Campfires dotted the shoreline of the Black Lake, but Ayae walked in the opposite direction, to the skeletal crop of trees behind it. There, in the arm of the largest, sat a man sharpening a sword.
‘Silence is an awful thing to behold,’ Jae’le said to her, as she approached. ‘Tinh Tu’s is one of the worst.’
‘Why do you let her do it?’
‘I do not let her do anything. My sister does what she wants because she can. She always has.’
Ayae grabbed one of the thick, empty branches opposite him. She had been unable to remain in the camp the Saan had made, the silence of it becoming more and more oppressive, until she had felt suffocated by it. It was different to the silence in the Mountains of Ger, the nothingness that had been the prelude to an event that Ayae relived when she closed her eyes. Not that she would forget the camp: it would linger in her memory, like the camp of her youth, the one behind scarred walls and heavily fortified gates. In that camp, the Innocent had stripped away the freedom and the lives of the people who lived in it, and the silence of the soldiers who had come to ask for help was much the same. Ayae had twice begun to approach Tinh Tu to tell her that, but she had stopped well before she reached the other woman. She had seen Ayae twice from the stump she sat on, overlooking the camp, and on both times, the old woman had watched her intently. She did not try to wave Ayae away, but instead seemed to invite her protest. But what would she would say to Tinh Tu? Let these people speak? Let them draw their swords on you? Don’t be like Aela Ren? She wouldn’t say that. Tinh Tu had done nothing like the Innocent’s deeds, and Ayae knew, if the roles were reversed, Miat Dvir would exert his power over Tinh Tu and the others no differently.
‘My sister was not subtle,’ Jae’le said, as Ayae climbed slowly up to the elbow of the branch. ‘But it was necessary, I suspect. Dvir will be under no illusions about his position in the world now.’
With only the slightest twinge from her back, she took a seat. ‘Any one of you could have made that point.’
‘Tinh Tu is the most powerful of us,’ he said. ‘It was hers to make.’
‘That is why you let her do it?’
‘Again that word.’ He ran the stone along his blade. ‘The relationship of my brothers and my sisters is defined by power, Ayae.’
‘They look to you for guidance. All of them do that.’
‘Sometimes,’ he admitted. ‘I think it is because of my age. Because I am the oldest. But it is a strange concept for the five of us. What is a hundred years or so if you have lived so long already?’
‘You don’t think it is as simple as that, do you?’ Ayae said. ‘You, of all people.’
‘I have known my family for a long time.’
‘I know I haven’t, but when I first met you, you were trying to protect Zaifyr. At the same time, you were trying to help Aelyn. When you heard Eidan was with Se – with her, you tried to help him.’ She turned to him, twisted so she could look up into the shadows of the tree that hid all but his shape and the blade of his new sword. ‘You talk about power, but you gave up part of yours for Zaifyr. That’s why they look to you now. Maybe they didn’t always, but you have sacrificed and protected each of them because—’
‘Of love?’ Above him, a shadow shifted, revealing a swamp crow. It was unconcerned by the closeness of the two, by the sound of the whetstone along the blade. ‘You sound like Zaifyr,’ Jae’le finished.
‘He does not talk of love. That’s you putting words in his mouth. But you could learn from him.’
‘The man he is now, or the man he was before? I do not think you would have liked the lessons the man before gave.’
‘He is not that man any more.’ Ayae shrugged. ‘Truthfully, none of you are who you once were.’
‘It is within us all to return to it.’
‘Are you trying to convince yourself? I don’t know if it has occurred to you yet, Jae’le, but we may not survive this. We probably will not. How are we to defeat the Innocent when they could not? When no one has?’
‘We may die,’ he said, a strange calmness in his voice. ‘We may not. We are all part of much larger events and we can be certain of little, now. We are pieces the gods have moved in their ancient war. It is oddly fitting, really. It is how life with the gods was when I was a child. You would be ignored for so long that you could forget that they existed. You would begin to argue that they had no influence upon you. That you were free of them. Then, one day, they would disrupt your life. They would react to something you had done, an event that a god had planned. An act you had been destined to do. Then, everything would be in turmoil. The gods would respond. They would move their pieces. They would fight for control over fate, for the right to define the world that we lived in.’
‘Perhaps we should not go to Ranan.’
‘We would abandon Zaifyr, if we did not,’ he said, the stone running along the blade in a second, inhuman voice. ‘Would you truly do that?’
She thought of the Innocent, of the painting on Ger’s leg, of her fear in it. ‘If that was the cost of ending the war,’ Ayae said, exploring the idea despite herself, feeling a revulsion for it even as she said it. ‘What if it led to something better?’
‘Who is to define what will be better for the world?’
‘Zaifyr would say the price is fair.’
‘But I would not pay it,’ he said, ‘and neither would you. Not even in your fear.’
A tremor ran through the broken mountains, the sound not of a new quake, but of rock and stone settling into a new position. On her branch, Ayae wondered just what fate had been lost, and what fate had been written.