm but stale, lit too much by the feeble hearth.
‘These rugs,’ said Korya, staring down at what was beneath her feet. ‘Wild myrid wool, twisted raw, the strands knotted. Dog-Runner, not Jaghut.’
Arathan grunted. ‘Didn’t know the Dog-Runners wove anything but grasses and reeds.’
‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘you didn’t know. But then, you’ve not been in their camps. You’ve not sat round their fires, cockles cooking in the ashes, watching the women make stone tools, watching the boys learn the knots and using spindles and combs – the skills they’ll need to make the nets and snares they use to trap animals and birds, for when they all begin their year of wandering.’
‘A year of wandering? All alone? I like the sound of that.’
She sniffed, at what he wasn’t sure, and then walked over to the fireplace. ‘Who’s been feeding this, I wonder?’
