He felt after the straps of his armor and unbuckled it. "No," he said when she moved to help him. He managed it all himself, glad of the twilight that put a haze between her and the filth and the sores, but while time was that he would have gone out of her witness to bathe, now it seemed a rebuff to her. He only turned his body to hide the worst of it as he slid into the chill water.
Then he ducked his head and shoulders under, holding fast to the rocks on the bank, for he did not swim. Cold numbed the pain. Clean water washed away other memory, and he held there a moment and drifted with his eyes shut till Morgaine came to the bank with salves and a blanket and his personal kit, and sternly bade him get out.
"Thee will put a chill in the wounds," she said, and was right, he knew. He heaved himself up onto the dry rock and wrapped himself quickly in the blanket she flung around him. He made a tent of it to keep the wind off while he shaved and brushed his teeth, careful around the cuts and the swollen spots, and afterward sat rubbing his hair dry.
She came up behind him and laid her hands on his shoulders, and took the fold of the blanket and began to dry his hair herself.
So he knew she forgave him his disgrace. He bowed his head on his arms and did not flinch when she combed it with her fingers—only when she put her arms about his shoulders and rested her head against him. Then it was hard to get his breath.
"I did not deserve it of them," he said, in his own defense. "I swear that, liyo.Except my falling into their trap in the first place. For that—I have no excuse at all."
Her arms tightened. "I tried to come round north and warn thee. But I came too far. By the time I came back again it was too late. And thee had come riding in. Looking for me. True?—True. Is it not?"
"Aye," he murmured, his face afire with shame, recollecting the well-trampled stream, recollecting every mistaken reasoning. "It might have been you in their hands. I thought you were, else you would have been there—"
"To warn thee off. Aye. But I was being a fool, thinking thee was like to rush into it for fear I had been a fool; and thee knew somethingwas wrong, well enough, that I was not somewhere about. It was as much my fault as thine." She moved around where she could see his face. "We cannot do a thing like this again. We cannot be lovers and fools. Trustme, does thee hear, and I will trust thee, and we will not give our enemies the advantage after this."
He pressed his hand over hers, drew it to his lips and then let go, his eyes shut for a moment. "Will you hear hard truth, liyo?"
"Yes."
"You take half my opinion and do half of yours, and whether mine is good or ill I do not know, but half apiece of two good opinions makes one very bad one, to my way of thinking. Hear me out! I beg you." His voice cracked. He steadied it. "If your way is straight down the road, straight we go and I will say no word. My way, to tell the truth, has not fared very well in recent days."
She sat hill-fashion, on her heels, her arms between her knees. "Why, I thought I had done tolerably well by your way in the last few days—I did think I had learned well enough."
"You learned nothing of me—"
"Constantly. Does thee think me that dull, that I learn nothing?"
His heart lifted a little, a very little, not that he counted himself so gullible.
"Does not believe me?" she asked.
"No, liyo."He even managed a smile. "But it is kind."
Her mouth tightened and trembled, not for hurt, it seemed, only of weariness. She put out her hand and touched his face with her fingertips, gently, very gently. "It is true. I did not know what to do. I only thought what thee would do, if it were the other way about."
"I would have gone in straightway like a fool."
She shook her head. "Separately, we are rarely fools. That is what we have to mend." She brushed a lock of hair from his eyes. "Trust me,that I will not be. And trust that I trust thee."
He glanced at the dragon sword behind her shoulder, that thing she did not part with even now, that one thing for which she would leave him.
Perhaps she understood the direction of that glance. She settled back on her heels with a bruised and weary gaze into his eyes.
"With my life," he said.
It was not enough to say. He wished he had not had that thought, or given way to it.
I believed you might come, only because we were still far enough from the gate.
Beyond such a point, she had no such loyalties, nor could help herself. He believed that. With the sword, at such a time, she fought for nothing but the geas,—and for her sanity.
At such a time,liyo, you would have taken me with your enemies.
And always that is true.
"Truth, liyo,I had no doubt."
She looked so weary, so desperately weary. He rose up on his knees and put his arms about her, her head against his bare shoulder, her slim, armored body making one brief shiver, hard as it was. Her arms went about him.
"We have no choice but move on," she said, her voice gone hoarse. "Chei has gone back toward Tejhos. I do not think he will go all the way south."
"Chei has done murder," he said. "He killed a captain Mante sent by way of Tejhos. The captain's men deserted."
"Was thatthe division." Her shoulders heaved to a sigh, and for a moment her weight rested against him. "None of them escaped. Plague take it—I should have killed him—long since. . . ."
"Chei," he murmured, "went to them . . . willingly, he said. And Mante knows everything he knows by now. I have no doubt they do. There may be more than a few riders out from there."
She nodded against his shoulder. "Aye. I know that."
"And neither of us is fit to ride. What could you do? What could I? Sleep."
She was limp in his arms, and moved her hand then to push away from him, and abandoned the effort, slumping bonelessly into his arms. "Not wise, not wise, of me. I know. We have to move. This place is not safe—'tis not safe at all—"
It was, perhaps, the first time in recent days she had done more than close her eyes.
Chei splashed water over his face and wiped it back over his hair, crouching at the stream. Across from him in the dusk, the remnant the witch had left to him—witch, he insisted to himself, against all the knowledge qhalur rationality could muster. He grew superstitious. He knew that his soul was lost, whatever that was, simply because he did not know how to believe in it any longer; or in witchcraft, except that in the workings of the world there might conceivably beprescience, and outsiders might know things he did not understand.
Ichandren had believed in unnatural forces. Bron had never doubted them. The man across the rill of water from him had known them, Rhanin ep Eorund, before he housed a qhalur bowman, and perhaps even yet. They were foreign only to Hesiyyn, the qhal, whose face was a long-eyed, high-boned mask, immune to the worry that creased Rhanin's brow—human expression, woven into the composite like so many subtle things.
Like fear. Like the moil of hate and fear and anger that boiled inside Chei's own self, seductive of both halves: revenge on the strangers; revenge on Mante, which had always been his enemy no less than Chei's; and life, life that might stretch on forever like the life that trailed behind, life that remembered jeweled Mante, and the face of the Overlord which young Chei had never seen, and of kin and friends Gault-Qhiverin had both loved and killed and betrayed for greater good—