He felt wounds on him. He felt bruises. His knees ached with exhaustion. That was the penalty this body brought with it. None were unbearable.
He sought weapons—the sword which the Man had given him: that was one weapon he did not intend to lose. It was qhalur-work, and foreign—from further, he was sure, than merely overseas, and he delighted in it when he tried its balance.
He took his own bow; and the red roan; the lame gelding he turned out to fend for itself: perhaps it would recover.
But he declined more weapons than that, and declined to go in more than the breeches and mended boots and light mail that came with the man.
"This is the shape they will expect," he said to Hesiyyn.
"Wake," Morgaine's voice whispered out of nowhere, and muscles jumped and body tensed all in one spasm as on the edge of a fall—But it was stone at Vanye's back, and he pressed himself against it, controlling his breaths and blinking at the shadow that stood between him and the horses. "I might have hit you," he said. "Oh, Heaven—" He caught his breath and brushed loose hair out of his eyes with a trembling hand. "I dreamed—" But he did not tell those dreams, that took him back to old places, old terrors. "I did not mean to sleep."
"Best we move."
"Is there—"
"No. Only shortness of time. A little of the night left. We travel while we can."
He glanced around to see were Chei and Bron awake then, one instant's impulse, and remembered everything like a blow to the stomach; he drew a breath then and rubbed an unshaven face, and quickly gathered himself to his feet, trying not to think on anything but the road.
Fool, he thought. Do not look back. Look around you. Look around you.That is what caused this sorry business, nothing more and nothing less than losing track of things.
He wanted to weep. He adjusted Arrhan's gear and reached out to hold Siptah's bridle for Morgaine as she prepared to mount. "Do not be seeing to me,"she said sharply, taking back the reins, by which she meant do not be twice a fool.
It stung. He was not in a mood to bear her temper, and she was not in a mood for debating what she wanted. He turned and flung himself to horse, and waited on her, since she was in such haste.
She mounted up and rode without a backward look. She was fey and doom-ridden, and the loss of a comrade and the driving away of another—the excessive cruelty of it, like her ultimatum to him with Chei, was all one thing.
It was because of that blade she bore. It was because of the lives it took. It was because of the things she knew that he did not, and the madness—the madness which distracted her, and which, this morning, beckoned both of them.
Her moods had been tolerable while he had been no more than ilinand now were enough to drive him to black, blind rage, anger to match her own.
She spoke finally. It was to remark on the land, as if there had never been a quarrel.
"Aye," he said, and: "Aye, my liege," choking down his temper—for hers was gone, vanished. That was the way of her. He was Nhi on one side of the blanket and Chya on the other and temper once it rose was next to madness, it blinded and it drove him—even to fratricide; after which he had learned to smother it under ilin-law. O Heaven, he thought, ilinto a temper-prone woman was one thing. Both lover and shieldman to a woman half-mad and geas-driven was another.
He had the warrior's braid back. The cool air on his neck, the high-clan honor that forever reminded him he could take another path, the ilin'soath that bound him to a liege he could in no wise leave—unwise, unwise, ever to tangle matters further, unwise to have drifted closer and closer until she could wound him, and drive him mad, and then absently forget she had struck at him at all.
But it had happened. He was snared. He had been enspelled from the beginning.
And she left him with his ghosts—thinking at one time he heard more horses than their two, thinking at another moment that Chei and Bron were behind him. They haunted the tail of his eye so that a bit of brush, a stone, a trick of the rising sun, persuaded his sight that they were there.
Both.
Chei is dead,he thought with a chill, and crossed himself. Chei is dead.
And he could not say why he suddenly believed this, or why it was two riders that haunted him, except it was guilt, or foreknowledge what they had sent Chei to, in a land where he had qhal-taint on him.
He wept, the tears running down his face, without expression. Beside him, Morgaine said some word.
"Vanye," she said then.
There was no place for a man to go, except to turn his face away.
She was silent after. The wind dried his face. There seemed nothing to say, that would not lead to things he did not want to discuss. He only gave a sigh and shifted in his saddle and looked at her, so that she would know that he was all right.
The sun came up by degrees in the sky and showed them other ghosts, the heights of hills which had not been there, showed them a land of crags and rough land ahead of them, all painted in shadows of gold and cloud.
"Rest," she said again, when they had come to water, a little pond between two hills, and this time again he took Siptah's bridle as she dismounted.
She laid her hand on his back as she walked past him, as he slipped the horses' bits to let them graze and rest a little. He felt it faintly through the armor, and it set the thoughts moiling in him, a little of relief, a great deal of reluctance to do or say anything with her. It was not a quarrel of woman and man. It was, he decided finally, that their blood was up, both, that they had killed, that she had fighting in her mind and so did he, and to expect any gentleness or to offer any was unwise.
He went and washed his hands and his face and his neck in the pond, wetting his boots in the boggy grass.
"Do not drink," she said from behind him, reminding him of cautions that he knew as well as she, and he turned half about with a sudden, trapped fury in him.
He said nothing, and rose and walked back to sit down on his heels and press his wet hands to the back of his neck and to his brow.
"Sleep," he said without looking at her. "You are due that."
"I should not have chided thee."
"No, you should have let a fool drink from standing water. It is not Kursh, or Andur, liyo.I know that. I was not that much fool."
"Thee can take the rest. Thee has more need."
"Why, because I am short-tempered? I have killed a man. I have killed one man I held for a friend. And we have lost the other. No matter." He wiped the hair back from his stubbled face, the wisps that had come loose from his braid and trailed about brow and ears, and he had not the will left to do more than wipe them out of his way. "I am learning."
Then the reach of what he had said shot through him. He glanced up at her face. My God, why did I say that?
The mask had come back over her countenance, pale as it was. She shrugged and looked aside at the ground. "Well that we save our shafts for our enemies."
"Forgive me." He went to his knees and she moved so suddenly he thought she would strike him in the face, but it was his shoulder she caught, hard, with the heel of her hand, before he could even think to bow to the ground as reflex made natural. He met her angry stare and there was nothing woman-gentle in the blow that had stopped him from the obeisance. He had meant to make peace. Now he only stared at her.