On his fifteenth night, he didn’t sleep a wink. Restless, he tossed and turned until the early hours, when he finally rose and slipped out of the castle under the dawn stars.

In this hour, the air was fresh, cold, laden with smoke from the house fires and the residue of cooking. The faint metallic tang of snow tingled on Sorrel's tongue, and mingled with the musty smell of damp thatch and the reek of the middens outside the walls. A gentle breeze came from the darkness, though the sky was tinged with rose, a line of silver above it, hanging above a shadowed horizon still cloaked in the black of a moonless night. 

He buttoned his coat against the chill, and pulled his boot laces taut under his knees, intending a walk through the streets to the sheep-pens, with the hope of finding a few Tethiri among the tents. Most of them who had come for the Midwinter Dark had departed again, and wouldn’t be back until New Milk, or even later in the year.

His peace didn’t last long.

‘You said little at supper tonight,’ said a silvery voice, and he turned to see Arianlach in the shadows behind him. ‘Don’t tell me you’re homesick!’

Arianlach came forward, his shirt open to the cold air, though he’d thrown a fur-trimmed cloak about his shoulders. A half-empty cup of varttir dangled from one listless hand. His mouth twisted in sudden pain, and he wiped the edge of his cloak over it. Despite the energy he’d shown over the first few days after Sorrel’s arrival, he’d reverted to the stained and crumpled young man he’d been that first time, half-drunk and reeking of his filthy mead hall. Sorrel was almost tired of it. Arianlach rarely made any appearance before late afternoon at the earliest, when the shadows were already lengthening, and Sorrel had had to content himself with the company of Henarian and Melysarian. He was beginning to prefer his own company. Melysarian didn’t have a lot to say for herself and hung on Henarian’s every word, and Henarian had made it clear he wanted to keep Sorrel at arm’s length as much as he could.

Arianlach hiccupped and almost choked on it. He emptied the rest of his cup onto the cobbles. ‘Blazes. Stuff’s foul. If that’s the best they can come up with I’ll have to send to Vallesia, and gods know they hate sending me anything worthwhile!’

‘Are you alright?’ Sorrel asked Arianlach. He put his hand on Arianlach’s elbow and turned him to the light. ‘You don’t look well. Can I help, somehow?’

‘Not if you don’t know a cure for curses.’

Ah. Sorrel stilled himself for a moment, searching out his magic, and found it near his heart. He let the Rune for health form, and pressed it against Arianlach’s chest.

The spark that answered had him stumbling backward. Shock flared in his heart. He’d used healing Runes before and never felt that. A look passed between them: Arianlach had felt it too.

Arianlach pushed Sorrel’s hand away and wrapped his cloak tighter around him. ‘That’s better: thank you. Do you want to walk a little way?’

‘I was going to the sheep-pens.’

‘Oh? And what were you looking for there?’ Arianlach gave a low chuckle. ‘Sheep are poor company. You could have come to see me instead.’

Sorrel rolled his eyes. ‘I was hoping to find some of my own people there, Earl Cangarth! You’re only good company if I want my ears talked off!’

Arianlach squinted at the sky. ‘It’s almost morning. Blazes! I lose track.’

‘You're up all night, every night. You said you have trouble sleeping. Why can’t you sleep?’

‘Why don’t you ask me something else? Like what I like to do of an evening?’

‘I already know that. I’ve seen you every night in the hall. You like to drink yourself into a stupor so that your men must carry you up to your room, if they can be bothered to move you at all.’

Sorrel paused, his next words already thickening his tongue. He scuffed his toe in the thin wisps of straw, brittle with frost, that lay across the cobbles, wondering how best to phrase it.

Arianlach came to stand in front of Sorrel and looked him over with the critical suspicious air of a man buying a horse.

Sorrel turned his back.

