The Gathandrian Trilogy 02 - Hallsfoots Battle

many dead, dying or wounded.
    What has the war been for? The mind-executioner promised Ralph power once, but he stopped believing in that a long time ago. He even stopped wanting it.
    It’s time to go. And even though he senses he belongs nowhere, the concept of home is the nearest refuge he has.
    His fingers search for the Tregannon emeralds even before he realises he’s made the decision. The executioner’s still warm blood and the stillness of his flesh cuts through Ralph, but he forces himself onwards. Yes. He has one of the precious jewels, then three and four of them in the palm of his hand.
    The scribe’s sudden cry makes him stumble and a fifth jewel of the original seven rolls away from his grasp. When he looks at Simon, Ralph knows the scribe sees the danger, perhaps even wants him to stay, but the Overlord has travelled beyond him now into another kind of a valley.
    As Ralph throws the gems upward and allows his mind to track the wild arc of their rising, he sees the undead soldiers are beginning to shatter. Their frames collapse to mere skeleton and bone. Without Gelahn’s magic, the mountain dogs, too, thicken into nothing but rock and fragments of stone, and tumble broken across the earth. The killing power of corpse and hound are no more.
    It is fitting, but no matter. The green circle is barely there, lines stretched thin across morning air between each jewel. Perhaps it not enough to carry him back to the Lammas Lands, but still he must try. Let what may happen do whatever it will.
    He takes his first step into the emerald sphere, and everything vanishes away.

    Simon
    Simon found he was weeping. Kneeling like a child at the place where the Lammas Lord had disappeared. The four jewels Ralph took back had gone with him, but Simon knew there was no guarantee the journey would have been a safe one.
    Mindlessly, he gathered together the rest of the emeralds—the three Ralph had left behind in his desperation to get away and those two that Annyeke had suffered to give to them—and placed them in the executioner’s velvet pouch. The scribe’s fingers trembled only slightly when he unfastened the bag from the dead man’s waist and retied it to his own.
    No, he said to himself, the word an echo of the warning he’d given to Ralph, but also with something of affirmation in it. No, it’s not over yet, my good Lammas Lord, no matter where you are or what you might think.
    Then he took in the exhaustion and also the relief of the people as it passed over him in waves from all directions of the city. He looked at Johan, his face and body scarred but the wounds not life-threatening, and at Annyeke, understood the source of their happiness, and his own still foolish grief. Just as the snow-raven alighted like the softest of breezes at his side, he knew what needed to be done.

    Annyeke
    The snow had stopped falling when the final battle had turned to silence. Annyeke wondered if she’d ever be able to stop hearing the noise of the dying in her dreams or whether that was a necessary remembrance. So many Gathandrians dead, the First Elder amongst them. The sheer scale, the terrifying uproar and horror of what she and Johan had witnessed had pierced her to the core. The year-cycles of the war of attrition before the Lost One returned to them had, in themselves, been marked with pain and loss, but had taken place over a period of moons, not all at once as in this most recent war. And it had mainly been played out in the mind, not the body.
    Everything was different. A full day-cycle on from when the battle had ended, she could sense the mood of the people, which echoed her own thoughts—the greyness of shock, like a river in winter, the sharp orange of pain, as bitter as an unguarded tongue of flame, and the beginnings of grief, something between blue and green, shadowed by cloud. But she sensed more—a white-streaked relief and the emptiness as of a great trial being complete.
    Perhaps, then, it was not the best time to enact a ritual of joy? Or perhaps it was. Besides, she was here now and glad of it. The Lost One’s suggestion—no, more than that, his command —had been as a too bright morning after a winter night, overpowering but beautiful. Annyeke’s heart beat fast, but the rhythm of her breathing was steady.
    Around her, the ruins of the Great Library showed jagged against the late afternoon sky. She could hear the faint calls of weaver birds as they flew over the cypresses on the edge of the