Winterbirth Read Free Page B

for all that we have tried.'
    K'rina subsided into silence, muffling her grief.
    'He's right in one thing,' someone else said. 'We are afraid of him.'
    'There is no shame in that. He is stronger in the Shared than anyone we have seen in years, even if he lacks the knowledge to use that strength as he might. When he was only playing cruel games, whispering in ears and working a child's tricks, we might overlook it. But now . . . the girl still cries in the night. If he remained amongst us there would be greater sorrow in the end.'
    'Wherever he goes in the world, there will be greater sorrow,' said a man with wild, dark spirals etched upon his face. 'It would have been better to put an end to him. Blood will fill that one's footprints.
    Wherever he goes.'

Chapter 1
    Winterbirth
The Third Age: Year 1102
    THERE ARE RITES and rituals sunk so deeply into the fabric of a race that their roots are long forgotten. In the northern lands, where the fierce cycle of the seasons rules life with a snow-bound fist, the Huanin have marked the arrival of winter since before there was a written medium to record the means of that marking. Across countless centuries the ceremonies have changed, remaking themselves according to the temper of the peoples who performed them, and the thread linking each to its predecessors has been forgotten. But the ancient theme lives on.
    Before there were kingships, the cruel tribes of the Tan Dihrin practised bloody rites to win the protection of the Gods against ice and storm. When the Kings rose in Dun Aygll, their subjects in the north kept to the old ways though they forgot what they meant, and though there were no Gods left to witness their rituals. The kingdom fell, as the works of mortals do, but through all the chaos that came after, through the turbulent birthing of the Bloods, the seasons turned as they always had and the people of the north remembered that the turning must be marked.
    Thus, to the Kilkry and Lannis Bloods, and to the Bloods of the Black Road in the farther north, there is a night late in the year that stands, more than any other, for the passage of time. On that night the world passes into cold and darkness to await its reawakening in the following spring. It is a night of mourning, but it is a celebration also, for in the slumbering of the world that is winter lies the promise of light and life's return.
    From Hallantyr's Sojourn
I
    A HORN SOUNDED clear and sharp across the blue autumnal sky. The baying of hounds wound itself around the note like ivy on a tree. Orisian nan Lannis-Haig turned his head this way and that, trying to fix the source of the summons. His cousin Naradin was ahead of him.
    'That way,' Naradin said, twisting in his saddle and pointing east. 'They have something.'
    'Some distance away,' Orisian said.
    Naradin's horse was stirring beneath him, stepping sideways and stretching its neck. It knew what the sound meant. It was bred to the hunt, and the horn pulled at it. Naradin jabbed the butt of his boar spear at the ground in frustration.
    'Where are the cursed dogs we were following?' he demanded. 'Those useless beasts have led us nowhere.'
    'They must have had some scent to bring us this way,' said Rothe placidly. The elder of Orisian's two shieldmen was the only one to have kept pace with him and his cousin over the last mile or so.
    The forest of Anlane was open in these parts - good hunting country — but still it was forest enough to scatter a party once the chase was on.
    If the hounds had stayed on a single course it would have been different, Orisian reflected. Instead, the pack had divided. It was only bad luck that he and Naradin had followed the wrong dogs. Orisian could not summon up much regret. He knew his cousin would feel otherwise, though. As of four days ago Naradin was a father, and tradition said he must put meat killed with his own hand on the table on the occasion of the baby's first Winterbirth. For a farmer or herder that might mean