‘Go on,’ said Arianlach. ‘Spit it out. You’re dying to ask me why I’m not afraid my men will murder me when I’m drunk and lying in a heap of shit under the table, aren’t you? Well, the answer is, I don’t care if they do! The sooner the better.’ This last was uttered as an aside, and Arianlach filled his cheeks full of air and blew it out on an exasperated puff. ‘I really couldn’t give a shit if they do,’ he repeated, louder now, and Sorrel caught his eyes. There was a spark of mirth in them that lightened his heart considerably.

He didn’t give the Earl the satisfaction of answering it, however.

‘Blazes, you’re dull!’ Arianlach’s laugh was low and soft. ‘No matter. I like drinking, music, laughter. At either end of the day. I like making you laugh.’

Sorrel tensed. ‘And what don’t you like?’

‘I don’t like a quiet hall.’ Arianlach smiled. ‘I don’t like cold, lonely nights with nothing for company but owls and grave-wights.’

‘Are there such, here?’ Sorrel was intrigued, despite himself, and a little spooked, remembering the howl he’d heard, that first walk on the moor. Had that been a wight? It had slipped his mind since. A door banged at the end of the street, and a dog began an outraged yapping, startling them both.

Arianlach coughed, smiling still. ‘You're white as a sheet. I guess you're not used to towns.'

'Noisy places,' Sorrel agreed, and flashed Arianlach a grin. He began to walk along the street toward the arch that would take them out to the sheep-pens. 'All this talk of wights makes me nervous.'

Aren’t there wights everywhere?’

‘Not on the grasses.’

The Tethiri burned their dead. There were only ancient barrows on the grasslands now, and they had all been cleared of shades and wights long ago. Some had been built on, in the South, the poselenech towns there springing up like barnacles on a ship’s hull and obscuring all that had been there before them. The poselenech also burned their dead, at sea if they could.

But the Mariskenes still buried their dead in barrows, like the old Tethiri.

‘The South shore of Lake Draugr’s full of them,’ said Arianlach blithely. ‘And every barrow between here and Skóldurin has to be Warded every three moons. Cebol Gorge, too. No-one knows why, though. No graves up there.’

‘There must be, if you need to Ward,’ said Sorrel, feeling a little breathless. ‘Do you go to Ward them?’

Arianlach snorted. ‘I’ve been once. I will let you into one of my secrets, Prince Ellazhán. I live in mortal terror of tall sides of rock. Besides, it’s too far for me to go regularly. I was on my way to visit the Shield when I went last.’

Sorrel’s lips parted in shock. ‘You hate ravines? Cliffs as well?’

‘Yes,’ said Arianlach, watching him closely. ‘Any tall, sheer face of rock. I don’t know why. Not walls – they’re different. I’m fine with walls. Are you surprised?’

‘I am. I thought…I thought Lyr Blaed lived their lives amongst mountains and forests. I have not seen the Hester mountains. And I can Ward. Perhaps I can go with the warders, next time?’

Arianlach peered into his cup in the vain hope there was still anything in it, and finding it truly empty, shoved it up his sleeve. The sharp vinegary smell of old wine clung to his clothes. ‘Didn’t you hear me? It’s a month’s ride to the Hester hills. If you want to spend New Milk at The Shield, we can go. Actually, I think there’s a lodge in the mountains that’s supposedly mine, a hunting lodge. Never been there. Maybe I  never will, although I should. Probably a ruin by now! What need have I to hunt? Anyway, you infuriating stiff, I have told you one of my secrets, so where is my gift of a secret from you? You’ve been here half a month and I barely know you.’

Sorrel’s mouth twitched. He cast his eyes down. ‘I...I dream terrible dreams each night. My magic does this to me, yet I do not stop. That’s why I can’t sleep.’

He didn’t mention that the dreams only happened the nights he tried to walk the High Roads. Nor did he want to say how often he did that. That was his secret. The joints of his fingers ached, as if to remind him what it cost him. He curled them around the thick woolen cuff of his sleeve and willed the pain away. 

