his body and features frozen in a final taunting grin. Ultin lay with a rope around his neck, face swollen and purple. Linden Al Hestian stared up at him with pleading eyes that begged for release from his pain . . .
He froze at the sight of the next one. It peered into the smoke-clouded sky with dim eyes set in a face rendered near unrecognisable by the multiple slash and stab wounds that covered it. He hadn’t been there when Caenis met his end but had imagined it many times. However, the horrors crafted by his imagination hadn’t come close to matching this. His pain must have been unimaginable, he thought, staggering with the sudden weight of once dulled grief. I’m sorry, brother . . .
“You couldn’t save them.”
Vaelin’s gaze snapped to the slim woman. Her face was turned from him but he knew her voice as well as he knew the surrounding dead. When she turned, her eyes were white in the bleached angular mask of her face, the eyes that told of a spirit flying free from her body.
“You couldn’t save me,” she went on. The thin robe she wore blew away like chaff in the wind, leaving her naked. There were no marks on her body, for she had died by a single touch. Nevertheless he could see no beauty in her now. Her skin he knew would be like ice to the touch, bled of all life.
“What makes you think you can save her?” Dahrena enquired. “Is it because you loved her more? Was she the one you always really wanted? Is that why you let me die?”
Her words sank into him with all the force of a hundred arrows, robbing him of strength, sending him to his knees, lips moving in whispered, nonsensical entreaties, for he had no words for her. All he had was guilt and sorrow.
Dahrena blinked her white eyes at him as a pitying frown passed across her mask of a face. “Poor Vaelin,” she said. “Why didn’t you just stay in your tower? It wouldn’t have saved you either, but at least you would have had a few years of peace.”
He breathed deeply, the smoke thick in his throat, making him cough as he sought to calm his racing heart. “The wolf . . .” he gabbled. “It called . . .”
“The wolf.” She laughed, a sound harsher than anything he had ever heard in her voice in life. “For one who shuns gods with such fervour, you seem happy to abase yourself before a dying remnant of the Nameless. It called, that’s true.” She walked towards him, the thickening pall of smoke wreathing her naked form like a cloak. He stared up at her, as frozen as the Volarian army he had slaughtered, staring in terror at the hand she lowered to caress his cheek, her touch a blade of ice on his skin. “It called you to an early death . . .”
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
“Brother!”
He came awake with the scent of smoke still in his nostrils, blinking at Nortah’s tense features. “What is it?” Vaelin asked.
“Trouble, by the looks of it.” Nortah had unfurled the blanket that concealed his weapons and was busy stringing his bow. “And the smell.”
Vaelin retrieved his sword from his own blanket and shook Ellese and Sehmon awake before leaving the cabin. Alum was already perched atop the roof, one hand gripping the mast as he gazed at something to the west. Catching sight of Vaelin he gave a grim smile and said, “It seems I have a talent for finding pirates, even far from the sea.”
Dawn had risen to paint the surface of the lake a pale pink beneath a lingering haze, and it was easy to make out the object of Alum’s interest. A pall of smoke rose from a burning boat about a mile away. It was similar in dimensions to Crab’s vessel but appeared to be adrift, flames licking the length of its sail and covering its deck from stern to bow. Beyond it Vaelin could make out a confusion of other boats, two large like the first, surrounded by a dense cluster of smaller craft. The accompanying sounds were faint but Vaelin’s ears were well attuned to shouts of struggle and terror.
“The Silver Thread,” Crab said from the tiller. He was speaking to Chien, both of them watching the distant turmoil with an aspect of professional disdain. “What’s left of them these days. They’ve taken to preying