It was as if the strength the gate had lent him had begun to dissipate. He heard voices at a distance. He saw them drag their captive up against one of two fair-sized trees at the edge of the brush, along the stream, saw him kick at one of them, and take a blow in return.
"Stubborn man," he murmured with a pain about him that might be Jestryn and might be Bron and might be outrage that this man he had trusted had not prevented all the ill that had befallen him.
Or it was pointless melancholy. Sometimes a man newly Changed wept for no cause. Sometimes one grew irrationally angry, at others felt resentments against oneself. It was the scattered memories of the previous tenant, attempting to find place with the new, which had destroyed it.
He had fought this battle before. He knew coldly and calmly what was happening to him, and how to deal with it—how he must to deal with the memories that tried to reorganize themselves, for his heart sped and his body broke out in sweat, and he saw the wolves, the wolves that ep Kantory mustered like demons out of the dark; he heard the breaking of bones and the mutter of wolfish voices as he walked across the trampled ground, to where his men had managed finally to bind the prisoner's hands about the tree.
"Chei—" Vanye said, looking up at him through the blood and the mud. And stirred a memory of a riverbank, and kindness done. It ached. It summoned other memories of the man, other kindnesses, gifts given, defense of him; and murder—Bron's face. "Chei. Sit. Talk with me. I will tell you anything you ask."
Fear touched him. He knew the trap in that. "Ah," he said, and sank down all the same, resting his arms across his knees. "What will you tell me? What have you to trade?"
"What do you want?"
"So you will offer me—what? The lady's fickle favor? I went hunting Gault, friend.That is what you left me. And I am so much the wiser for it. I should thank you."
"Chei—"
"I went of my own accord. We discovered things in common. What should I, follow after you till you served me as you served Bron? I was welcome enough with your enemies."
Vanye flinched. But: "Chei," he said reasonably, "Chei—" As if he were talking to a child.
"I will send you to Hell, Vanye. Where you sent Bron."
Vanye's eyes set on his in dismay.
"I say that I was willing. Better to bea wolf, than to be the deer. That is what you taught me, friend.The boy is older, the boycannot be cozened, the boyknows how you lied to him, and how you despised him. Never mind the face, friend:I am much, much wiser than the boy you lied to."
"There was no lie. I swear, Chei. On my soul.— For God's sake, fight him, Chei— Did you never mean to fight him?"
Chei snatched his knife from its sheath and jerked the man's head back by the braid he wore, held him so, till breath came hard and the muscles that kept the neck from breaking began to weaken. The man's eyes were shut; he made no struggle except the instinctive one, quiet now.
"No more words? No more advice? Are you finished, Man? Eh?"
There was no answer.
Chei jerked again and cut across the braid, flung it on the ground.
The man recovered his breath then in a kind of shock, threw his head back with a crack against the tree and looked at him as if he had taken some mortal wound.
It was a man's vanity, in the hills. It was more than that, to this Man. It was a chance stroke, and a satisfaction, that put distress on that sullen face and a crack in that stubborn pride.
Chei sheathed the knife and smiled at human outrage and human frailty and walked away from it.
Afterward, he saw the man with his head bowed, his shorn hair fallen about his face. Perhaps it was the pain of his bruises reached him finally, in the long wait till dark, and his joints stiffened.
But something seemed to have gone from him, all the same.
By sundown he might well be disposed to trade a great deal—to betray his lover, among other things: the first smell of the iron would come very different to a man already shaken; and that was the beginning of payments ... his pride, his honor, his lover, his life; and the acquisition of all the weapons the lady held.
Always, Qhiverin insisted, more than one purpose, in any undertaking: it was that sober sense restrained him, where Chei's darkness prevailed: revenge might be better than profit; but profitable revenge was best of all.
And there were those in Mante who would join him, even yet. . . .
Unease suddenly flared in the air, like the opening of a gate. A man of his cried out, and dropped something amid the man's scattered belongings down along the streamside, a mote that shone like a star.
"Do not touch it!" Chei sprang up and strode to the site at the same time as the captain from Mante, and was before him, gathering up that jewel which had fallen before his own man could be a fool and reach for it again—a stone not large enough to harm the bare hand, not here, this far from Mante and Tejhos: but it prickled the hairs at his nape and lit the edges of his fingers in red.
And there was raw fear in the look of the man who had found it.
"My lord," the captain objected. There was fear there, too. Alarm. That is not for the likes of you,was what the captain would say if he dared.
But to a lord of Mante, even an exiled one, the captain dared not say that.
Chei stooped and picked up the tiny box which his startled man had dropped amid Vanye's other belongings, and shut the jewel in it. Storm-sense left the air like the lifting of a weight. "I will deliver this," Chei said, staring at the captain. His own voice seemed far away in his ears. He dropped the chain over his head. "Who else should handle it? I still outrank you,—captain."
The captain said nothing, only stood there with a troubled look.
This, a Man had carried. The answering muddle of thoughts rang like discord, for part of him was human, and part of him despised the breed. That inner noise was the price of immortality. The very old became more and more dilute in humankind: many went mad.
Except the high lord condemned some qhal to bear some favorite of his—damning some rebel against his power, to host a very old and very complex mind, well able to subdue even a qhalur host and sift away all his memories.
From that damnation, at least, his friends at court had saved him, when he had given up Qhiverin's pure blood and Qhiverin's wholly qhalur mind for Gault's, which memories were there too—mostly those which had loved Jestryn when Jestryn was human. And knowledge of the land, and of Gault's allies—and Gault's victims—when Gault was human: but those were fading, as unused memory would.
There were a few things worth saving from that mind, things like the knowledge of Morund's halls and the chance remembrance of sun and a window, a knowledge that, for instance, Ithond's fields produced annually five baskets of grain—some memories so crossed with his own experience at Morund that he was not sure whether they were Gault's recollections or his own.
Gault's war was over. He no longer asserted himself. It was the Chei-self, ironically, which had done it—human and forceful and flowing like water along well-cut channels: young, and uncertain of himself, and willing to take an older memory for the sake of the assurance it offered, whose superstition and doubts scattered and faded in the short shrift the Qhiverin-essence made of it: wrong, wrong, and wrong, the Qhiverin-thoughts said when Chei tried to be afraid of the stone he held. Let us not be a fool, boy.