Arianlach didn’t say anything right away, for once, but leaned against the corner of a tall house covered in dark, glossy ivy, his face turned to the dawn.

Then he said, ‘magic is a curse. Don’t you think so?’

Sorrel’s hair stood on end.

‘A curse,’ repeated Arianlach. ‘People love to revere us, little thinking of the pain we endure. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone. Not even my worst enemy.’

‘I…it is a curse we must bear,’ Sorrel replied, just as hushed. ‘We have to learn to bear it.’

He heaved a sigh that turned into a yawn that he tried to hide. Arianlach saw it and laughed, then turned to point to one of the towers of Silverheim’s inner bailey. ‘Come on. Never mind the sheep pens. I’ll show you my quarters. Perhaps you might find some rest there.’

Sorrel he felt suddenly homesick for his táldafen. The tower looming above them seemed so cold and grey, rising into the blackness of the sky. ‘I think I’d rather go for a ride.’

‘Later. It’s time we got to know each other. Properly. Blazes, I’ve hardly seen you except at supper each night! We pass like ships, isn’t that how the saying goes? Fleeting moments here and there. Is my company so terrible?’

‘Not at all,’ Sorrel said. ‘But there’s only so much of my night I want to spend watching you kill yourself with drink, Earl Cangarth. And I like to sleep at night. I'm often in your library during the day.'

‘If peace is what you’re looking for, you’ll find it there,’ Arianlach grumbled. ‘Place is a grave. Did you find anything worth reading?’

‘A few things.’ Sorrel didn’t mention the books of love poetry he’d purchased from the binder and sequestered under his pillow. Nor the erotic memoirs of some bard who’d lived several hundred years before.

Nor that he’d been shown the books the Earl himself liked to read.

Arianlach took a torch from the sconce inside the door and went up the narrowly spiralling stone steps, Sorrel following behind. The walls were plastered inside, painted russet and blue, hung with tapestries that failed to give the place any warmth at all, though they were woven from wool and not silk, and were thick, their colours bright. The light from the torch chased writhing shadows up the walls. The stone smelled old, and Sorrel ran his fingers over it, marvelling at the glisten of mica within the pale grey granite. 

Arianlach took them all the way to the top and flung a door open onto a room bright with firelight. ‘Welcome to the Earl's chambers - my room.’

Sorrel almost cringed under the lofty rafters that seemed to rise into the heavens, where not even the warm gold of the torches could send their light. The Southern wall was all tall, narrow windows, shuttered with elaborately-carved filigree shutters, painted in gold and blue. An oaken bed dominated the middle of it, curtained in heavy blue damask, the headboard carved with the leafy motifs of the Lyr Deru, stylised animal heads and boldly-carved feathers of strange birds that Arianlach said were only ravens. There were several large cedar chests, a cushioned settle, and Arianlach’s clothes all over the floor. 

He kicked them aside and gestured Sorrel inside, lighting the candles on one of the tall candlesticks that stood in each corner. Sorrel gazed about him at the disarray, and finding the place crammed with things: old swords and knives, a suit of leaf maille on a wooden cross-form, rolled rugs and tapestries, a couple of tall clay pots glazed with a design of pale roses, faint and dull under a thick layer of dust, and whole clusters of empty wine jars, some of them green Vallesian glass. There was an air of neglect and decay that shocked Sorrel. Even the rugs on the floor were crumpled and grey with dust. A sour smell hung over the room. 

There were books, too. Five of them, piled up on the table’s corner, neatly tied together with a length of silk ribbon. Sorrel’s fingers lingered on it. It seemed the collection the librarian had shown him had been missing a few volumes.

‘You can borrow those if you like.’ Arianlach offered. He’d seated himself on the dusty settle and had another bottle of liquor in his hand. Sorrel didn’t know where he’d got it from. Probably from under a pile of dirty clothing. He could see nothing that resembled a wine cupboard. Just the huge oak linen chest along the far wall. He flung open the doors. A few tatters of clothing lay creased in the bottom, but otherwise it was empty. Sorrel presumed that whatever its contents had been, they were now on the floor.

He wrinkled his nose and turned back to Arianlach. ‘Thank you.’

Arianlach stirred up the embers and threw a log on the fire. ‘Shall I order up some breakfast?’

Sorrel shook his head. ‘I would like to sleep. I won’t be any use to you if I don’t get any sleep.’

‘Do you sleep badly all the time?’ Arianlach leaned his elbows on his knees and looked vulnerable and weary. Sorrel felt sorry for him, remembered the amount the Earl drank, and told him it was his own fault.

Arianlach’s face turned stony. ‘You have no idea why I drink, do you?’

‘You’d have told me if you wanted me to know. You offered only one secret. I didn’t ask you for a second.’

‘Are you asking now?’ Arianlach leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. ‘I’ll tell you anything you want to know.’

‘Anything? I’m honoured! So, why do you drink? Why don’t you refuse the witchbane…?’

‘That’s two questions, and I can’t refuse it,’ Arianlach said. ‘Don’t you know that? Don’t you know what happens if I were to do that? That’s why I drink. It hurts otherwise. Do you know how evil that stuff is?’

Not as evil as letting your true nature out.

Sorrel chewed his lip, wondering if he wanted to continue the discussion. These secrets seemed too intimate; he didn’t feel ready to know so much about the Earl. Not yet. He was sorry he'd spoken.

He rolled his shoulders back and took a deep breath. ‘I'm sorry. I shouldn't have...I need to rest. I’ll see you later, Earl Cangarth.’

Arianlach turned large, mournful eyes on him and shook the bottle.

Sorrel smiled. Then he bent his head, the backs of his hands over his forehead. ‘Nie ghó Au, henazhi Au.’

Arianlach spluttered. ‘What does that mean?’

‘It means, Earl Cangarth, good night.’

‘But it’s morning,’ grumbled Arianlach, as Sorrel went from the room, and Sorrel heard the words impossible stiff drifting back to him from the corridor.

He shut the door, and went to throw himself on his bed, suddenly exhausted.

He didn’t know how he’d ever get through this.

And the Earl wasn’t at all what he’d expected. He’d expected a small, sickly boy, from everything he’d heard of him. He had not been prepared for this tall youth, all fluffy yellow hair and eyes piercing as arrows. He suspected the Earl’s drunkenness was only partly real. And what had he meant about his magic being a curse? Did he mean that his Lyr Blaed side was stronger than he’d like? Or was there something else?

Sorrel unlaced his boots then disrobed. A clean nightshirt had been shaken out of his coffer and laid on the bed for him, and his sheepskin house-boots, scented with a scattering of lavender, were at its foot. He shook the lavender onto the fire, set a bundle of sweetgrass to smoke at the edge, put the boots on and went to sit by the fire. 

Perhaps I should invite Arianlach to sit in my room. But why don't the servants tidy his?

After a little while, he fell into a restless daze.

He turned his head sharply at the sound of wings at the window. The shadow flew past, too quick to see clearly. He shook his head, went back to watching the fire, thinking.

After a while, he felt an icy prickle between his shoulder blades.

‘Well, son of thorns,’ said a soft, dangerous voice. ‘Finally, I have found you!’

Sorrel’s breath misted the air. He dared not move. He knew that voice well. A Rune gleamed on the end of one finger, ready to be unleashed in a flash.

‘Put that away,’ said the man. ‘I’m not here to harm you.’

‘Leave me be.’

‘Why should I?’

Sorrel whirled around in a flash and let the Rune fly, his spell spat after it on a furious snarl. Arnoth flung himself backwards, into the night. His laughter drifted on the wind. Then he was back, a tall figure outlined against a swirling violet sky. He snapped both arms out, palms forward. No Runes, just amber light that blazed into flame. Sorrel clenched his fists and reached deep down inside himself. There was dark energy there; he could feel it writhing, and ethereal. He formed it into a Rune, then let it out.

He grinned fiercely as Arnoth was slammed against the wall and then dropped breathlessly to the floor.

He rallied fast, springing to his feet again, the blaze of surprised fury in his eyes. ‘Blood Runes? You little shit! How dare you!’

Sorrel raised his hands and curved one over the other. A swirling mass of ragged black smoke formed between them.

‘Stay away,’ he gasped.

‘Only crowfeathers use the Blood Runes,’ hissed Arnoth. ‘Know what those are? They are cursed death mages, boy!’

He snatched a handful of copper water from thin air and drew back his hand. It shot out again, a long line of amber liquid, and whipped Sorrel’s black smoke from his hands. ‘You don’t know what you play with!’

Sorrel dropped his hands, defeated. ‘What else should I have done, when you come here and threaten me?’

‘I came to see you, boy! Not to threaten or do harm. Or do you think me like that ghoul that rots in the Deadlands?’

Sorrel folded his arms and shifted his eyes to the floor. ‘What do you want with me?’

‘I can teach you,’ said Arnoth softly. ‘I’ve seen you Travel – you can’t help it. You’re drawn to the Gates, almost, I suspect, against your will. But that dark energy you wield will kill you if you don’t learn to use it well. The Blood Runes mean death, in the end. They are what cursed the Lyr Blaed.’

Sorrel chewed the inside of his lip. It was true. The Lyr Blaed had become thus through their use of the dark magic of the Blood Runes, Runes which should never have existed. And it was said that their brothers in darkness, those that had welcomed their dark magic, had revelled in the Runes, had given themselves up to their curse and become the Lyr Celain. Hideous, cruel and monstrous, and utterly consumed by their need for blood, they now inhabited the dark islands at the top of the world, and took sacrifices from the peasant folk along the shores of Vartjastafel and Vertland.

‘Think about it, boy.’ Arnoth stepped close. Sorrel felt his aura caress him, snaking around his body in a cold, dark cloak. It made him nauseous. It made his eyes blur with intoxication. It grabbed hold of his heart in a fearful, terrible vice. It felt like thorns being pushed slowly inside him, killing him slowly. ‘You fear them, don’t you? Yet I can see in your eyes a curiosity that will surely lead you down a dark path, if you have no firm hand to keep you from it!’

‘You know nothing of me!’ Sorrel steeled himself not to inch away from Arnoth.

‘I am not your enemy, boy! I’ve come to warn you. Stay away from that yellow-haired boy. His touch will kill you, and him too. Stay away from him if you want him to live!’

‘How do I know you’re not lying?’ Sorrel gasped. He knew Arnoth and his compatriots could not be trusted. None could have any real interest in the safety of mortals. He knew that. And Arianlach had touched him on many occasion. They’d danced the dragon-dance together at Midwinter Dark. They’d sat with shoulders pressed together on crowded mead hall benches, and around Tethiri campfires. He’d felt no danger, only a warmth that heated his blood to a level that worried him, and thrilled him at the same time. No danger, just a sense of home that he hadn’t felt before.

Arnoth watched him intensely. He lowered his face to Sorrel’s. Sorrel squeezed his eyes shut, bracing himself for what was next. He felt the light enter him, twining around the thorns that held a cage around his heart, pulling them open again. Then Arnoth touched a finger to Sorrel’s forehead and traced a Rune.

‘Leave him. Leave here as soon as you can, for the sake of your soul, and go far away! If he touches you, I can no longer help you.’

Sorrel’s vision went black. For a moment he could see nothing, and then there was a flash of blue light behind his eyes. Someone whispered a spell, a spell like a breath of warm wind that wreathed around his head.

Then air rushed away from him and he was driven to his knees. When he opened his eyes, he was alone.

And the shutters were barred fast, just as they’d been when he’d entered.

He threw up.